26 September 2011 Leave a Comment

Are Your Benefits Really Benefits?

BenefitsI’m sure you’ve read many articles about the difference between Features and Benefits, and the importance of focusing on Benefits in discussions with your potential clients.

The trouble is, most of these articles are wrong.

Not completely wrong. It’s just they don’t go far enough.

It was brought home to me recently when I was preparing for my webinar on Tuesday with Craig Elias on Resistance Free Selling

Craig calls what I’m about to explain “setting the context” and “avoiding your clients having to do mental gymnastics”. Here’s what we mean…

Normally when you learn about Features and Benefits, the explanation is that:

  • Features are the factual attributes of your product or service – what it does, how fast it goes, how many knobs it has, the steps in your process.
  • Benefits are what your clients get from those features. The results they achieve by using your services, what it means to them.

All well and good.

But here’s the big question: benefits to whom?

You see, far too often we get the so-called benefits of our service by listing the features (what we do) and noting what our clients should get from them as a result.

What we fail to take into account is that these are just potential benefits. Things the client might get. Or might value.

Specific clients might not get those benefits. Let’s say you’re a consultant who improves the throughput and decreases the downtime of production plants. The benefit the client gets is more output from their factory.

Except that if the factory is currently running at well below capacity, increasing the capacity isn’t going to give you more output.

And sometimes clients might just not value the benefit. I worked once at an airport where a fellow consultant showed them how to change their processes so they could get 1 or 2 extra flights in and out per landing bay every day. Unfortunately, as the airport was putting in planning permission to build a new terminal and citing lack of capacity as the reason why, that was certainly a benefit they didn’t value at the time.

So while you can identify the potential benefits of your services in isolation, in order to know whether they’re real benefits for your clients, you have to know their context. You have to know what’s going on in their business.

As Craig says, you can’t rely on them performing mental gymnastics to figure out whether your potential benefits will be of value to them. You have to do that thinking for or with them.

When you’re marketing you need to focus in on a picture of your ideal target client, your narrow niche, to figure out what the potential benefits actually mean to them.

And when you’re selling, you need to ask your potential clients questions about their situation, what problems they have, and what the impact of those issues is.Then you can see which of your potential benefits has real value in their specific situation and which to focus on discussing.

It’s this transition from potential to real benefits that makes the difference between your clients seeing you as a salesperson pushing something he’s not sure he wants to a trusted advisor helping him with his biggest issues.

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: ,
25 August 2011 Leave a Comment

It Ain’t What You Do…It’s Who You Do It With

Quite a bit of the training and coaching work I do is to help professionals improve their selling skills to close more business.

It’s an area where many people feel unfomfortable – they don’t want to be too pushy or “salesy”.

And there are indeed techniques and approaches which can improve your conversion rate by improving the way you interact with potential clients in sales meetings.

But often there’s something else you can do. Something that can have an even bigger impact than any sales technique.

Let’s do a little exercise.

Think about the very best ever sales meeting you’ve had. A meeting with a potential client that was incredibly pleasant, where you felt really engaged, and where the client emerged enthusiastic and signed up to work with you right away.

Visualise it now.

Now rather than thinking about what you did in that meeting, I want you to think about the characteristics of the client you were meeting with. What was it about them that made the meeting go so well?

Chances are, they had most of the following factors:

  • They had a genuine problem or issue that you could help with
  • The issue was important to them – it had a big impact
  • You could add a tremendous amount of value to them
  • They were able to easily afford your services
  • They respected your expertise – they saw you as an authority in your field
  • They trusted you – they weren’t second guessing what you were saying and your motives
  • You got on well – your personalities and communication styles clicked

Let’s call these types of people your high potential prospects.

Here’s one of the big secrets to having more successful sales meetings.

Your success at winning clients is less to do with what you do in your sales meetings and much more to do with having the meeting with the right person.

If you can sit down with a high potential prospect: someone who has a genuine need for what it is you do, who feels the urgency of that need, who trusts in you and believes in your capabilities – then you are very likely to get a sale.

Conversely, if you meet with people who don’t have an urgent need, or who don’t perceive you to be an expert at what you do – then no matter what clever sales techniques you might use, you’re going to struggle to sell. It’s going to be painful.

Now, if you’re a huge company – IBM, say – then you don’t have much choice. You pretty much need to sell to everyone to keep up your market share and revenues.

