Selling Consulting Services Report
Forget Everything
You Know
About Sales and
Begin to Sell
Without Selling
A RainToday.com Special Report
By Mike Schultz
Love for Selling Consulting Services is Uncommon
You probably didn’t enter consulting so you could spend all of your time selling, but the world of consulting has changed considerably. To flourish as consultants, most of us have to succeed with selling.
When you find you have to start selling, you’ll fall somewhere on this spectrum:
I love selling! On the one end are those of you who love the idea of selling. For you, every part of the sales process offers a thrill—finding new opportunities, uncovering the full set of your prospects’ needs, crafting solutions, helping the prospect envision a better future, and so on. But even you lucky folks who are destined to love selling, if you haven’t done it much, you need to do some learning before you get on the horse.
I’d rather retire penniless than sell. On the other end are those of you who don’t like to sell at all. You dread the process of promoting yourself and your services. You’d rather do just about anything than have to sell.
Wherever you fall on the spectrum, if the time is now for you to start selling or to have more success finding clients and winning new business, this is the report for you.
Here at RAIN Group and RainToday.com, we’ve worked with thousands of
consultants to teach them how to sell. We’ve seen consultants who never thought they could do it bring in 7 figures regularly. And we’ve seen fear change to
excitement when the dollars start to flow in.
Where does it all start? With action! And the first action: stop avoiding selling.
Here’s what we hear from consultants all the time:
I didn’t become a consultant so I could be a salesperson.
My clients won’t respect me if I try to sell more to them.
I don’t want to sound too “salesy.”
I don’t sell; I uncover problems and partner with clients to solve them. I wasn’t trained to sell. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I am afraid I will look foolish.
I’d rather just provide my clients with great value and let word of mouth do the rest.
I just don’t have it in my genes.
“The Dog Ate My Rolodex” and Other Great Excuses Not to Sell
Let’s get some common excuses for not selling out of the way:
Pick Your Poison:You’re too young or too old. You’re too busy. You’re better in the morning and it’s late in the day. You only have 15 minutes before your next meeting. The dog ate your rolodex.
(Remember them?)
If you want to achieve the financial success and freedom that top-performing revenue generation can bring you, you need to fight through these excuses and get it done.
Forget What You’ve Heard About Selling
Oily. Smarmy. Phony. Mendacious. Two-Faced…
Right or wrong, these words are often associated with salespeople.
You’re reading this report because you’ve been asked, you want, or you need to add the label of “rainmaker” next to the “trusted advisor” label you already have. So, you look to the sales world for tips on how to do it. When it comes time to sell, you fear becoming your own worst nightmare—the overly aggressive, overly slick, walking sales cliché.
This can cause consultants to backtrack from the appearance of selling by making it known to clients that selling them something isn’t what they’re about. As Queen Gertrude said to Prince Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Protest too much, and the prospective client will wonder what’s going on. While being salesy is ill-advised for almost any sales rep, it is particularly bad for consultants.
Buyers of products often say, “I don’t like the sales rep, but I can tune her out for the next few minutes and simply evaluate her product against the competition.”
Buyers of consulting services evaluate the sellers. Why? The seller is often the service provider. The relationship does not end when the sale is completed—it is just beginning. Thus, the foundation of trust set up between the buyer and seller in the sales process is of paramount importance.
I don’t have an exact definition for too salesy, but I do know when I’m on the receiving end of a hard sell.
Most buyers know it as well and their reactions are consistent:
Defenses go up. First impressions are important. If the buyers’ first impression is, “He’s a hard-charging
pitchman,” it is tough to shake.
Trust is difficult to establish. Being too salesy makes buyers question the seller’s motives, making trust difficult to establish.
Buyers feel patronized. Sellers may try to be deferential by saying things like, “Thank you for your valuable time.” Most times buyers feel that the seller’s running through a script.
There is Nothing Wrong with Selling
Quite the contrary, the act of selling, when done well, adds a significant amount of value. A well-planned sales conversation can help even sophisticated buyers make smarter decisions.
You Can Be Effective Without Sounding Like a Used Car Salesman Here’s the good news: You can and should sell with high integrity and high success, and do it without snake oil tactics.
In fact, we’re going to let you in on a little secret: you can apply the same skills that make you a great consultant to help you succeed in selling—all you need to do is sharpen them to apply them effectively.
