We used to think charm was a competitive advantage.
Thirty years selling to Fortune 1000 executives as the only women in the room will cure you of that fast. The clients who hired us at Clermont Partners didn’t hire us because they liked us. Some of them didn’t even particularly like us. They hired us because we walked into the room knowing something they didn’t. And they needed that something more than they needed comfortable.
Yes, relationships matter. We’re not saying they don’t. But we’ve watched too many brilliant consultants spend years cultivating relationships with executives who never once wrote them a check. Great dinners. Real warmth. Zero revenue.
Here’s what nobody tells you: likability gets you in the room. Relevance gets you the contract. A sharp point of view delivered at exactly the right moment. That’s it. That’s the whole game.
When we built our second firm, we made a deliberate decision. We weren’t going to out-charm the big guy in our space. They were literally flying our would-be clients to conferences on their private jets. We weren’t going to out-golf them. We weren’t going to win on personality. We were going to out-think them.
So instead, we invested two months’ worth of profits in original research nobody had done before. We brought in academics. We built a point of view on a problem every CEO in our target industries was quietly panicking about. Then we got those academics on stage as keynote speakers. We moderated. We weren’t the logo on the lanyard. We were the people who brought the idea everyone was talking about at dinner.
Slowly, our email started to get responses. We got invited to come in and talk more. Not to dinners. But to conference rooms. 1 hour with a Fortune 1000 CEO. Which is really hard to come by for those of you who sell in that ecosphere. Not because they liked us. Because we had something they needed to know.
Stop asking how I get in front of more people. Start asking what my ideal client needs to understand that nobody is telling them. Answer that publicly, repeatedly, specifically, and the right doors open without you having to knock on them.
Victoria was six months pregnant the first time we walked into a Fortune 500 boardroom to pitch. The CEO looked surprised—not at the proposal, at her. I saw it. So did she. We didn’t address it. We queued up our slide deck and started talking about the specific problem we’d identified in their industry that they hadn’t publicly acknowledged yet. Charm was never going to work in that room. We were never going to be the people they expected. But we could be the most prepared people they’d ever met. Three months later, they became a client. The relevance did what the relationship couldn’t.
Relevance transfers. Likability doesn’t.
This is harder than it sounds—not because it’s complicated, but because it requires you to stop relying on the thing that has probably worked for you your whole career. If you’re good with people, and most successful consultants are, there’s a seductive version of your career where you grow on personality. And it works, with some prospects. But it doesn’t get you the big clients with anything close to consistency.
So here’s what it actually looks like in practice, because knowing the problem and fixing it are two different things.
- Know their problem before they say it out loud. Enterprise decision-makers are surrounded by people who respond to problems. The small firm that wins anticipates them. Read their earnings calls. Follow their industry press. Know what’s keeping their peers up at night. Walk in having already done the thinking they haven’t had time to do.
- Have a point of view, not just a pitch. A pitch says here’s what we do, here’s our track record, here’s our price. A point of view says here’s what’s about to happen in your industry and here’s why most companies are going to get it wrong. One starts a conversation. The other starts a negotiation. You want the conversation.
- Publish before you pitch. When you share your point of view publicly, something shifts. The executive who might have ignored your email forwards your article to three colleagues. The cold intro becomes warm because they’ve already read your thinking.
You show up as a resource, not a vendor. That is a fundamentally different conversation.
- Make the relationship about their success, not your pipeline. Send them something relevant when you’re not trying to sell them anything. Make the introduction that helps them, not you. Be the person who brings insight, not the person who brings a proposal.
Do these four things consistently, and you won’t need charm. You’ll be the person in the room they actually need.
