Selling professional services in a technology-powered, content marketing-inundated world is evolving. Is your firm adjusting its approach?
People love to buy, but hate to be sold. When’s the last time you downloaded a Salesforce eBook or Research Report? What were you looking to accomplish? Maybe learn a bit about marketing trends? Or access some sales benchmarks? What happened after you clicked “download?” BAM! A phone call from a Salesforce rep calling you to explore the Marketing Cloud. Often within minutes. Suddenly you felt like an antelope being chased by a hungry lion on a Nat Geo episode.
Unfortunately, this has too often become the norm for modern selling. Sellers pushing solutions without context or a clear understanding of the problem to be solved. Many sellers don’t really care about YOUR goal — they’re only focused on THEIR goal, which is closing a sale. Of course your clients need thought leadership. They need insights, options, clarification, and comparisons to make an informed buying decision. But all too often, sellers come at them with their end goal as the priority for the conversation. Which raises the question, are you having the right conversations with your clients?
The business of selling professional services has changed a lot over the past decade. Modern technologies have given us more ways than ever to reach potential clients. But they’ve also led to some bad selling behaviors. Online, offline, in their inboxes and on their phones, clients are inundated with information from firms vying for their attention. Of course, many are tuning these things out. But despite being sensitive to our clients’ struggles, we’re often pushing content that contributes to — rather than alleviates — the noise. In our most recent thought leadership survey, many decision-makers indicated content overload is a significant problem for them. And nearly 40% said most of the content they do consume isn’t that valuable in helping them chose which firm to use.
New technologies have created an environment in professional services organizations that requires a reevaluation of the selling model for many firms. What’s worked in the past may not work in the future, and the implications are significant for any firm that wants to achieve growth in this new landscape.
GETTING THE BUYER’S JOURNEY BACK ON TRACK
Modern marketing is educating, and modern selling is helping. But those two concepts are evolving. Ten years ago, helping the buyer largely meant empathizing with them on their challenges and identifying possible solutions. Today, it means so much more. From helping buyers make sense of a sea of noise to building consensus, selling professional services is changing rapidly.
So what should you do differently? In modern selling, your role is to help clients:
- Sort through the noise (help them make informed decisions)
- Validate solutions (help them make good decisions)
- Build consensus (help them make aligned decisions)
Here’s a look at 3 ways you can help your clients achieve these goals and make better purchase decisions.
#1 – DON’T CHASE RFPs
RFPs are fine for well-defined, core problems. But often in professional services selling, a one-to-one match of a problem to a solution doesn’t exist. Buyers are dealing with more complex problems than ever before. In an RFP buyers rarely admit to their real problems. More frequently, they’ve identified a solution without full context on the problem or problems they’re looking to solve. If your first point-of-entry into a new client relationship starts with an RFP it’s very difficult to help the client make an informed decision because they’ve already largely dictated the solution.
Often, this means focusing your selling efforts less on clearly understood problems and more on ones that are new or emerging on the periphery. Problems like these provide more ambiguity and more opportunity for your firm to offer consultative advice. In short, to help clients sort through the noise, identify the challenges they don’t even see, and develop new ways to think about how to solve those challenges they’ve not considered (sounds a lot like thought leadership, doesn’t it?). If you can take clients from “not knowing what they don’t know” to “understanding what they didn’t know and knowing how to solve it,” you’re much more likely to have worked on the right problem. And your client is likely to be more satisfied, even if the journey was a bit rockier and longer than expected.
#2 – DON’T FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR SOLUTIONS
Your firm’s core capabilities can be applied in a number of different ways. So it’s critical to understand how the client is actually defining their problem. Unfortunately, many sellers don’t listen long enough nor closely enough —they hear a problem scenario they’re familiar with and think, “Oh yeah, here’s a solution for that.” They become the proverbial hammer looking for a nail to pound.
There’s an old marketing maxim: People don’t buy drill bits, they buy holes. But, in the world of professional services, what are the holes that clients buy? As my podcast co-host, Jeff McKay, frequently reminds us regardless of what type of service you’re selling, clients are ultimately buying growth, efficiency, or financial performance. Any solution you offer needs to drop into one of these value buckets. Evaluating your firm’s positioning and service offerings along these three dimensions is a key step in validating that your solutions will help your clients make good decisions. Encourage your sellers to bring client conversations to these three sources of value early and often.
#3 – APPROACH SERVICES SELLING AS A TEAM SPORT
Ideally you want all members of your prospective client’s organization to show the same level of enthusiasm for whatever solution you’ve proposed. Building consensus is critical to modern selling. It creates internal support for a decision. It gives all stakeholders a chance to share their ideas, perspectives, and concerns — which often results in more motivated buyers and more effective execution post-sale.
But it’s getting more difficult to gain consensus. Just a few years ago, the typical B2B buying decision might have involved 6-7 people. These days, buying decisions can average 11 or more. With almost all B2B buying happening virtually, presumably a client’s buying group could reach as many people as they can cram into a Zoom call.
As a result, building alignment around decisions is perhaps one of the most challenging and most important aspects of the modern selling equation. A good portion of your selling energy needs to go towards helping your clients gain the buy-in, will, and energy to move forward with a decision from all the layers of a multi-faceted organization. The problem and the solution tend to cut across numerous functions, in spaces where clients not only want help, but also in places they don’t even know they need help. Yet the fear of not getting it right can be paralyzing for both the individual buyer and the organization.
DIG DEEPER INTO MODERN SELLING
The thinking underpinning this article was derived from a series of podcast interviews we conducted with sales experts from across the professional services space and beyond. I encourage you to listen to each of these episodes as they cover many of these concepts, and more, much more deeply than I was able to here:
From Value-Based Pricing to Value-Based Selling with Blair Enns of Win Without Pitching (Part 1 and Part 2)
How to Get Cross-Selling Right with Charlie Green, Co-Author of the Trusted Advisor
Avoiding the Sales Kill Box with Gartner’s Maria Boulden
Overcoming Client Indecision with Matt Dixon, Co-Author of The Challenger Sale and JOLT Effect