As a Consultant You Already Have Many Skills You
Need to Be Great at Sales
Here are just a few ways you can apply consulting skills to your selling process: Sell as You Serve
Many consultants who have never sold think the purpose of selling is to part
someone from their money at any cost. They believe that to be successful at selling, consultants must leave their values and everyday personalities at the door and adopt a sleazy persona and voice, one that would naturally say something like, “What’s it gonna take to get you into this shiny, red, pre-owned sports car today, ma’am?”
Nothing is further from the truth. The best rainmakers bring in new clients because they are no different when they sell their services than when they deliver their services.
Great consultants create better futures for their clients that the clients didn’t know were possible.
The best rainmakers meet mutually-set expectations over and over again, building trust, relationships, and confidence. The best rainmakers are ethical at all times. The skills that make you a great consultant and trusted advisor to your clients can make you a great rainmaker.
Sales is about helping clients and prospects find solutions that solve their problems and help them succeed.
When you deliver your services to clients you: Ask questions
Provide expert opinions Work hard
Prepare Are accessible
Build creative solutions Deliver what you say you’re going to deliver
Develop relationships Solve problems
Act with your clients’ best interest in mind
Introduce clients to new ideas, helping them see a better way
That is exactly what you need to do to become successful selling your consulting services.
Sell to Need
Great consultants are masters at uncovering clients’ goals and challenges and helping them to make the changes necessary for success.
Great rainmakers are no different. However, many consultants feel uncomfortable making connections, uncovering needs, and working closely with people they don’t yet know well. Too often the first conversations go awry when they don’t need to. The same skills you use to get to the root of your clients’ problems and develop solutions to help them meet their goals are the ones you can use to uncover prospects’ needs and propose winning solutions. You just need to recognize what you need to do and bring these skills out at the right time and in the right way. Communicate the Value
Great consultants understand the value they provide to clients. They craft compelling solutions based on their clients’ unique needs, and communicate that value to clients clearly and articulately.
Selling is no different. You must learn to lead discussions that influence direction and outcomes, and you must advocate your services and communicate your value. Just like when you advocate new ideas to your clients when you work with them, you must be persuasive, confidence inspiring, and empathetic all at the same time when you sell to them.
Plan for Success
It’s been said that if you don’t know where you’re going, then any road will get you there.
Great consultants have a clear process that they follow. Each project has a specific objective, timeframe, budget, and resource allocation. Rainmaking is no different.
Like consulting, selling is a process, and it’s waiting for you to master it.
Where does that process start? With generating the first conversation.
Selling consulting services requires planning on multiple levels:
Generating discussions for the first time with prospective clients
Leading individual
conversations and interactions
Planning outcomes for specific accounts
Orchestrating the entire business development process—how many clients you need to gain, how often, and for how much revenue and profit
How Can You Sell to a Prospect You Don’t Have?
Grizzled old consultants tell stories of the days when they could rely on repeat business and referrals to generate all the new conversations they needed. The phone would just ring.
It would be great if you could just rely on your business network and friends and family to send leads your way, but most of us don’t have that luxury.
You need to create conversations with executives so you can uncover needs, help them see the solution, and help them see you as the person who can deliver a better future for them.
It would also be great if the books, white papers, and articles we write; the
speeches we deliver; and the press recognition we receive made the phone ring off the hook. Over time they sure help, but many of us need to develop conversations now that create new opportunities now.
To do that, a few old standards are our friends: email, mail, and (yes) the telephone. It would be a long report, indeed, to cover all of these.
Let’s focus on the one feared so often by sellers of consulting services: the telephone.
Is Cold Calling Dead?
Of course not. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the most effective ways to generate initial sales conversations with prospects.
Just those two words together—Cold and Calling—make many people feel anything but warm and happy. Given that it’s far from fun for so many people, and that we have heard a number of times recently that the last nail has been banged into the cold calling coffin, why is cold calling still on our radar screens?
Because it works.
“It doesn’t work,” you say? Well, in one sense I agree: there are a million ways to do it wrong and fail. Fail at something enough, and it’s easy to dismiss the whole tactic. (No matter how many times I try, I just can’t hit a Jonathan Papelbon fastball. Swinging a bat at a baseball must not work!)
The Reports of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
In our research, Lead Generation Benchmark Report, we asked the more-than-700 professional services providers, “What’s the #1 most effective way to generate leads for your business?” Of all possible business development and marketing tactics for services firms, one rose to the top as the most effective. You guessed it: next to referrals, cold calling is the top way to attract new clients.
