Gabriel Sales has experience providing different types of outsourcing sales and outsourcing lead generation solutions for Professional Services firms. Below is a transcript of our quick overview of building a high velocity sales model for professional services firm.
Gabriel Sales is a top sales outsourcing solution provider that specializes in in building sales machines that can double sales for services firms.
Situation
For Professional Service Sales the Job remains the same. Targeting the right markets, generate qualified sales leads, close faster and upsell accounts. As a seller you are tasked with growth when both the seller and buyer are being asked to more with less. As a Services firm, you now have some additional challenges which makes this a great time to consider outsourcing sales.
Sales Challenges for Professional Services Firms
You have less access to decision makers doing more work which means you need to double your lead generation efforts. Your top producers need to sell and in this economy they need to spend more time servicing accounts. So your sales pipe peaks and valleys are more exaggerated. You now need to engage and close two decision makers and that doubles the time required sell. Education is even more critical in the buyer’s process to remove perceived risk. And you need to sell your expertise and thinking style harder than ever to drive rates and margins. Finally sales and marketing operations can drain focus and steal time from revenue producing activities.
Solution
You need to maximize your top producers sales effectiveness and efficiency. If you are still selling and marketing the same way you may feel like you are running to stand still. How do you sell faster, more effectively and grow your business? You build a sales machine that aligns sales and marketing that clones your top producer’s sales process.
Your sales and marketing operations need to embrace the new rules of sales engagement and integrate sales reps, pushing digital content and measuring the results with smart technologies. And you need to push and repurpose that sales content across platforms to make it easier for you buyer to buy and give your sales reps the ground cover they need to close deals.
Here is what a sales machine looks like. You put qualified deals in the pipe using reps and digital tools. You engage. You address one sales objection at a time. Push content and engage or nurture, until the deal is closed or out of the pipe.
You have two options. Take a year and a half to build a sales solution your own, or partner with an outsourcing sales and marketing provider to augment your gaps. With sales outsourcing you can be up and running is as little as two weeks, with a fully functioning sales and marketing operations execution team, leveraging a scalable sales process that is transparent and metric driven.
As an outsourced sales company we provide, speed to market, a managed sales process, digital content production and distribution, sales staff and marketing staff that executes seamlessly, sales tools and all the sales metrics to maximize ROI.
Sale services range from full time sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing operations, sales consulting, sales staffing and digital sales execution. Or you can test with a Gabriel Sales Spark™ Campaign – outsourced lead generation to boost existing efforts, Gabriel Sales Ramp™ – for New Product Launches, or Ignite™ – a fully integrated outsourced sales and marketing campaign.
Is it harder to put leads in your pipe? Are you spending more time educating and less time closing? Do you build a pipe and then abandon it, starting from scratch every quarter? Do you over or under forecast your revenue?
The professional services sales industry has its ups and downs. On the plus side, professional services sales are forecasted to grow at over 2.5X of the rest of the economy for the next 4 years. On the downside, it’s getting more competitive and there are new rules of engagement. Below is a quick outline of how you can build a sales machine that addresses those new rules and will double your revenue.
A high velocity sales machine for professional services requires a different approach to the typical professional service sales and marketing method. It takes commitment to continually improve the process. It takes a commitment to becoming a “digital publisher” and learning how to use new technologies. It takes a commitment to managing inside and junior sales reps on a daily basis, and most professional services professionals love solutioning and would rather not spend their time managing junior employees.
Make Your Product Accessible Digitally. Your Top Producers are Your Product! As a top B to B professional service sales outsourcing company, we map all the sales objections we get during the sales process. We measure what wins deals. Once we understand these objections, we work with our outsourced sales clients to create content that demonstrates their intangibles—their thinking style, their approach to solutioning, their character, their personality—and create content that is authentic, and allows them to enter into dialogue with the prospect one to many. With or without us you need to create content that clones your Top Producers. Once we start working with a client, we generally find that over 50% of the content we need is already lying around in one form or another in past presentations, RFPs and speeches they have given.
Use an Inside Sales Team. You cannot afford to have your high-end sales resources, or professionals, that could be billing clients instead generating leads and selling to early stage prospects. To make this work you will need a hands on VP of Sales who has prior experience running an inside sales team. The team needs to be able to sell strategically over the phone, qualify prospects and understand both their business need and how they will budget for the solution. Open ended questions and smart probing questions go a long way. Once the lead is engaged, bring in your senior resources and then pass back to the inside rep to manage the logistics of the close.
Start by Leveraging Digital Content on the Back End of Your Sales Cycle. Start with your close when creating content and then work backwards to share that content. This means you need to approach your B2B customer by taking more of a consumer approach to marketing. Once they are engaged, you need to sell to them digitally. Any presentation you give more than one time a quarter needs to be turned into a webcast. Any objection that comes up more than once a quarter, you need to write a blog about. You can then repurpose that same content for SEO and have your inside team use it for lead generation downstream.
Leverage Technologies. If you have a complex sale (and most professional services sales have some level of complexity) and the prospect is moving through your pipe, they will be actively looking at your content and will be sharing that content. You need to track when people are looking at your content. All the Fortune 1000 have these technologies in place, and they will win if you do not compete. Prices have come down dramatically in 2011 and you can now have equal footing.
