Season 3, Episode 1: Matt Dixon
Activators Win: How Top Performers Drive Growth with Matt Dixon
In this episode of Jack Rants with Modern Bankers, Jack Hubbard sits down with bestselling author and researcher Matt Dixon to explore his latest book, The Activator Advantage. Together, they dive into the shifting world of sales and professional services, discussing why traditional rainmaking no longer guarantees success and how the "activator" mindset is transforming business development. Matt shares insights from his global study of over 3,000 partners, revealing what top performers do differently to build lasting client relationships, generate opportunities, and deliver value proactively.
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Jack Hubbard: So, I always like to start out
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Jack Hubbard: the first program of the year with something dramatic and amazing, and I think I've accomplished that.
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Jack Hubbard: Because today, I get to interview Matt Dixon, who wrote this amazing book, and I have dog-eared almost every page, The Activator Advantage. Matt, great to have you on the show.
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Matt Dixon: Hey, Jack, it's great to be, back talking with you again.
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Jack Hubbard: Well, let's… let's start with, you know, you've written…
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Jack Hubbard: so many great books. People will remember the Challenger Sale, The Challenger Customer, the Jolt effect, and I want to dive into the Activator Advantage, but let's first talk a little bit about your company. You do have a firm. You don't just write books, although you do that really well. You have a firm called DCM Insights. Talk about what you do and how you help your clients with that firm.
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Matt Dixon: Yeah, DCM Insights is a boutique firm. We're basically a consulting and training firm. We focus on helping
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Matt Dixon: professional services firms, much bigger professional services firms than ours, drive growth by making their partners and associates more effective commercially, so making them better at client engagement and business development, and we… we do that using a set of insights that are derived from our research, many of which are in that book you just held up.
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Jack Hubbard: Well, you talk about professional services, and getting accountants and attorneys and bankers and other professional people to sell is a real challenge. So let's start, before we talk about the book, you're out and about, your co-authors are out and about, your colleagues are out and about.
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Jack Hubbard: What are you seeing in sales today, Matt? What's going on? What's the state of sales in 2025?
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Matt Dixon: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think there are sort of two… two sides of that, because as you mentioned, some of our previous work really focused on the B2B sales, world, so Challenger, Challenger Customer, Jolt Effect, really focused on more traditional B2B sales, so we're talking about
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Matt Dixon: salespeople who sell, technology-based products, like software, SaaS products, AI, etc. People who sell medical devices, manufactured products, and the like. And then, the activator advantage is really more about that professional services world.
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Matt Dixon: You know, what I think is interesting is… is the sort of split between these words. There's some commonality, of course. If you look at the changes in client buying behavior, whether a client is
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Matt Dixon: considering buying a SaaS product from a B2B sales rep, or hiring a law firm, a consulting firm, taking out a line of credit with a, with a business banker.
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Matt Dixon: you know, for clients, it's all kind of the same, and that client buying behavior is the kind of tie that binds. So, clients are engaging, I'd see 3 big changes. One, clients are engaging salespeople much later. We talked about this in the Challenger sale. Our data back then showed, Jack, that the average customer was almost 60% of the way through their evaluation process, their purchase process, before they ever picked up the phone.
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Matt Dixon: before they ever… and called the salesperson before they ever filled out a form on the website to ask for a demo, etc. The second big challenge is the rise in buying committees. So buying committee growth has really exploded in recent years. When we wrote the Challenger Customer, we found the average B2B buying committee, and again, whether that's a committee evaluating a tech product, a new medical device supplier, or a new law firm, or consulting firm.
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Matt Dixon: Or, or a commercial bank.
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Matt Dixon: those buying committees have grown from about 5 people on average back in 2015, today to almost 20 people. And I actually think the particle accelerator of that was COVID and the shift towards virtual, because if you think about it.
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Matt Dixon: from the client side, there's really no downside to sending that Zoom invite to everybody in your organization. You get to spread the blame if you make a bad decision. And then the third big change we're seeing, or the big challenge we're seeing is the rise in no-decision losses, and this is what we wrote about in the Jolt effect. So, it's much more likely today that you'll have clients who engage in tire kicking.
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Matt Dixon: window shopping, engaging in a lot of discussions with a supplier, but never actually pulling the trigger on the decision. Instead, they go radio silent, they start ghosting you, and they just kind of disappear into the ether. And so those are 3 big challenges that, again, whether you're a partner in a professional services firm or you're a B2B sales rep.
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Matt Dixon: Those changes affect everybody. What I will say, though, is if you talk to the average B2B sales organization, these organizations are way more focused on leveraging advanced technology like AI to really drive efficiencies and ideally more effectiveness as well, but I think they've been a bit hit or miss there, using technology. When you talk to professional services partners, I think, as you alluded to before.
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Matt Dixon: I wouldn't say they're stuck in, kind of, the dark ages, that's not what I mean to say, because they're certainly talking about technology there too, but they're struggling with more basic problems, which is
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Matt Dixon: should we even be selling to our clients, or should we just sit back and wait for the phone to ring? Should we do more marketing and brand building and signaling to the market to drive inbound demand? And I think a lot of this is rooted in the fact that
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Matt Dixon: you know, for most partners, they're… they're part-time salespeople, they're not full-time salespeople, and I think they grew up in a world where, for many, many decades, it was enough to have a great brand, to work for a great firm.
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Matt Dixon: To have a great reputation, and then you could wait for the phone to ring. People would find you, and they'd reach out to you.
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Matt Dixon: But that is much less likely to be the case today than it once was.
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Matt Dixon: And I think that for partners in professional services who've grown up in this world where you could wait for the phone to ring, and if you did good work for your client, and you built a deep relationship with them, they will come back to you again and again and again. Again, that's no longer the case, so the axis upon which this whole
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Matt Dixon: relationship-based business of professional services has spun for a really long time. It's kind of wobbling, if not breaking entirely, and so it's really forcing partners to reckon with what does it mean to be effective commercially, how do I really get my arms around this, and then how do I do a little bit more of what those top rainmakers are doing differently?