That’s right, not SEO, or speaking, or publishing, or direct mail, or seminars—cold calling rose to the top as the most effective tactic to generate quality leads. Why all the debate around cold calling and whether or not it works for consulting firms? The short answer is because people do it wrong.
A sale is not the goal of a cold call.
You are not going to go from cold to client in one
conversation.
The purpose of a cold call is to set a meeting to introduce yourself and to learn about the prospect…
Not to go into a detailed sales pitch.
All too often business developers try to pitch their services over the phone rather than approaching their targets with a value based-offer for the meeting (research, industry insights, best practices, etc.).
Cold Calling Works…If You Bring the Value
Let’s assume you’re a Chief Strategy Officer at an $800 million manufacturing firm in Ohio. Someone calls you and says:
My name is John Smith, and I’m a change management consultant. Do you need change? Let’s meet. Even if you’re headed to the vending machine, your immediate change needs probably won’t include John Smith. But let’s say John calls and says:
My name is John Smith. The reason I’m calling is because my firm, the ABC Consulting Group, has just recently conducted a major benchmark study on how manufacturing businesses—including Competitor 1 and Competitor 2 of yours—in the Midwest are succeeding with their labor unions in the face of global outsourcing. There are 3 practices that are working across the board and a few that fail most everyplace. If you’re interested, we’d be happy to come by and take you through the results.
If this topic is on your mind, you might risk a half hour to hear the results. Or you might have some questions right then and there. Either way, if I’m John, I’ve presented my cold “introduction” of myself and my firm to your company in a way that delivers value to you.
Will everyone take me up on this meeting? Of course not. But if my target list is well-segmented and clean, a number of prospects will. When I get in front of them, the topic of conversation will be my recent research, work, and expertise— not a “get to know you and sell you” meeting.
The telephone is a powerful tool in any consultant’s arsenal. Warm or cold, if you learn how to use it well, your chances of success skyrocket.
The 5 Pillars of Successful Sales Conversations
The great news: however you did it, you now have an initial meeting with a decision maker at a top company that would be a great client.
The challenging news: she doesn’t know much about you, your
company, or what you do. It’s a “cold” meeting, but when you (or someone from your company) called her she agreed to speak with you to hear what you have to say.
Whether you generate leads through cold calls, referrals, speaking, publishing, direct mail, search engine optimization, or the host of other tactics that can work, at some point each one leads to the all-important first (and possibly second, third, fourth, etc.) conversation. Much sales success and failure is decided here, and this where we see so many consultants struggle.
To help you lead successful sales conversations, we developed the concept of RAIN Selling.
RAIN Selling is designed to help you plan your sales conversations to sell as you serve, sell to need, and to communicate the value you provide.
Let’s get straight to it. In the rest of this report we’re going to introduce you to the 5 pillars of RAIN Selling conversations so you can start using this process in your sales conversations right away.
RAIN SellingSM stands for:
Rapport
Aspirations and Afflictions Impact
New Reality
These are the four pillars of successful sales conversations. The fifth pillar is a second interpretation for the A and I in RAIN:
Advocacy and Inquiry
I Like Them Better: The Power of Rapport
The concept of rapport building is not new. You can find book after book written from the 1920s onward that will teach you “techniques” for rapport building with your prospects. For example, you might be told to look around their office and talk about what you see. “Ah, I see you have a big fish on your wall. Are you a fishing enthusiast? I go trout fishing all the time in Wyoming. Let’s talk about trout.”
Unfortunately, many people today, both buyers and sellers, equate the concept of rapport building with this type of contrived chit chat.
Rapport building is not the planned buttering up of the buyer before a salesperson moves in for the kill.
The mindset behind that approach is underhanded. My emphatic response to this approach: don’t do it.
Yet the fundamental underlying need for a buyer to connect with you—or at least to generally like you—exists and must be attended to. At least, it must if you want to generate new clients and retain your existing clients.
In our research How Clients Buy: The Benchmark Report on Professional Services Marketing and Selling from the Client Perspective, we found that 25% of buyers of professional services have experienced having “no personal chemistry with service providers.” Of these, 86% said they would have been more likely to consider purchasing the services of that provider if some kind of personal chemistry was established.
The importance of building real rapport cannot be understated.
