A Sales Conundrum: Do We Need a Sales Meeting to Sell Nowadays?
By Ian Brodie | August 22, 2008
If there’s one thing I know about selling professional services - it’s that my chances of making a sale go up exponentially if I can meet my prospect face to face. In fact in my 20+ years in business and over £20m of consulting projects sold - I’ve only ever sold one engagement (and a very small one at that) without at least one face to face client meeting.
Yet in my life as a buyer of services, I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to meet salespeople face to face. Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s that I’m increasingly used to being “in control” in other aspects of business life - especially on the internet. For whatever reason, I basically don’t want to be sold to. And I am confident enough in my knowledge of most service areas that I don’t need the “help” a salesperson to guide me.
In fact, when I recently bought some marketing information services, I selected a supplier I’d never met - but one that was prepared to provide me with all the information I requested over email. The other potential supplier insisted on trying to set up a meeting. Despite my requests for them just to tell me what I needed to know, they insisted they would need to meet me face to face to properly explain what they had to offer. As a result, I simply put off the meeting to a much later date (that will never happen) and went with the first supplier.
So should a salesperson push for a meeting with a potential client or not? There’s no easy answer to this conundrum. Obviously, the simpler, easier to specify the service is, the more possible it is to buy without a face-to-face meeting.
But the key determinant of whether a meeting will progress a sales is the attitude of the buyer. Is the buyer the sort of person who will resent a push for a meeting - or will (perhaps despite some initial resistance) it work in your favour? An experienced expert buyer is more likely to be able to buy without a meeting - but might not necessarily want to do so.
It takes skillful reading of the buyer - knowing when to push and when to back off - to navigate through this. One thing I can tell you though - don’t try to push me for a meeting.
Ian
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Sales: It’s the Small Steps that Count
By Ian Brodie | August 14, 2008
The element of sales most visible to outsiders is the “big win”. The “rainmaker” seemingly works some magic in a presentation, or big meeting and returns home with the sale in the bag.
This often leads to a belief that the crucial element of the sale was that final event. When people look at what the salesperson did, and what skills they have; they focus on the final event. When they then try to reproduce that performance themselves or train and foster it in others they focus again on that final event - on big presentations and “closing”.
Of course, what they miss is all the small things the salesperson did over time to make the sale happen. The initial persistence in sending useful material to the potential client to eventually gain a meeting. The ongoing networking at client associations that meant the salesperson was well known and trusted by the key decision-makers. The connections the salesperson made to thrid parties who were able to help and advise the client in related areas. The careful listening to differing client perspectives - and the meeting the salesperson organised to help them reach consensus on their needs. None of these steps individually was enough to guarantee the sale - but added together they put the salesperson into a position where the final presentation was simply to confirm what had already been decided.
Effective salespeople seem to instinctively know that they need to repeatedly go the extra mile and plug away at these small steps - day after day, week after week, month after month. It’s not glamorous - but over time it’s effective.
If you want to reproduce effective sales behaviour it’s these seemingly little things you need your team to be able to do. And it’s often these things which are the hardest. Presentation and closing skills are so much sexier - and often easier for trainers to focus on than the real sales drivers - the persistent plugging away at all the small steps.
Ian
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Interactive Document Creation: Papershow Trial
By Ian Brodie | August 12, 2008
Over the last few weeks I’ve been trialling a product called the Papershow from Oxford (the chaps that make those nice Black & Red notebooks so beloved of we consultants).
The product is basically a fancy pen with clever paper and a USB key for your PC. When you write or draw on the paper, it is reproduced on your screen in the Papershow application.
So basically you can use it like an ordinary pad of paper for collaboarative design, sketching, writing, etc. But obviously as you write, everything is copied to your PC and/or beamed onto a big screen. You can also change colours, delete previous actions, draw rectangles, ellipses, arrows, etc.
You can also print out existing presentations on to the Papershow paper and import them into the application. This allows you to annotate the presentations live - an the annotations appear in exactly the right place on the screen. There’s a brief demo below:
I can imagine this sort of application being really great for people who need to collaborate on the design of something - perhaps a user interface, or a graphic for an ad campaign. You could also use it to capture meeting minutes or actions electronically without the pain of typing.
