Secrets to Selling Consulting

Selling consulting is different to selling product and nobody teaches how to do it.

In fact very few know how to do it. Consulting is mostly sold by consultants, and they don’t train sales guys.

Why does this matter? Who cares? Sales is sales, right? Or that’s what the motivational guys would have us believe.

Well not when it comes to selling your ability to help clients get where they want to go, and that’s where most of the business is these days. Not marketing physical product, but skills and experience. The majority of new businesses today are experts in their field starting out on their own, providing skills clients need but don’t have in house. They’re starting out as a consultant.

We see them everywhere – in marketing, financial management, retirement planning, party planning, coaching. Today we even came across our first Child Protection consultant. Everybody’s a consultant for a simple reason – that’s what people are buying.

But typically they don’t have experience in selling, and especially selling consulting.

Here’s just some of the ways consulting sales is different to product sales:

• Clients (customers if you prefer) are smart. They know they need help and will buy it when they believe the pitch. They want help to figure out where their problems are and the right solutions, for them.
• Consultants don’t know the answers until they’ve understood the problem. They have the ability to uncover real, as opposed to perceived, issues and tailor solutions to solve them.
• Consultants have the ability to deliver results. This isn’t shipping a product, it’s added value – results achieving returns greater than the costs.
• Consultants sell aspiration – whatever clients want for their business – and then they sell a path to reaching it, a step at a time.
• Consultants minimize the client’s risk. They don’t shoot for the end game. They’ll give one day to sell three days, to sell thirty days, to sell an on-going relationship.
• Consultants have a process – for selling and delivering what the client wants.

We’ll be posting more articles on how, and how not, to sell consultancy services – watch this space. But while you’re here you might enjoy some of the other posts in our sales strategy category.

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Tagged as: Business, Consultant, Consulting, Customer, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Product, Sales