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.
