sales – David Bailey

5 February 2020

Don’t be scared of “sales”!

A very high proportion of consultants has either come up through the ranks or joined from industry. They are subject matter experts, industry experts, team leaders, programme managers and the like, and we and our clients love them for it! Often, however, they are blinkered on the topic of sales, feel uncomfortable when asked to sell our firms’ services and shy away from sales activity, preferring to disappear into valuable client delivery activity, knowledge management or internal training. Why?

The clue is in the first sentence of this post – very few people in consulting firms have come from professional sales backgrounds and whilst IT Services firms tend to have some people with sales training, even these feel more comfortable in a product or solution “features and benefits” world. Professional Services and much of IT Services sales is around “concepts” – there’s nothing to hold, show or point to without creating it from prior client deliverables or accelerator tools, for example.

Sales training is useful in order to make consultants familiar with the “methodology” of sales but, in itself, can create a mechanical process. Adding sales targets to this environment can serve to increase the feeling of discomfort, leading to high stress levels and likely failure. What to do?

More fundamental than the mechanical tools associated with sales is the mindset. I’ve encountered many, many consultants, including at Partner level, who believe that sales is not part of their job description, that trying to sell to a client would damage their trusted advisor relationship and/or that sales is about responding to inbound requests from client organisations. Hmmmm! I can almost smell the fear!

There are many ways to address this but I often find that appealing to the ethical standpoint that all quality consultants have is the best way forward. Would we try to sell something to a client that isn’t in their organisation’s best interests? Would we try to sell them something that we’re not truly capable of delivering? Of course not! Good, so that creates a list of things (that we don’t need to write down!) that we’re not going to raise with them. So let’s look at what we are going to raise.

Whether we’re focusing on a new business sales campaign or expanding an existing account, understanding the relevant issues that the client or potential client is, or may be, facing is a good start point. We can do that, it’s called research and is part of what consultants are trained to do! Then we match these against our firms’ capabilities and identify which issues we’re able to help to address, using combinations of our capabilities – again, standard consulting stuff known as analysis. Next, we develop our proposition, how we can use our bundle of capabilities to focus on the client problem and produce a solution – otherwise known as design.

OK, so we have our head sorted out and we’ve used our core consultant training to develop something that we can go and talk to a client or potential client about – and it’s not just “something”, it’s something that’s in the client’s interests and something that we are capable of delivering. It suddenly isn’t so “scary” after all, is it?!

Now to put the mechanical sales training to good use!

3 August 20173 August 2017

Account management should come from the heart!

We all know the saying that it’s easier to sell to an existing client than a new one. How many firms, however, truly act in accordance with this?

I witnessed a classic situation a few years ago when the Managing Partner of a consultancy client of mine asked me to spend some time looking at the forward revenue profile of the firm and investigate anything that seemed strange. Amongst a number of other things, I noticed that a particular client, with fees for a current project amounting to well over £1m, had no forward opportunities marked against it so I decided to ask some questions.

The current assignment was going well and was due to complete in the next few weeks. Benefits for the client were coming through ahead of target and the client was happy. Delivery of the assignment, therefore, was not an issue. The issue, of course, was that the entire team devoted to the client was focused on purely the job at hand and was neither using the assignment itself nor spending time outside of the assignment to uncover further opportunities or even expand their network of Executive contacts within the client organisation. Thankfully, we had just enough time to work on this and a client organisation that was open to having wider discussions – a few months later, a new assignment commenced in a different division of the client. Phew!

I regularly come across situations like this, in all sizes of professional services firm. But why? Most firms deliver sales training of varying kinds to their consultants, especially from Managing Consultant to Director levels. Shouldn’t this be enough?

To understand this, we need to go back to why people enter the professional services industry in the first place. They like problem solving, they want variety in their job, they want to make a difference to a business, to government, to society. Nowhere in the list is selling work – sales is “a dirty word” and an uncomfortable place to be pushed into – delivery is so much more satisfying, and a safer place to be, for most consultants.

Surely this is illogical, especially within existing client organisations. Take the example given above – the client was happy and receiving benefit. In such situations, it is in the interests of the client if we can open up conversations about where else our consulting firm can help – if we help in other areas too, they’ll gain even more benefit and be even happier! What’s not to like?

Sales training courses focus almost exclusively on tools and techniques – that’s fine and will increase the chances of success. In our industry, however, we need to recognise that the vast majority of consultants will not be involved in new business sales beyond proposal writing and delivering their part of a beauty parade presentation – opening up “new new” opportunities will always fall to the few rather than the many.

All consultants do have a responsibility, however, to make existing clients happy and to deliver benefit for them – accordingly, they should be involved in the development and implementation of account plans for existing accounts and, crucially, they may need to go through a mindset shift to understand that doing this is in the client’s interests. If they truly believe this then their actions in this area will become more natural and “from the heart”, leading to more opportunities, increased fee income for the professional services firm, stronger client relationships and increased client value!

21 March 2017

Marketing is about “Being There”

Many Professional Services firms don’t really “get” Marketing – it’s a drain to pour money down which could otherwise go into Partners’ pockets! IT Services firms tend to “get it” more but the spend can often be focused on things that take up lots of time and budget for little effect. So what’s the problem?

Marketing professionals talk about the “Marketing Mix”. In Services Marketing, the original 4Ps of product, price, promotion and place are expanded to 7Ps, adding in process, people and physical environment …. and some people even add an eighth, namely performance – this is a lot of Ps! If we’re running a services firm and don’t have much Marketing experience, we find all these Ps a bit difficult and uncomfortable and, hence, tend to gravitate to one end of the spectrum and do only what we feel comfortable with (e.g. buy hospitality tickets for the rugby and invite some clients and a few prospects) or the other and try to cover all the bases. Both approaches fail in most cases.

Let’s start with what we’re trying to achieve. When we boil it down, we’re looking for Marketing activity to generate sales leads. In services businesses, sales leads must lead to face-to-face sales meetings because we all know that, in this industry at least, people buy from people…so they’d better meet and get the chemistry going as soon as possible if any sale is going to be made!

Now, it’s increasingly true that there are hygiene factors to consider that don’t directly lead to sales leads or which, if handled poorly, can hold sales opportunities back. A consulting firm that I’m working with had a sales campaign put on hold recently when the potential client wouldn’t introduce the consulting Partner to his boss to get a decision until the firm’s web site was more fit for purpose…which it now is! Which hygiene factors to address and how much to spend on them is worth thinking about – I’d suggest that you do just enough to create an environment within which your target market might start to get a warm and fuzzy feeling. So you want to tweet – why? You want an article in the FT – do the people who buy your services read the FT?

It’s best to decide which specific messages you want to get to which specific audiences and then, alongside creating something of an environment around this, research how to get to these audiences – which industry journals they read, which conferences they attend etc – and then put Marketing spend and effort into delivering your messages into these places, consciously and deliberately avoiding spend in places that don’t fit with this. If this involves face-to-face contact as part of the Marketing activity then this is fantastic since it gives you a better opportunity to start building a relationship and increases the likelihood of getting that all important face-to-face sales meeting.

About five years ago, I worked with an IT services firm focused on Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing – they had reached a plateau and were getting frustrated. We took the same Marketing budget that they were spending by trying to cover all the bases and focused it onto getting specific messages into three vertical industries, and we aligned the sales team up behind these industry messages. The result? 50% growth in revenues the next year and 65% growth on top of that the following year.

Decide where you need to be and then “be there”!