by Glen Springer | Oct 28, 2011
Does it seem like you are spending a ton of time talking to prospects, and your company isn’t growing at the speed you expected? Are your professional service sales inconsistent and spikey, or your revenue projections often wrong? Do you know what sales tactics, conversations and content are your best performers? Maybe your sales reporting and metrics need some fine-tuning.
A strategically-designed sales reporting plan is critical for your company’s success, because you can’t improve what you don’t measure. This is especially true for professional service sales, because so much time can be spent educating the market and scoping projects that don’t close. A first step we take, when we work as a professional service sales outsourcing partner, is to help establish Key Performance Indicators that improve our client’s sales productivity.
Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs)
- KPIs need to reflect more than just revenue figures
- They need to include data about your sales process
- They need to include data about what messages are working
- They need to include data about what markets are the best performers
- They need to address how fast or slow specific decision makers move through the pipe
- They need to include how much time is spent educating prospects and scoping business in each market
- They need to be split between time invested with the technical buyer and the business buyer
Sales reporting and solid KPIs have many benefits. They give your company and team a consistent view of progress daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. KPIs can be used to create a scoreboard to keep your team engaged and motivated towards a common goal. The KPI scorecard keeps sales, professional service leads and lead generation reps moving towards that common goal, and also ensures everyone knows what specific tasks they are responsible for in achieving this end. This is especially critical when the sales process get passed between a professional service lead to develop and then back to a sales lead to close. Using KPIs to establish benchmarks and analyze results allows you to identify sales trends, including what high-value activities to optimize (usually with digital content) and what new tactics to leverage. Overall, you learn why you win and when you lose.
In this economy, with the new rules of engagement, professional service sales need to use sales reporting to make informed and timely decisions. We use sales details and patterns because they help us to discover insights to generate revenue and grow your business. As a professional services sales outsourcing partner, we recommend that you:
- Evaluate how many touches it should take to qualify a prospect
- Identify the most important business pains your solution fixes
- Identify what content is shared internally by your champion to move the deal forward
- Understand what Return on Investment argument makes the most sense to specific markets
- Evaluate how much time is spent educating a prospect
- Evaluate how much time is spent scoping a project
- Manage more efficiently by focusing on what’s working best and eliminating unproductive activities
- Target markets that are ready to buy and nurture markets (and decision makers) that are still educating themselves
Effective sales reporting can help you get the most out of your existing professional services team and allow you to introduce sales reps into your complex sales process. Sales reporting will help you to clearly identify what messages and presentations can be digitized to spare your senior resources from attending meetings with prospects that don’t transact. It will also help you to more accurately predict when you need to hire more client servicing team members, decrease costs and strengthen customer upsells.
Professional Sales outsourcing can link you with the expertise necessary to establish a constructive sales reporting process, and provide you with the appropriate tools and metrics for your company. With over 12 years of experience as an outsourced sales operations company working with professional services firms, we can work with your team to monitor your data, leverage our historical data to benchmark you against the competition and identify areas for increased efficiencies and insights. Overall, we have found great sales reporting can lead to great insights, which yield great sales results. Feel free to contact us for a free pipe velocity consultation to see what sales reporting and strategy can do for your business.
by Glen Springer | Oct 24, 2011
Our job as a sales outsourcing company for professional services is not to replace your top producer. Our job is to augment what they do to increase their capacity. We will keep drilling on this point throughout this Series on Building Sales Machines for Professional Services because it’s important to remember that if you are considering outsourcing sales for professional services, no one can replace your Top Producing Professional Service Person. They are the product and they are required to close business.
In this blog we want to discuss two other unique challenges faced when outsourcing sales for professional services. They are:
- The Professional Service Sales industry is often highly complex and time needs to be spent educating the buyer. The buyer needs to be educated to reduce their perceived risk.
- Educating the Buyer is often when the Top Producer sells their intangible value like personality, leadership style, thinking style and communication style. You need to sell your intangibles to close business and increase margins.