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, and the two words that come out of this book, for me, are rainmaker and proactivity. Activators are proactive, and we're going to get into that profile a little bit. The Harvard Business Review says…
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Jack Hubbard: The Activator Advantage is one of the top 10 must-read books in 2025. I'll go farther than that. I think this is THE book for 2025. Any salesperson out there, and I don't care what industry you're in, if you're not reading this book, you're at a huge disadvantage.
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Jack Hubbard: I gotta believe, every single book that you've written, there's gotta be some kind of inspiration, or something in the back of your mind that says, it's time to write this book. Talk about the inspiration for the Activator Advantage.
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Matt Dixon: This one had its roots, and you know this, Jack, having read the book, the preface, I tell this story, which is actually completely true. As my co-author and challenger, Brent Adamson, loves to say, I'll steal this line shamelessly, most of my stories are true, and this one definitely is true. This is a true story. So back when we wrote The Challenger Sale, which, of course is a book about business-to-business salespeople, that book came out in
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Matt Dixon: 2011.
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Matt Dixon: And, a couple of years later, I was invited to present that research to the partners of one of the big strategy consulting firms. And for those people who are in the know, you know there's… there are three big strategy consulting… consultancies out there, known as the MBB firms. McKinsey, Bain, BCG. It was one of those three. So one of these guys invited me to come present to their partners. It was their North American Partner Retreat.
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Matt Dixon: And, I knew something was wrong, because they never made time for a prep call or anything like that. They just said, here's your time slot, bring your slides and a thumb drive, and you'll be… away you go. So, I got up on stage, there's about 400 partners in the room.
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Matt Dixon: And, I was about 45 minutes into my talk, and, the managing partner stood up and kind of started waving his arms in front of everybody and said, can you please stop? Just stop what you're doing. And I'm thinking, like, and by the way, this has never happened to me before as a speaker, it's never happened to me since, thank goodness, but it really stopped me dead in my tracks.
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Matt Dixon: And I'm thinking, what the heck is going on? This guy gestured for a hand mic to be brought over to him, and he says in front of the entire ballroom, you know, Professor Dixon, you've been talking about sales and selling, and sales effectiveness and sales productivity for 45 minutes now.
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Matt Dixon: And I'm sure our clients would find this work fascinating. We do a lot of consulting on go-to-market and, you know, GTM efficiency and effectiveness here at our firm.
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Matt Dixon: But maybe nobody told you before you got up on stage, and I'm thinking, -oh, here it comes. And he says, none of us in this room are salespeople.
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Jack Hubbard: We're not salespeople, we're partners. At best, we're doer-sellers, or seller-doers.
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Matt Dixon: But we're not salespeople in a traditional sense. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that our firm doesn't actually sell anything.
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Matt Dixon: And I was reminded by what happened to Professor Neil Rackham years ago, when he had a similar experience. I just happened to recall on the fly what he said in that moment. I stole shamelessly what he said, and it could have been a career-limiting move, but it ended up being pretty funny. I said, can we just stipulate to the fact that there's a mysterious process by which the client's money ends up in your firm's bank account? Can we just call it sales for the next 15 minutes?
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Matt Dixon: So that got a laugh from him and from the rest of the folks in the ballroom, but I did make a mental note at the time. The first one was.
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Matt Dixon: to turn down every invitation to present my research to professionals in the professional services business. And, I pretty much abided by that commitment for about a decade. Mainly, you know, I just concluded after that one experience, you know, this stuff is…
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Matt Dixon: is broadly relevant, but it's not directly relevant, because it's not about people like them. Especially because they don't even think of themselves as salespeople, and for many of these firms, this firm in particular, sales is kind of a four-letter word for their partners.
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Matt Dixon: And then the second thing I made a mental note of was.
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Matt Dixon: this is such a big sector of the global economy, and if you broadened it to include not just professional services, but financial services as well, it's a massive, massive chunk of the global economy, and this would be a really interesting place to go do some research. So, the seed was planted from that experience. It wasn't until many years later, in 2022, that we had an opportunity to kick off a global study, and as you know, we collected
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Matt Dixon: to data on more than 3,000 partners across professional services, and it was a pretty fascinating journey to dig into that and find what it told us about what top rainmakers are doing differently in today's day and age.
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Jack Hubbard: Well, the research is amazing, and what came out of the research are five.
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Jack Hubbard: profiles. I want to talk about the activator, but let's talk about all of them, and a little bit of the… I'll call them behaviors or attributes that you found in each.
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Matt Dixon: Yeah, absolutely. So, and that's a really important point, Jack, is that I think when I go through this, I always…
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Matt Dixon: take great pains to explain that, this is not… these are not personality types. These are… these are bundles of behaviors and techniques and tactics about time spent. It's about what you do with clients in the market, it's about how you close business, about how you use tools and technology, things like that. So, in other words.
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Matt Dixon: this isn't about who you are, it's about what you do. And so the…
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Matt Dixon: the subtext is, that means any of us can learn this stuff. And it doesn't mean that it comes easily, but it does mean it can be learned. So the first, the first profile we found was, the expert profile. So the expert I would describe as a reluctant business developer. These folks,
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Matt Dixon: when you talk to them, it's interesting. Many of them kind of bristle at the idea that they should have to sell. They just find it untoward, it's not the kind of thing that a professional should be engaged in.
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Matt Dixon: Their view is, I am a well-known lawyer, or investment banker, or commercial banker, or a wealth advisor, that… and people know who I am, they know my credentials, they know my pedigree, they know my track record.
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Matt Dixon: They can find me on LinkedIn, they can find me on the website. I should just be able to signal to the market that I'm one of the leaders in this field, and people will find me.