But for most of us, that’s not the case. Most of us only need a handful of good clients every year to do very well indeed.

We have a choice. We don’t have to try to sell to everyone.

One of the characteristics of a consultant or coach with an inadequate marketing system in place is that they have very few high quality leads, and spend a lot of painful time trying to sell to the few they do have. Most of whom aren’t anywhere near the high potential prospects we thought about earlier.

With a strong marketing system, the people you’re meeting are a good fit to that high potential prospect profile. They’re a pleasure to meet with and talk to, and they’re much, much easier to sell to.

So next time you lose a sale, or are considering doing something to improve your selling skills, take a step back.

Is the issue really your selling skills?

Think about your most recent sales meetings. Have the people across the other side of the table looked like those high potential prospects you visualised earlier?

If they haven’t, then chances are the issue is really your marketing system.

Chances are you’re just not selling to the right people.

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: ,
29 May 2011 1 Comment

Why “Finding the Pain” is a bad strategy

I’ve been a big fan of Alan Weiss’s work for a number of years.

It was probably reading Million Dollar Consulting while on holiday in Hong Kong many years ago that inspired me to go solo.

I don’t always agree with everything he says (I suspect Alan would say those are the times when I’m wrong). But his arguments are always well made and based on probably more experience of high level solo consulting than anyone else.

One of the thing’s I’ve heard Alan say on a number of occassions is that “finding the pain” went out with the ark. That it’s no way to sell your services.

That had always puzzled me. Finding the pain for me means diagnosing the client’s problems and understanding which are the biggest priority (and so motivating them to buy).

I always wondered what he didn’t like about it. Perhaps he considered it to be manipulative or something?

Thanks to the power of the web, these days we have a chance to interact with “superstars”, not just read their books. So when Alan repeated this statement on a blog post recently I asked him to elaborate.

His answer was incredibly significant.

His point was not that “finding the pain” was unethical – or even that it didn’t work. But that it led to commoditisation. Problem solving to address clear areas of pain is something most organisations have got good at, and that a whole bunch of consultants and coaches can do pretty well.

Or put it this way, lots of car mechanics and engineers can fix a broken engine. But how many can design and build a new one?

Who is it that gets paid the big bucks? Not the guy down your local repair shop.

So by focusing on aspirations and innovation instead you set yourself ahead of the pack. You’re not easily copied, and you’re not doing work that the client finds difficult to justify paying high fees for because they could probably have done it themselves.

To my mind, this is more important today than it’s ever been.

Whether we’re talking about decreasing purchasing costs, writing a marketing plan, creating a website or improving your people management skills: 5 years ago if you needed to do it you had a very limited choice of people you could find to help who you were confident would do a good job.

These days you can go online and find decent free guidance, buy a training course, or hire one of a myriad of competent advisors willing to help at highly competitive rates.

So for consultants and coaches, the days of an easy six figure income just because you’re skilled in something clients need are over. It’s just too easy for clients to find competent help at low cost.

If you do want that six figures and more income then simply solving problems isn’t going to be enough. You have to help them innovate. Achieve something they didn’t even know was there. Deliver something remarkable the problem-solvers can’t match.

Sure, you might have to start by fixing some core problems – find the pain and stop the bleeding in medical terms. But you then have to move on to something much bigger.

If that’s making you feal uneasy, it’s a good thing. It makes me feel uneasy too because the implications are big.

It means we have to constantly stay at the leading edge of our field. We can’t just learn our trade then happily ply it for 20 years.

And it means we have to find the clients that need more than problem solving. That have the appetitie for something bigger.

But it also means we’re going to have an interesting and rewarding time doing it.

——
Image by A Strakey

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: , ,
27 April 2011 Leave a Comment

Do You Really Need a New Sales Process?

I read a thought-provoking blog post by Dan Waldschmidt today entitled The Lie of a “Better” Sales Process.

In it Dan argues that we spend far too much time looking for a shiny new way of selling that will improve our results – and far too little time getting better at using the perfectly adequate process we already have.

I’d agree with him up to a point.

If you’ve already got a decent sales process or methodology in place, then switching to a new one is going to have little impact on your success. Some methodologies are better suited for selling professional services than others (SPIN, Solution Selling and the ORDER process from Let’s Get Real immediately spring to mind). But given a decent methodology, you’re usually far better off getting better at using it than starting again from scratch.

