on a new engagement? Bring together a group of veteran sales and consulting professionals for a brainstorm session. During this session, select two or three successful new business wins, and backtrack through the sales process. Be painstaking during this dialogue, and examine all of the detail involved in targeting and closing a new business deal. This exercise will help your organization to see all of the steps involved in your sales process, and, over time, a pattern will emerge. This pattern is your unique sales process.
Once you have insight into your unique sales process, you can then map it against the typical sales cycle as outlined in Exhibit 4.7 to create an informational f low chart that depicts your firm’s process.
Selling the Way People Want to Buy
As stated earlier, successful sales professionals sell the way people want to buy, not the way they want to sell. There is a contagious energy that results from this approach to selling.
Before going on a sales call, it is necessary to understand the nuances of selling professional services. Selling professional services is unique in that you are positioning capabilities; this is different from positioning a solution or a product. In the early stages of selling, finding the right amount of positioning (positioning the firm in addition to the practice), without having done a lot of discovery about the client need, is difficult. However, in the professional services sales environment, it is critical that you position the capabilities of both the firm and the practice to gain the legitimacy that is required to gain access and the confidence of the prospect’s decision makers.
In selling professional services, the most important part of the selling process is the beginning. This beginning, or discovery stage, is the second step in Exhibit 4.7. In a typical selling environment, consultants often walk into a new client meeting feeling pressured to present a solution before having a clear understanding of the problem. Or, out of confidence (or arrogance), a consultant will walk into an initial sales meeting claiming to already know the solution that the client needs. In both of these situations,
Sales Management
109
the consultant immediately starts selling; there is no time to assess and re-f lect on the situation and position the value of the solution in the context of the client need. This approach to selling results in a decrease in selling power.
Selling power directly correlates with contextual power. Contextual power results from placing your solution in the context of the client need. It is at the beginning of the sales cycle that the sales professional and consultant have an opportunity to clearly understand the client challenge, to identify the right solution for the client, and to then position and sell that solution in the context of the client’s need. This is why the beginning of the sales cycle is so important. To establish selling power and sell your capabilities through the eyes of your client, sales professionals must continually challenge themselves with three key questions, as listed in Exhibit 4.8.
According to Wendy Lea, within the professional services sales environment, there are five stages that make up the ideal discovery phase of the sales process. These five stages guide the initial dialogue between the sales professional and the client service consultant, and the prospect:11
1. What is the client trying to accomplish? This is the first question to raise in any discussion with an enterprise. Typically, a consulting organization is brought in when something has gone wrong and the client
needs assistance or the client does not have the in-house capabilities to deliver on a particular project. A team of professionals on the client side is responsible and accountable for meeting a commitment.
2. What is keeping the client from accomplishing what they’ve committed to? Or, what is your challenge? It is critical that the sales professional and consultant understand what challenges and obstacles the functional group has encountered in its attempt to accomplish the project.
QUESTIONS TO CONTINUALLY ASK
1. What is your (client) challenge?
2. What decisions do you (client) have to make?
3. How do I lay my value on top of that?
And most importantly:
Does this (solution) make sense for my client?
Exhibit 4.8
Key Selling Questions
110
The Front Office: Driving Sales and Growth
Remember, typically, an internal group at the client site has made a commitment that they are accountable for achieving and have encountered bumps along the way.
3. How can the prospective client solve the problem? At this stage of the discussion, there are three options the client can choose to pursue:
— Do nothing. The prospective client makes a determination that there is a problem, but perhaps the problem does not have enough
weight or is not understood well enough to proceed with a solution.
— Solve internally. The prospective client more clearly understands the problem and determines that the best route is to use an internal team to manage the project.
— Go outside. The prospective client more clearly understands the problem and determines that the best route is to bring in a team of
external professionals to manage the project.
4. Research the solution. If the prospective client decides to pursue a structured solution or to “do something,” the client will either assign an internal team to research a solution or retain an external firm to research the solution. Ideally, your professional services firm will be engaged at the solution research, or proposal development, stage.
5. Evaluate the proposed solution: Once proposals have been developed, the prospective client will then look at the proposal through a set
of evaluation criteria and determine whether they have the budget
to proceed.
The challenge for many professional services firms is that the consultants get brought in at the middle of the buying process; thus, they walk in and start selling a solution. Or, some professional services firms are so confident in what they think they know that they either go through the five stages in a surface fashion or don’t go through them at all. However, if your sales professionals are trained to sell as your clients buy and to continually ask the right questions, you will create context for the dialogue with the client, which will result in greater selling power and, ideally, greater client satisfaction.
Targeting and Lead Generation
The terms targeting and lead generation both equate to identifying and touching potential customers. As a salesforce, it is important to focus on generating a steady hum of revenue. In a professional services firm, if you don’t have new business, your consultants are on the beach. While this steady revenue might not be the most interesting business, it will keep your firm’s consultants active. At the same time, however, your sales organization needs to be available for and attuned to the big deals. During the exercise in which you defined your unique sales process, you likely uncovered some marketing
Sales Management
111
and lead generation tactics that resulted in qualified prospects for your firm.
In addition to this insight, tips to effective lead generation include:
• Identify the buyers of your service on a regular basis. The buyers of your service depend on the nature of your consulting services and
might be broken down by industry, size, or geography. Know them intimately: What do they read, what organizations do they belong to, what authority impresses them or regulates them? Invest in market research to understand their buying behavior and preferences.
• Frequent “touches” with your buyers. By using an activity-based sales model combined with specific targets, you increase the number of times that you are in conversation with the buyers of your services. In conversation with your targets, continually ask yourself what information you can share with them that creates the perception of the value you provide and gets you in front of them. You want to get your prospects ex-cited, whether through opportunity or pain. Storytelling is a proven way to touch your buyers. People listen and remember through stories, and whether you are phone canvassing or selling in front of a client, leveraging your great case studies, dressing them up, and sharing them is a home run tactic. And, above all, brand your touches. If you want to be memorable, you have to be branded.
• Be opportunistic. While you are paying regular attention to your steady buyers, pay attention to what’s happening in the marketplace. If you see a need that your services can meet, go after that business. Your professional consultants, the experts, will be attuned to marketplace
shifts, and it is important that sales professionals stay close to this pulse of knowledge. Intranets and knowledge portals can be helpful with this level of knowledge sharing. In addition, the daily business papers and weekly trade journals are excellent sources of knowledge, as well as industry-specific databases. For example, FTI sales professionals regularly access Lexis Nexis, CourtLink, and CourtEXPRESS to check the
dockets for significant upcoming cases where the firm’s services might be useful to a law firm or corporation.