| By John Doerr If you want to grow a professional services business, once you get past your comfortable circle of family, friends, and referrals from clients, you eventually must start selling. More precisely you must begin cultivating new relationships with strangers. Unfortunately, for most professionals this triggers a whole host of nagging questions such as; what do I say? What do I do? What do I not say and do? Since the entire experience is so much more nerve-racking and different from merely talking to our inner circle of acquaintances, mistakes are often made that sabotage far too many new relationships and cripple many of our business development efforts. So what's a person to do? What are the obvious (and not so obvious) mistakes to avoid? In our recent research on how purchasers of professional services actually decided to choose their service providers (How Clients Buy: The Benchmark Report on Professional Services Marketing and Selling from the Client Perspective), we asked exactly that, “what problems have you experienced during the sales process.” And then we asked, “If the service provider were to improve on those problems, how much more likely would you be to choose that service provider?” When the votes were tallied up, and all the many possible mistakes - from poor presentation skills to no personal chemistry - were recorded, four problems stood out in both frequency with which they occurred and in how much of a difference any improvement would make. They were, in order of frequency (with verbatims from some of the purchasers): During the sales process the service provider:
- Did not understand my needs.
”Don't try to sell me everything. Be honest and recommend the things I need, realizing that the happier I am with you the first time I use you, the more likely I am to come back and also refer others to you."
- Did not listen to me.
"Let me explain what I need and what I'm trying to do before second-guessing me."
- Did not convince me of the value I would receive from using his / her services.
”Patience, patience, patience. I will take the time to make sure the engagement is right, rather than entering into an engagement that isn't the best for my company. I'd rather have a firm tell me that they think a broader or more narrow engagement is more appropriate than try to make themselves fit into an engagement that isn't quite right."
- Did not craft compelling solutions to meet my needs.
“Craft a value proposition that I can believe at a price I can afford. Show me something to illustrate the return on my investment by signing with the provider."
The chart below gives you a compelling snapshot of the research results. Very simply, not only do many of your competitors (and most likely you) make these mistakes that kill the sale, but if you fixed just these four not so little things listed above, your chances of closing the sale increase dramatically. And since so many of your competitors are making the same mistakes, you can actually start to differentiate yourself as a service provider who listens, understands needs, provides value, and crafts compelling solutions to specific needs in the business development process without a referral, and before they even work with you. 
So the next time you are about to engage in a new sales conversation, think about these four not so little things and how they can make a huge impact on your ability to start a new relationship and gain a new client. The prospects have spoken. Are you listening? |