The shortlist made before anyone calls you

The machine will not choose your next client’s adviser. It will decide who is on the list they choose from.

Ten years ago a managing partner emailed me out of the blue. He wanted to meet. He told me he had Googled me.

I asked him a bit more. What had actually happened was this. A peer of his had recommended me. He meant to ring, got busy, forgot. Then he saw me quoted in a magazine. Then he sat in the audience at a conference where I was on a panel. Three nudges before he picked up the phone.

The referral started it. The visibility finished it.

That still happens. What has changed is that there is now a second conversation, and you are not in it.

Picture the same partner today, driving home, thinking the firm really must find someone to help with business development. He turns on the microphone and talks into ChatGPT. He does not type “business development consultant”. He describes what he wants in his own words. Someone who has worked with professional services firms. Someone who has sat inside a firm rather than only agency side. Someone who understands partners.

He has a shortlist before he reaches his house.

The machine is not making the decision. It is making the list. Somebody then reads it, looks people up, asks around and chooses. That part has not changed and it is not going to.

What has changed is who is on the list in the first place. You cannot be chosen from a list you are not on, and reputation does not help at the point where the list is being made.

The obvious objection is that your best clients would never do this. They have known you for fifteen years and they ring you directly. That is true, and it was never where the risk was. The risk is the relationship you do not have yet. The referral that gets checked before the call. The day the finance director who knew you retires and somebody new arrives with no history and a search box.

I know how it works because it happened to me. Earlier this year a senior marketing leader at a global firm needed a speaker for a corporate finance meeting. Instead of asking her network, she described what she wanted to ChatGPT. It gave her a shortlist and I was on it.

She then did what anybody sensible would do. She looked me up, read what I had written, watched something I had done, and made her own mind up.

What put me on the list were phrases I had written on my own website a few weeks before. Adviser visibility. Deal storytelling. LinkedIn for people doing deals. What kept me there once she started looking properly was the same material, doing a second job.

It became paid work.

“Earlier this year a client found her by asking ChatGPT instead of her network, and it turned into paid work.”

Cory Blumenfeld, Taking My Time Back

Why the best people are often invisible

Three reasons, none of them a failing.

The first is that the work sits under the firm’s name rather than the person’s. Twenty years of excellent advice, all of it attributed to the practice.

The second is that visibility and self promotion get confused with each other, so people opt out of both. They are not the same thing. I have had senior partners ask me, in all seriousness, what they are supposed to say when they walk into a room and everyone is already talking.

The third is that what they know lives in their head and in client conversations. It was never written down anywhere a machine could read it.

Expertise and visibility are not the same skill. One does not produce the other.

Where to start

You will not win the generic term. You can be the obvious answer to the detailed question, which is the one your next client is actually asking.

Case studies do double duty, and so does everything else you publish. It has to be specific enough to put you on a list, and good enough to survive the person who then reads it properly. A real client, a real problem, a real outcome, named. That is what a referrer forwards to a colleague, and it is also what a machine reads.

Business development fails inside firms when it is treated as something extra rather than part of the job. One conversation a week. One piece of thinking a month. Start with the work you have just finished.

The ten minute test

Tonight, ask ChatGPT or Claude who is best at your advisory work in your market. See whether you appear. Then look at why the people who do appear are there.

Most people have never tried it.

Then try it the way a client would. Not the category, the problem. Something closer to: our firm keeps reaching the final two on panel reviews and losing, who should we be talking to? The names that come back are rarely the same as the first set, and the second set is the one that matters, because that is how people actually ask.

Then look properly at whoever did appear. Not to copy them. Look at what the tool is citing when it names them. It is rarely their own website. It is a conference programme, an article in a trade title, a directory entry, somebody else’s podcast. That is the whole lesson on one screen.

Then ask it about you, by name, and about your firm. Read what comes back slowly. Notice what is wrong, what is missing, and what is five years out of date. Most people find at least one of the three, and the third is the most common.

Last, ask it where that came from. Most tools will tell you. You find out which sources are quietly working on your behalf, and which ones you had forgotten were still out there.

Ten minutes, and nothing to set up.

If your ideal client described exactly what they needed into an AI tool on the drive home, would you be on the list it came back with?

This piece draws on a conversation with Cory Blumenfeld on Taking My Time Back. The episode is here.