A client from years ago called me recently. He wasn’t shopping for a service. He was standing at a fork in the road: keep investing the energy to grow his business, or start moving toward a transition.
Here’s what stayed with me. He didn’t take that question to Google. He didn’t type it into ChatGPT. He didn’t even take it to his attorney, at least not yet. He picked up the phone and called someone he trusted to ask good questions and help him think. He wanted to talk it through first, so he’d know what to ask his attorneys and wealth advisors next.
Fix it or Flip it
Think of it like your house. You can remodel and stay in the neighborhood, or you can dress it up a little, sell, and move on to the next property. It sounds cut and dried. It isn’t, because the question is never only about dollars and cents. It’s about energy. Do you still have the drive to do the work?
And here’s the catch with a business. When you remodel a house, you can hire a contractor. Most owners can’t hand the changes in a business to someone else. If the changes are going to happen, they’re the ones making them, on top of running the company. Meanwhile, they can’t put a For Sale sign out front. They would lose their customers, vendors would get nervous. Negotiating power goes out the window.
Every conversation has to be confidential. And confidential decisions don’t get made in a search bar. They get made in quiet conversations with people who have earned the right to be in the room.
The call that doesn’t look like a sales call
That conversation with my client had no pitch, no proposal and no deck. It was questions. What does he actually want the next few years to look like? What would it take to keep growing, and does he have the energy for it? What would a transition require? The point was to leave him clearer on what to ask next, and who to ask.
That’s what being top of mind really looks like. It isn’t a marketing message in someone’s inbox. It’s being the person they think of when the decision gets hard.
This example is selling a business, but think about the other high stakes decisions that buyers are facing and think through how they are being made today.
Where the shortlist really forms
Most advisors, consultants and attorneys spend a lot of energy on being found: ranking, content, visibility. But an owner deciding what to do with a business they’ve spent decades building isn’t browsing. They’re asking. They ask a peer who has been through it. They ask the people who already hold their trust: their wealth advisor, their attorney, their accountant, their banker.
And often, as with my client, the first conversation isn’t with one of those professionals at all. It’s with a sounding board who helps the owner figure out which questions to bring to them. That conversation shapes who gets called next.
The research points the same direction. 6sense studied about 4,000 B2B buyers and found the winning vendor was already on the buyer’s shortlist on Day One 95% of the time. For a decision as personal as selling a business, I’d expect that to be even more true. By the time someone reaches out to you, much of the deciding has already happened.
Search and AI are useful for plenty of things. But for the decisions that carry the most weight and the most emotion, people want a person who will listen, ask good questions and remember their situation.
And they recognize that AI tells you what you want to hear, and high stakes need advice that you NEED to hear, and it’s not all sunshine and roses.
What this means for you
This example today is an extreme, selling a business is probably the highest value decision someone might make in their life. But think about the impact of what you do. Many professionals have a ‘bet the company’ element in their offering when you really start digging at some level. Even hiring an entry level employee that is client facing can offer substantial damage if not managed correctly.
If you want to be part of the solution when an owner finally asks “who should I talk to?”, the work happens well before the question. It happens with the people they’ll ask. Here’s a test you can run this week.
- Name them. List the wealth advisors, attorneys, accountants and bankers your best clients already trust. Start with the handful who come up most often.
- Ask the question. “If one of your clients faced a big decision about their business, who would you send them to? What would you say about me?” The answer shows you exactly where you stand.
- Make yourself easy to describe. Can they explain what you do, who you help and who you’re not for in one sentence? If not, they can’t pass you along.
- Give them something to talk about. Advisors can’t share confidential client stories, so give them language, not names. A short story about the kind of situation you help with, told without identifying anyone, is something they can carry forward.
- Be useful before there’s a decision. Offer a question set, a checklist or a framework they can hand to a client who is weighing a hard choice. Helping owners ask better questions makes you the person advisors want in the conversation and their first call for these weighty decisions.
- Show up where they gather. Trust builds in rooms and across tables, not in inboxes. The more AI makes it’s way through service models, the more people crave the human to human connection. (That’s the whole premise of my book, How to Happy Hour Your Way to a Million Dollar Deal.)
One question to sit with
Who is the first person your best client would call when they hit a hard decision about their business? Does that person know you well enough to say your name?
I’m pulling together my annual report about how professional services are sold today and building my annual report – the State of Sales 2026. It publishes 10/19. Stay tuned, it will bring you practical, ‘how to’ insight without a lot of marketing jargon.
A referral gets you a meeting. Influence gets you a client.