Pillar #1: Building Real Rapport
“The farmer, it appears, must not be approached too abruptly. If you are to get his money, you must break the news to him gently. You should first talk about horses, soil, and market conditions. This conversation will show that you are interested in things close to him and likewise give you a chance to study his temperament and to learn his likes and dislikes, and discover his weaknesses.”
- Clarence Darrow in The American Mercury in 1925 writing about the topic of “Salesmanship”
Decisions Decisions…
We do extensive research for our clients into what influences a buyer’s decision to buy from a particular firm. We hear the usual—expertise, knowledge in my industry, client base, and reputation. But we also often hear a common thread that runs something like this.
Me: So how did you choose firm A over the competition?
Buyer: Well, we liked their experience with firms like ours and were impressed with the case studies they showed. Oh and we certainly checked out the credentials of the people that would be working with us. Top notch.
Me: Anything else that entered into the mix?
Buyer: Their references all were excellent. But you come to expect that after awhile. And they had come highly recommended before we even asked them to come in.
Me: So they stood out in these areas above the other firms you evaluated? Buyer: Not exactly.
Me: What tipped the scales in their favor?
Buyer: They were easy to talk to. They seemed like people we could work with. I guess in the end we just liked them better.
Moral of the story: buyers evaluate with their heads, but buy with their hearts. Do not forget the importance of developing rapport at every step in the selling process.
Being liked won’t win you the clients, but it sure does help.
The Real Deal with Uncovering Needs
(Most Sales Advice Only Gives You Half the Story)
Problems, frustration, pain, irritations, challenges…call them what you will; you must uncover your prospective client’s afflictions. Once you’ve established rapport with a client, you now have the opportunity to begin the discovery process of learning what issues the client has and how you can help.
Uncovering afflictions is a crucial step in the business development process.
The reasons are simple:
If the prospect communicates his business afflictions to you, then it is likely that he will want them to go away 1) if it’s possible, and 2) if it makes sense to invest the time, money, and brainpower to get rid of them.
Each affliction you uncover gives you the chance to explore it fully to discover its true business impact (see pillar #3).
The more you openly discuss afflictions with prospects, the more those afflictions take front-and-center space in the prospect’s mind.
Uncovering and discussing one affliction can lead—much like
brainstorming—to other afflictions that the client may not have been thinking about in the first place.
If no business problems afflict the buyer, inertia may keep him from doing anything that rocks the boat, including purchasing your services.
Pillar #2: Uncovering Aspirations and Afflictions
To uncover the full set of your clients’ needs, ask open-ended sales questions to help you understand what
afflictions (challenges) they are facing. For example: What do you want to happen that isn’t happening now?
What’s holding you back from reaching your revenue (or profit or other) goals? In our work in your industry, we’ve seen that time to market greatly affects profitability, how have you adjusted your supply change issues?
It is essential to learn, “What keeps him up at night.”
Most Sales Advice Stops Here
Afflictions are only half the story…
Afflictions, while important, focus on only half of the client’s needs—the negative half. If you focus only on the negative, especially when selling consulting services, you leave opportunities on the table to expand your existing client relationships and generate new opportunities.
The best way to understand why this is true is to think about how business leaders buy consulting services. There are two core buyer mindsets:
Houston. We have a problem. Buyers are in problem solving mode when something is bothering them or is not performing up to expectations. It typically gets to a point where they want to fix it, so they seek out solutions to do so. When you encounter this buying mindset, uncovering afflictions and helping to solve them, particularly with your products and services, is a core goal.
The world is our oyster. When buyers are future seeking, they’re looking to grow, make their companies better, or somehow improve their current circumstances, often in new and innovative ways. In other words, maybe what’s keeping them up at night is not a problem in their business at all, but the passion and excitement that stem out of innovation, growth, and endless possibilities.
To get a look at the full picture of what’s going on in your buyers’ business and to uncover the full set of needs, you must focus on both the afflictions and the aspirations.
If you focus only on afflictions, you’ll miss the whole set of buyers who want to work with you because they’re seeking a better future.
Pillar #2: Uncovering Aspirations and Afflictions
The two core buyer mindsets are:
1) Problem solving 2) Future seeking
Think of yourself for a minute. You’re considering joining the next Selling Consulting
Services program. It’s likely either:
1) You’re sick of trying to sell and not having the success you know you should 2) You want to triple your sales, sell more faster, and get to the next level of your career
It’s often partly both, but at least one of them needs to be there for a sale to happen.