The two issues above are discrete issues and so we will address them separately. In the end, what we hope to inspire are some new ways that you can leverage digital content and an inside rep to increase your sales pipe velocity. These techniques will also reduce the amount of time your most highly valued resources spend educating your customers.
The professional service sale is a highly complex sale. Time often needs to be invested in educating the prospect. Your prospects become intrigued and you love solutioning around what you do, so your top producers can end up investing several hours and several meetings educating the prospect. This is not cheap. Even worse, there is no guarantee that the deal is even qualified. Until you have done the education, in more complex sales, the prospect in many cases cannot evaluate if you are a fit. The math here is simple. Spend just 90 minutes educating the technical buyer and then another 90 minutes educating the business buyer (to establish if they are actually qualified) and you have 3 hours sunk in a sale before a deal is qualified. If only 25% of these sales leads are end up being sales qualified you can have 12 hours of your Top Producers time invested in direct dialogue and another 12 hours in preparation and follow up work. This means you have a sunk cost of 3 full working days to get one qualified deal and you haven’t even started selling. Addressing this issue is probably the single quickest bang for your dollar that you can get leveraging an outsourced sales company. When outsourcing sales for professional services, we integrate reps and digital content.
Challenge: Qualify the opportunity without taking Top Producers bandwidth
Solution: Script the initial intro presentation to be delivered by the inside sales rep. Leverage Webcasts moderated or led by your Top Producer, Video Taped Presentations showing your Top Producer, Blogs addressing early stage sales objections “written” by your Top Producer and White Papers to do the education for you. In some cases, we require the inside rep to understand their budgeting and decision making process before they have “live access” to the Top Producer. Bottom Line: You need to use Digital Content to maximize your Top Producers bandwidth.
Building on the point above, most professional service folks love educating the buyer because it allows them to problem solve by starting to engage in abstract and technical thinking. This is also a critical part of any professional services sale, because they need to sell their intangibles—critical thought, passion, personality and expertise—to the buyer. This builds trust. Trust is critical and required to get the deal done. What we find when working as a professional service outsourced sales provider, is the sharper the professional service person, the tougher it can be. This is because it is often difficult to stop him/her from educating buyers, because of the excitement generated by the solutioning on both sides.
Challenge: Selling the intangibles to build trust without crushing your Top Producer’s bandwidth.
Solution: You need to measure how much time your Top Producers are spending educating prospects and set limits on this investment. You need to leverage Webcasts, Video Blogging, and Whitepapers in your sale. This allows you to share the intangibles one to many, instead of one to one. You need to refuse to travel until you have a specific project on the table and scoped. You need to have a sales rep clearly accountable for the close of business and articulate that accountability to the prospect. This gives you the option to cut off access to the expert if the deal is not moving forward.
Outsourcing Sales and Marketing Operations for Professional Service Firms can help you increase the productivity of your Top Producers, increase the volume of deals in your sales pipeline, increase your margins by maximizing the revenue from closed deals and free up bandwidth to focus on serving your customers. Contact us to see if we can help you to build a professional services sales machine.
by Glen Springer | Oct 20, 2011
The first thing you need to keep in mind when considering outsourcing your Professional Services sale, is that no one can replace your Top Producing or Lead Consultant. They are required to close business. At the end of the day, they are the product your customers are buying. The one challenge that Consultants and Professional Service folks face that can really twist the sale into knots is the fact that the often need to sell the deal to the buyer and then turn around and put on the delivery and then service the account. This sometimes requires two completely different skill sets and two completely different postures.
We realize it’s cliché, but for Professional Services Firms time literally is money. When outsourcing sales, especially outsourcing sales for professional services or building your own sales machine, your top priority needs to be maximizing the bandwidth of your top producers. What follows, is a little deeper dive into the complexities and challenges, as well as some approaches you can take to address the issue that in many cases for professional service firms, Seller and Deliverer are one in the same.
Seller and Deliverer are the Same Person – One of the largest challenges in scaling sales in a Professional Services Firm is that Seller and Deliverer are often the same person. This creates multiple issues:
- As a seller/deliverer – you are tasked with selling yourself. If you are too much of an expert you can come off arrogant, self-absorbed, and self-serving, and the buyer does not want to work with you on the delivery side. If you are too humble, you are not an expert. Catch 22.
