Ian Brodie - Consultant · Speaker · Author

Specialist in Professional Services Business Growth

Ian's passion is professional services strategy, marketing and sales - and helping professionals and their firms to build their skills and grow their businesses.

No one becomes a consultant, accountant or lawyer because they have a passion for selling. It often comes as a shock for budding professionals to find that the critical determinant of their career success and promotion to partnership is their ability to sell.

But with clients becoming increasingly promiscuous, and competitors increasingly aggressive; business development skills are becoming ever more vital for professionals.

The intangible nature of services means that potential clients cannot “touch and feel” or test the product before buying - so all the great benefits of the service can often be viewed as simply salesperson’s claims rather than hard facts. Worse still: even if your services are unique, highly differentiated and of much higher quality than your competitors - what’s to stop them claiming the same thing?

And with professional services, the risk for the client is high. They are handing over their "baby" to the professional - their finances, an important legal case, or the strategy of their business. The outcome of a professional assignment is often uncertain and highly dependent on the skills of the professional - and especially on their ability to truly understand the needs of the client. As a result, it's absolutely critical that the professional establishes a high degree of trust with the client throughout the sales process.

Although professional services business developers can often find much to learn from consumer and business to business product sales, it is this area of establishing trust where professional services sales takes a different track. While I may buy a television or a photocopier from a salesperson I neither like nor trust as long as the product is good; there is no way I will buy a professional service unless I absolutely trust that the seller is capable and has my interests at heart. All the stages of the professional services sales process must work to build trust and credbility. From the initial approaches to the client, through meetings and diagnosis, through to closing. How the business developer interacts with me during the sales process will be taken as a proxy for how they will deal with me during the delivery of the service. Their ability to add value up front will be taken as an indication of their ability to add value during the engagement.

The irony of professional services sales is that while most professionals either fear or dislike selling; the skills that make a real difference actually come relatively naturally to them. They are the questioning, diagnosis and relationship building skills they frequently use after the sale has been won. So while there is usually still much to be learnt from a skills and knowledge perspective, often the biggest challenge for professionals is a change in attitude. A change away from a stereotyped "Glengary, Glenn Ross" view of sales to a realisation that not only is selling professional services an honourable occupation; it is that honour and trustworthiness that actually marks out the excellent professional services business developer.