Build relationships with customers
PwC used to run a television commercial that said, “Your clients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” and that tagline has stuck with Gary Price.
“There’s no specific formula for doing this — it’s an art as much as science,” he says. “It starts with relationships. If I walked into company X’s offices tomorrow and I didn’t have a good, trusting relationship with whoever’s office I was in, I wouldn’t get very far asking questions. The starting point is it’s all about relationships, and you’ve heard that before, and it’s true, and it’s exceptionally true in our business because our product is ourselves.”
But how do you show your customers you care? How do you make them the center of an organization that has not just 1,300 people in one region across three states, but 30,000 people and revenue just below the $8 billion mark across the whole country?
“If you really, really want to, you can turn that into a complicated story, but if you think about what we do at the core, it’s very simple,” Price says. “We help our clients solve difficult issues. It’s that simple. It’s no more. It’s not that complicated. When you’re able to distill it down, it really takes away the complication.”
It’s a simple mission, but even the simplest of tasks can get muddied, so start with how you initially communicate with your customers.
“I always start with, ‘What are you trying to achieve,’” he says. “Whether that’s financial goals, strategic goals in the market, growing the business, product expansions, mergers and acquisitions, and divestitures, tax planning, improving processes in the business, there’s a lot of ways companies like to make themselves better. I always ask, ‘What are you trying to achieve? What are your goals? I want to make sure I understand clearly what your goals are.’”
Show them you truly care about those goals so ask them to not just tell you about them but to show you, as well.
“Most people in most businesses have personal plans where they put on a piece of paper somewhere their goals, and somebody in their organization reviews it and holds people accountable to those goals,” Price says. “We encourage people to actually ask people to review their plans with them. Usually, not always, our clients share those with us, and when they do, it provides a great road map to how you can help them be successful.
“When I have a clear picture of their goals and have that trust with them, then I have the opportunity to step in their shoes and start to break down what’s keeping them from achieving those goals.”
For example, if a client says they want to reduce their tax burden and do some tax planning, he can begin to ask questions.
“Questions you begin to ask are let’s talk about your structure — you start drilling down into the details and let’s talk about where your tax burden is here or overseas,” he says. “Where is your tax burden most problematic? If you say, ‘What are you trying to achieve?’ and they say, ‘We close our books in 20 days, but we want to close them in five; how do we get there?’ So you have to understand what they’re trying to achieve.”
As he builds these relationships and asks these questions, he’s able to see patterns across industries that allow him to pinpoint the real issues for which his employees should be focusing on finding solutions.
“You start talking to multiple companies, and you start coming back and saying, ‘You know what, what we heard from Company X is the same thing we hear from Company Y,’” Price says. “You begin to build a knowledge base, and in a firm like ours, it replicates itself in many ways, and it allows us to be very focused. … We get very focused around the most important issues our clients have. We don’t go into our clients and say we can solve all your problems. One, it’s not true, and even if it were true, we don’t have the capacity to achieve that. But where we do go, we say, ‘Tell us what your problems are; we think we can help you with some of the biggest problems.’”
Through all of this, you have to keep the customer at the center of your focus instead of money.
“You might hear, with professional services firms, the old saying, the billable hour — how important that is,” Price says. “In our mind, equally important is that nonbillable hour where you’re investing that time to build trust with your clients. That’s the baseline. Once you have that trust, how do you get at those things?”
And lastly, you have to be yourself. It’s the best advice that he ever received and it’s true in any situation with customers.
“Some people are always trying to work on things that are viewed as negative and trying to create an image externally with other people that is not consistent with their personality and who they are. I had a mentor and he said, ‘Take that solid foundation and those values and build on it and be a positive person and be who you are. Don’t take on someone else’s personality just because it’s expedient or you think it will get you somewhere.’
“It’s hard to go into a client’s office — and we work with really smart people and clients — and fool them. They see through that really quickly. And then once that happens, you no longer have trust and credibility with them. You walk in, you are who you are, you help them, and by the way, if they ask you a question and you don’t know the answer to it, ‘I don’t know,’ is a great answer. ‘But I’ll be sure glad to find out and get back to you.’”
Taking this approach to building custom
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relationships will help your customers trust your leadership and what your organization does.
“I used to think that commercial was so hokey, but that tagline is so good,” Price says. “It’s true. … It’s very difficult to outsmart the competition, but if you can build better and deeper relationships, you can outhustle them.”
