Selling Professional Services
Selling professional services is a unique challenge. But just pounding on doors doesn’t work – security concerns may limit the business development professional to simply dropping off literature in the lobby, and just networking through gatherings is time consuming and may not generate sufficient new business. A great approach on the phone is required to generate interest to set up a face-to-face meeting.
At Business Performance Group, we have almost twenty years of experience helping organizations like yours successfully sell professional services business-to-business using inside sales. We can help you develop a successful business case, hire the right people, and orient and train your team. We can help you manage, coach and lead inside sales. We can help you set up communication channels between the sales group and those that deliver services to assure customer satisfaction and minimize friction between your employees. We can help you balance service demand and supply.
Give us a call, and let’s get started!
Training for Business Development Professionals
To be successful, professional services marketing and sales groups must work closely together, and the business development representative must be carefully trained. In many industries, the sales cycle for new customers into the service organization is long. For example, if the selling organization is offering accounting or legal services to business owners, they may need to wait for existing contracts to expire or other business drivers which will prompt the potential customer to consider switching providers. Marketing should work with sales to determine trigger emails and other marketing automation assistance to keep customers warm in between phone calls. Marketing will also need to help create sales collateral – electronic, on-line and printed – which support verification and trust features which may be identified by potential customers as important to them. The business development reps will need to be carefully trained on how to define and activate marketing automation, and how to use sales collateral.
Many business development professionals know your industry and organization, but are afraid of being perceived as a salesperson. Let us help, we can turn your experts into amazingly effective sales consultants!
Closing the Professional Services Sale
Business Development Representatives using the telephone must realize that when selling a service, different members of the customer’s “buying committee” – those who participate in making the decision – may request unique customizations and may have specialized viewpoints of the service the selling organization is proposing. The sales cycle itself is often more complex, because a significant amount of trust must be established. Because services may involve extensive interactions between the staffs of the selling and buying organizations, cultural differences and ways of doing business may be need to be recognized, understood and communicated, and appropriate adjustments put into place.
Juggling long and complex sales cycles can seem daunting.