The Top Consultant: Developing your Skills for Greater Effectiveness

Key Steps in the Selling Process

There are three key steps involved in practical selling:

1. Identifying potential clients, getting access to them and establishing a dialogue with them.

2. Conducting sales transactions (telephone calls, meetings), which should lead to an invitation to tender (ITT). An ITT need not be a formal document - it can be an oral request from a prospect for you to put in a proposal.

3. Converting the ITT to a sale.

The framework within which these activities are applied may be ad hoc, or it may be part of a focused, proactive sales campaign to get new clients.

Large consultancies with extensive networks may have no difficulty getting access to a specific target. With greater resources than small practices, they may invest more in selling to a specific target prospect. For example, they may prepare a detailed presentation, free of charge, on an aspect of the client's business where the consultancy believes there to be a good opportunity of working together. Even with good contacts, however, the number of times you can 'cash in' on a relationship is limited. You can exercise a key contact about a couple of times a year, but goodwill on their side will disappear if they see the meetings are of little value. Selling skills are needed in all cases. In what follows I have assumed that you cannot command the attention of the target and so have to follow a more general sales process.

Managing the Selling Process

Early in the selling process you will need to judge how much work (for example, how many meetings) is required to win an invitation to tender. In some circumstances the opportunity may arise at the first meeting; this will be the case when your consultancy offering is clearly defined and you have carefully pre-qualified the prospect. For example, a recruitment consultant may have established the prospect's need for recruitment services during a preliminary telephone call. At the initial meeting the consultant will have sold the firm's services extrinsically, so that the prospect feels encouraged to invite the consultant to submit a proposal if there is a vacancy to be filled. In other cases a series of meetings may be required, to do one or more of the following:

• clarify the nature of the consulting project;

• meet others of the client staff who might be involved in the buying process;

• introduce others from the consultancy to help in selling or who might be involved in operating the project.

The criteria described in Chapter 3 are useful to remember in the sales process, namely:

• The client has to recognize that a problem or opportunity exists.

• The client has to believe that it merits attention.

• The client must believe that it is possible to resolve the problem or realize the opportunity.

• The client must see the value of outside consultancy help.

• The client must choose your help.

Remember that it is a competitive market. As well as managing your side of the sales process, you need to be convincing the prospect that you are the right consultancy to undertake the project.