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Matt Dixon: Now, what that translates into, then, is, they do a lot of speaking, they post a lot of thought leadership, they're on a lot of panels at conferences. They do use LinkedIn, but when they use LinkedIn, they really use it to post a point of view, or, you know, a thought piece, that kind of thing. And then what they do is, in the words of one CEO who quickly concluded that most of his partners were experts.
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Matt Dixon: What that leads to is a posture where they, quote-unquote, aggressively wait for the phone to ring. So again, I'm gonna signal to the market that I'm an expert in this specific area. If you have a need that aligns with that area, you should be able to find me, and I will just sit back and let it rain, right? I don't need to make it rain.
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Matt Dixon: Now, what that means in practice, though, especially in today's market, where it's far more competitive, and buyers are armed with AI, they know all of the providers out there who can help them with specific services and solutions.
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Matt Dixon: What that means is that by the time the client finds the expert, they're probably also talking to several other experts from other firms, and then it can be a race to the bottom on price. These people get pulled into a lot of competitive pursuits and RFPs and that sort of thing. The second one is the confidant. The confidant I would describe as kind of an old-school trusted advisor, and that's not to denigrate the concept of being a trusted advisor. Of course, that's kind of a gold standard, I think, in the services
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Matt Dixon: industry. But…
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Matt Dixon: It's the way that these folks go about this approach. So what they do is they try to build a small portfolio of key client relationships. So think, like, 3 to 5 key clients, and they basically try to mine those clients for the entirety of their careers for more follow-on work and fees and loans and the like.
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Matt Dixon: Now, what allows them to do that is that they deliver great work, they really do pride themselves on the quality of their work product.
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Matt Dixon: They bend over backwards for their clients, so they really have a very client-first kind of service posture. And then they, they seek to create not just business relationships, but ideally personal relationships with their clients. So you'll, you'll hear these folks talking about, in terms like.
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Matt Dixon: you know, Jack, I go skiing together with my top clients, and their family and my family. We go skiing together on the holidays, or…
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Matt Dixon: Did you know, Jack, I went to law school with the general counsel from this, this company. We were law school classmates, we worked in the same, legal practice, and now I'm in private practice as a partner in this firm. That person's a general counsel, they're not just my friend and former classmate, they're now my client as well.
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Matt Dixon: Now…
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Matt Dixon: what these folks really do believe is that if they've got this kind of relationship with the client, they do great work, they've got a great relationship, they bend over backwards for the client, that client should automatically come back to them again and again and again. It would be unthinkable that the client would force you to compete for the next piece of work after all the great stuff you've done for them in your career.
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Matt Dixon: Now, that also leads to some bad behaviors internally. A lot of professional services firms are really trying to get their partners to collaborate to bring the breadth of the firm's capabilities to bear, to solve more complex and more lucrative client problems and opportunities.
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Matt Dixon: These folks are the anti-collaborators. They really live in fear of what might happen if they introduce a colleague from another practice or another office.
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Matt Dixon: And those people come into your… their trusted client, their deep client relationship, and they… they basically screw it up for them, because they don't have that many of these to go around, and so these folks tend to have very, very sharp elbows inside the firm. Then the third one is the, the debater. So the debaters, actually, I would say, pretty similar to the Challenger from the Challenger sale research. These folks are very, they've got sharp elbows with the client, they're very interested in reframing the client's
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Matt Dixon: entire worldview, their entire mental model. Client comes to you saying, hey, we want to do this, and we're interested in hiring you for this piece of work, and they try to say, actually, that's not at all what you should be doing. You should be going left, not right. They're really, again, trying to be provocative and trying to upend the client's own understanding of what they're seeking to accomplish. Now.
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Matt Dixon: In, what's interesting to me is that where you find these folks is in a lot of commoditized spaces, where fees are pretty much the same. So, I'm thinking about it like Executive Search, for instance. For the top 5 search firms in the world, they all charge exactly the same rate.
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Matt Dixon: They all have access to the same candidates out there, it's everybody on LinkedIn, basically, right?
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Matt Dixon: there's not a lot to differentiate them. They've all worked with top-tier clients, they've all got relevant search experience, and so you do find these folks in this field who will talk about the fact that, you know, I spoke to one of these partners just the other day, and she said, look, I do CFO searches for Fortune 100 companies.
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Matt Dixon: And when a company is looking to hire a CFO at the Fortune 100 level, they're talking to all the big search firms, plus probably a few boutique and niche firms that focus on CFO search.
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Matt Dixon: And so, when I come in.
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Matt Dixon: if I've got any shot of winning, I've got to basically help the client think outside the box, and blow up their entire conception of the job profile, or the talent pools they're looking at. And I asked her, I said, well, how does that work out for you? And she said, well, I'm showing the door about 90% of the time, but the 10% of the time that I win, the client says, because I help them think differently about
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Matt Dixon: About the goals and objectives. Now, what's so interesting is, and not to tip my mid to the results, but these people don't do very well in professional services, but what's interesting, as I said, they are the winning profile in B2B sales, but what it told me as a researcher is.
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Matt Dixon: It's okay to be a challenger if you're selling a product, but if you are the product, it's a kind of a tough posture to adopt, and you gotta be really careful, because you gotta… you're selling a relationship. Your client's gotta want to spend time with you.
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Matt Dixon: Right? Invite you to their office, spend time with their team, and if they find that every time they sit down with you, you're telling them they're doing it wrong, that's just an exhausting feeling to give your client. And then the fourth one's the realist, before you get to the activator. So the realest is kind of the glass-half-empty,
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Matt Dixon: professionals. So these folks are very…
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Matt Dixon: focused on telling clients things are gonna take way longer than you think, they're gonna cost a lot more than you budgeted for, and the impact is going to be a lot less than you hoped for. That might sound like an odd way to sell, and it probably is.
