Consulting sales is all about not dropping the ball

So find a system, either pen and paper, Excel, Trello, SalesTool.app or one of the gazillion other solutions out there to help you manage your sales funnel.

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer: Nobody wants to be sold, but everyone wants to buy what they want.

Here's a quote from a book that you can find in our bookshelf, CustomerCentric Selling by Bosworth, Holland and Visgatis:

This attitude directly conflicts with the fact that human beings prefer to buy. Buyers view selling as something that is done to them, rather than done with or for them.

From the same book

In fact, most salespeople approach their initial meeting or meetings with the buyer with a focus on “what I want to tell them” rather than “what do I want to learn about them.”

This really resonated with us.

In our experience selling consulting services, we’ve never managed to convince anyone. The customers always convinced themselves that they wanted the service we were offering. We just facilitate the sale.

That’s why you can’t look at sales in isolation, as a business you have to know your customer: Who is your ideal customer, what is it that they want and how to reach them.

If your offering isn’t a perfect fit for what the customer wants then you are wasting your time.
Here is the key: Selling is ensuring that the decision that someone took - wanting your service - is executed upon. So as a sales person you need to make it as easy as possible for someone to buy.

So don’t drop the ball, make sure you reach out when you said you would, make notes about what you learned and make the process as easy as possible for the potential customer, then they will become actual customers. Your closing rate should be at least 33%* otherwise you need to go back to the (Marketing) drawing board and reassess your target customer.

When building SalesTool.app we thought about how often we dropped the ball in the past and hopefully with some of the automation built in (untouched opportunities are automatically archived after x days, you also get an optional email when that happens which may or may not spur you into action).

It's also really handy to have a Sales Tool Box where you store your sales tools. One of those tools are key questions that you need to ask your clients that give you insights and help them understand how your solution is perfect for them (if it really is the perfect solution - otherwise you lose credibility).

Like any tool, it’s about what the user makes of it, the tool in itself is pretty much irrelevant. But while we are at it, we might as well build the best tool that we can. That can only happen by being close to our customers (that’s you!) and we would love it if you reach out and we can talk about what you want when managing your sales funnel and how we can help.

As an incentive for people who are thinking about reaching out, we’ll comp your subscription fee.

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* 33% is an arbitrary number but 1/3 is easy to remember. This number obviously depends on many factors. Ideally it should be 66% (when you have a crack marketing team, it's possible!) but as most of our customers are solo consultants or tiny consultant companies, they don't have the resources yet.