However, there’s an exception to this rule.

And it’s one that, sadly, applies to many consultants, coaches, lawyers and other professionals.

If you don’t use a methodology at all – then you need to find a decent one.

If you “just wing it”, you think you’re a “natural salesperson” or you use what you’ve learned from your personal experience – the chances are your performance is way below what it could be.

Sales isn’t just an art. It’s been studied based on decades of experience and observation of thousands of sales meetings. And that includes large, complex professional services sales.

If you’re using just your own experience or what you’ve learned from colleagues and you’re up against a competitor using a process based on these decades of experience from thousands of people then you’re going to be outgunned time and time again.

And before you invest in sales training focused on “tips and techniques” – make sure you have a solid process in place too. Otherwise most of what you learn will be pointless. Rather like trying to learn how to “fade” a golf ball when you haven’t got your basic swing sorted.

——

How about you? Have you switched sales processes and had great success? Or has it just been a horrendous waste of time? Drop me a comment below, it would be great to share experiences.

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: , ,
24 March 2011 1 Comment

How to Market Your Product in Mexico (Even If You Don’t Speak Spanish)

Today’s blog post is a guest article from Caelen King, founder and CEO of WhatClinic.com a website that allows consumers to easily find and compare health clinics around the world. WhatClinic.com gets over 8 million visitors each year and has most recently expanded into Private Dentists in the UK and Plastic Surgery Clinics in the UK.

Caelen tells a fascinating story of how one of his sales team has been able to win business in countries where he and the client don’t share a common language. They use a gentle and professional approach which treats the potential client with respect and builds up trust through personal communication followed up with email.

Here’s the story in Caelen’s words…

Lately, I had a good chance to listen to one of our salespeople, Dermot, while he was doing business on the phone. I noticed that he was talking to someone who I believe whose English was very poor because Dermot was trying to spell out our business key advantages. I later learned that he was talking to a dentist in Mexico who does not speak English at all!

Everything seemed normal. Dermot was very accommodating and nodding courteously as he listens to the Mexican dentist at the other end of the line. But what was amazing was that Dermot does not speak Spanish, except for a few poorly pronounced “Gracias” and “Hola.” Despite the language barrier, Dermot was able to successfully deliver a clear message about the pricing of our products in both Euro and Mexican Peso.

What is wonderful about Dermot is that he was able to deliver his message and even understood the dentist’s unintelligible reply. The conversation went on for another few minutes, and then I finally heard Dermot taking the dentist’s credit card information, sealing that conversation with a final deal.

You may not believe what I am saying, but as we expand our market worldwide and WhatClinic.com is now starting to export products, it is no longer strange to us to deal with non-English speaking clients. In fact, Dermot is now able to close a deal almost every week with overseas client he has no common language with. Interestingly, he does it always in a unique way: by developing trust with a prospective client.

What usually occurs during the initial conversation is that a clinic manager—who at least know some English and who surely does not have any authority in terms in financial matters—would insist Dermot to speak to the clinic’s owner, who is a surgeon or a dentist. Since there is no common language, the conversation usually ends rather quickly, but effectively. Dermot, on his part, ends the conversation by promising to send a follow up email.

The most interesting part of this marketing approach begins after each call when Dermot would summarize our benefits along with the pricing, and then he translates the information using Google Translate to the client’s language. In our experience, this process is remarkably beneficial, both on our part and that of the client’s. Once Dermot receives the communication from the client, he would again use Google Translate to uncover the message. This process always ends in a successful sale.

Every successful sale is always a product of a successful phone call, despite having a language barrier. All information needs to be translated, but the initial phone conversation is all that matters in sealing a deal. In other words, if Dermot won’t pick the phone there would have been no sale at all.

Most business entities spend their marketing efforts looking for instant big wins, but ended up getting small or no gains at all. At WhatClinc.com, we invest on getting the client’s trust because it is in developing trust and confidence that huge sales are born. We make it a point that client is aware that at the other end of the line there is a real person who is willing to establish a genuine relationship and is willing to do business. We also make it a point that we are trustworthy, reliable and honest.

The success of our business lies in our professionalism in that we treat non-English speaking clients with the same respect we give to dentists and surgeons from the UK or Ireland. Dermot is the epitome of our business. He is aware that whatever lapses in phone communication due to language barrier can always be complemented by follow up emails. The result is that we are able to establish connection with prospective clients that always leads to sales. We have proven that it is impossible to do business without human contact.

