The Opening Playbook: Building Business Relationships That Grow Revenue

Our business culture promotes “closing" as the most vital element of selling. And why not? It implies tangible results now, not later. Based on the presenter's book of the same title, The Opening Playbook workshop takes a counterintuitive approach. Closing is finite. Closing is an end. Closing before you've appropriately opened a business relationship is the sound of a door shut in your face. Here's the mantra for the 21st century: Always Be Opening. Opening is everything that happens before the pitch that puts you in position to be bought. Coaches, teams, and athletes rely on playbooks to define orchestrated plays, patterns, and progressions that increase the likelihood of scoring. Similarly, once professionals get in the room with an ideal prospect that has a real, immediate need for help, they usually do a fine job of winning work. The problem is that too many professionals don't know how to get into that room in the first place. The Opening Playbook workshop presents and practices the prior actions that put trusted advisors in more of those opportunity-filled rooms more frequently. (1.25 CEUs)

Learning Objectives:

• How to pursue ideal prospects more successfully by playing in the “open field" or “white space" that competitors can't match.
• Spend business development time more productively by concentrating specifically on the highest probability prospects.
• Shift from a focus on closing deals to opening new business development relationships that put firms in position to be selected.
• Participants will stop telling business development prospects what makes their firms so great and start engaging prospects in experiences that demonstrate their difference.