How To Sell Consultancy Services

Consultants Should Stop Thinking Of It As Selling

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If you want to build a consultancy practice, you have to be able to sell your services.

Sales is a skill - but it’s a grossly misunderstood skill.

Drop These False Beliefs About Selling

If you’ve watched movies like Boiler Room, Glengarry Ross, Wolf of Wall Street, or Pursuit of Happiness you might be forgiven for believing sales is a game of psychological Ju-Jitsu. This is where you have to be able to say the right words at the right time and, boom, you ‘close the deal’.

In the past, there was some truth in this. Sales professionals mastered the art of rebuttals. They would contact you out of the blue, make their pitch, and whatever reason you gave for NOT buying from the sales professional is precisely the reason they would use to encourage you to buy from them.

For example “I don’t have the budget for this sorry”

Salesperson - “Not having this product is why you don’t have the budget. At the moment you’re wasting too much time and money on …..” etc…

This doesn’t work these days for two reasons.

First, it’s harder to get people to listen to a cold call pitch in the first place. I guarantee I’ll hang up before you get through your second sentence. I simply don’t trust people who cold-call or cold-email me.

Second, prospects are much more informed about their options. They can browse around and find the best solutions for their needs. We’re not waiting on a salesperson to call us up to provide us with something we need.

There are ways to speak persuasively and use compelling stories at the right time, but sales today is far less about saying the right words and far more about trust, listening, and price.

The Three Things You Need To Sell Consultancy Services

When sales is done well, it should feel easy and natural for you both.

You should never feel like you’re misleading or cheating a prospect. It shouldn’t feel like a silly game of manipulation or trying to find the right words to say.

It should be a natural journey of building trust, making sure you know exactly what they need (and you’re the right for each other), and coming to an agreement on the fee.

I know a couple of my past clients read this newsletter and I’d hope they would agree that our sales process is direct, honest, and authentic. There are no gimmicks or high-pressure sales tactics.

Let’s go through each of the three things that matter in the process:

1. Trust.

2. Product.

3. Price.

We’ll tackle trust first.

Why Trust Is Key

FeverBee doesn’t make a single outbound sales call.

That’s partly because it’s ridiculously ineffective, but primarily because we don’t need to. Our entire strategy to attract clients is to provide ‘super proof’ that our methods work. Before organisations contact they should hopefully have already seen what we’ve done for others, know a lot about our methodologies, and whether we’re the right match for them.

We try to achieve this by:

• Speaking at major industry events.

• Showing up at events we don’t speak at.

• Building relationships with people throughout the industry.

• Sharing dozens of case studies of success.

• Having dozens of video testimonials on our site.

• Having three books showcasing our methodology people can purchase.

• Publishing regular content on solving challenges prospective clients face.

• Being clear about who we do and don’t work with.

• etc…

Our process begins by establishing trust prior to the initial expression of interest and then being honest and direct throughout the sales process.

The Relationship Is More Important Than The Sale

As a rule, the relationship is always more important than the sale. If a prospect isn’t ready for us or we’re not the right match, we’re happy to say so. We might even guide them to another consultant or supplier. We never want to find ourselves in a situation where a client has hired us but one of us isn’t happy about the project.

We would always prefer to have a strong relationship than a quick sale. Relationships can morph into future referrals, employees, customers, or advocates for us. A great relationship is worth more than a sale.

Consultative Selling

The second part of this process is ensuring you’re selling the right service.

Once the process has begun, our approach is to ask the right questions, really clarify what they need, and listen as much as possible. We must really take the time to understand their needs before proposing solutions.

The more we learn about what a prospect needs, the more we can design a specific service around their needs. This is known as consultative selling.

Instead of trying to sell the same product to every organisation, we instead aim to uncover the pain points, challenges, fears, and goals of each client. Then we can design a tailor-made service specifically for them.

For example, I asked one prospect recently

“Do you have any concerns or fears about this project? Even if it’s something relatively minor?”

She replied:

“I kind of worry that once the project is done, things might change internally and we might need to tweak the plan later to deal with anything that comes up”

This is a classic example of turning fears into useful opportunities. I suggested we set aside a few hours a month for the first six months to deal with any issues that arise. This slightly increased our earnings but, more importantly, made her feel a lot more confident moving forward.