So What?
You’ve uncovered the needs and desires of prospects. Now you have to get down to the financial and emotional impact on your client and their business if the client moves forward.
If your pain doesn’t go away, so what? What won’t happen? Will the problems get worse? How will they affect the bottom line of your company, division, or department?
If your goals don’t become reality, so what? Will they drop by the wayside never to be picked up again? If you reach your goals, how much better will your competitive position be? What will be the bottom line impact on your company, division, or department? What will be the effect on your career and your happiness?
What’s the impact of engaging your services on the client’s business? Your ability to quantify and paint the “so what” picture is the cornerstone for how important engaging your services is to the prospective buyer (and how much they’re willing to pay).
You need to make the business case for either solving the pain or helping the
aspirations come to fruition. The stronger you make the case, the more urgency you create for the client to address the issue with your help.
In essence, you need to paint a picture for them so they can see, as strongly as you can depict it, what is going to change if they engage your services (and what will happen if they don’t).
When selling your consulting services, if you can’t make the business case, you’re at a major disadvantage.
Pillar #3: Communicating the Impact of Your
Services
When you make a strong business case you are able to justify your premium fees. A prospect might balk at a $100,000 fee you propose. But when you frame the fee in the context of the
$10,000,000 you’ll save them over the next five years, it’s much more digestible.
The more you can quantify the impact and provide examples, the stronger the case for using your services.
A Tale of 2 Firms
Showing impact does not have to be difficult. Take these two simplified examples of consulting firms describing the same services to a prospect:
Smith & Jones Advisors: We provide efficient, effective solutions that help you achieve tangible business results.
The Doerr Group: Here’s how we’ve helped a major automobile manufacturer decrease costs by 150%.
Smith & Jones Advisors is telling their prospects what they do. OK, so what? How do you do it? What consulting service firm doesn’t help you “achieve tangible business results?”
The Doerr Group, however, is showing the prospect. They are beginning to tell a story that proves the business case for engaging in their services. Not only is this more memorable, but it demonstrates their expertise and the results they have produced for others.
These are two very simple examples, but think about it: which one is more enticing? Which consultant would you be more interested in working with?
The Best Kept Secret in Leading Successful Sales
Conversations
Up to this point, we’ve talked a lot about asking questions. Asking questions to build rapport, to uncover needs and aspirations, to get to the impact. All this question asking can leave little time for you to describe your services and get prospects excited about working with you.
The key to successful sales conversations is balancing inquiry (asking questions) with advocacy (describing your services, results, and whatever else about you that will persuade the buyer). Those who get it right walk the fine line between talking too much and giving the prospect the third degree with
questions.
When it comes to selling consulting services, if you talk too much, you generate too few clients.
You may be thinking, “So what if I talk too much. I am, after all, a very good consultant, and I know my stuff. Isn’t it important for my prospects and clients to know what I know so they can understand what I can do for them?”
Yes, that is an essential part of the sales conversation, one that should not be overlooked. There is a time and place for that.
The fact is most of us talk too much in our sales conversations and that leaves prospects feeling unheard.
Pillar #4: Balancing Advocacy and Inquiry Willy: I don’t know why—I can’t stop myself—I talk too much. A man oughta come in with a few words. Charlie’s a man of few words, and they respect him.
Linda: You don’t talk too much; you’re just lively. -Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman
We all have sympathy for poor Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. He knew he talked too much, but he couldn’t figure out why.
And he couldn’t stop talking too much even though he wanted to be like Charlie—a man of few words—who was respected by all.
When you do all the talking:
You miss out on the opportunity to really engage the prospect. It makes it hard to build a real connection—a connection that fuels rapport and trust.
You have a tough time uncovering needs. If you do all the talking, you can only guess which components of your service set will resonate with the client and offer the greatest value. What ends up happening is you spout off a laundry list of services and hope one of them sticks. That is not a good way to get prospects excited about your service and envision working with you. Don’t give the prospect the third degree with a long line of questions. On the flip side of talking too much is talking too little, and this often takes the form of asking question after question in an effort to get the prospect talking.
Long lines of questioning can feel more like an interrogation than a conversation from which the prospect derives value.
A good business development conversation is a give and take. You should have the client talking quite a bit, but clients also want your insight and expertise.
