Промышленный лизинг Промышленный лизинг  Методички 

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and lead generation tactics that resulted in qualified prospects for your firm. In addition to this insight, tips to effective lead generation include:

Identify the buyers of your service on a regular basis. The buyers of your service depend on the nature of your consulting services and might be broken down by industry, size, or geography. Know them intimately: What do they read, what organizations do they belong to, what authority impresses them or regulates them? Invest in market research to understand their buying behavior and preferences.

Frequent touches with your buyers. By using an activity-based sales model combined with specific targets, you increase the number of times that you are in conversation with the buyers of your services. In conversation with your targets, continually ask yourself what information you can share with them that creates the perception of the value you provide and gets you in front of them. You want to get your prospects excited, whether through opportunity or pain. Storytelling is a proven way to touch your buyers. People listen and remember through stories, and whether you are phone canvassing or selling in front of a client, leveraging your great case studies, dressing them up, and sharing them is a home run tactic. And, above all, brand your touches. If you want to be memorable, you have to be branded.

Be opportunistic. While you are paying regular attention to your steady buyers, pay attention to whats happening in the marketplace. If you see a need that your services can meet, go after that business. Your professional consultants, the experts, will be attuned to marketplace shifts, and it is important that sales professionals stay close to this pulse of knowledge. Intranets and knowledge portals can be helpful with this level of knowledge sharing. In addition, the daily business papers and weekly trade journals are excellent sources of knowledge, as well as industry-specific databases. For example, FTI sales professionals regularly access Lexis Nexis, CourtLink, and CourtEXPRESS to check the dockets for significant upcoming cases where the firms services might be useful to a law firm or corporation.

In relation to targeting, John Salomon, forensic advisory practice leader at FTI Consulting, Inc., stresses the critical role that the sales professionals play in being in front of a prospective buyer at the time they have a need. Salomon notes that while he might meet an attorney (prospective buyer) at a function and talk with that prospect extensively at that time, if there is no immediate need for FTIs services, that prospect is most likely not going to remember Salomon and FTI when a need arises three months or one year down the line. The sales professional, on the other hand, is trained to identify prospective buyers on a regular basis and, in an ideal situation, can get in front of prospects when the need is hot.12



Mining Your Firms Consultants

Mining your firms consultants equates to knowing who and what you are selling. John Salomon notes that a key role of the sales professional is to assemble the best client service delivery team. 13 To do this, the sales organization must have intimate knowledge not only of the key practice and service areas, but of the practice leaders and consultants within those practice areas.

There are a number of processes, all communication based, that you can institute to help your sales professional mine your firms consultants:

Regular meetings: When your firm is small, hold regular meetings where client service and sales professionals get together and discuss what theyve done. As your firm grows, regular networking opportunities and attendance at national sales meetings provide good discussion and networking forums. In addition to information exchange, meetings provide opportunities for the client service professionals to get to know, respect, and trust the sales professionals.

Relationships with client service leaders: One of the most direct routes to locating the best consultant for the client need is to ask the senior practitioner in a practice area: Where do I find this skill set? For relationships to form, meetings and networking are essential.

E-mail: A simple use of technology is the firmwide e-mail distribution. When searching for the ideal consultant for a new business meeting, the sales professional can quickly send out an e-mail to the firm or a particular practice area, providing some background on the potential deal and indicating what skills he or she is looking for (e.g., a senior practitioner who has experience in intellectual property damages in the auto after-market industry).

Intranet knowledge database: A more sophisticated use of technology is the creation of an intranet (internal) knowledge database that maintains updated information on the firms consultants. Ideally, the sales professionals can search this database on key criteria such as region, service experience, industry experience, and other more qualitative information, such as average client engagement size. This information will help the sales professional put together the best team for a particular client.

Decision matrix: At FTI, the sales professionals found that the practitioners were able to speak clearly in relation to what they did, but they could not talk about themselves in relation to the client or in a way that was helpful or appropriate for sales professionals. To meet this communication gap, the FTI sales organization developed a matrix that asks key questions and helps sales professionals to mine their client service professionals:



-Who is your ideal prospect (client)? -What are the clients decision triggers?

-What are the typical questions you get asked on a sales call? -What is the marketplace competition for your service area? -What is the structure/process associated with a typical sales call? -What are the steps in your typical sales cycle? -How do we price your services?

-Includes frequently asked questions the practitioner receives from client prospects.

Communication is the cornerstone of effective mining. It is important that sales professionals and client service teams get to know each other and build relationships on mutual respect and trust. It is this integration that will help sales professionals to identify and pull together the best team based not only on skill and expertise but also on working style.

Measurement

When thinking about measurement, there are two distinct questions: How much does it cost the firm, on average, to win a significant piece of new business? How do I measure the success of my sales organization?

The costs associated with closing a new business deal in the professional services environment are complex. One approach is to measure your sales success in terms of efficiency. Your sales professionals, in this environment, touch many people; and you can assess how many calls were initiated, presentations delivered, and deals closed. Another approach measures effectiveness. In measuring effectiveness, understanding your sales cycle and how much resource investment, in terms of time and money, it costs to get to the end of the deal is the overarching issue. Measuring effectiveness is difficult, and it can be even more difficult in an environment in which professionals and salespeople are often in reactive mode and responding to requests for proposal (RFPs) and other reactive sales efforts. In this environment, the professional services firm is spinning its resources to respond to a client prospect in a relatively short time and invest a significant number of hours and money into winning new business. In this selling environment, it is difficult to step back and honestly assess how much it costs to bring in a deal and then measure the cost of sales in relation to that figure. The challenge for your particular firm is to assign some costs to time and touches. How much time does it usually take for us to close a deal, and how many times do we need to touch the prospect within this time period? Then, the question becomes: How do we economically touch and educate a reasonable number of prospects to reach our revenue goals?

Once you determine the costs associated with selling, you can more accurately predict the investment the firm will need to make in sales to achieve



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