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Matt Dixon: But, when you talk to these folks, what they'll tell you is the reason they do this is that they know that every client out there, worth their salt, every client has had a bad experience with a partner from a professional services firm, whether it's the lawyer who sent the surprise invoice after the matter was closed, whether it was the consultant who left them
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Matt Dixon: you know, holding the bag and a set of recommendations, but with no plan or no support to implement those recommendations. Everybody's had these bad experiences, and so they try to do the exact opposite. They want to be known as the partners who give it straight to the client, who speak truth to the client, who tell clients what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear, and that will separate them out. Though, I will also say, clients, when you talk to them, they say they appreciate the candor
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Matt Dixon: in the transparency, but they also want the partners they hire to talk about what could be accomplished, right? Like, paint the art of the possible. What's the… what's the big picture? Where could we get together, or get to together, if we were to hire you and your firm?
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Matt Dixon: So those are the four profiles that don't win, and of course, as the name of the book suggests, the activator advantage, the activator's the winning profile, which we can talk about as well.
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, so let's talk about some of the behaviors, traits, if you will, of an activator. What separates them from the other?
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Matt Dixon: Sure. Yeah, so activators, I'll think of it in a couple of dimensions. One is, they're super connectors. So these folks are very active, digitally, so they're very active on LinkedIn, not in the same way as the expert, who just posts their point of view, their thought, and then they sit back and wait for clients to inbound.
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Matt Dixon: What these folks are doing is they're using LinkedIn as, like, the world's biggest business conference. They're engaged in the conversation, they're liking, they're reposting, they're sharing. And what they're really trying to do is get that conversation from LinkedIn
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Matt Dixon: to, email, and then from email to a Zoom, and then from maybe Zoom to a coffee or dinner, right? They're trying to move it, to the… from the virtual to the live.
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Matt Dixon: These folks are also differentiated by how they engage and they connect in live settings. So partners in professional services firms, especially, you think about lawyers and accountants, not to pick on them.
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Matt Dixon: But when they go to, events, whether it's a firm-sponsored client event, or whether it's an industry conference, a lot of these folks will kind of stand in the corner with their colleagues, kind of clumping, talking to people they know, waiting for a client to approach them, right?
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Matt Dixon: what activators are doing is they're working the room, and what they do specifically is they get a punch list together of… they know who's coming to the event, they're setting up the coffees and the lunches and the dinners and the side conversations well in advance, and they go in with kind of a target list of, here's who I want to have a conversation with, here's who I'm looking to get a business card from.
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Matt Dixon: Now, somebody asked me the other day.
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Matt Dixon: Connections, obviously a big part of what activators are doing. Why didn't you just call them connectors? But I think it kind of undersells what happens next, and this is the real active ingredient, no pun intended.
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Matt Dixon: But what they do is they take those LinkedIn connections, they take those business cards that they collect at live events, and they try to turn them into paying client relationships. And the way that they do this, and this is very unique in professional services, where
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Matt Dixon: Professionals bill for their time, right? Time is their product, if you will.
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Matt Dixon: they give free advice, so they look to pay it forward by bringing new ideas to their clients, whether that's a new way to make money, save money, mitigate risk, take advantage of a new regulatory change, or a new court decision, or respond quickly to a competitor's move in the industry. They're trying to bring these ideas to clients before clients have that light bulb moment and think.
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Matt Dixon: I need to call a consulting firm, I need to call an accountant, I need to call a tax advisor, I need to call a lawyer. They're trying to get to the client first. Now, interestingly, again, they're not looking to charge for that time, they're looking to pay it forward, and they do that for a few reasons. One is.
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Matt Dixon: they want to, create a posture of goodwill towards the client, that even though we are not engaged in paid work, I was the person who was thoughtful enough to alert you to a new risk or opportunity, and to bring it to you, and give you a little bit of free advice about how I might respond to it, or how I'm seeing other firms respond to it. Second.
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Matt Dixon: ideally, I can shape your understanding of that opportunity in a way that leads you to me, right? Versus, it helps you see us in a category of one, or uniquely positioned to help you.
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Matt Dixon: Now, the last thing I'll say about the activator is…
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Matt Dixon: Unlike the confidant… so they're… so again, they're quite proactive, as you said earlier, Jack, bringing that idea to the client instead of sitting back and waiting for the phone to ring. But they're also very different from that confidant, where the confidant tries to keep colleagues out.
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Matt Dixon: Activators are looking to bring colleagues in. Most of these folks, when you talk to them, it's interesting, because their secondary posture, the thing they minor in, is actually the expert profile, which I think is fascinating. What that tells me is that these partners, these activators, they are experts. But for them, expertise is table stakes in today's competitive market. You need to activate that expertise.
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Matt Dixon: And many of them will talk about the fact that even more important than their personal expertise in a given area is the fact that they pride themselves on being general contractors for expertise. So my real gift to the client is my ability to knit together the capabilities of my colleagues in my… our broad practice areas, and bring to you a holistic solution that solves for a much bigger, more complex need on your end.
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Matt Dixon: So, if I can, you know, look, it's great that the client is loyal to me, that's fine.
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Matt Dixon: But if they're only loyal to me.
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Matt Dixon: that's kind of easy come and easy go. It can be kind of transactional. If we are supporting the client across many practice areas, many departments, many functions, many priorities, that's a much stickier relationship, because we're plugged in at many different points in the client organization, and the client thinks twice before they pull up the 10 stakes and they leave. So… so those are just some of the… some of the attributes, of the activator. Again, we can go into some more detail. We talk about the activator model.
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Matt Dixon: model, as you know, Jack, in the book, and I give people a little bit of a walkthrough of what that is, but… but that at a high level, think of these folks as proactive, they're highly… they're really connecting, and then the one piece I didn't really talk about is their commitment to business development. Again, in a world
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Matt Dixon: Where most professionals don't really think of themselves as salespeople. I don't think they should have to sell.
