How To Sell Consultancy Services (for people who hate sales)
Skip the automation tools and silly tricks, here's a much better approach to selling consultancy services.
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You Need To Become Adept At Sales
If you’re going to thrive as a consultant, eventually you have to get good at sales.
Getting good at sales takes time. You’re not going to go from beginner to amazing overnight, but you can gradually get better over time. You can gradually improve each step of the process.
Key Lesson: Always Add Value
The easiest way to stand out in the sales process is to always add value
Most consultants think the challenge is to tell the prospective clients why they’re the best choice. This often means highlighting a unique positioning or past track record of success. The problem with this, if it’s a competitive process, is this is precisely what everyone else is doing as well.
A far better approach is to add value in every single interaction.
Imagine a client goes from having boring calls with other consultants in which they’re bombarded with reasons why that client is the best and then they join your call - and you give them a bunch of useful insights and advice they didn’t expect.
The goal in each stage of the process is to add value.
Step One: Build A List From Existing Connections
If you start a sales conversation, be prepared to be ignored
You probably get as many spammy LinkedIn requests as I do. A bad request typically looks like this:
And you probably ignore these messages. They’re just spammy, impersonal, and just feel suspect. Getting sales messages from strangers is never going to work.
If you do want to do outbound prospecting, I’d suggest you begin by looking at your existing mailing list or following.
Begin with people who are already aware of you. This is the entire reason you create content, to increase awareness of yourself. If you begin with folks who know you, everything else is a lot easier.
Make a list of five organisations each week in your following. You’re going to approach at least one of them per day.
Step Two: Offer Something Of Value
Forget about sales for now, just offer something of value
Take some time to think of what the person(s) you’re approaching might find really valuable.
There’s a balance here between something that is valuable (but not available elsewhere) and something that is too valuable to be believable.
“15 free leads for your company” just isn’t believable. Likewise, offering a “free audit” is a poor idea for the same reason. People perceive it as a desperate attempt to sign them as a client. It doesn’t position you as an expert authority in the field.
A far better approach is to tell them something they want to know.
Here are some ideas:
A benchmark report you recently created showing how organisations in their field compare with one another.
A short presentation showing the latest trends in your client’s sector.
A salary/budget survey highlighting how much different organisations pay staff.
How top organisations are structuring their teams.
It should clearly show how you’ve created value they would find interesting, but don’t have already (and won’t require a huge amount of their time).
The key here is you’re not sending them a document they can ignore, you’re inviting them to a 15 to 20-minute presentation.
You can invite several people to the same presentation or simply have an individual presentation for each.
But make sure you have something valuable that people want. You have to be really careful in what you call this and how you describe this.
A good approach might begin with:
Hi [name],
We’ve recently benchmarked ten organisations (including yours) in [client’s sector] and put together a short presentation on how you each compare, which organisations are the best, how much they invest, and what the top organisations are doing especially well.
I’d be keen to share it with you and get your feedback if you have a spare 15 to 20 minutes?
You can keep it short and direct. The key thing is you’re offering something which:
The prospect can’t get anywhere else.
The prospect would find valuable even if they don’t become a client.
Can naturally lead into a discussion about what the prospect can do better.
Step Three: Outline The Changes Which Need To Be Made
Collaborate with the client on the change the organisation needs to make
A key step in the value you create is it should highlight a deficit between where the organisation is now and where it should be. (If there isn’t, then your services aren’t needed.)
Once you’ve shared your findings, you can ask them for their thoughts. You can ask them what’s stopping them from being at that level? You can gather information and feedback on the blockades the organisation faces.
It’s at this point where you can ask a question like:
“Would you be open to some ideas from me on how to tackle this?”
They’re welcome to say no. That’s fine - you’ve still built a useful relationship. But if they say yes you can start sharing what’s worked in other organisations and begin developing some options for how to improve.
They might say “you can, but I should tell you now we don’t have any budget for outside help”. In which case, you can reply with something like: “That’s fine, I’m happy to put together some options nonetheless so if there ever is a budget, we can move forward on the project”. From there you can simply check in every few months.
At this point, you also want to set up an additional call to discuss some options. I would encourage them to invite others as well so they can agree on:
The need to change.
The barriers preventing change.
What options for overcoming this might look like?
So you might wrap up the call with a question like:
Give me a little time to research some options that might work here. How about we set up a call on [date] to go through them? What times work for you?
You should also ask if there is anyone else who might be interested or impacted by the project and should be on the call.
Step Four: Gain Alignment On The Options
You need to bring everyone with you on this journey
The next step is to put together some options in a short presentation. Ideally include examples and best practices which others can look up to. You might want to have different options targeting different challenges or structure them as low-budget to high-budget depending on how ambitious you want to be.
In this call, your goal isn’t to sell a service. Your goal is to collaborate with the client to explore what each option would look like, whether there are any barriers which are preventing them from going ahead with one of these options, and which options are likely to be most effective.
You can adjust and tweak the options based on their feedback to ensure you arrive at something which closely matches what the client wants. By this point you should have a client who has agreed:
That they need to change how they’re doing something.
What that change would look like.
The best way you can support them on that change.
I’d also outline what the approximate budget would look like for each option you present so they can consider which is the best approach.
They don’t have to agree to a budget, they just have to make sure that the options sound feasible. You need to know you’re in the right ballpark and you’re suggesting options they can actually implement.
At the end of this call, you can tell them you’re going to take everything they’ve said and drop it into a proposal. You will send the draft proposal in a couple of days. In the meantime, however, ask to set up a call to review the proposal
Step Five: Review The Proposal Before Finalising It
Review the draft proposal and adjust as needed with the client
A major part of the sales process is turning prospective clients into allies on the journey. If you’ve got this far, interest is usually quite high. The next step is to review the draft proposal with the client to make sure it 100% aligns with what they need.
It’s incredibly important to make clear at this stage that your proposal is just a draft and you’re going to collaborate on it together to make it 100% right.
This is the opportunity to address any concerns which are raised. You should really do the work here.
Step Six: Get A Decision
Don’t just send a proposal and wait indefinitely for a response
Here’s the really painful truth about sales. Clients will sometimes simply vanish at this stage. You won’t get a yes, you won’t get a no. But the client will just go quiet and you won’t ever hear from them again.
I wrote about why clients go quiet here (and what you can do in that situation). It’s painful when it happens. The goal is to pre-empt that situation by asking for their business.
A common mistake is to send a proposal and then wait indefinitely for a response. That leads to a situation where you might never get a response.
Don’t do any silly closing tricks here. They just make you seem like a snake oil salesperson. Instead, you can simply ask on the call:
It sounds like we’re aligned on the project and we’ve addressed any concerns. Can I get a contract to you so we can get started?
That’s as simple as it needs to be.
Send One Message Per Day
This is the easiest way to get started on this practice
By far the best way to begin this process is simply to send one well-written message to a prospect per day. Like most habits, it might help to do it at the very beginning of your day.
This will add up to 260 outbound messages sent per year. If you do this well, you should be able to generate at least a dozen or so clients from this. And that in turn should net you at least a dozen clients. Which, for most of us, isn’t a bad living.
p.s. Everything I’ve learned about modern selling I’ve learned from Anthony Iannarino. Make sure you subscribe to his blog.
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Thanks for reading
This is great advice, Richard. I would add that many people -- whether in job interviews or client pitches -- talk mostly about themselves. A much more effective approach (as you talk about here) is to answer the "what's in it for me" question from the client's point of view. Put your finger on the problem and talk about why/ how you're the solution. Makes for a much more valuable/ memorable conversation. As you say, always add value!