Leverage Social Media. Once you have the content created, you simply need to push that same content into Social Media. This means YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. The average B2B customer goes out on the web looking for you once they are sales engaged. Make sure that they find you. This is ground cover for your inside sales team.
Nurture Prospects. Take the same digital content you use as part of our sales cycle to engage, develop and close prospects that are actively buying; and cut it up into much smaller chunks – 90 second videos—and use that same content to stay in front of prospects that are not ready to buy. Staying top of mind will win you deals when they are ready to buy. Let the longer term prospects engage in the sales cycle with your content, and use your inside reps to touch them so they know you care. Technologies like Pardot (our vendor of choice) and Marketo automate this process. Hit them with a monthly blog and a quarterly newsletter via these tools. Your inside team will be watching.
Metrics are Critical. Gabriel Sales top management executive team members are all endurance athletes. This approach is not a sprint. The high velocity sales model for professional services is an endurance sport, and you need to have your handle on every step of the process. You get stronger over time. This model is designed to get deals that are ready to move moving, and keep deals not yet ready to buy engaged until they are ready. With more content and more inside sales touches you get more results; and you need to measure what starts momentum, what sustains momentum and what builds momentum.You also need to understand what fakes momentum and what takes momentum. We build custom metrics for every client because generally a professional service sale (with both a business buyer and a technical buyer) is a 5 to 7 touch sale. Our experience is that about 70% of these touches can be done with inside reps.
SEO and SEM Focus. Within six months to a year, you will start to see a lift in Natural Search, Organic Search and SEO. You will have the metrics and the insights to start to give your Marketing efforts a Sales Quota. If the content is crafted carefully, you will be able to niche target and save a ton of money executing your SEO strategy.
For more information on B to B Professional Service Sales Outsourcing, please feel free to contact us. You can also visit our Knowledge Center for more tips for Professional Service Sales.
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.
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.
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.
This is the first blog in a series that talks about the unique challenges and opportunities that you have in selling Professional Services and consulting. We hope to share what we’ve leaned building sales machines for our Professional Services clients.
Whether you are considering outsourcing sales or are building your own sales team, there are challenges that all of us face selling a Professional Services solution. Discretionary or experimental budget is gone, or at the very least cut. Both the technical buyer and the business buyer need to be sold and closed. And with companies running leaner at the top, the decision makers you need to sell to pick up the phone 30% less than they did 18 months ago. Once you do connect and start to develop and engage, their schedules are so jammed it takes longer to move them through your sales funnel.
Bottom line- lead generation, lead qualifying and sales engagement can take 2X plus the time and energy it did 2 years ago. For Professional Service firms that we provide outsourcing sales and outsourcing lead generation services to, this means we need to sell smarter than ever and do our best to maximize their top producer’s sales efficiency and effectiveness. We also need to make it easier for the buyers we are selling to. We need to make it more efficient for them to buy.
When professional service firms come to us (as opposed to product sales companies) to talk about outsourcing sales they, often discuss additional unique complexities they face in the Professional Service business:
Seller and Deliverer are often the same person. More time spent selling means less time in delivery and/or less time available to develop a new sales pipe.
The professional service sale is often a highly complex, and requires you to invest time in education and solution selling.
That education is required because Professional Services Sales are often perceived as high risk for the Buyer, since they can’t hold the product in their hand. Consequently, the buyer now takes longer to make the decision and often wants to break up the solutions, so there is a pilot or proof of concept stage.
Professional Service Selling requires selling of intangibles—character, thinking style and personality of the lead consultants and top producers—to close the deal.
Top producing Professional Service executives are generally predisposed to “solutioning” and solving customer problems, rather than “selling” and sales management.
Professional Service Sales are high risk for the Seller, because the real return and margins come from long-term engagements beyond the initial pilots.
If you examine all these complexities, they point to “time” as the single largest issue. Time is quite literally money in a Professional Services business model. For Gabriel Sales, the challenge in outsourcing the Professional Service Sale boils down to how to customize a program to make your Top Producers time more effective and efficient.
Gabriel Sales has been providing outsourcing sales and outsourcing lead generation services successfully to a wide variety of Professional Services selling into multiple verticals and Ideal Customer profiles, for over 12 years. Over the last 18 months, we have seen a large market shift in buyers approach to engaging and making decisions surrounding Professional Service solutions. This has also created the largest opportunity to date for increased efficiency and effectiveness in cloning Top Producers.
The Opportunity: Buyers are now actively leveraging content, specifically digital content and social media, to streamline their own buying process! You can now leverage lead gen reps and sales reps who are skilled in pushing your message and value digitally. These reps can manage your sale and replicate large chunks of what was previously required of your Top Producer. As a Professional Services firm, you can make it easier for the buyers to buy, alleviate the buyers time constraints, and alleviate your Top Producers time constrains. This will simultaneously increase the sales productivity of your Top Producers by 2X (plus multiples) within a year, and by 3X multiple in 18 months.
The great thing about this opportunity and shift, is it does not require completely changing your existing sales process. What it does require, is sales and marketing alignment and cloning whatever you can in your top producers arsena, so they can engage in a one to many dialogue as you generate leads and engage and develop both the technical buyer and business buyer. It requires training and management of sales reps in the use of these tools.
The next part in this series will talk about the challenges that top producers face when they are required to be both the seller and the deliverer.