Mexico is now our largest single market. We are able to achieve this largely because Dermot has broken the language barrier that separates us from our clients.

So what can we learn from this?

Well, if nothing else, if Dermot can use patience, respect and professionalism to build a relationship with someone he doesn’t even share a common language with – then the rest of us should certainly be able to use the same approach with the far easier challenge of someone who does speak the same language as us.

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: , ,
7 March 2011 3 Comments

What’s Your Step #2?

Would you like to grab a coffee some time to discuss how we might be able to help each other out?

No.

How about we meet up and we can talk about how we might be able to support your business?

No.

Could I schedule a short meeting with you where we can find out more about your business and see if some of our services might be valuable to you?

No.

Would you be open to a short meeting to explore your business challenges and how our solutions could help?

No, no, no.

Maybe I’m getting grumpier in my old age, but I just don’t want to meet people for sales meetings any more. Nor do I want to have a coffee with potential partners who might be able to work with me some indeterminate time down the line. Nor do I want to discuss who I know that might be helpful for your business and vice versa, thank you very much.

Now I might say yes to some of these out of politeness to someone I know or as a favour.

But I don’t really want to have these meetings.

Maybe you’re a bit like me too. I’m desperately short of time. And my business is doing very well – so I have no desperate issue to solve that will spur me to have a meeting with someone who could help.

I don’t want to have these meetings, because to be frank, I get no immediate value from them.

Telling you about my business so you can craft a solution to a problem I don’t think I have doesn’t do it for me. Nor does a plesant coffee where we discuss how we might help each other some time in the future.

I need value now. Instant gratification if you will.

If I’m going to give up my most precious and scarce asset, my time, then nowadays I’m only going to do it if I can see immediate benefit for me.

It doesn’t have to be money in my pocket right now. In fact, I’m even willing to pay to go to events where I learn something important. And I’ll spend an hour or longer on a webinar if I think it’s going to teach me something valuable.

But an “initial meeting” where we just talk about my business in the hope you’ll be able to come up with something that will help me (for a price, of course). No way.

And that’s why I ask: “what’s your step #2?”

Step #1 is easy. Step #1 is that initial connection with a potential client or referrer. You go networking and meet people. You send them a letter. You ask to connect on Linkedin. You get a referral from a mutual acquaintance. They visit your website.

We know how to do Step #1.

But what do you do next? How do you really engage with them?

What seems like a few short years ago, people were much more willing to have these exploratory initial meetings. If a consultant sounds sensible on the phone and they’ve done good work for similar companies to mine, it was worth spending an hour with them to see if they had anything of value.

I don’t have that hour today. I need to know I’m going to get something of value in the actual meeting.

So Step #2s that work to get me engaged with you today are things like:

  • Inviting me to a seminar you’re running on a topic of interest to me
  • Offering to share some benchmarking information on what my competitors are doing in a 1-1 meeting
  • Sending me a report or video with ideas I can immediatley apply to improve my business
  • Inviting me to a webinar where you show me how to do something I’m struggling with right now

In other words, you need a Step #2 that actually adds value to me right away.

I suspect it’s the same for your clients. You need a Step #2 that adds value to them right away.

‘cos if all you have as Step #2 is an exploratory or sales meeting – we’re not going to show up.

*** By the way – if you liked this post – do me a favour and tweet it or like it – or better still, add your comment

———-

Image via www.signgenerator.org.

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With:
14 January 2011 2 Comments

Expertise Driven Selling

I’ve been reading Mike Schulz’s excellent free report on the “New Rules of Selling Consulting Services in 2011″ (to get a free copy, click here).

One of Mike’s points is that to succeed in selling consulting (or other advisory services like coaching, training, accounting or law) you need to set the agenda. It’s no longer enough to show up, ask the client “what keeps you up at night?”, then drop in a proposal to address the issues they raise.

Today’s clients are looking for immediate advice and help.

In particular, the more complex and difficult their problem and the higher your fees the more risk they’re taking in hiring you. If it’s vital they get a real expert with experience to work with them then they simply can’t take it on trust that you have those capabilities. Testimonials and references help, but nothing works better than them seeing your expertise in action with their own eyes.

If, as part of your sales meeting with them, you open their eyes to new insights on their problem and new solutions they’d never thought of before, then you’re immediately elevated to pole position for working with them.