Challenge: The Seller needs to position the Deliverer to be a Trusted Resource.
Solution: You can leverage a sale rep (call them an engagement consultant or account rep) to sell your deliverers exceptional greatness. You need to support your rep with digital content in your deliverer’s voice (educational webcasts, highlights of live speaking events) and video testimonials that support those claims. Supply your inside rep or outsourcing sales rep with success stories that support the results your team can produce.
Benefits: The seller can now generate anticipation and excitement around the first meeting with your Top Producer and sell as hard as they want to without sounding arrogant. The sellers excitement about the Top Producers talent will translate into excitement for the customer.
- As a seller/deliverer – The buyer is buying you (and your team). Once you get the deal done, especially in this economy, the buyer expects more of your time than ever to get the initial project of the ground. Handing deals over to other team members to service is not as easy as it once was. The buyer wants the advantages of direct involvement of the top producer, at the expense of you growing your own business. That crushes your top producers sales bandwidth to generate more business, so the peaks and valleys are more pronounced than ever before.
Challenge: Keep your Top Producers pipe filled when they get sucked into delivery.
Solution: Use a lead sourcing rep equipped with a script that asks open-ended questions around the business pains your solution solves. Essentially, take the initial light discovery your top producers would do and pass that process to a less expensive resource. The questions need to be smart and demonstrate that as an organization, you understand the potential client’s pain. As you are getting started, keep that outsourced lead gen rep targeting companies that are in similar verticals and decision makers that you already have a proven track record making happy. Supply that lead sourcing rep with short case studies and success stories as collateral.
Benefits: Your Top Producer gets rid of about 80% of the time required to generate and initially qualify new business and can save backend delivery time also. When the Top Producer does start to engage, you also have the opportunity very early in the relationship with the client to prove your own internal communication is fluid and the customer will be getting serviced by a team and not just the Top Producer. This sets precedent downstream, so you will deliver the solution for the client without the Top Producer needing to be involved in every step of delivery.
- As a seller, you need to close the deal; and as delivery, you need to bill yourself and your team at 2X to 3X of salary. This can be a tough conversation for the “deliverer” to have.
Challenge: Closing the business and getting top dollar without encroaching on “deliverer” credibility.
Solution: Staff a Senior Sales/Sales Account Rep to manage the logistics of closing of the business selling ROI/Opportunity and presenting the initial offer to give your Top Producer a little distance. Leverage this rep to deal with parts of the “commercial relationship”. There is then a clear division of responsibility.
Benefits: Keep margins up with the following additional benefits: First, the initial cost can be presented by the sales rep. If there is an issue with the cost, the Top Producers knows this before he enters into that conversation. Second, the sales rep can take the first pass at negotiating the price and sell the value of the top producer again, if necessary, to keep your margins up. When the Top Producer comes in for the final negotiations, if you choose to discount, they are the hero and have avoided most of the mildly adversarial parts of the negotiation. Finally, the sales rep can deal with chunks of logistics like Non-Disclosure Agreements and navigating purchasing.
So to summarize, the job to be done in addressing the challenges of Seller and Deliverer as one in the same, is not to remove the Top Producer from the close. It is to remove the Top Producer from the parts of the sales cycle that can be done with a more cost effective resource and to support the Top Producer strategically to maximize your margins. In our next blog in this series, we will tackle the challenge of how Professional Services Sales can educate the customer without taking up a great deal of the top Producers time and energy.
The first thing you need to keep in mind when considering outsourcing Professional Services sale, is that no one can replace your Top Producing or Lead Consultant. They are required to close business. At the end of the day, they are the product your customers are buying. The one challenge that Consultants and Professional Service folks face that can really twist the sale into knots is the fact that the often need to sell the deal to the buyer and then turn around and put on the delivery and then service the account. This sometimes requires two completely different skill sets and two completely different postures.