Sometimes really simple questions can lead to really profound insights.

Another recent example is when I asked:

“Is there anything anyone internally that needs to see from this project to approve it?”

The response was:

“They’re very metrics driven. They’re going to want to know what the metric improvement is going to be before they approve anything”

If I hadn’t asked the question, there was no chance the proposal would be approved. But having this insight meant we could focus heavily on the metrics, the measurement system, and share examples of improvement in metrics with past clients and include references they can follow up with.

This makes the whole process collaborative. We can discuss ideas, let the prospect highlight what resonates most for them and, often, build the proposal together.

These proposals should never be rejected because every aspect of them should be designed around their specific needs, time-frames, budgets, resources, and more. This also creates plenty of ways to add value.

The real skill in selling is asking the right questions which will let you design exactly the kind of service your prospective clients need - a service tailor-designed for them

Pricing

As I’ve said recently, pricing is a strategic decision about the audience you’re targeting and the kind of services you’re offering.

That said, it’s easy to invest a lot of time with prospective clients who simply don’t have the budget you want to charge.

Often a prospect will reach out to us just to get an understanding of what we charge. We don’t want to take them through several exhausting rounds of well, it depends (which it obviously does). Far easier to give a very broad illustrative range and let them contact us again if they want to move forward.

But this raises a question, should you share your pricing publicly?

Should you share your pricing publicly?

If you’re selling a turnkey service at a cheaper price point, then yes. You can save everyone a lot of bother by sharing what your services cost.

But selling consultancy services at a higher price point is trickier for the reason given above; we typically design our services around the needs of clients. Every client is unique and it’s tricky to give an accurate fee without knowing what they need.

There are two obvious downsides of not sharing prices however. These are

1) You might lose out to people who do share prices

2) You can spend a lot of time collaborating with prospects who don’t have the budget to afford your services.

Aside: Some consultants will argue you just need to reach a high-enough decision-maker and you will get that budget. And there’s certainly truth in that. But in my experience, the odds of reallocating budgets halfway through a year are so slim as to not be worth the while. See the principle above; if they’re not ready for you yet, be there when they are.

Instead, of sharing specific prices, I’d suggest sharing the range you work within to see if you’re in the right ballpark

Sharing The Range And Conditions

We have a relatively simple approach. We list our minimums (and conditions) on our website contact page. This means we’re not working with organisations that aren’t in the right ballpark, but we’re not trying to guess a value without scoping out the project.

To avoid anchoring our fees to the minimum fee, we also give a rough maximum. We’ve worked with clients at higher multiples of that maximum, but it’s rare.

This has only been live for a month, so it’s hard to gauge real the impact yet. But thus far it seems to be working ok. We’re getting fewer inquiries, but the inquiries we are getting we can devote more time to.

We’re also being very clear that we don’t want to get involved in the ‘is a brand community a good idea?’ stage. Nor do we want organisations with a limited budget or not looking to get started in the near future.

Give an early estimate

If someone wants a narrower figure we typically arrange a 30-minute call and give a broad estimate. The range might vary by as much as 50% (i.e. $35k to $52k), but it gives a quick check that we’re both in the right ballpark to move forward with scoping out the full service, deliverables, time-frames and creating a detailed proposal.

I’ve found most people appreciate having a rough cost to work with.

The worst thing you can do is have multiple calls with a client, spend days working on a proposal, and then find the prospect has experienced sticker shock.

By giving a few early figures to work with, you can decide whether it’s in both of your interests to move forward with the process.

Sales Are About Trust And Learning, Not Pressure

If you think of selling as applying pressure to achieve a goal, you’re not going to enjoy it much (or get far).

But if you recognise that it’s about building trust through honesty and direct communication, learning as much as possible about what people need, and coming to an agreement on the fee, you might find the process collaborative and, maybe, enjoyable.

I usually enjoy the process. It feels great to be able to identify exactly what a prospect needs and understand what organisations are struggling with.

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My advice, if you’re an independent consultant, is to read the sales books which are out there (there is value in them), but remember that ultimately it comes down to trust, listening, and clear communication about fees and value.