The first sale is to yourself - How sold are your team on the value of your accounting firm's additional services?

Michael Carter - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

In the process of learning professional selling skills, the first sale is to yourself. This means that you need to believe in—have absolute conviction in—what it is you are selling.

This is often easier for the Partners and Principals of accounting firms, but this belief and conviction level is not always so easy to pass on to associates and client managers. The Partners and Principals of an accounting practice have the experience and expertise to know, to their very core, that the additional services they are proposing to clients will be of great benefit to the clients, and that these benefits will outweigh the costs.

The first step in believing in what you sell is knowing what it is you are selling.

By that I mean, knowing in great depth the features and benefits of the additional services; knowing these services 'like the back of your hand' so that you are absolutely confident you can answer any question a client might ask when you are proposing the service to them.

In sales training this is called 'product knowledge'. Leading companies conduct product knowledge training for their sales staff at least every month. It is a constant ongoing focus.

What is your accounting firm doing on the product knowledge front?

How much do your client-facing team members actually know, for example, about what cash flow planning and working capital budget entails? Do they understand the benefits of doing it properly, and perhaps more importantly, the consequences for clients of not doing it well? What about Self-Managed Super Funds and related borrowing strategies? Succession planning? Management reporting and KPI control panels? Even something as seemingly basic as tax planning?

Do not assume your team members understand the ins and outs of all your firms services. In fact, it is safer to assume the opposite, and to institute an ongoing training process to address product knowledge of your key services.

Above I mentioned features and benefits. It is crucial that your product knowledge training covers both aspects.

Features are the facts, the description of what the service is, how it is delivered, what it costs and what the outputs are.

Benefits are the emotions, what it is that the service helps the client to gain or to avoid. Human nature is driven more by the desire to avoid pain that to gain pleasure, but always think about both aspects for each service as different clients will be motivated by different factors. Benefits include reducing risk, providing for family, retiring comfortably, making money, saving time, achieving recognition or status, and so on.

Here is a 10 step process you can follow to increase your team's product knowledge and ultimately their confidence and belief levels in suggesting additional services to clients.

1. In a spreadsheet, list out every service your firm delivers - one per column.
2. Enter into the spreadsheet the name of the 'No.1 Guru' and 'No.2 Guru' in your firm at selling each service.
3. Ask the 'Gurus' to document into the spreadsheet the features and benefits they emphasise to clients for each service.
4. For each service, video a selling guru in a role play situation, explaining the service to a client. Video is a powerful knowledge capture tool, not just because it is so quick and easy to use, but because it is a powerful communication medium covering not just the content (the words to say) but the visual and non-verbal aspects such as tone, pace, facial expressions and body language. We recommend that each firm have a pocket HD camera such as a Kodak Zi8, as well as a simple lapel microphone to capture better audio quality. Videos capture the knowledge, whereas although live verbal training is of value, that value is fleeting. It fades quickly.
5. Write down the name of the 'No.1 Guru' and 'No.2 Guru' in your firm at delivering each service.
6. For each service, video a delivery guru explaining the service from a technical perspective. This is not information that would be explained to a client, but it is information that many accountants and advisors want and need to know before they feel can confident that they understand enough about the service in order to recommend it.
7. Store the spreadsheet and videos in your firm's intranet/knowledgebase.
8. Instruct all relevant team members to read and view the appropriate documents and videos prior to a product knowledge session regarding a specific service. This gets everyone up to speed prior to the next step ...
9. Conduct a team training workshop involving role plays of explaining and selling the service to a client where one team member pretends to be the client and the other team member explains the service. Involve your 'selling gurus' and 'delivery gurus' heavily in the session—have them drive the session.
10. Conclude the workshop with an open forum discussing what participants have learned about the service and what questions they asked in their role as client. Document all questions and the answers and add these as FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) to the product knowledge documentation in your intranet/knowledgebase.

Keep in mind that it only takes one small doubt in the mind of a team member—a team member you may be expecting to sell additional services to clients—about what a service entails or what the benefits are, for them to not want to discuss it with a client. No advisor wants to look bad. All advisors want to look like (and be!) the expert on what they are discussing.

Put the processes in place to give your team members the expert product knowledge they need ...

... and soon you'll start to see them discuss (and, dare we say it, sell!) these additional services to your clients.