I’ve used similar technologies before - but this is far simpler. What I’d used previously required seperate synchronisation/docking and/or the transmission of the data over the mobile phone network: it was fiddly and often failed. This just works with no fuss.
I believe the retail price will be around £140 - so well within the budget of any small business. And because the application runs from the USB key provided, you can run it on anyone’s PC.
I must admit, I don’t see an immediate use in my business. When I’m with clients I do a lot of sketching, scribbling and pencil-selling but to be honest, I would feel the presence of technology to be a barrier between me and my client. I want them either looking at the paper I’m drawing on, or looking at me - rather than a computer screen. But for people invoved in creating graphical products in teams - user interfaces, websites, brochures etc. I can imagine it would be a great help. You can discuss, collaboratively design; and even hand the pen over to “users” who don’t know how to use your graphics programs - yet they can still add to the outputs easily by using the normal human activity of drawing.
Ian
PS - for more information about the product go to Papershow
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Sales Tips from Angelina Jolie
By Ian Brodie | August 6, 2008
One of the featured resources on Rainmaker Resources is David Maister’s series of podcasts. In his Business Masterclass episode “Cultivate the Habits of Friendship” he shares a lovely anecdote about building relationships that bears repeating:
The actress Angelina Jolie was interviewed on television and asked if she had to like the characters she was portraying in order to act them well. Her answer was brilliant. She said something like: “You can’t love everything about everyone. But there must be something there. The key is to find that one small slice of overlap between you and them, and focus intensely on that overlap, ignoring everything else.” I don’t know about acting, but that sounds like a perfect recipe for human relationships to me.
The reality of relationships is that everyone is different, and everyone is flawed. There will be things we like, and things we dislike (in differing proportions) about everyone.
Although it’s often said that you get 30 seconds to make a good impression - and that’s great advice for how we should present ourselves - we absolutely must not treat others in this way. Yes, our time is precious. Yes, we cannot have deep relationships with everyone and we must be selective. But we must not make that selection based on the first 30 seconds. We must take time and make an effort to establish a relationship with people before making that selection. In my life, the scouser who looked so much like a “scally” at our first meeting I feared for my hub-caps is my oldest friend; and the irascible Scot who everyone else steered clear of was the guy who gave me some of the most insightful advice on sales I’ve ever had.
Angelina’s method of focusing on the areas of overlap and ignoring the rest is a great way of starting relationship and of beginning to find out enough about people to know whether to continue the relationship rater than making a snap decision. And - as Skip Anderson points out in his Selling to Consumers podcast it’s a great way to begin to establish rapport with potential customers.
Ian
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Topgrading for Sales: A Review
By Ian Brodie | July 18, 2008
The folks at the Topgrading team (http://www.topgradingforsales.com/) kindly sent me a review copy of their latest book: Topgrading for Sales – so here’s the review.
A quick caveat: Topgrading focuses primarily on recruitment – and I’m far from an expert in that area. In fact, in my 15+ years working in consulting organisations I managed to studiously avoid the corporate recruitment process whenever possible, And when I was hired by others, it was always as a “done deal” result of headhunting rather than happening through a structured recruitment process. So this review is from the perspective of someone who is coming at it with a fresh pair of eyes.
Philosophy
The first interesting thing about Topgrading for Sales is its simple philosophy. The core concept of Topgrading is that you can and should hire only “A Players” – the top 25% of the population. Topgrading is very stark here; there’s no hiring of nearly-A’s or B+’s and hoping they will make the grade. Yes – try to coach your existing team if they’re not A Players yet, But when it comes to hiring – aim for the top.
There’s an unwritten assumption behind this, of course. It assumes it’s possible to do this. Theoretically, if everyone was Topgrading, there wouldn’t be enough A Players to go around. But my experience is that very few firms are really thorough in how they go about hiring – and certainly not as thorough as the Topgrading process. So in practice you don’t have to worry about a shortage of A Players – especially if you follow the first key piece of advice they give.
