While these phases are universal to most sales cycles, your sales process is going to be unique depending on your firm, the services that you sell, and the industries that you target. The first step in successful selling is to understand your sales process.

Exercise: Mapping Your Unique Sales Process

This exercise asks and answers the question: How do we get to closing on a new engagement? Bring together a group of veteran sales and consulting professionals for a brainstorm session. During this session, select two or three successful new business wins, and backtrack through the sales process. Be painstaking during this dialogue, and examine all of the detail involved in targeting and closing a new business deal. This exercise will help your organization to see all of the steps involved in your sales process, and, over time, a pattern will emerge. This pattern is your unique sales process.

Once you have insight into your unique sales process, you can then map it against the typical sales cycle as outlined in Exhibit 4.7 to create an informational flow chart that depicts your firms process.

Selling the Way People Want to Buy

As stated earlier, successful sales professionals sell the way people want to buy, not the way they want to sell. There is a contagious energy that results from this approach to selling.

Before going on a sales call, it is necessary to understand the nuances of selling professional services. Selling professional services is unique in that you are positioning capabilities; this is different from positioning a solution or a product. In the early stages of selling, finding the right amount of positioning (positioning the firm in addition to the practice), without having done a lot of discovery about the client need, is difficult. However, in the professional services sales environment, it is critical that you position the capabilities of both the firm and the practice to gain the legitimacy that is required to gain access and the confidence of the prospects decision makers.

In selling professional services, the most important part of the selling process is the beginning. This beginning, or discovery stage, is the second step in Exhibit 4.7. In a typical selling environment, consultants often walk into a new client meeting feeling pressured to present a solution before having a clear understanding of the problem. Or, out of confidence (or arrogance), a consultant will walk into an initial sales meeting claiming to already know the solution that the client needs. In both of these situations,

the consultant immediately starts selling; there is no time to assess and reflect on the situation and position the value of the solution in the context of the client need. This approach to selling results in a decrease in selling power.

Selling power directly correlates with contextual power. Contextual power results from placing your solution in the context of the client need. It is at the beginning of the sales cycle that the sales professional and consultant have an opportunity to clearly understand the client challenge, to identify the right solution for the client, and to then position and sell that solution in the context of the clients need. This is why the beginning of the sales cycle is so important. To establish selling power and sell your capabilities through the eyes of your client, sales professionals must continually challenge themselves with three key questions, as listed in Exhibit 4.8.

According to Wendy Lea, within the professional services sales environment, there are five stages that make up the ideal discovery phase of the sales process. These five stages guide the initial dialogue between the sales professional and the client service consultant, and the prospect:11

1. What is the client trying to accomplish? This is the first question to raise in any discussion with an enterprise. Typically, a consulting organization is brought in when something has gone wrong and the client needs assistance or the client does not have the in-house capabilities to deliver on a particular project. A team of professionals on the client side is responsible and accountable for meeting a commitment.

2. What is keeping the client from accomplishing what theyve committed to? Or, what is your challenge? It is critical that the sales professional and consultant understand what challenges and obstacles the functional group has encountered in its attempt to accomplish the project.

QUESTIONS TO CONTINUALLY ASK

1. What is your (client) challenge?

2. What decisions do you (client) have to make?

3. How do I lay my value on top of that?

And most importantly:

Does this (solution) make sense for my client?

Remember, typically, an internal group at the client site has made a commitment that they are accountable for achieving and have encountered bumps along the way.

3. How can the prospective client solve the problem? At this stage of the discussion, there are three options the client can choose to pursue: -Do nothing. The prospective client makes a determination that

there is a problem, but perhaps the problem does not have enough

weight or is not understood well enough to proceed with a solution. -Solve internally. The prospective client more clearly understands

the problem and determines that the best route is to use an internal

team to manage the project. -Go outside. The prospective client more clearly understands the

problem and determines that the best route is to bring in a team of

external professionals to manage the project.

4. Research the solution. If the prospective client decides to pursue a structured solution or to do something, the client will either assign an internal team to research a solution or retain an external firm to research the solution. Ideally, your professional services firm will be engaged at the solution research, or proposal development, stage.

5. Evaluate the proposed solution: Once proposals have been developed, the prospective client will then look at the proposal through a set of evaluation criteria and determine whether they have the budget to proceed.

The challenge for many professional services firms is that the consultants get brought in at the middle of the buying process; thus, they walk in and start selling a solution. Or, some professional services firms are so confident in what they think they know that they either go through the five stages in a surface fashion or dont go through them at all. However, if your sales professionals are trained to sell as your clients buy and to continually ask the right questions, you will create context for the dialogue with the client, which will result in greater selling power and, ideally, greater client satisfaction.

Targeting and Lead Generation

The terms targeting and lead generation both equate to identifying and touching potential customers. As a salesforce, it is important to focus on generating a steady hum of revenue. In a professional services firm, if you dont have new business, your consultants are on the beach. While this steady revenue might not be the most interesting business, it will keep your firms consultants active. At the same time, however, your sales organization needs to be available for and attuned to the big deals. During the exercise in which you defined your unique sales process, you likely uncovered some marketing