Develop A Diverse Sales Model to Guide Your Business Development Activities

Sales can be difficult. Some people thrive in a sales environment; they enjoy the art of the deal. But many entrepreneurs and business owners just want to do what they love. They want to build their concept or perform the service they enjoy. They view sales as a necessary evil, to be sure. One of the best ways to bring yourself into a sales mode is to develop a model that works best for you and your business.

A sales model is simply a framework which will guide your selling activities. Usually, this involves identifying all the ways that clients currently find out about your product or service and blending them with all the other ways you might employ to generate new business. I like to think of a basic model that includes three main components: sales generated through events (in person or online); sales generated through proactive means (i.e. cold calling); and sales generated through passive means (such as through ads). If you start with this basic model, you can expand it to include those channels that might work for your specific business.

If you have a sales team, you can divide specific functions according to the skills of the individual team members. If you are part of a small company with no dedicated sales team, you might want to focus on certain types of activities on particular days. Either way, the idea is to create a model that will support a robust sales process on an ongoing basis.

Focusing on just one aspect of the model (i.e. online ads) will carry additional opportunity costs and increase business risk. You might end up leaving money on the table or leave an opening for competitors. Creating a diverse and complete model should help you determine all the various channels that are available to you and allow you to put forth a broad based business development effort. This will help prop up your sales numbers in the long run by allowing you to capitalize on as many opportunities as you can.

Implementing a diverse sales program during a down economy will be as competitive as you can be and will ensure you are better positioned when the market begins to turnaround.

Be Specific When Selling Services, Or Risk Losing Current AND Future Opportunities

You really do only have one chance at creating a first impression; otherwise it wouldn’t be called a “first” impression. At no other time is a first impression more important than when you are selling services. The product you are selling is already intangible enough; it is expertise, experience or know-how after all. Being specific about what you are selling and the value that you bring to the table is paramount to moving key relationships forward.

Timing is everything. If you know your value proposition, then why hide it? Throw it out there right away so that your prospect understands immediately how you can help his or her business. Many sales people like to ask questions so that they can tailor their pitch. Ultimately though, this handicaps their pitch. How many people do you have working on that? What is your current process? Have you had trouble with this, that or the other thing? Although I am a big fan of question based selling (see http://www.qbsresearch.com/), once you have secured the meeting to discuss your services specifically, you owe it to yourself and to the prospect to be as clear and concise about what you can do for them as possible. It is the only way to get engaged in a constructive conversation about a specific initiative, which is where you get to explain the details of your services.

Recently, my sales team and I were in a conference call with a large multinational about a service that we provide. My sales director, who normally takes the lead in setting up conversations such as this, immediately started asking questions. Right away I could sense that the guy on the other end of the line wanted to know what we were selling and how we were relevant to his business. Previous information exchanges were via email with his superior, who asked that he meet with us. He even came right out and told us that he was not sure why we were meeting. That was generous. As he politely answered all my sales director’s questions, I could sense the growing frustration (“How to I extricate myself from this call, I have work to do.”). At that point, I stepped in and simply stated our value proposition with confidence that he was either going to be interested, or not. Either way was fine with me. I’d rather not spend one extra minute on the phone selling unless I thought we had a real chance of moving a project forward. Heck, I have better things to do too! In this case, as soon as he understood the value proposition he put us on hold to pull other people in to the meeting. Next thing you know we are part of their planning process for the next busy season and we were able to move the opportunity forward.

In another sales meeting recently, I was meeting with the president and chairman of a company that we had been referred to as a good resource for companies that needed project bandwidth. This meeting lasted five minutes. As soon as I understood their business better, I simply stated that we offered a different kind of solution and might not be appropriate for them. I didn’t waste their time or mine. But I know they appreciated the honesty and I might be able to call on them in the future. This relationship got off on the right foot even though no deal was done. Either way, they know that we are straight-shooters and the kind of firm they ultimately would like to work with.