Maintaining an A Player “bench”
The first piece of advice in Topgrading which I’d not come across before is to maintain an A Player “bench”. Rather than do what most companies do – ignore the job candidate marketplace until you really need someone - their recommendation is to maintain regular contacts with a “bench” of high performers you would like to hire, and referrers who are able to put you in contact with high performers. This approach makes a lot of sense to me – rather than starting from scratch each time you want to hire you have an active pipeline of high quality candidates already at your fingertips. And if you’ve been keeping in contact with them regularly it will help you sell your organisation to them.
Rigorous Selection Process
The next differentiator of the Topgrading approach is the rigour with which the hiring process is carried out. For example, rather than relying on the candidate’s CV/resume (which is likely nowadays to have been significantly massaged by one of the many career coaches and CV advisors available), the Topgrading approach is to ask candidates to fill in a detailed Career History form – including compensation details, exact dates for each job, the name of previous bosses (hinting that they will be contacted) etc.
The process also includes a detailed “Topgrading Interview” in addition to the normal competency-based interviews (which most people now know about and how to prepare for). This interview is a rigorous career history review – talking about specific accountabilities, achievements and learnings.
The next key step is to get the candidate to set up a call for the interviewer with each of their previous bosses for the last few years. Now, of course, you can’t force the candidate to get you these calls. But the authors’ experience is that the A Players will be happy to set them up – knowing they will get good feedback.
At each stage of the process, of course, there is a filtering and narrowing down of candidates with the final decision being made after the calls with previous managers,
Overall
As you’ll have guessed from the review so far, I rate the book pretty highly. There were a number of new ideas for me – and they reflected my own personal experience of what seems to work and what doesn’t. And I really buy-in to the philosophy of taking recruitment seriously enough and rigorously enough to ensure you are only hiring A Players.
The book is pretty slim – 113 pages – which is both a good and a bad thing. It’s a quick and easy read – but in areas I felt I would need more in order to actually implement the ideas. Over half the pages in the book are forms and checklists which is really helpful. But there’s little information on building the skills needed for successful hiring. For example, there isn’t really anything about interviewing skills, and the coaching chapter really only focuses on the timetable for coaching rather than on how to actually do it well. I think that anyone who buys-in to the Topgrading philosophy should take recruitment seriously enough to invest in books and other resources to make sure they are an A Player at all the skills needed to recruit A Players. In this respect Topgrading for Sales is an excellent overarching philosophy and framework for the way you should recrti sales people - and a starting point for further building your skills at doing so.
Ian
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Topics: Recommendations | 7 Comments »
Business Development for Accountants - is there Anybody Out There?
By Ian Brodie | July 14, 2008
When I was compiling Rainmaker Resources I scoured the net for articles, blogs, podcasts and videos of value to business developers in professional services. Most of these resources are, of course, produced by consultants and advisors who aim to help professionals in these areas. I informally categorised the firms and individuals I found, with the intriguing result that they all fell into one of three camps:
- There are many advisors who cover all types of professional services firms (lawyers, consultants, accountants, architects, engineers, etc.). I fit into this camp, as does David Maister, Ford Harding, Suzanne Lowe, Bruce Marcus, Mike Schulz and John Doerr, etc. (Bracketing myself with those giants of professional services is probably the most egotistical thing I’ve done for ages - as they say in Wayne’s World: I’m not worthy).
- There are a number of advisors who focus on law firms: Larry Bodine, Gerry Riskin, Allan Colman, etc.
- Rather fewer advisors who focus on consulting - Alan Weiss is probably the leading name here - others tend to mainly offer training and resources - e.g. SBR Consulting, the Guerilla Consulting team (perhaps consultants don’t like being consulted to).
And for accountants?
Er, nothing really. I drew a blank.
Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places - I’m a consultant by background rather than an accountant. But I’m one hell of a googler. And still I came up with nothing.
So maybe accountants don’t take advice. Or maybe advisors don’t like working for accountants. Maybe there’s a fantastic niche available for anyone willing to specialise.
Or maybe I’ve just got a blind spot when it comes to resources for accountants. So if you know of any - please drop me a line and I’ll add them to the site.
Ian
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Social Media and Professional Services Business Development
By Ian Brodie | July 14, 2008
An excellent post by Matt Brazil caught my eye recently. It’s provocatively entitled Are Social Networks the Last Nail in the Coffin for Cold Calling?
