Selling Professional Services | 3 Things You Might Not Know That You Might Not Know

Michael Carter - Wednesday, February 08, 2012 - Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

For many professional services firms, selling is a blind spot. For some, especially in the accounting industry, selling is a dirty word. For others it’s a mystery or at the very best an elusive art form only mastered after decades of experience.

The good news is that selling is a combination of art and science.

It is something that anyone can learn, although it’s important to acknowledge there are natural aptitude considerations as well. (See our free “What’s Your Profile?” online diagnostic tool.)

And selling skills can be learned quickly. Within one year an advisor can transform their ability to sell additional services. It doesn’t have to take decades.

In my experience dealing with many dozens of accounting and advisory firms over the past two decades, firms that have someone who can sell, prosper.

Those that don’t, struggle.

That’s a missed opportunity for the firm to do more with their existing clients. Apart from growing the firm’s revenue, providing more services to existing clients also gives advisors on your team more interesting and varied work, and strengthens client relationships.

That’s why we have such a strong focus at Practice Paradox on helping firms grow what we term their ‘Clientshare’. This is a measure of how many services a firm is providing per client group.

Growing Clientshare is good for everyone: Good for your firm,good for your team, good for your clients.

But you cannot grow Clientshare if you do not have selling ability–and a clear sales process–within your firm.

Selling is, in many ways, more important than marketing.

Why?

In an established firm there are always up-selling and cross-selling opportunities available. Always.

There is not much point focusing on finding new clients when your existing clients are under-serviced.

Yet time and time again, Principals of firms think that ‘getting more clients’ will be the cure for all their ills.

It won’t.

Why bring on more clients and under-service them as well?

With every client relationship comes an overhead in managing that relationship. A financial and an emotional overhead. Relationships take work to maintain. If you could have half the number of clients with double the average fees per client, I’m sure you’d take it. (Unless of course you only have a handful of clients and already have too many eggs in too few baskets.)

In our surveys of the accounting profession, for example, 77% of those surveyed have not been formally trained in how to sell.

That is a clear indication that most accounting firms just don’t take selling seriously. They don’t treat it as a profession, as a core competency to be mastered.

And selling is a profession. There’s a skill-set, a framework and a mindset to selling effectively. It is based on a deep understanding of human nature and how to communicate. It’s a form of psychology.

It’s a fascinating area and, perhaps more importantly if you’re reading this as a Principal of a firm, it’s probably the highest Return On Investment skill-set you could invest in this year.

Or any year.

We see effective sales training have an immediate effect. Often resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional fees simply through cross-selling additional services to existing clients.

This can be achieved with no additional staff, no additional client meetings, no additional marketing budget. Just with additional focus and new skills.

Here are 3 things we find that members of our Clientshare Academy training program realise once they start to learn about professional selling skills:

1. Selling skills development needs to start with mindset and attitude, not skills training. If you don’t successfully address these issues first, then sales skills training will not only be a waste of time and money for the firm, it will actually have a negative effect on the team. They will ‘nod and smile’ through the training, then go straight back to their desks and keep working the way they always have. Reactively. Time sheet and WIP focused. That’s why we spend a lot of time on–and have great success with–addressing selling mindset first, before selling skills.
    
2. You need to have a defined sales process, with clear stages or milestones, along with supporting checklists and forms to use before, during and after client meetings. Scripts are important too, but only as a training and role playing tool. They are never used ‘live’! Selling can be systemised just like any other process with your firm. There is a structure to it.
    
3. There is a BIG difference between selling and ‘sales management’. They are as different as being an advisor in your firm and being the practice manager or workflow manager. They involve a completely different skill-set, different focus, different metrics. If firms by and large do not take selling seriously as a profession, then it is fair to say that most firms are not even aware of ‘sales management’ as a profession and responsibility that needs to be designated within their firm. Sales management is about managing the sales or ‘opportunity’ pipeline in an objective, systematic way so that no opportunities fall through the cracks and statistics can be gathered on conversion rates, usual sales cycle time (elapsed days) and so that reliable sales (‘new fees’) forecasts can be easily generated.

What you can measure you can manage, and sales process effectivess is readily measured if you have a clear methodology and know which technology to use.

A hugely important aspect of sales management is the coaching and mentoring of the ‘sales people’; the advisors who have selling KPIs to achieve. This mentoring is vital in keeping them focused on the selling objectives. Otherwise they’ll get sucked back into the urgent, reactive day-to-day of delivering services, and not be active in selling more services.

Selling is such an important topic, we devote 5 of the 10 Foundation Modules in The Clientshare Academy to it. The first 5 modules address marketing and strategy, then we address selling. Marketing and selling are two sides of the one coin, and it’s important that your sales process flows smoothly from your marketing processes and is totally congruent with your marketing message.

What's your view?

Tell me, what is your number one challenge with selling additional services to your existing clients? Enter your comment below. You can answer either from our own personal perspective, or from the perspective of managing others who have a selling and advisory role.