The Art of Consulting – Selling

For many consultants the idea that they might sell their skills is anathema. They prefer to delegate such activities to sales staff, who, supposedly, aren’t offended by the grubby world of money – of price, of fee rates, of raising invoices, handling disputes and getting paid.

Consulting, they like to believe, is about ideas, about working in a collegiate, almost academic, atmosphere, with clients who are almost friends. And when do friends ever need to talk about money?

Your idea of a salesman?

Such consultants (and I have been one of them) will work extra hours without payment, and are motivated by their fascination with the work they do, rather than by the material rewards that follow. Their clients love them, and their work is often, but not always, profitable.

But the idealistic approach is ultimately dangerous. Your client may love you, but you’ve still got to pay the rent. If there are consultants of this kind, doing far too much for their clients, willing always to accommodate additional demands, to extend the scope of a project without commercial discussions, I can only think that this must reflect some kind of insecurity, as if they are uncertain of the value of the analysis and advice they are delivering. It certainly isn’t the basis for a healthy relationship between consultant and client.

And if a consultant thinks of sales activities as in some ways contemptible, this merely reflects a misunderstanding of sales staff and what they do.

My own experience as a manager and entrepreneur is that the best sales staff are those who have formerly been consultants, though I shared some of these ‘uncommercial’ views when I was a young consultant. Like consultants, sales staff must listen more than they speak, ask penetrating questions and demonstrate knowledge, wisdom and pragmatism. The good ones don’t sell the impossible, don’t promise more than their consulting team can deliver. They know what they are talking about, and they will only convince a client to buy their services if the client recognises that knowledge. After all, you can’t sell ideas if you don’t understand them.

Selling consulting services is a difficult task. You must be proficient, not only in the technical matters of your profession, but also in the particular skills of selling, which include:

Qualifying – determining if the potential client is serious, has a budget, needs the services you are offering, has the time to devote to the project you are proposing, and ensuring that the people you are talking to are in a position to make a decision
Scoping – agreeing as precisely as possible the scope of services being proposed, shaping them into affordable packages, especially if there’s a need to prove your value
Pricing – determining the price that a potential client is willing to pay (this is the area where the timid consultant is most likely to fall short!)
Persuading – understanding and overcoming the particular objections of those involved in the decision to buy
Demonstrating Competence – showing deep understanding of the client’s needs, and demonstrating competence by fielding all the appropriate skills the company has to offer
Providing References – using strong relationships with current clients to gain the confidence of the potential client

..and there are many more.

The point is that almost all of these are skills that are close to the non-technical skills that all consultants must possess. They are the usual consultants’ skills, simply extended by techniques such as ‘solution selling’. If you are a good consultant you can be a very good salesman.

But beyond the special task of working on a sales opportunity, there are sales skills that all of us must demonstrate daily as consultants. We must always be ready to promote our company, our brand, our special knowledge, our methods, or any of those other things which differentiate us from our competition. This doesn’t mean parroting slogans or nagging our clients for additional work, it means confidently supporting and promoting our skills whenever opportunities arise, and, through good questioning, seeking them out. After all, if the client is rational, he or she is buying your services because the benefits outweigh the costs.

A certain kind of diffidence is understandable. Many of us see every side to a question, and when we put forward advice to our clients we do so in the circumstances and with the view that on the balance of probabilities the course of action we suggest is the best. We are not always certain and we often lay out the risks as well as the options. But this doesn’t mean we should not be confident in our skills, and if we are confident in our skills we should be confident of the value that we offer to our clients, and reasonably expect payment for what we do.

In fact, we usually find that our clients want us to be successful, that they respect us well enough to want to pay us for our time. It isn’t a zero sum game and most clients don’t negotiate as if our gain is their loss.

If ‘selling’ means identifying opportunities that will bring benefit to our client as well as to ourselves, then we must all be ready to ‘sell’. And if someone suggests you might be a good sales person, don’t be offended. It can be a good career move into a very respectable profession.