You can be extremely persuasive with a certain amount of air time to get prospects excited about your services, to help prospects see the new reality you’ve helped others in the same situation achieve, to persuade prospects that this project should be on the agenda and that you are the one to help.
The key to talking the right amount is balancing advocacy (giving advice…talking) and inquiry (asking questions…letting the client be heard).
Pillar #4: Balancing Advocacy and Inquiry Before a client becomes a client all they know is what you’re like during the
marketing and sales process. This is your opportunity to show them what it’s truly like when they work with you. If you’re the one doing all of the talking now, they’ll assume that’s what it’s going to be like if they choose to work with you later.
Will They Know It When They See It?
“I can’t describe it, but I know it when I see it.”
- Potter Stewart, Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court
In writing his ruling on pornography, Justice Stewart probably sounded like so many of the clients you work with as a consultant. Since you are selling something
intangible, before a prospect works with you they often have a hard time knowing exactly what they are buying and what value they will get in return. But they do know it when they see it…after you’re all done, that is.
One of the most important skills in selling consulting services is helping prospects to understand exactly what outcomes they get when they work with you. (Remember Pillar #3: Communicating the Impact of Your Services.)
Like it or not, as consultants we are all in the business of change. You help to change your clients’ world and make it better in some way. In other words, you create a new reality that leaves them in a better place than where they were when they began.
Help Your Prospects See “It”
With the RAIN Selling process thus far you’ve nailed down your prospects needs and aspirations, you’ve developed rapport and initial trust, and you’ve uncovered the business impact of working with you. Now you need to show the prospect the path to get them from “here” to “there.”
Enter your solution.
Unfortunately many consultants get to the solution/proposal phase of the process and then list out their services that will make the client’s world a better place. But all the client sees are the phases of your process and the expense associated with it. You have to get the prospect thinking less in terms of “expense” and more in terms of “investment.”
The goal of your proposal is to paint a compelling picture (literally and figuratively) of what will happen when and if the client engages your services. You must paint the picture of the new reality and help the prospect see the ROI of your services, not just the fee.
The best way to do that is to translate the new reality into real dollars and cents so the prospect can clearly see the difference between their current state and vision of the new reality.
Show your prospect what it will mean for their business to engage your service, communicate it clearly (both verbally and visually), and you’ll be well on your way to gaining more new business because they’ll know it when they see it.
Pillar #5: Envisioning the New Reality
To help your prospects to “see it” paint a picture of the impact your services will have on their business.
A chart outlining the value each of your services will deliver to the client is often more powerful than
paragraph after paragraph of prose.
You might tell them that as a result of cutting out major inefficiencies in their
operational processes, they’ll improve cycle times by 13 days, leading to $20 million in cost savings and allowing them to go to market faster. This helps them envision the new reality rather than just saying, “We’ll improve cycle times and here’s how.”
Why “Closing Techniques” Can End Up Losing You
Business
Now we’re getting to the good stuff…you just painted a compelling picture for your client of the new reality they can seize if they just chose to work with you. All that’s left is closing the deal.
It’s time to pull out one of the many tried-and-not-so-true closing techniques and get the prospect to sign the contract:
The presumptive close: You assume the prospect has already made the decision to buy. “We’re ready to start right away. Let’s schedule the kick-off for next Tuesday.”
The 1-2-3 close: This technique takes advantage of the power of threes. “If you sign today, we’ll give you this, that, and the other thing.”
The urgent close: This can take many forms. You may offer the prospect something extra or special if they sign now, or you may create a deadline (i.e. “If we don’t get started by next week, we won’t be able to fit you in until two months from now”).
The ask-the-manager close: “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to check with my manager as we usually don’t do it that way.” And of course you are able to “persuade” the manager to make this one exception.
The everybody’s doing it close: Peer pressure.
The alternative close: Here you give the prospect a choice of a yes or a yes. “Do you want me to start this Tuesday or Wednesday?”
Selling consulting is about trust, not tricks.
The type of psychologically manipulative closing techniques on the previous page don’t belong in the consulting sale. They come from the mistaken belief that the close is the final step in the sales process that corners the prospect into making the final decision.
When selling consulting services, the close begins the relationship. It’s not about “closing at all costs” because you have to work with the client after the close. It’s your job during the sales process to build a trusting relationship with the prospect that carries through to when they become a client. Traditional “closing techniques” only diminish any trust you’ve built.
