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.