But this brings up a dilemma. Isn’t there a risk you’ll “give away the store” by sharing your expertise with them before you’re hired?

Well, there’s definitely a risk – but it’s not that you’ll “give away the store”.

Let’s put that myth to bed.

If you think that in the course of a short sales meeting with a client it’s possible for you to give away enough of your expertise that the client will then be able to go away and solve their problem themselves – well, you ought to have a serious think about how much expertise you actually have.

The sorts of high impact issues that high paid consultants and coaches work on are not the sort that can be solved simply by “knowing the secret” as if it had been revealed by the Masked Magician on Magic’s Greatest Secrets Revealed.

And the sort of clients high paid consultants and coaches target aren’t the sort of people who think that knowing the secret to a trick is the same as being able to do it.

If you want to make it to the top of the advisory professions, you have to be working on client issues that are tough and complex and require significant expertise, experience and judgement to solve. Those are the projects that earn the “big bucks”. If the client can solve the issue by himself simply by “knowing the secret” then you’re working on the wrong issues.

By giving your advice and recommendations in a sales meeting you’re helping your potential client to evaluate one of the key criteria they’re going to use when deciding whether to go ahead with you: does this person know their stuff? Have they got the capabilities to do the job?

So what is the real risk that sharing your expertise creates?

The risk is inappropriate advice.

If you immediately jump into advising the client in a sales meeting on what they should be doing before you’ve thoroughly listened to and explored their issues – then your advice will most likely be inappropriate. And the client will feel you haven’t really understood them.

If your advice giving consists of telling the client what they need to do – rather than sharing what has worked for others in similar situations or what you would do in their place (but not knowing all the facts yet) – then you’re giving inappropriate advice. And the client will feel you’re being pushy and taking over.

If you’re not softening your advice with phrases like “well, obviously I don’t know all the details of the situation – but from what I can see, your best course of action is probably…” then the client will feel you think you know it all and don’t respect them.

You see the other key criteria clients will use in evaluating whether they want to work with you is interpersonal. Can I get on with this person? Would I enjoy working with them? Often this criteria is applied unconsciously – it’s just a feeling. But often it’s more powerful that the more rational criteria about your expertise.

After all, how would you feel about working with someone who didn’t listen to you, who thought they knew everything, and told you what to do without getting your perspective?

You might put up with that for a little while.

But for a significant project where you’re going to be working closely with your advisor, you absolutely have to get on with them.

That means that for consultants, coaches and other advisors you must learn how to give advice in ways that engage and enthuse potential clients. Not in ways that, to be blunt, piss them off.

——–

If you’re a consultant or coach and you want to learn how to sell successfully in 2011 and beyond, then there’s no better program that the Raintoday Selling Consulting Services online course. It’s the only course other than my own that I recommend, and I’ve been through the course myself when it was first launched.

The program consists of 4 months of the very best online training, live Q&A calls and webinars and an active forum. You’ll also get a free copy of Raintoday’s “How Clients Buy Professional Services” benchmarking report (which I bought for $345 when it was released – bah!).

If you do end up signing up for the course by clicking through from my site, I’ll get paid a commission. I hope you know me well enough by now though to know that I’m recommending this course because I think it’s great. I was a student on it myself, and I’m proud to have my recommendation up on their sales page along with leaders in our profession like Charlie Green and Michael McLauchlin.

You can get more details of the course by clicking here. Make sure you check it out fully before you sign up. And most importantly, make sure you’re ready to put in the work to make it a big success for you.

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services
9 December 2010 2 Comments

How To Differentiate Yourself When You’re Selling

We talk a lot about differentiation in marketing. Differentiation is something that sets us apart. Unique attributes of our services that are valued by our clients but that can’t be easily reproduced by our competitors.

At it’s simplest level, it could be a service we can deliver that no one else can. Or perhaps we specialise in working with a particular sector so we have more experience and knowledge in that field.

Differentiation in marketing can make us the obvious “go to” person for a client who recognises they need our unique skills and capabilities.

We talk much less about differentiation in selling however. But it’s just as important.

If we’re face to face with a client trying to persuade them to choose us over a competitor then unless we’re different in some way, the client will end up choosing on price.

Differentiation at this level is hard. By the time a client is talking to us face to face they’ve already discarded the firms and individuals who aren’t specialised in their sector (if that’s important to them) or who don’t deliver the services they’re looking for.

