How are your Sales?

Do you need sales - but hate selling?

Are you discouraged that Clients are no longer loyal?

Are you concerned that there isn't enough money coming in?

Are you embarrassed to try to be a Rainmaker?

Client work is a legitimate use of your time — but without a selling effort, your firm has an uncertain future!

Who can do this selling? Perhaps the other people in the firm – but probably those people are hoping the “other people” (that’s YOU) will do it!

Can you outsource your selling efforts? Unlikely. In the Professional Services world, you’re selling you, and it’s unlikely that anyone can sell you as well as you can!

Go here, to view the solution for this common challenge.

Speak with Lenann live now by calling: 505.828.1788.

Go here, to read “What People are saying about Lenann's Professional Sales Training Programs”!

Challenge:

Your firm has survived, maybe even thrived, with only a few people doing most of the rainmaking. Though the caliber of the services you offer is high, there's really no one else who has contributed consistently and meaningfully to growing the client base. You're dependent on these individuals -- who may be aging, suffering illness, or just considering other options for spending more time with their families. What to do?

Solution:

Rather than relying on a too few rainmakers, spread the New Business Development effort over most or all the professionals in your firm, even leveraging the ability of more junior people to identify opportunities to do more business with current Clients, and to network in the community.

Combine that with the contacts and skills of the more senior people to follow-up on leads identified by the junior folks, as well as to pursue new business relationships and close business, and you have a winning combination!

You need three things to make this happen in your firm:

1. State-of-the-art Selling and Closing Skills – so you’re not using outdated approaches when you speak with prospective clients, and you maximize the likelihood that they choose to do business, or to do more business, with you (when there’s a good fit).


2. A structure for a Selling effort. How much of what kind of selling activity is appropriate for individuals at all levels of the firm, and how and when should they follow-up with prospective clients? What can be done about cultivating Referral Sources (those who are unlikely to buy from you themselves, but who can refer others to your firm)?


3. An underlying Marketing Strategy and Positioning Statement (the most powerful, provocative messages you can hope to get into the minds of prospective clients about your firm – 4 to 6 ideas that you reinforce on your website, in conversations with prospective clients, and in your written materials).
   
   Without a consistent, powerful, provocative message, you and your associates will probably make up reasons why your firm is different from others and why it’s the best choice for prospective clients. Marketing research is clear: when there’s NO message, or when there are LOTS of messages, nothing sticks, and prospective clients assume that you are similar to all the other firms in your area of expertise. When they assume that, they have a greater tendency to purchase based on price/fees.

In these circumstances, you have three choices:

• Develop the expertise to do all these things yourself.
• Allow your firm to go on with a less-structured sales and marketing approach.
• Or to seek an outside advisor who has the expertise to set up all three things, and support you as your firm begins to operate with the new knowledge, assuring that it turns into both increased revenue and the sort of business you would most like to have, with the clients you prefer to serve.

Lenann Gardner is such an advisor. We look forward to serving you!

“Business developers stimulate dormant business problems into buying actions,” writes Rick Page in Hope is Not a Strategy: The 6 Keys to Winning the Complex Sale. “The first step is to find a business problem and create a vision of what life could be like if they solve it. You may also create a vision of what bad things could happen if it is not solved. This creates a gap between where the client is and where they could be. The next step is to quantify the gap to define the financial return on investment with you. Then you must find a sponsor with enough power to whom this gap is politically painful and emotional because pain doesn’t actually come from the problem, it comes from the political embarrassment, or the chance for glory. No pain, no change.” Do you have a selling system that uncovers potential political embarrassment or chances for glory? If not, click here for some ideas!