The Art of Consulting – Persuading

In the mid-1980s I worked for a large IT services company in London. Every so often the company arranged an away-day, a sort of troop-rallying exercise in a good hotel with plenty of food and drink to lubricate the message. We troops would sit through a series of motivating talks, the usual graphs and bullet points, though it was before the days of PowerPoint, so all of these were printed on slides and projected using an epidiascope.

These were the relatively early days of the corporate presentation and I was new to the whole exercise. I almost enjoyed it. I remember the CEO’s presentation as especially impressive. There was a picture of the Queen at one point, and a dog, but I can’t now remember why. He brought a touch of irony to the proceedings that made his talk stand out from the rest. As I recall, he ended by asking all the salesmen in the room to stand up. A few rather self-consciously struggled to their feet (salesmen drank more at lunchtime that we consultants did).

‘What about the rest of you?’ the CEO asked, ‘Why aren’t you all standing?’

It’s a tired trick, but not so tired that I haven’t tried it myself from time to time. Yes, of course, in a sense we’re all ‘salesmen’ even if our job title doesn’t include the word. We must all present our company in a favourable light and keep our ears pricked for potential opportunities. Some consultants aren’t cut out for this, and however good they are at their job, they’re almost ashamed that money should be demanded in return for what they do. But some are good, or very good. Indeed, in my organisation some of the very best salesmen (even those with the word ‘sales’ in their job title) have formerly been consultants.

Selling projects is one thing, and not all of us are suited to the argy-bargy of negotiation, but selling ideas is another. If we’re advising our clients, and if we firmly believe in our advice, then at the very least we must persuade, and there’s an art to that too.

The most important point about persuasion may sound counterintuitive. It is that, as in almost all situations, it’s better to listen than to speak. You won’t win by wearing people down with words. And , after all, you already know what your opinion is (I would hope) and why you hold it. But you may not know in advance what your client’s opinion may be, how he has understood your reasoning, what his objections may be and what motivates them. He may disagree as to the facts, he may disagree as to your reasoning, or he may raise issues that you haven’t considered (certainly judgements as to the pragmatism of your advice may differ, since the client’s knowledge of his organisation is likely to exceed yours). Finally, he may object irrationally, for all kinds of emotional reasons.

So you must listen very carefully to understand the motives behind your client’s objections. Of course, you should already be aware of some of them, especially if they’re based on disagreement as to the facts. If you’re not aware of these, then your project hasn’t been managed well. By the time you come to make your case you should be aware of opposing views, findings and interpretations.

Listening is essential if you’re going to persuade. You can’t just disagree, and mount a direct assault on your client’s opinion. You mustn’t be aggressive but you mustn’t be defensive either. You must always behave and persuade in a way that allows for compromise and even defeat. You can be enthusiastic about your opinion, but not emotional. You mustn’t seem so wedded to your view that compromise or defeat will seem like a personal affront or contempt for your professional skills. Whatever you do or say, you must not put your professional relationship with your client at risk. As with all negotiations you must have a number of compromise positions prepared in advance.

I have always hated training courses that aim to teach you a thing or two about human behaviour. They’re often based on a few bogus ideas from behavioural psychology. I studied psychology at university and developed, during those three years, a lifelong aversion to the subject. But on one ‘interpersonal skills’ course I attended in the early 1990s I learned something useful. The subject was ‘how to be assertive’. If you want to assert your own point of view, to persuade others of its merits, and to prevail, we were taught, you must strenuously demonstrate that you understand your opponent’s (or client’s) point of view. You begin your argument by showing that you have listened to and understand your opponent’s point of view. You might even flatter.

‘It’s interesting that you see it that way,’ you might begin. ‘I can understand that from your point of view, with all your experience it would seem obvious that it should be done that way rather than the way I’m recommending. Indeed, I’ve seen similar circumstances where that is exactly the right course of action, and where what you’re recommending has worked. It often makes sense. BUT……..’