In the end, I believe that people want to work with honest, straight-forward people. More importantly, everyone has limited time to deal with sales meetings. They want to know if you can help them right away or not and how you are going to do it. Why not give them what they need? In the end, if the prospect is not a good match for your services then you are wasting your time too. Better to find that out before you are engaged than after your client has started to spend money.

Solidify Your Client Relationships - Let Your Clients Have a Peek Behind the Curtain

Now more than ever professional services firms need to find a way to solidify their relationships with clients. One of the best ways to do that is make them feel that your team is truly acting as an extension of their company. This makes them understand how much you value their business. Many firms will write reports and make sure clients are getting deliverables and meeting notes in a timely manner. But that is still delivering work product to clients instead of actually letting them in. So how do you do you build a more solid relationship with your clients?

One of the best ways to let your clients in is to truly operate transparently. I don’t mean that you necessarily work onsite all the time or send daily updates (that can be expensive and cumbersome). But you can use collaboration tools to manage your own work on behalf of clients and then provide them with unfettered access. Giving your clients the ability to see what you are doing when you do it will certainly make them feel better about the work that they are paying for and will go a long way towards building trust. It will also help you manage their expectations better and eliminate any doubt about your workload, especially if you operate on a time-and-materials basis. If all your work products are delivered to clients via email over time, they never have the opportunity to truly appreciate the effort that goes into their project as they never get to see all the work in one place.

There are tons of inexpensive tools out there to help even the smallest firm or sole practitioner collaborate with clients. Any collaboration tool that you consider should have a few basic features. They include: the ability to upload multiple documents simultaneously; full text searching across all documents loaded in the library; the ability to integrate calendars and similar tools with MS Outlook, or whatever scheduling application that you use; storing links to key project assets can be useful; managing tasks, including the assignment of tasks to project team members and tracking progress against assignments; plus the ability to post messages or announcements to keep all stakeholders informed of key events and happenings.

This approach will provide clients with complete transparency into your activities on their behalf. If you think about it, they are paying for your time; they might as well know how their money is being spent.

Once you pull back the curtain and show your clients all aspects of your activities, you may find that your own tracking tools are lacking. Naturally, there are all kinds of project tools that you can use, and I won’t get into the best ones here, but it is important to make sure that you are consistent in how you manage your tasks. I have found that the old maxim “A picture is worth a thousand words” is truly correct. As such, I always try to include a graphical representation of our activities instead of just coughing up spreadsheets or pages and pages of prose explaining activities. Clients seem to appreciate the effort made to help them visualize the final solution and nothing keeps us on the same page better than something that I can point to later if some confusion arises.

When things are difficult for your clients you need to make yourself invaluable. The best way to do that is to help them understand how much you already do for them. This will make it easier for them to appreciate your current and past work and will hopefully prevent you from being cut from their budget as they look for creative ways to reduce costs.

To Campaign or Not to Campaign; Product Marketing and Public Relations on a Shoestring Budget

Small and mid-sized companies that have been working on new product initiatives for the past year are now trying to figure out how to get the word out about their new stuff while keeping a wary eye on their marketing budget. The challenge for companies that are reluctant to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a big marketing or public relations campaign is to figure out how far they can get with self-promotion alone.

The fact is that sometimes you need to hire an expert. With that said prudence dictates that in leaner times you should see just how far you can get on a limited budget before you seek outside help. There are enough tools out there nowadays that savvy businesses should make considerable progress simply by taking time to execute.

Here are a number of ideas that could help get your homespun PR campaign off the ground.

Create a press release through Enhanced Online News (EON) – Enhanced Online News is a service of Business Wire. This innovative service is definitely geared for the do-it-yourselfer. EON helps you turn your basic press release into an interactive web page that is optimized for key words and phrases. Your press release will be indexed and served up to all major search engines. Each release costs $295 with additional fees tacked on for including media and image files. These fees range from $50 to $100 per release. A single release with a logo or graphic embedded will run you about $395. Not too bad if you only plan on issuing a release once in a while. Visit http://eon.businesswire.com/portal/site/eon/home/ for more information.