At this stage, the short list almost always comprises firms who can perfectly well help them address their problems or opportunities (or at least claim they can). They might do it in a different way to us. But at the end of the day, it’s highly likely that they’ll claim they can achieve the same end results.

If a client says they want to reduce their indirect procurement costs by 20% – all the consultants pitching to them will say that’s what they’ll deliver.

If a client says they want a smooth divorce that doesn’t impact the kids, all the lawyers will say that’s what they’ll deliver.

If a client says they want their accounts done quickly and efficiently with minimum hassle – then pretty much every accountant they speak to will say that’s exactly what they’ll do.

And if everyone is saying they’ll do the same thing – then the only thing that sets them apart in the client’s mind is their price, right?

That’s not good. Certainly not if, like me, you price at a premium because you believe you deliver a premium service.

So when it comes down to the crunch. When you’re sitting 1-1 with a client and discussing what you’ll do for them, how on earth do you differentiate yourself?

Well, the first thing you need to accept is that simply identifying the client’s needs and then telling them you’ll address them isn’t enough. Everyone will do that.

Here are some ways you can differentiate yourself in these competitive selling situations:

The “Safe Pair of Hands” Strategy

You may all promise you’ll deliver what the client wants. But from the client’s perspective, there can be major differences in how confident they are that you’ll make good on that promise. If you’re able to prove through testimonials, references, or just how much you seem to understand their situation, then they’ll feel more confident that you’ll be able to deliver what they want. And so they’ll pick you rather than selecting on price.

The “Relationship” Strategy

People choose to work with people they like and trust. They won’t pick you if they don’t think you can do the job. But once you’ve proven that, then they’ll almost always choose someone they like and feel they can partner with over someone they don’t.

The “Change the Game” Strategy

When you’re interacting with a potential client and talking about their needs – if you can identify problems or opportunities that they haven’t thought of themselves – then you can mark yourself out as being different. The quality of your diagnosis immediately marks you out as being an expert – and (rather fortuitously) can prompt the client to question the abilities of your competitors who didn’t highlight these new ideas.

It can be a risky strategy if the client has fixed ideas about what they need and doesn’t want to be challenged. But it can be a particularly powerful way of pulling the rug from under entrenched incumbents who have better relationships than you and are seen as safer pairs of hands.

What’s Your Strategy?

These aren’t the only strategies you can use in sales situations – but they’re good ones. Ones which I’ve seen work time and time again.

Whenever you’re in a competitive selling situation you absolutely must have a differentiation strategy in place. Just diagnosing the client’s needs and saying you’ll meet them is not enough. That’s the baseline – everyone will do that.

Unless you want to end up competing on price you must have a compelling reason why they should choose you. It might be different for every client – but you need one for every client. And that means in every competitive sales situation you’ve got to put the time and effort into developing it.

So for those upcomings bids, pitches and sales meetings you’ve got: what’s your strategy?

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Image by Foto43

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: ,
9 November 2010 10 Comments

Secrets of Selling Professional Services: Pencil Selling

One of the most powerful techniques I’ve come across for building relationships with clients while you’re selling to them is the concept of pencil selling.

It’s also one that I’ve almost never seen anything written about.

When most professionals meet with a potential client to discuss how they might be able to help they typically come armed with a brochure or a big pack of slides. We consultants are the worst with the latter – often seemingly trying to batter a client into submission with the sheer weight of our slides.

These presentation materials are a sort of comfort blanket. They provide certainty for us. We’ve had time in advance to think them through and perfect them. They look professional.

But they also stand in the way of building a relationship with your potential client. Of really engaging with them.

And sometimes we get even worse – we take a laptop in to the meeting and present slides from there – putting an actual physical barrier between ourselves and the client.

Now I’ve nothing against maybe leaving a brochure behind after you leave. And maybe the odd pertinent slide (if you’ve already discussed with the client something you’re then presenting ideas on).

But in an early sales meeting your key objective is to engage with the client. To get him or her to open up and share with you what their real challenges are. To delve into them and pull out the impact so they’re motivated to do something about it. To get them to commit to moving forward to the next step with you.

You won’t get there by presenting at them.

And that’s what having pre-prepared slides inevitably does – you present them. And presenting means you talk and they listen. The exact opposite of the dialogue you want.

