Selling Expertise to a Suspicious Market

Starting a business carries risk. During the early stages of developing any business concept an entrepreneur is essentially a business person operating without the safety net provided by an employer. Even after their product or service concept has been defined and has matured somewhat, the entrepreneur must still work to overcome considerable business challenges unique to start ups while also shouldering the burden of running a business. For those entrepreneurs who are starting a professional services firm there are also some special challenges.

One of your first challenges as a new consultant or service provider is creating a market for your services. In order to do this, you must make your expertise clearly understood by the marketplace. Traditionally, all new consultants make the same mistake at this point.

Consultants tend to believe that their past history and track record is what sells their services. So the first thing they do is build a website. This is a requirement, of course, for any new business today. But the content that you include on your website matters. The typical consultant’s website reads like a resume that was simply divided up into separate web pages. Fact of the matter is that prospective clients care very little about what you have done for others. They want to know what you can do for them specifically.

My experience has been that very few prospects even ask for references. They know you will load your reference list with only people who like you. The prospects that we are able to convert to clients we convert simply because we were able to present them with a viable solution to their specific business challenge at the right time. More importantly, we go out of our way to show them that we understand their business and take time to explain the benefits of our proposal to their company. I am fond of telling our sales director (and anyone who will listen) that clients never buy expertise from a consultant despite consultants’ often lofty opinions of themselves. Clients are buying a benefit to their business. So if you cannot explain exactly how your service will save money, make money or mitigate risk for your clients then you will not close a sale.

So what can you do to successfully sell your services to a suspicious market? The steps below may help you get started:

1. Productize your expertise and experience. Everything you have ever done professionally can be boiled down to areas of expertise, each with a specific benefit to your past employer. Instead of listing past accomplishments, look hard for what expertise you leveraged to accomplish corporate objectives in the past and link that directly to a realized benefit. Describe this in general terms linking the benefit to one of the three purchasing drivers mentioned above. A road map on how to do this can be found at http://www.jlroy.com/Documents/Creating%20A%20Framework%20For%20Growth.pdf.

2. Put something useful on your website. One of the best ways to demonstrate expertise is by providing something for free. This thing should be useable and provide a specific benefit to the user. It might be educational “how to” kind of information. It could be templates or case studies that teach a lesson. It could be links to other useful sites or online resources. The point is that at some point during your sales process you will direct someone to your website (or they will go out and find it independently). The site should not only be informative but should be useful too. If you can build a useful online destination then you have successfully demonstrated that you understand how to help your clients.

3. Sell efficiently. Many consultants will go out and try to sell their service to everyone and anyone by casting a wide net. They spend an inordinate amount of time selling. Although sales are important to any consulting firm, the hours spent on sales are not billable. Another way to think about this is that you have roughly 2,000 billable hours per year. Your income is directly affected by how efficiently you sell. Locate companies that you understand. Make sure that you completely grasp how you can specifically help each company. Make company specific proposals. This will dramatically improve your success rate and as a result will require you to spend fewer hours on sales. We will generally target entire industries. If we can help one company in an industry then we can pattern most participants. This will make your research easier too.

There are lots of ways to sell your services. My belief is that you must spend a little time up front learning how you can impact clients. Make sure you completely understand the benefits of your services and remember that if you can’t describe your benefits in one sentence then prospects will likely miss the point as well.