Create a product page in Facebook – A Facebook page can be used by a business to post information about a product or service. The customer community can support your business by adding themselves as a fan or by leaving comments on your wall. At the very least, you will learn what people think about your product. You can engage your community directly by making special offers to fans, uploading videos, product reviews, etc. For more information visit http://www.facebook.com/business/?pages.

Find reporters seeking experts via HARO and contribute – HARO, or “Help A Reporter Out” is a unique site where reporters can post requests for assistance from the community at large. You may peruse the HARO site and find that some reporter is working on an article that is in your field. By providing assistance to that reporter you might get quoted or your company mentioned. Being quoted as an expert can help generate interest in your firm. Visit www.helpareporter.com for more information about this free service.

Submit your product to the blogosphere for comment – Bloggers are always looking for things to expound on. Most bloggers can pull off their blogs because they actually know what they are talking about. The trick of course, is finding the right blogger and inviting him or her to look at your product to provide a review. You can search the blogger directory at Technorati to find the right blogger to approach. This directory lists blogs by subject and provides rankings so you can select the most popular blogs to approach. Visit www.technorati.com for more information.

Naturally, these aren’t the only things you can do to launch your own PR campaign. You can create product videos and post them on YouTube, for example. These same videos can also be used to guide new users on your help pages and generate product interest on your home page. In the end, you may need to hire a marketing or PR firm anyway to help you get the word out to a broader audience, but these things will get you started and allow you to spend your limited PR and marketing dollars in the areas where you need the most guidance.

Starting or Growing a Consulting Practice? Better Start Branding Now

Even with the economy in a shambles, now is as good a time to start a consulting practice as any. There are lots of reasons to start a consulting practice. They range from wrapping a security blanket around you as a way to insulate yourself from potential layoffs, to simply having the right kind of experience and expertise to help other companies work better. Either way, having a brand may be more important than you might think.

If you’ve read my stuff before you already know that I am a big fan of “productizing” experience and expertise as a way to build a consulting practice. You’ll also know that I am not a big fan of the standard sales practices of many consultants (i.e. selling on your resume or past accomplishments instead of on what you can do for clients specifically). One of the missing links for most consultants, even those that do a pretty good job of selling services, is a solid brand.

A brand can be a powerful tool. Every company has one; it’s just that some are more effective than others. Can the average person really tell the difference between a laptop with an Intel chip and one with a chip from AMD? I don’t think so. But Intel has developed a solid brand and that has translated into a following of sorts. If you don’t believe that then explain why Intel has revenues of around $38 billion and AMD closer to $6 billion (source: Hoover’s). That’s quite a difference when you consider that the average person can’t tell the difference between the products.

A consultant’s brand essentially symbolizes the value a consultant brings to his or her engagements. Quite a bit of thought needs to go into what a brand is. The challenge of course, is trying to “symbolize” something that is intangible and translate that into a tangible mnemonic or logo. For example: How should your clients feel when they think of you?

The branding process can be long and arduous. I’m not going to pretend to suggest that the steps below represent a complete outline of the branding process. But they might be an effective starting point for a new consultant or a consultant that is currently operating without a brand identity.

Develop your brand with your website – Everyone needs to review their website from time to time to keep it current. As part of your next review, think about how you would like your website to reflect your brand. List key words that you want to project to clients (i.e. “dependability”) and then find a color palette that will project that feeling. Think about images that you see and ask yourself how they make you feel. When you see an image of a bison do you think of “power”? Why does the elk in the insurance giant The Hartford make you think of reliability? List the colors and images that make you feel the way you want your clients to feel. Find a pattern or component of these images that you can repurpose for your brand and try to develop some thoughts and shapes that you like.