Now you’ll know from my other blog posts on selling professional services that being able to ask smart questions is one of the absolute keys to engaging a potential client.

But at some point, as a professional, you need to start sharing your own ideas and tentative thoughts. You need to be opening up the client’s thinking.

This is where pencil selling comes in.

Simply put, pencil selling is where in the meeting you sketch out ideas and concepts which illuminate and enhance your discussion with the client.

And I mean that literally, not metaphorically. Getting out a pencil or pen and sketching out a concept on paper.

In practice, what it looks like is that you position a blank pad of paper between you and the client (you are sitting next to the client aren’t you – not opposite?).

Then depending on what you’re discussing, you sketch out a diagram which pulls together some of the concepts you’ve been talking about. And you use it to illustrate your thinking.

So if you’re talking about improving their product launch capabilities – maybe you sketch out a rocket and talk about how the product itself is the fuel in the rocket. But how you also need a guidance system – your segmentation and marketing so that the rocket hits its target. And then your performance measurement and management system is like the radar – spotting obstacles ahead and adjusting the flight.

Or the client is talking about building a stronger organisation – so you sketch out a greek temple with a series of pillars representing the major components (business functions, perhaps) supporting the roof (their goals). And of course, you sketch in the foundations and talk about what they need to be in an organisation (people, culture, technology, etc.).

Or maybe you sketch a simple 2 x 2 diagnostic and hand the pencil to the client – asking them to show where they are on the map.

The possibilities are endless. the key is that you use the diagram both to illustrate a point or concept – and as an engagement device to get the client interacting. You want them to make their additions to the diagram. To “get their fingerprints on it” and begin to take ownership.

How much more effective is that than showing some pre-prepared slides about who you are and what you do which they know anyway because they looked at your website?

Mind you – it sounds difficult.

How do you make up all these different diagrams and diagnostics on the fly?

Of course, the secret is that you don’t.

You have a repertoire of diagrams and diagnostics you can use repeatedly with minor tweaking.

Think back to recent client discussions. How many times have you been asked the same questions? How many times have you described the way you run projects, or what the three core components of a marketing plan are, or what makes organisations creative?

Most of us probably have half a dozen or so core concepts which we repeatedly use with clients in slightly modified form.

Rather than (or in addition to) turning those into bullets on powerpoint slides – spend some time figuring out how to draw them out as quick diagrams you can recreate with clients.

Then try it out next time you meet a client. You’ll see how much more effective it is at buildign a relationship and getting the client energised and interacting with you than presenting a bunch of slides is.

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Image by Marc Fonteijn

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: , , ,
1 November 2010 3 Comments

Why Are We So Afraid Of Selling?

Selling Professional Services is tricky.

Most professionals intensely dislike selling. In fact, I’d go as far to say that a great many fear it.

The thought of having to sell ourselves brings butterflies to our stomachs, makes our palms sweat, and triggers all sorts of negative thoughts:

“I didn’t do years of training to have to go out and sell”.

“I’m the expert here, people should be coming to me, I shouldn’t have to beg for work”.

“Selling is beneath me”.

In fact, some professionals can’t even bring themselves to call selling by it’s proper name. They call it business development or even marketing. When really they mean selling: engaging with potential clients and persuading them to hire you.

Why do we get such intense emotions when it comes to selling?

The most common response is that it’s “fear of rejection”.

But that’s far too simplistic a view. What on earth is “fear of rejection” really? We get rejected all the time. What are we really afraid of?

In my experience, there are multiple factors.

Sometimes we’re worried that we might damage client relationships by being “too pushy” and asking for sales.

Sometimes it’s because we have a very negative stereotypical image of salespeople. The sales people we’ve come across are the Ricky Roma, Willy Loman “used car salesman” types and we don’t want to be like them. (Apologies to all the professional used car salespeople out there who of course aren’t at all like the stereotype).

But the issue I see more often than not is that we’re worried what others might think of us. We’re worried that by “selling” we might come across as desperate. We have a self image of a highly successful professional we want everyone to buy in to.

Of course, we make all sorts of excuses and rationalisations. The time isn’t right to call. A direct mail sales letter is “unprofessional”. Clients’ don’t respond well to being asked for referrals.

We’re none of us immune to this. I did – and to some extent still do – this all the time. I have to catch myself when I start talking to myself like this and shake myself up.