Now, of course, the increased prevalance of social media (and Matt includes blogs, articles, podcasts, etc. in that group) aren’t going to completely kill off cold calling. But Matt’s point - based on a lead generation experiment he ran - is that for many businesses they may now present a better return on investment than cold calling.
In the case of professional services: article writing, seminars and speeches have always been a fantastic business development device for the larger “names” in the business. They provide advanced clues for potential buyers to the credibility and knowledge of the consultant, lawyer, accountant, engineer or architect who wrote the article or delivered the speech. Given the intangible nature of professional services; those clues are often an immensely powerful lever to at least get the professional engaged in a dialogue with the potential client.
Historically, speech-making and article writing has often been the preserve of the well-known individual or the major firm. Most people read a small number of quality journals so competition for placement was high and the chances of a small firm or unknown individual getting a high degree of visibility was slim.
But like many things in life, the internet has changed all that. Not only is it much easier for good quality content to get published on a plethora of sites and blogs; but potential clients have changed the way they find material. Nowadays they don’t subscribe to a small number of quality journals in the hope that something of relevance will appear every few months - they search for what they want, when they want it.
So equipped with some half-decent SEO and an interesting niche to write about; smaller firms and less well-known professionals can replicate the marketing tactics of the industry giants.
Of course, actually being able to produce quality material that really is going to raise your credibility is a whole different story. But at least today the barriers to publishing and being found have all but fallen.
Ian
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Back round the blogs…
By Ian Brodie | July 8, 2008
My weekly look at sales blogs:
Colin Wilson is clearly mad. As a hatter. But they say the line between madness and genius is a fine one - and Colin seems to skip with abandon across that line. In amongst the ramblings on the Padstow Obby Oss festival and Robert de Boron’s octosyllabic verse you’ll find some real wisdom on Pipeline Management.
By a strange coincidence, Tibor Shanto’s sales blog is called “The Pipeline”. His latest post is an excellent treatise on Selling to Procurement - how to work with and around that wonderful group who are often stereotyped as the nemesis of salespeople. He also introduces a fantastic new phrase - the “chumpion” - read the post to find out more.
This week I’ve also been listening to some of David Maister’s podcasts. I’ve been an avid follower of David’s work since reading Managing the Professional Services firm well over a decade ago. But until listening to the podcasts I hadn’t realised he still had a strong, lingering British accent - intertwined with a lot of US pronunciation - I guess picked up from his years at Harvard. I encourage anyone interested in strategy, business development or practice management in the legal, accounting or consulting professions to head on over to David’s site - or search for his name on itunes to get a huge source of high quality material - pdfs, podcasts and videos.
Ian
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Rainmaker Resources | Links & Resources for Professional Services Partners, Business Developers and Marketers
By Ian Brodie | July 8, 2008
I spend quite a bit of time scouring the net for high quality resources and information on business development and marketing for professional services. While they have a lot in common with product sales - particularly large, complex sales; there are also a number of unique factors which need to be taken into consideration when marketing and selling professional services. Unfortunately, there are relatively few high quality resources available to give guidance in this area.
Well, the good news is, I’ve created the Rainmaker Resources (www.rainmaker-resources.com) portal as a guide to some of the best resources on professional services rainmaking available on the net: blogs, articles, podcasts, videos and books.
The portal reflects my own personal opinion, of course; but please feel free to add your own favourite links and resources - either directly (it’s a Squidoo Lens) or drop me a message and I’ll add it for you.
Ian
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Topics: Selling Professional Services | 4 Comments »
Becoming a Trusted Advisor
By Ian Brodie | July 5, 2008
It’s the holy grail of Professional Services - to become a trusted advisor to your senior clients. To be viewed - and sought out - as a source of valued advice and support.
The benefits from a business development perspective are clear: the professional who is the first port of call for a client with a business problem is in a tremendous position to help shape that client’s thinking, to build a deep understanding of the situation, and to establish strong credibility through the discussions. In other words, they will be in pole position to win any related work.
Sphere: Related ContentTopics: Selling Professional Services | 9 Comments »