That is not to say you shouldn’t ask for the business or communicate the impact of moving forward. You should.
Gaining commitment to engage you is an essential skill for anyone selling consulting services. The fact is you are closing throughout the RAIN Selling process by building trust, demonstrating your expertise, uncovering the impact, and painting a picture of the new reality. By the time you get to the “close” you should simply be
confirming the agreement you’ve already reached.
When done right, you don’t need tricks to cinch the deal.
Walk your prospect from rapport to commitment. Following the 5 pillars of RAIN Selling:
Rapport
Aspirations and Afflictions Impact
New Reality and
Advocacy and Inquiry you are able to build
relationships with prospects that ultimately lead to new business.
I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now
I’ll say it again…
As a great consultant you already have many skills you need to be great in sales.
To advance in your career it is no longer enough to deliver amazing engagements; you need to excel at selling. Boosting your selling skills does not have to happen through years of trial and error. You can speed up the process by learning from others’ successes and missteps.
Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to introduce you to an educational resource to help you do just that:
In this report we’ve barely scratched the surface. The Selling Consulting Services
program is an intensive online training program designed to walk you step-by-step through all facets of selling consulting—from building a value proposition that sells, to leading masterful sales conversations, to filling the pipeline with qualified leads, to overcoming objections, to closing the deal.
We’ll share learnings from mistakes we’ve seen thousands of consultants make along with the best of what we’ve learned in our decades of experience in the field of sales, our research, our own successes in selling consulting services that
propelled us to win a spot on Inc. magazine’s list of the fastest growing companies. Plus with expert forums and monthly Q&A coaching calls, you’ll get all the support you need from experts who’ve been there. I wish a program like this had been around when I first got started.
Copyright © RAIN Group Selling Consulting Services Report
“Selling Consulting Services with RAIN Selling has given
me greater confidence and comfort with selling my services.
“The program structure and tools are logical and practical, and have helped me learn how selling can
be a natural extension of who I am and what I have
to offer.”
- Jeremy Bromberg, Bromberg LLC
Over the course of the program, we’ll give you all the pieces of the puzzle you need to:
1. Keep the front end of the pipeline full with qualified prospects while maintaining your practice with active clients
2. Position yourself as a trusted advisor during the sales process, building strong, trusting relationships from the get go, making the sale smoother and faster 3. Lead masterful sales conversation in any situation
4. Overcome objections and get closer to the close
5. Follow up with prospects in a way that deepens your relationship over time
6. Get premium fees for your services even when clients pressure you for lower fees
7. Develop a winning value proposition and describe complex services in a way that gets prospects excited about you and your services
8. Make the business impact of your services clear so you can sell more with less buyer resistance
9. Increase profits by charging (and getting) premium fees for your services 10. Create winning proposals
In the program, we’ll dive deep into the RAIN Selling process. We’ll equip you with the practical, how-to information and tools you need to fill the pipeline, command higher fees for your services, and bring in a predictable flow of profitable new clients.
“When I first started my
consulting business I had a few legacy clients and thought that my network would produce enough business for me to support myself. This worked for the first 2 years and then I realized I had tapped that well dry. “The RAIN Selling program came at a perfect time for me. It’s taught me how to start new relationships with 'cold' prospects and how to foster those relationships into new business. I’ve been able to
double my revenue and I even
had to hire 2 more consultants to help.”
What’s Next?
We have a lot more free content coming your way, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you can learn more about the 6 core modules in Selling Consulting Services with RAIN Selling and what you can look forward to learning in each one here. Best regards,
Mike Schultz
President, RAIN Group
Founder and Publisher, RainToday.com
Co-author, The Wall Street Journal bestseller, Rainmaking Conversations and Professional Services Marketing Adjunct Professor, Marketing Division, Babson College Instructor, Selling Consulting Services with RAIN Selling
P.S. Stay tuned over the coming weeks and look for emails from me. You don’t want to miss the valuable tips I’m about to share with you. To be sure you receive these emails, please add mike@raingroup.com to your safe sender list.
“I’ve tried several sales training programs and I’ve read the leading books and I can confidently say that the
RAIN Selling program is the most valuable, highest quality resource out there.
“RAIN Selling jumpstarted my business development
effectiveness by helping me identify how I provide value and how to align that value with the specific needs of my clients. The program just
made everything click for me.
- Andy Schneit, Consultant, a National Consulting Firm