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Matt Dixon: Activators have a metronomic, kind of rhythmic cadence to their business development. They never take their foot off the gas. They find those little slivers of time in the day to keep the wheels of progress moving on their business development. The reason is, they know today's client, as loyal as they seem, tomorrow might be your competitor's client, so you better have a backup plan, right?
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, and I want to pick at that a little bit. It's interesting that you found that activators spend 37% more time in business development.
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Matt Dixon: Yeah.
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Jack Hubbard: But not all of their time in business development.
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Matt Dixon: Yeah, yeah.
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Jack Hubbard: When we talk about a client, one of the things I found fascinating, and I've always tried to do in my experience, is when I have a client, I want to surround that client and provide a lot of value, and I want to get to that value point.
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Jack Hubbard: What… what were some specific things that you found that activators did
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Jack Hubbard: to provide value to their client, where the client said, wow, this is great stuff, I've never seen this from anybody else.
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Matt Dixon: So, I think there are really, first, before I answer that question, Jack, just a quick note on the time spent. This is, I think, a conundrum sometimes for partners, especially if they are in a…
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Matt Dixon: billable hour environment. So think about lawyers, for instance, who bill… bill… well, they actually bill in, like, 15-minute increments, and some firms are even moving to smaller increments of billable time, but they bill by the hour. And,
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Matt Dixon: I think a lot of partners look at that and they say, well, my firm requires that I bill, you know, 1,800, 2,000 hours a year, whatever the number is. How on earth do those activators find time to do that much business development?
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Matt Dixon: And, I… this is epitomized by what one activator told us when we asked her, how much time do you spend on business development? And she said, 100% of the time. And we said, well, you're also working on client matters, right? And she said, well, of course. And you're also involved in firm initiatives. Oh, of course I am.
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Matt Dixon: So then you don't spend 100% of your time on business development. She said, well, what I mean is that I think of every client interaction as an opportunity to generate new business, to bring in… to broaden our relationship, to deepen the relationship, to bring in new service lines, to think about next follow-on work, right? To reinforce the value of what we're doing to retain you as a client. It's all about client engagement, business development, and so it's just a little bit of a mindset difference.
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Matt Dixon: It's not actually that they spend all their time business development, it's how they think about the time in front of the client. But I'll also say, activators seem to be much more kind of surgically precise in finding those slivers of time across the day, whether that's walking the dog, whether it's the commute to work, and thinking about how do I just put in a few minutes here and there to keep, again, keep the wheels of progress moving on business development.
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Matt Dixon: Now, in terms of value delivery, in the book, we talk about three sources of value. Two of them, I would say, are table stakes for any good professional or advisor. It's the third one that really differentiates activators. So the three sources of value are these. You've got business value.
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Matt Dixon: trust, value, and personal value. So, business value is how we help our clients make money, save money, mitigate risk. Basically, how do we help them for the thing that they hired us to do?
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Matt Dixon: that, that is… for every professional, it's different, right? For a lawyer, it might be helping the client mitigate a risk. For a management consultant, it might be helping them save money. For an investment banker, it might be helping them make money, right, by divesting an asset, by buying a business that helps drive growth for their enterprise, etc. But whatever the business outcome is, that's what we're helping with on that side.
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Matt Dixon: The second piece is trust value. So trust value is,
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Matt Dixon: How… how we deliver that work.
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Matt Dixon: Do we do it in above-board, transparent, ethical way? Do we do it in a way that delivers at, ideally, above the client's expectations? And do we deliver it in the manner that the client expects?
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Matt Dixon: Clients expect different kinds of delivery from one partner or one firm versus the next, and clients are all different in terms of how they like working with their partners.
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Matt Dixon: So those two things are critically important, and every activator we spoke to said, look, you're not even at the table if you're not delivering business value and trust value. But the problem with those two things is that they're not exclusive to you. That is the core of being a trusted advisor. You do deliver business results, and you do it in a trustworthy way.
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Matt Dixon: But being a trusted advisor is not good enough anymore, because the market is crowded with trusted advisors. Many of them work at your competitors' firms. They work in boutique and niche firms. They've hung up a shingle, and they're vying for business that used to come to you exclusively. And so nobody has a monopoly on that. And so, as important as it is to deliver those two things, it's not… it doesn't make you unique. So what activators all talk about is this idea of
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Matt Dixon: personal value. What is personal value?
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Matt Dixon: It's… it's more than just knowing your client's kids' names, or remembering their wedding anniversary, or their favorite, you know, wine, or their favorite, hobby.
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Matt Dixon: That's just being a nice person, and it's not to be confused with personal value. What personal value is, are the things that are important to the client, personally or professionally, that matter to them, that lie outside of the scope of paid work. So, for instance, what are the things that your client is trying to accomplish in their career?
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Matt Dixon: What is the thing that they're struggling with at work? Is it a new boss? Is it a new ownership structure for their company? Is it an initiative that perhaps has gone sideways? Is it an underperforming team member or entire team?
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Matt Dixon: what are they passionate about outside of work? Are there causes, or foundations, or even personal challenges that they talk about?
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Matt Dixon: And is there some way that you…
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Matt Dixon: maybe somebody in your network, maybe a colleague in your firm, can get connected to that client and help deliver value on those things. You know, the stories we heard from activators really ran the gamut. I'll give you one, you know, not very invasive, and one maybe more invasive example. So the not very invasive kind of low.
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Matt Dixon: a low-lift, example. There was a search consultant we interviewed who said that
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Matt Dixon: you know, she deals with top-tier executives, and she said a lot of these executives go on expat assignments around the world. They get, you know, moved to be president of a business unit and wherever.
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Matt Dixon: And she said one of the things she does is she introduces that client to her colleagues in the office in-country, where that client is about to move to, not to sell them work.
