Episode Details

David disagrees with Blair (sort of) on his model for growing existing accounts in the post-AOR era, and then offers his list of 6 ideas on the topic.

The Peter principle

The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

Tony Mikes

DAVID C. BAKER: Today Blair, we are coming to you live from the ReCourses Woodworking Shop, where so far I have done no woodworking, but a whole lot of podcast recording. Maybe I need to take my saws up to my office or something, but I can wander because I'm on like a corded mic and I can just look at my stuff. If you start to bore me, I just read the manuals for my saws and it's really fun. Is that okay with you?

BLAIR ENNS:Yeah. I'll hear the table saw fire up in the background, right?

DAVID: You know you need to start to get more interesting at that point.

BLAIR: You know you're retreating further and further from civilization and identifying more and more with machinery and animals.

DAVID: And the rest of the world thanks me for this.

BLAIR: All right. Unabomber, what are we doing?

DAVID: Today, we're talking about growing accounts. And as I was thinking about this, why are we so interested in this? I guess one alternative would be that we could just really land big accounts at the beginning but it seems like two things have changed in the world that our listeners occupy. One is that they are tending to start with relationships that begin smaller. That's one thing that I've noticed. So it makes it more critical to grow accounts. The other thing that's changed is that it's much more of a project-based world and so maybe growth isn't necessarily going to solve all of that, but we're talking about a chain of projects. So it's kind of like an AOR relationship disguised as a whole bunch of projects that follow on, which require the skills to grow an account. Why do you want to talk about this? Why is this that important?

BLAIR: Yeah. And I think you're right in describing the environment. In this non-AOR environment, the emphasis is greater than it's ever been to go mine the account for the very next project because there aren't the guarantees, to the extent that there were guarantees at all in an AOR relationship. I guess in some of them, there were some form of guarantee. So you really do have to kind of eat what you kill in the modern project-based world.

BLAIR: As somebody who focuses on the new business side of things, I've worked with a lot of firms where they were really good at new business and then you look at how quickly their accounts or clients move on, you think, "Man, if you would just solve that problem, you would be killing it."

DAVID: Yeah. And thank goodness they were good at new business because as fast as they landed them, they left, right?

BLAIR: Yeah. So you've got a list of things, pointers that we'll review on growing existing accounts. And I have one point. And I don't think you agree with my point. Is this going to be the first podcast where we disagree?

DAVID: Publicly, yeah. There's been a lot of ...

BLAIR: You're so polite.

DAVID: Maybe I read through ... You sent me one paragraph with some ideas when I thought, "I don't know about that one."

BLAIR: And a PowerPoint deck.

DAVID: So this will be very interesting so you're going to talk about a concept called the account conference. Sounds very very official. And then we're going to, if you leave me any time at all.

BLAIR: I'm not planning to.

DAVID: Right. Then I'm going to provide just some very specific pointers, which I'm sure you'll agree with, right?

DAVID: Wh