Next time you find yourself thinking like this, take a step back and consider whether this is the reality – or whether the real issue is that you’re worried what the client or prospect might think of you.

And then think about how much preserving that image is worth to you. Is it worth limiting your career for? Is it worth risking the livelihood of your business – and your family for?

Sometimes we just have to get over ourselves and get on and do what’s needed.

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With: , ,
8 April 2010 2 Comments

Selling Consulting Services: The Myth of “Killer Closing Techniques”

Mike Schultz’s excellent free report “Selling Consulting Services: Forget Everything You Know About Sales and Begin to Sell Without Selling” has a great section in it on closing techniques.

At first I approached this chapter with trepidation. In my professional career I’ve never found closing techniques worked for me. Not only did they feel uncomfortably manipulative – the complete opposite of the relationship I was trying to build up – but clients didn’t seem to respond to them as well as all the books suggested.

Maybe it was just me, I thought.

After all, all these sales gurus can’t be wrong.

But as I grew in confidence and experience, I learned it wasn’t just me.

The truth is that despite all the books you can buy and courses you can go on to learn “killer closing techniques”, when it comes to selling high value consulting and other professional services, they’re actually counter productive. If people aren’t yet convinced that they really need a service, and they’re not sure that your particular one is right for them; then using closing techniques like asking if they’d like you to start on Tuesday or Thursday will push them further away.

So how do I recommend closing if it’s not with techniques?

In my experience, closing is a three stage process which begins early on in your discussions with the client.

Initially, you set the stage for a positive close through the whole sales process by:

  • Confirming agreements through the discussion.
  • Addressing client concerns as they arise rather than “steamrollering” through to the next point.
  • Ensuring you drill for impact – it’s understanding the full implications of the issue which will motivate the client to buy.

Next, close at the Concept level (i.e. first get agreement on what the client wants to achieve):

  • Summarise the client’s priority needs, the impact of the issue and the outline of what they are looking for.
  • Check for any outstanding concerns – and genuinely address them if there are any.
  • Propose the next step – usually to move on to agreeing the practical details.

Finally, close at the Practical level (i.e. get agreement on what you will actually do together). This may need a second meeting and some further work from you to prepare an outline plan. But it’s crucial that you and your potential client work together to finalise the scope and plan, for example:

  • Jointly discussing and designing the approach to the project/engagement (while remembering that you are the expert).
  • Checking for any final concerns – and addressing them.
  • Proposing moving forward together.

The idea of being able to use a magic technique to increase your sales is a very alluring one. But in the case of selling consulting or other professional services, it’s a misguided one. Clients will only buy when they feel comfortable they’re getting what they need from someone who’s capable and who they can work with. You establish this in the way you engage with them throughout the selling process – not by using some clever technique at the end.

So how did my approach fare vs Mike’s recommendations?

It turns out we’re in agreement (which shouldn’t have really been a surprise given I know Mike quite well). As Mike says in the report:

Selling consulting is about trust, not tricks

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

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You can download a free copy of the Selling Consulting Services report here.

The reason Mike’s giving away such a valuable report for free is simple: it’s a bribe!

He and the team at Raintoday.com have just launched a new online training program on selling consulting services which they’d like you to try out: hence the “bribe” of the free report.

I chatted to Mike on the phone last week about the program and the content looks excellent. There are 6 modules, teleseminars, expert forums, and over 25 individual training sessions covering everything from developing your value proposition to starting sales conversations with rapport to getting in front of the economic buyer to crafting winning solutions to closing the deal.

Next to having your own personal business development coach or mentor, it’s absolutely the best way to boost your selling skills.

They’re limiting enrolment to the first 200 members who sign up and they’re closing the doors on April 16.

This initial “Charter Membership” will be at only $97 per month. When they reopen the program the price will be at least double.

And as an added bonus, all Charter Members will get a free copy of the $345 “How Clients Buy Professional Services Benchmark Report” absolutely free. (As many of you know, I’ve been quoting the report and using it to guide a lot of my work over the last year).

You can find out more about the course here.

You should know, the Raintoday.com team have offered to pay me a small commission if any of my readers sign up for their course. I hope you know me well enough by now to know this has in no way influenced my recommendation. If you’ve been a reader of the blog for any time you’ll know I’ve been a long-term supporter of Mike and the team and really respect the quality of their training.

Filed Under: Selling Professional Services Tagged With:
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