And then you go on to explain why the circumstances, or the logic are different in this case. It doesn’t always work, but often it does. And even if it doesn’t, you’ve demonstrated an understanding of the client’s point of view, perhaps even to the point that you may be persuaded of it. Whatever happens, you’re more likely to reach a compromise without endangering your relationship.

Arguments and ideas are lost if your client thinks you don’t understand his position, or if you seem too emotionally attached to your own, or if he thinks you’re concealing some deeper agenda, or if you’re arrogant, or if he suspects you think he’s stupid. You’ve got to be reasonable and likeable at all times.

When you’re persuading, always take account of what will work for your particular audience. Get the level of detail, and the level of informality right, and always understand the motivation of your audience.

Persuasion is most effective when it quiet and reasonable and acknowledges alternative points of view.

The Sorrows of Selling

Selling business software sometimes seems like the worst job in the world, but I’ve come to understand that buying software can be even more difficult.

Software salesmen used to be held in greater contempt than second-hand car salesmen. Indeed, it still seems that a chasm of misunderstanding separates the salesman (even if he is honest) and the buyer. The buyer and the seller each ask questions and answer them in a language couched in their own terminology. Volumes of unspoken assumptions could be written about both.

Which is why selling software gets ever more difficult. The distrust of the buyer (which is not intended to be insulting, isn’t based on the assumption that the salesman will lie) is reasonable. So many projects go wrong, even if both parties are buying and selling in good faith.

Buyers are ever more wary. Long gone are the days when a steady gaze, a firm handshake and a couple of boozy dinners could win you a deal.

But there is risk on both sides of the equation. The buyer risks wasting too much time and money on something that doesn’t do what he wants. Buying more carefully, at the expense of the seller’s time mitigates this risk. The seller, on the other hand, risks spending vast amounts of time trying to sell, failing, ever more expensively, more often than not.

Which is why the seller must ‘qualify’ every opportunity. If you’re selling software you must always ask yourself:

Can my software meet the buyer’s requirements?
Am I talking to the decision makers?
Is there a clear buying process?
Does the buyer really intend to buy something within reasonable timescales?
Does the buyer have a budget for the project?
Does the list of competitors make sense?

A salesman must be a shrewd psychologist as well as relentlessly inquisitive. He or she must understand the motivation behind each link in the decision-making chain.

So, two trends make selling ever more sorrowful.

The first is the understandable trend of asking the seller to demonstrate the capabilities of his software and consultants more and more extensively. It’s as if the implementation project must be completed before the sale is made. This means prototypes, ‘sandbox’ environments where the buyer can play with the system, and multiple virtual ‘meetings’. These activities close the chasm, narrow the differences between the vocabularies of buyer and seller and they are a very good thing. But for the seller, even more than for the buyer, they are expensive.

The second trend is that all of this is more and more often done remotely, using tools such as GoToMeeting or WebEx. Very often we never meet the people who buy our software, or at least, not until the final stages of a sale or when the project begins.

The trouble with the ‘remote’ approach is that you get to know your buyer less easily and that makes ‘qualification’ very much more difficult. A salesman must make judgements about people, their interests, their ambitions, their credibility and their influence, and this is difficult to do with only an electronic link.

I write this because I spend ever more time building demonstration systems, discussing them with potential users, writing about them, offering them to the buyer to use in secure ‘sandbox’ environment, and failing to sell my software as often as always. These are the sorrows of selling. It gets ever more difficult, ever more expensive.

In one recent case I built several versions of a prototype for a company in India, exchanged at least a hundred emails, attended about ten ‘meetings’ and provided a test environment for the buyer to work with. I was told to expect the procurement process to begin (which means negotiating terms and conditions all over again – often another set of humiliations!). But then they decided that they will widen the scope of the project and start the process all over again. They promise to include us as a potential supplier. True, this isn’t exactly failure, but it certainly feels like it.

You simply can’t know everything you need to know when, as technology now makes possible, you can’t really look the buyer in the eye.

Adam Bager

Occasional thoughts on IT, Business and Other Matters

Tag Archives: selling

The Art of Consulting – Selling

The Art of Consulting – Persuading

The Sorrows of Selling