Seven Phases for Selling Professional Services

When you buy a car, you want to know about its features, don’t you? Does it have electric windows? How big is the engine? What is the fuel consumption? Does it have all wheel drive? Automatic or manual stick shift? Even though the salesman may influence your purchase, if you like the car (and the price), you will buy it even if you don’t necessarily like the salesman.

However, when you sell your professional services, you are selling yourself first! If the client does not like you, they will not pay for your services. Think about the professionals that you use in your life. Your doctor, your lawyer, your accountant … do you like them? Would you do business with them if you did not like them (and had a choice)?

What if you are the professional trying to sell your services? Successful professionals are great at Personal Marketing. This applies to doctors, lawyers & accountants. But this applies particularly to consultants, as their services are far less tangible.

Here are Seven Phases of Selling Professional Services:

Phase 1. Create a Public Image. Getting involved in professional associations; civic, social & political organizations; church groups; school associations; writing articles, blogs; delivering talks to groups. Malcolm Gladwell calls people who do this well “Connectors”. Connectors are people who involve themselves in diverse groups – in this way getting known by a broad cross-section of people.

Phase 2. Develop Contacts. Through the networking opportunities that these activities create, you will get to know of many people … and many people will get to know of you. Professional Networking tools will help you further develop these contacts.

Phase 3. Develop Relationships. Contacts are great … but do these people really know you well enough to help you sell your services, or to buy your services from you? Developing relationships with your contacts takes a lot of work. You need to understand their needs; offer assistance where possible. Use your contacts to help people connect with others that can help them – they will remember you for that. You need to interact socially with people … why do you think good sales people play a lot of golf?

Phase 4. Interest the buyer. Your contacts and your relationships will lead you to opportunities where you can demonstrate your capabilities enough to interest a buyer.

Phase 5. Sell. Just having someone interested in you will not get them to agree to pay for your services. You will need to do the due diligence of understanding and defining the need well enough where you can make a proposal to the potential client. This takes preparation, documentation, presentation and follow-up.

Phase 6. Deliver your Service. Some may say that at this point, the selling is complete. In selling professional services – this is when you have your opportunity to PROVE your capabilities and thus to develop additional business. So, in meeting (or exceeding) your clients’ expectations, you are in fact selling yourself and your services.

Phase 7. Retain your clients. Retaining an existing client is a lot easier than getting a new client. You retain your client (and thus sell more business) through delivering high quality, timely service. After delivering your service – maintain and develop your relationship. This is back to Phase 3, but this time around it is a lot easier if you have done a good job of delivering the service that was paid for. Becoming a “trusted advisor” makes sure that you have effectively locked out the competition.

If you sell professional services – review the above phases. How well do you do each of these? It is extremely difficult to be good at all of these. Your ability to perform different phases better than others depends so much on your personality and personal preferences. Some people are great networkers, but not good at closing deals. Others are good at closing sales deals, but not good at delivering solutions.

Why Should I Hire a Consultant?

"A consultant is someone who provides value through specialized expertize, content, behavior, skill, or other resources to assist a client in improving the status quo in return for mutually agreed compensation"

Alan Wiess

I know that I need someone to help me with my problem, but how do I know that I need a consultant? Why should I invest my company's money and time in a consultant? How can I measure the return that make in this investment?

In his book, "Million Dollar Consulting", Alan Weiss goes on to define the categories of value that a consultant will bring to a company. These are the key areas of value that you can use to evaluate whether the consultant you are considering using to solve your problem to is the right one for you.

1. Content. This is the most common consulting value. The consultant you use must know what they are talking about. Consequently, you will probably be able to find consultants who have worked in a specific field or industry that you need help on. Many people who break out of corporate life to go into consulting base their business on content consulting.
2. Expertise. Many consultants have an expertise that transends a specific industry. For example supply chain management; or change management. These consultants can adapt their expertise to a variety of problems and across multiple industries. You will find people who have worked across diverse industries and companies to have developed this type of expertise.
3. Knowledge. This is a quality of people who have "been there before". Knowledge includes an understanding of process as opposed to content. Real process knowledge come with experience. However, don't expect the consultant to have the same level of knowledge of your business that you have.
4. Behavior. A consultant with good interpersonal skills in virtually never behind the scenes. These interpersonal competencies may be of value to you in facilitating groups, leading teams, resolving conflict, enhance brainstorming and creativity, listen to customer or employee feedback, etc. Mediators and arbitrators are examples of consultants with with this competency.
5. Special Skills. Some people have highly developed, well defined skills that are in high demand. These are often talents and innate abilities. For example, some people have a sense of style that makes them excellent image consultants. These people may not know anything about the content, or have precise expertise of knowledge related to your business. But, these consultants will have a gift or talent that you cannot acquire independently.
6. Contacts. Good consultants are normally well connected and will be able to get the right person for the job at hand, if they themselves do not have the necessary expertise, content, knowledge or skills that you may need for a specifiuc task. A well connected consultant can also be a good lobbyist for you.

Consultants will bring one or more (or all) of these competencies to bear to help you move from the status quo to the improved position.