Hire a graphic designer – No matter how creative you are, you probably will not come up with an effective mnemonic or logo in the same manner a professional will. Take the ideas, thoughts, and concepts developed in the first step to a graphic designer and ask for help creating a logo.

Develop a tagline that reflects your value proposition – This seems obvious, but it is surprising how little effort consultants spend delivering that all important sound bite to potential clients. This is especially shocking when you realize that most consultants worth their salt should know that people spend very little time on a specific web page, even though they might spend hours online. The average American spends one minute and 2 seconds on a web page on average and visits 104 individual domains per day while at work (source: http://www.clickz.com/3410151). Without an effective tagline how can you expect someone to understand your value proposition in just over one second?

Try your ideas on for size – Once you’ve developed a logo and some sort of branding, try to build out a business document, such as a proposal, to send a new client. How professional does it look? Are you projecting the right image? How do you feel about the brand and image you’ve created? Talk to your existing clients and show them what you are thinking. Ask them how they feel about your brand. If they like it then you probably have gotten it right.

Branding is more than a logo or tagline, of course. In the end, you must deliver what you promise and what you deliver must be supported by your brand and vice versa. Otherwise your message will get lost. So spend some time thinking about how you would brand your expertise. Your clients will create and image in their own mind of you anyway. Don’t you want some say in what that image is?

A New Outlook for a New Year; Preparing For Later Now

Happy New Year! It’s a new year and we all have much to consider as we complete our plans for the 2009 fiscal year. In many ways the things we do (or don’t do) at the beginning of the year will set the tone for the entire year.

This is complicated in 2009 by a tough economic environment. The weak economy means that we have less room to make mistakes and more challenges to overcome to achieve the same growth. As business owners, we can take two distinct approaches to preparing for a new year. The first is to be defensive and try to prevent the weak economy from draining our limited resources. The second approach is to try to grow our businesses despite weakness in the economy.

The first approach appears on the surface to be the safer choice. However, this is basically a position of surrender. As a business owner, if you choose to take this approach you will be conceding ground to the competition. This is a certainty and it will leave your business vulnerable when things start to turn around.

The second approach seems more aggressive but can allow your business to grow when others are giving ground. During challenging times there is an opportunity for healthy businesses to grab market share that would otherwise be unachievable. This might appear like standing still, but when things turnaround you’ll notice a difference. Smart companies will watch their expenses in 2009 for sure, but they will also seek out new opportunities.

Here are a few things to consider for the New Year:

Act like an entrepreneur – Even established companies can learn from younger companies. Start ups have a knack for doing more with less. Try to find creative ways to execute your strategy while keeping your expenses under control. You may have to alter your strategy or stage your product releases, but this will ultimately leave you with more cash to manage your business and see your employees through the troubled times ahead.

Look for ways that your business can thrive in a down economy – Even the weakest economic conditions will hold some economic activity. The motivation behind purchasing decisions will change during these times. So the challenge is one of positioning and thinking about how your business can deliver products and services that are in-line with the purchasing motivation of your customers. Can you offer services to help your clients operate more effectively?

Prepare for the economic recovery now– The reality is that if you are not prepared for the current economic realities then your mistakes all took place six months ago. Your current plans should be focused on positioning your company for the environment that will exist six months from now. By then, the housing market should have bottomed out. The credit market will loosen up as banks will need to lend money at some point in order to make money again (and all the weaker players will have been acquired or otherwise re-sized themselves). The new administration will have been in office for a while eliminating some uncertainty and people will be receiving their tax refund checks. Start thinking about the summer now and how you want your company to be positioned for your clients’ next budget cycle in the Fall.

This New Year can be a rewarding year. Find help where you need it. Pay attention to how you are spending your resources and keep an eye on growth even as you watch current revenues shrink. Just remember that what you do now at the beginning of the year will affect how you finish your 2009 fiscal year.

Good luck and Happy New Year!