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Matt Dixon: but rather to have a friend on the ground when they land. You could talk about great restaurants to go to, things to do on the weekends, schools and neighborhoods you might explore. And so, I know how hard it can be, especially if you've got a family, to move your entire life overseas and be unfamiliar with the surroundings.
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Matt Dixon: And my colleagues are so plugged into the local market, they're just great people to know, right? And if there's some work that comes out of that, great. But that's a low burden kind of thing.
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Matt Dixon: Here's another example. I spoke to a strategy consultant who was doing, focuses on market research in the consumer packaged goods industry. So, working with some of the big household name kind of brands that we're all familiar with.
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Matt Dixon: And, what he said is, he was talking to the head of market research from one of these big CPG manufacturers who was very stressed out about his team, and said, these team members are some of the most technically proficient market researchers in the world.
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Matt Dixon: But they just cannot present any of this data to the executive committee. They just say it's like the eyes glaze over, they don't listen, and they're doing great work, but I just… it all ends up falling on my plate, so it takes that much more time to learn all of their research so that I can put it in a deck and tell the story to the CEO or to the president of the business.
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Matt Dixon: these tech, you know, technocrats, I just can't put them in front of the executive committee, and it's putting a lot of stress on me.
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Matt Dixon: And so this strategy consultant said, this is one of the things we're best at at our firm, is storytelling and turning data into insight, into stories, and communicating it at an executive level. What if I set up a weekly call with your team where they pitched me their decks, and I just gave them feedback?
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Matt Dixon: on the story and the frame, and this kind of thing. He said, actually, it was a lot of fun, and the team had a lot of fun with it too, and the, the client, the head of market research at the CPG, came back and said, boy, when this stuff lands on my desk, it's so much better than it used to be. It's just, it's written for an executive consumer. It's got a story, it's got a compelling frame to it, that, you know, they're getting out of the weeds.
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Matt Dixon: And it was a low-burden thing, but it was really important to the client, and it really helped them with something that they were really stressed out about and challenged by. So again, a great source of personal value. It's just… it's outside of the scope of paid work.
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Matt Dixon: But what's so interesting is when you do that stuff, it creates a level of stickiness, that is hard to replicate.
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Matt Dixon: Jacqueline, just hit pause, I'm gonna close my window, because somebody's decided to mow their lawn right now, so… hang on one second.
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Matt Dixon: Alright, I am back.
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Jack Hubbard: So, I'm… you mentioned the activator model, and while I want people to buy this book, because it is the book of 2025 for salespeople.
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Jack Hubbard: Talk a little bit about the activator model that you put together as a result of your research.
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Matt Dixon: Yeah, so, so I gave you the kind of the high-level description of what activators are doing. You know, they're committing to business development, they're connecting broadly and deeply, and they're creating value proactively. Those are sort of the pillars of being an activator. We call it the three C's, commit, connect, and create.
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Matt Dixon: Now, below that, what the research revealed is a whole, set of mindsets that activists share. Not personality traits, but mindsets that they developed over time. We also find a set of routines or habits, that kind of, help inform what they're doing on a day-to-day, weekly basis. And then.
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Matt Dixon: What was interesting is that when you hear activators talk about, the moments that matter in the client relationship, everything from making initial contact, to proposing paid work, to negotiating fees, to dealing with the inevitable client setback.
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Matt Dixon: You know.
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Matt Dixon: these are… these, what we call, kind of pivot points, or moments that matter in the client relationship. These things together create kind of the activator model, and it's really a roadmap for the entire book. So we actually unpack, as you know, those three C's at a high level. We talk about the mindsets, we talk about the habits or the routines in the daily workflow, and then we talk about those five pivot points at great detail with lots of examples.
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Matt Dixon: This, I think, serves as kind of a rubric for, what great professionals are doing today. And I think…
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Matt Dixon: You know, it's interesting because, for the average professional, they'll look at these top rainmakers and often conclude, you know, there's a lot that they do well and that they do differently, but I think this kind of chalks the field a little bit. It's a lot of stuff.
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Matt Dixon: But it's not everything, right? It's that activators are really focused on developing these 3 mindsets, you know, these 6 habits, these… really mastering these 5 pivot points.
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Matt Dixon: Yeah, they're good at other stuff too, but if you really boiled it down and distilled it, get good at that stuff, and you'll really see the needle move in terms of your own business development, effectiveness, and your own client engagement prowess.
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Jack Hubbard: I'm sure when you're out speaking about this, you get this question all the time. My… and so I'll… I'll be in the audience. You've got 5 profiles of
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Jack Hubbard: All salespeople who could be relatively successful, but the activator is perhaps the most successful.
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Jack Hubbard: Can I, and if I can, how do I, migrate those other four profiles?
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Jack Hubbard: Can those other four profiles be pro-activators, and how do you do that? How do you make that happen?
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Matt Dixon: Yeah, a great question. So, I think, the answer is yes, and I would say the answer is more a function of, will than it is one of, skill. So, what I mean by that is that there are, for sure, partners out there that we've encountered. You think about
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Matt Dixon: Folks who've been really, really successful already, they're already one of the top-run makers in their firm, or folks who've just been doing this a long time and have kind of grooved their client motion, or maybe have just gotten kind of comfortable with their book of business.
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Matt Dixon: There are folks who opt out of learning how to up their game, but I would say for most partners, especially when we talk about new partners, you talk about lateral hires, so people came from industry or government, and now they're partners in a professional services firm.
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Matt Dixon: You think about folks who, you know, who are experienced, but maybe not as successful as they would like.
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Matt Dixon: And I might even include some of those top rainmakers who are actually looking… they like the fact that they're top of the heap, but they want to future-proof their success. I would say the vast majority, probably 80% of the partners we encounter are interested in open, they have the will to get better, and I think if that exists.
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Matt Dixon: teaching them the habits and the routines and mastering those pivot points and some of the behaviors is actually a lot… is pretty easy. Now.