We realize it’s cliché, but for Professional Services Firms time literally is money. When outsourcing sales, especially outsourcing sales for professional services or building your own sales machine, your top priority needs to be maximizing the bandwidth of your top producers. What follows, is a little deeper dive into the complexities and challenges, as well as some approaches you can take to address the issue that in many cases for professional service firms, Seller and Deliverer are one in the same.
Seller and Deliverer are the Same Person – One of the largest challenges in scaling sales in a Professional Services Firm is that Seller and Deliverer are often the same person. This creates multiple issues:
- As a seller/deliverer – you are tasked with selling yourself. If you are too much of an expert you can come off arrogant, self-absorbed, and self-serving, and the buyer does not want to work with you on the delivery side. If you are too humble, you are not an expert. Catch 22.
Challenge: The Seller needs to position the Deliverer to be a Trusted Resource.
Solution: You can leverage a sale rep (call them an engagement consultant or account rep) to sell your deliverers exceptional greatness. You need to support your rep with digital content in your deliverer’s voice (educational webcasts, highlights of live speaking events) and video testimonials that support those claims. Supply your inside rep or outsourcing sales rep with success stories that support the results your team can produce.
Benefits: The seller can now generate anticipation and excitement around the first meeting with your Top Producer and sell as hard as they want to without sounding arrogant. The sellers excitement about the Top Producers talent will translate into excitement for the customer.
- As a seller/deliverer – The buyer is buying you (and your team). Once you get the deal done, especially in this economy, the buyer expects more of your time than ever to get the initial project of the ground. Handing deals over to other team members to service is not as easy as it once was. The buyer wants the advantages of direct involvement of the top producer, at the expense of you growing your own business. That crushes your top producers sales bandwidth to generate more business, so the peaks and valleys are more pronounced than ever before.
Challenge: Keep your Top Producers pipe filled when they get sucked into delivery.
Solution: Use a lead sourcing rep equipped with a script that asks open-ended questions around the business pains your solution solves. Essentially, take the initial light discovery your top producers would do and pass that process to a less expensive resource. The questions need to be smart and demonstrate that as an organization, you understand the potential client’s pain. As you are getting started, keep that outsourced lead gen rep targeting companies that are in similar verticals and decision makers that you already have a proven track record making happy. Supply that lead sourcing rep with short case studies and success stories as collateral.
Benefits: Your Top Producer gets rid of about 80% of the time required to generate and initially qualify new business and can save backend delivery time also. When the Top Producer does start to engage, you also have the opportunity very early in the relationship with the client to prove your own internal communication is fluid and the customer will be getting serviced by a team and not just the Top Producer. This sets precedent downstream, so you can deliver the solution for the client without the Top Producer needing to be involved in every step of delivery.
- As a seller, you need to close the deal; and as delivery, you need to bill yourself and your team at 2X to 3X of salary. This can be a tough conversation for the “deliverer” to have.
Challenge: Closing the business and getting top dollar without encroaching on “deliverer” credibility.
Solution: Staff a Senior Sales/Sales Account Rep to manage the logistics of closing of the business selling ROI/Opportunity and presenting the initial offer to give your Top Producer a little distance. Leverage this rep to deal with parts of the “commercial relationship”. There is then a clear division of responsibility.
Benefits: Keep margins up with the following additional benefits: First, the initial cost can be presented by the sales rep. If there is an issue with the cost, the Top Producers knows this before he enters into that conversation. Second, the sales rep can take the first pass at negotiating the price and sell the value of the top producer again, if necessary, to keep your margins up. When the Top Producer comes in for the final negotiations, if you choose to discount, they are the hero and have avoided most of the mildly adversarial parts of the negotiation. Finally, the sales rep can deal with chunks of logistics like Non-Disclosure Agreements and navigating purchasing.
So to summarize, the job to be done in addressing the challenges of Seller and Deliverer as one in the same, is not to remove the Top Producer from the close. It is to remove the Top Producer from the parts of the sales cycle that can be done with a more cost effective resource and to support the Top Producer strategically to maximize your margins. In our next blog in this series, we will tackle the challenge of how Professional Services Sales can educate the customer without taking up a great deal of the top Producers time and energy.
