In relation to targeting, John Salomon, forensic advisory practice leader at FTI Consulting, Inc., stresses the critical role that the sales professionals play in being in front of a prospective buyer at the time they have a need. Salomon notes that while he might meet an attorney (prospective buyer) at a function and talk with that prospect extensively at that time, if there is no immediate need for FTI’s services, that prospect is most likely not going to remember Salomon and FTI when a need arises three months or one year down the line. The sales professional, on the other hand, is trained to identify prospective buyers on a regular basis and, in an ideal situation, can get in front of prospects when the need is hot.12
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Mining Your Firm’s Consultants
Mining your firm’s consultants equates to knowing who and what you are selling. John Salomon notes that a key role of the sales professional is to “assemble the best client service delivery team.”13 To do this, the sales organization must have intimate knowledge not only of the key practice and service areas, but of the practice leaders and consultants within those practice areas.
There are a number of processes, all communication based, that you can institute to help your sales professional mine your firm’s consultants:
• Regular meetings: When your firm is small, hold regular meetings where client service and sales professionals get together and discuss what they’ve done. As your firm grows, regular networking opportunities and attendance at national sales meetings provide good discussion and networking forums. In addition to information exchange, meetings provide opportunities for the client service professionals to get to know, respect, and trust the sales professionals.
• Relationships with client service leaders: One of the most direct routes to locating the best consultant for the client need is to ask the senior practitioner in a practice area: Where do I find this skill set? For relationships to form, meetings and networking are essential.
• E-mail: A simple use of technology is the firmwide e-mail distribution.
When searching for the ideal consultant for a new business meeting, the sales professional can quickly send out an e-mail to the firm or a particular practice area, providing some background on the potential deal and indicating what skills he or she is looking for (e.g., a senior practitioner who has experience in intellectual property damages in the auto after-market industry).
• Intranet knowledge database: A more sophisticated use of technology is the creation of an intranet (internal) knowledge database that maintains updated information on the firm’s consultants. Ideally, the sales professionals can search this database on key criteria such as region, service experience, industry experience, and other more qualitative information, such as average client engagement size. This information will help the sales professional put together the best team for a particular client.
• Decision matrix: At FTI, the sales professionals found that the practitioners were able to speak clearly in relation to what they did, but they could not talk about themselves in relation to the client or in a way that was helpful or appropriate for sales professionals. To meet this communication gap, the FTI sales organization developed a matrix that asks key questions and helps sales professionals to “mine” their client service professionals:
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—Who is your ideal prospect (client)?
—What are the client’s decision triggers?
—What are the typical questions you get asked on a sales call?
—What is the marketplace competition for your service area?
—What is the structure/process associated with a typical sales call?
—What are the steps in your typical sales cycle?
—How do we price your services?
—Includes frequently asked questions the practitioner receives from
client prospects.
Communication is the cornerstone of effective mining. It is important that sales professionals and client service teams get to know each other and build relationships on mutual respect and trust. It is this integration that will help sales professionals to identify and pull together the best team based not only on skill and expertise but also on working style.
Measurement
When thinking about measurement, there are two distinct questions: How much does it cost the firm, on average, to win a significant piece of new business? How do I measure the success of my sales organization?
The costs associated with closing a new business deal in the professional services environment are complex. One approach is to measure your sales success in terms of efficiency. Your sales professionals, in this environment, touch many people; and you can assess how many calls were initiated, presentations delivered, and deals closed. Another approach measures effectiveness. In measuring effectiveness, understanding your sales cycle and how much resource investment, in terms of time and money, it costs to get to the end of the deal is the overarching issue. Measuring effectiveness is difficult, and it can be even more difficult in an environment in which professionals and salespeople are often in reactive mode and responding to requests for proposal (RFPs) and other reactive sales efforts. In this environment, the professional services firm is spinning its resources to respond to a client prospect in a relatively short time and invest a significant number of hours and money into winning new business. In this selling environment, it is difficult to step back and honestly assess how much it costs to bring in a deal and then measure the cost of sales in relation to that figure. The challenge for your particular firm is to assign some costs to time and touches. How much time does it usually take for us to close a deal, and how many times do we need to touch the prospect within this time period? Then, the question becomes: How do we economically touch and educate a reasonable number of prospects to reach our revenue goals?
Once you determine the costs associated with selling, you can more accurately predict the investment the firm will need to make in sales to achieve
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set revenue goals. Two metrics you can use to measure the success of your sales organization are cost of sales and revenue. Your sales managers should be compensated based on these two metrics; this ensures that the managers work both to control the costs associated with selling and to drive revenue.
Support Systems, Processes,
and Technologies
Technology is central to good selling and good sales management; this chapter has touched on many sales and management processes, most enabled by technology. As you begin to form your sales organization, a crucial question will be: What technology do I need? The software that you choose will be distinct based on your firm’s current technology, the structure and size of your sales and marketing organizations, your unique sales process, and, most importantly, how your sales and client service professionals actually work.
Choosing the right technology is important and at times difficult. Kevin Hoff berg, of Decision-Quality, LLC, states, “For the most part, technology for sales organizations is a miserable failure.”14 This failure primarily results from a lack of understanding about how people work. Organizations often purchase and implement technology solutions to improve productivity or streamline processes without understanding what sales and client services professionals do on a day-to-day basis. If you have done the work suggested in previous chapters, you have a good understanding of your sales process; you have worked to integrate your sales, marketing, and consulting professionals; and you know a bit about how your people work. This is the first step in ensuring a successful technology implementation. To help you further along the technology journey, this section marks a path through the layered world of technology to help you evaluate your options.
Layer 1: Create access. Of prime importance is your professionals’ ability to communicate and to communicate remotely. Thus, the first technology layer enables access—access to clients and colleagues. To facilitate communication, every firm should have e-mail. After this rudimentary step, the communications challenges mount. Sales professionals, who spend
much of their time out of the office, need the ability to remotely access, send, and receive e-mail; do text messaging; and make telephone calls. For any size firm, remote access technology, such as the Blackberry, is rapidly becoming a cost of entry. Your firm must invest in this technology if you want your sales professionals to be available and responsive to clients and prospects. Over time, you might consider providing your sales professionals with laptops or PDAs that enable remote access to documents or hardware with Wi-Fi access. It is important that sales managers investigate the latest technologies. Sales professionals will be hungry for communication
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technology that improves their access to clients, colleagues, and their work, and they will actively use it.
Layer 2: Find ways to share. This layer is collaboration. Every professional services firm needs to share information in a way that allows sales and client service professionals to access collective wisdom and knowledge.