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Matt Dixon: What I would say, is that, you know, I get asked this a lot by partners, you know, should every partner be an activator?
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Matt Dixon: And one of the things I always want to point out is that when we studied these partners, more than 3,000 of them, it's important to remember that every single partner had all 5 of these profiles within them.
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Matt Dixon: They're not mutually exclusive, in other words. And I'll date myself a little bit with this reference, Jack, but, you know, I remember back in college, I had a stereo receiver, and it had the little equalizer bars, you know, the bass, the treble, you know, the balance, the fade, all the stuff. And you could dial it in just the way you wanted to make the music sound the way you liked.
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Matt Dixon: I would think about the 5 profiles like equalizer bars, and what we're trying to do is dial them into the right levels. All of us have some level of activator already. There's no partner we encountered that had 0% activator. They all have a little bit. Now, the question is, how do I increase the levels on activator
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Matt Dixon: And maybe tamp down a little bit of what might be hurting me right now about some of the other profiles.
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Matt Dixon: And so, one of the things we find that works well, and this is how professionals and partners are different from B2B salespeople.
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Matt Dixon: is that they're very autonomous people. They're very prideful of their client engagement approach, the way that they develop client relationships, especially if they've been successful in their careers. And so we always go in, not with a posture of.
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Matt Dixon: hey, we're all going to be activators, so throw out what you did before, and this is what we're going to do moving forward, because that doesn't work. These are independent people, and in many cases, in partnerships, they're actually
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Matt Dixon: co-owners of the business, right? So you can't really tell them what to do. It's more of a democracy, if you will.
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Matt Dixon: But what does work really well is to say, look.
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Matt Dixon: you're all here, you're all partners in this firm for a reason. You've all been successful in different ways. Our goal is for you to identify what works today, what are some of those habits that might be, holding you back, and then how do you infuse your client development approach with a little bit more of what top brand makers, activators do differently?
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Matt Dixon: And what's so interesting about that is that if we bring together a group of 20 partners, we might see activator implemented in 20 different ways at the end of, you know, if you look at it 6 months later. It's not a one-size-fits-all, and I think it's a really important
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Matt Dixon: Part of getting partners, these autonomous, opinionated, like, you know, tough-minded, skeptical people, getting them to come to it.
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Matt Dixon: really requires you to tell them, go make this your own. Go tailor this to what you do today. Our goal is not to tell you to do things differently, our goal is to just share the research with you, and then you can pick and choose those elements off the shelf that are going to work for you and make you better. And I think that message resonates a lot more. Now, I also think,
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Matt Dixon: some of this comes down to, and we spend a lot of time with partners just breaking down misconceptions about sales, and what it is, and what it's not, and that's not a dirty word, and what it really means. And I think one of the things that's really important for these partners to recognize is that
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Matt Dixon: Activators, none of them, none of the ones we interviewed held up their hand and said, I was a born salesperson, I was just born to do this, I could sell anything, right? Most of them actually said the exact opposite, said, I didn't find this came to me naturally, I had to work really hard to get good at this.
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Matt Dixon: And, it wasn't a comfortable thing for me to start out doing. I experienced a lot of failure, I learned a lot of tough lessons early on, but I stuck with it.
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Matt Dixon: And so, again, none of these folks
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Matt Dixon: describe themselves as natural-born sellers, they describe themselves as folks who learn through experience and trial and error. And that says a lot for the rest of us, right? That we can all get better at this, as long as we have the will and the commitment.
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Matt Dixon: This is one really important point, though, I would make for listeners.
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Matt Dixon: that for activators, because of the… and you mentioned this earlier in the call, Jack, because of the proactive nature of what they do, bringing ideas to clients, delivering that value, that business value, trust value, personal value, and doing it proactively.
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Matt Dixon: Without any thought of getting paid for it,
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Matt Dixon: what you're really doing is building a relationship and delivering value before you get into paid work. And so paid work just becomes a natural evolution of the relationship.
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Matt Dixon: Now, most partners, and I would actually say most salespeople, approach it the exact opposite way. Their mindset is, I need you to sign this agreement, and once you sign it, then I'll deliver value. Then we'll build a deep relationship. Activators do it the opposite way, right? They're building value, delivering a relationship, delivering value in advance.
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Matt Dixon: And then it just makes it a natural segue into paid client work. It doesn't feel… it's… somebody told me this, just the other day in a keynote I gave on the hallway. They said, you know.
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Matt Dixon: it occurred to me that when I proposed to my spouse, it would have been weird if I just ran into her on the street and just popped the question.
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Matt Dixon: Instead, we got to know each other, we were friends, we dated, you know, we met each other's families, we lived together for a bit, and then we bought the question, right? And it's kind of similar to what activators are doing, right? It's just a natural evolution. And so, therefore, for these professionals, it doesn't really feel like sales, right? It doesn't feel…
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Matt Dixon: Obtrusive, doesn't feel, aggressive or confrontational, just feels like a natural way that the relationship should evolve with the client.
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, and I want to ask you one more question, then, you know, get all your contact information. So, you mentioned partners, and you mentioned that, you know, maybe sales isn't the best word that they could possibly use. So.
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Jack Hubbard: But somebody in that firm has got to coach the junior.
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Matt Dixon: Yeah.
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Jack Hubbard: accountants or lawyers. Is… is… are any of the profiles that you found, or maybe you haven't even thought about this, are… are… is there… is there one profile that's a better coach than others?
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Matt Dixon: That's a great question. You know, I think this is one of the…
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Matt Dixon: There are two really hard things about trying to drive sales in professional services, and I think the first thing is the lack of time that professionals have to sell. So, you think about a salesperson whose job is to be a salesperson, they sell all day long.
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Matt Dixon: Partners really only get to do this when their schedules permit. And again, activators will find those nooks and crannies during the day, and they'll make it happen. But these are still part-time salespeople. They just don't get enough reps in the batting cage like a professional salesperson, so it's just hard to get really good at the craft if you're not doing it all the time.
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Matt Dixon: So that… that's… that's one piece, I would say, that… that is a challenge. The second big challenge for professional services firms is they tend not to have
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Matt Dixon: a rank of coaches or managers in the same way a sales organization would. A sales organization is going to have frontline sales managers, they're gonna have second-line sales managers, sales directors, and then they're going to have, in many cases, dedicated coaches who are working across the sales team to help them improve their skills.
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Matt Dixon: Most professional services firms don't have that infrastructure, and so those are two things that really make it hard for partners to get good at this. That being said, when we look at… most of the firms we work with have
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Matt Dixon: some capacity, whether it's the BD team, right? In some accounting and consulting firms, there are a small group of kind of professional salespeople whose job is to open doors and to bring in the partners and land those initial meetings.
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Matt Dixon: these folks are really, really… they're… they're cut more from the professional sales cloth, and I think for… in many of the cases, many of the firms we work with.
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Matt Dixon: Those people are actually some of the best coaches to the partners, right? Because they've been salespeople in their careers. They understand the profession of selling in a way that
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Matt Dixon: partners really don't, and so they're in a prime position to be able to coach that. That being said, back to your question, which of them… I think what I would say is the activators on those teams are actually the best coaches, because they are proactive in offering their help and their advice. They are committed to doing it. Even though these partners are busy, and they often say no, they always come back, like, hey, Jack, I saw you got this open window on your calendar. Did you see this change in the market?
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Matt Dixon: This court decision, this regulatory announcement.
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Matt Dixon: I think that this would be a great opportunity for us to put something together and go out to these three clients, and here's what I think we should say. So they're… they're providing that kind of active activator coaching internally, sort of activating internally, not externally, perhaps, and really helping those partners leverage their scarce time to be more effective themselves out in the market.
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, how does this affect HR? In other words, you know, if we believe, and your research would tell you, that an activator would be a great person to have on the team.
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Jack Hubbard: how does… how do the questions that HR is asking to get candidates… Yeah. How can they find activators?
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Matt Dixon: Yeah, we've got, in the book, we… we've got, kind of, an activator… there's a section, we talk about activator hiring. Now, again, I think it's really important… it is important that… that when firms are out there.
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Matt Dixon: interviewing candidates, they're asking the right behavioral questions, they're also looking at external markers, right? You want to look at, does this person have a headshot on LinkedIn? Are they active on LinkedIn? Are they…
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Jack Hubbard: Fantastic.
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Matt Dixon: what are they posting? What are they doing on LinkedIn? Are they just posting? Are they commenting and liking and participating in the dialogue, right? Treating it like the world's biggest business conference. What are they doing? So there are things you can look for, there are behavioral questions you can ask, and that is important, when it comes to hiring. It's important for when you're looking at lateral candidates, again, coming in from…
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Matt Dixon: industry or from government into a partnership, into a professional services firm. It's also important for when we're evaluating associates for partner promotion.
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Matt Dixon: Right? These are things… because these are things that… that associates will start showing before they even go up for partner consideration. You can start looking at their activator-ness, internally and externally.
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Matt Dixon: All of that being said, I think the real lesson for firms is you can't hire your way to victory. There just aren't enough kind of natural-born activators out there, so you really do need to tackle this question of how do we get more of our partners, who might not be natural activators, to do more of what activators do, what comes to them naturally, right? Committing, connecting, and creating, developing those habits, those mastering those pivot points, developing those minds
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Matt Dixon: So that is probably the 80 of the problem. Certainly, you want to get the hiring right, but I'd say the bigger challenge for most firms is, how do I take my existing partners, whether they're dozens, hundreds, or in some cases, thousands, or even tens of thousands, and start getting them to up their activator nests, if you will.
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Jack Hubbard: Don't… bankers, bank CEOs, don't buy this book.
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Jack Hubbard: Buy one for everybody. Don't buy one.
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Jack Hubbard: Buy one for everybody on your team. There is so much good stuff in here. To me, this is a training class for how to be a proactive salesperson in banking, and certainly in professional sales. Matt, how do people get ahold of you if they would love to have you speak, and I'm sure a lot of banks would?
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Matt Dixon: Sure, yeah, I'm very active on LinkedIn, and so LinkedIn's a great way to get ahold of me. Tell me if you heard me on Jack Harbard's show, and let's get connected on LinkedIn, so we can start the dialogue there. You can also email me, matt at DCMinsights.com, and you can… that's where you can visit our company as well. We're at DCMinsights.com. You can learn more about
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Matt Dixon: the kind of firms we work with, some more about our program, speaking, and there's a ton of free resources on there as well that…
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Matt Dixon: that, HBR Press cut for the stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor, so you might want to go check that out if you're really into the book as well and want to learn more.
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Jack Hubbard: And Matt Dixon is an activator, and thank you so much…
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Matt Dixon: I'll keep track.
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Jack Hubbard: For being on the show today, really appreciate it.
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Matt Dixon: Thanks for having me.
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Jack Hubbard: Alright, thank you for, being flexible. I know you must be swamped.
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Matt Dixon: Oh, no, yeah, I'm, I'm good. No, I appreciate your flexibility. Thank you for, allowing us to move it, and, sorry for the, sorry for the noise interruption. Ironically, my neighbor, who's a partner in a professional services firm, just used… he must have had a small sliver in his day, and he came out to move as long.
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Jack Hubbard: The program will be on September 10th. We'll get you all kinds of… you can use anything you want. We'll get you the complete show. Put it on your website or not. Use it in any way you want, Matt. I really appreciate your time today. Good to see you.
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Matt Dixon: Thanks, you too, man. Take care.
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Jack Hubbard: Thanks, man. See ya. Bye-bye. Bye now.
