Should Consultants Learn How to Sell?

To answer that question, let me present two different scenarios that might sound all too familiar to some of you.

First Scenario

You have decided to become a Consultant…you are an expert in your field…you feel you have a lot to offer companies so you hang up your shingle and wait for people to beat a path to your door. The problem is that no one knows where your door is….who you are…or …what you do. One of my favorite slogans is “a person who doesn’t market is like a man winking in the dark; he knows what he is doing, but nobody else does”.

So you start attending events, develop a Letter of Introduction and a mailer. You either buy a list, use the phone book or maybe a chamber list and you make a large mail-out to companies who you believe to be good prospective clients. Once again, you wait for your phone to ring off the hook or for people to knock on your door and very little happens. Your typical return on a mass mailing is 1-3%. What now?

You call the leads that have come in and you finally get an appointment, thinking that if you can just get in front of someone and tell them how good you are at what you do – that they will immediately hire you ….but they don’t. You have had a couple of appointments and everyone seems to be saying no. You start doubting yourself and wondering if you should go back to the corporate world and suffer through it until you can retire. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

I can’t tell you how many times I have talked with potential consultants, experienced consultants going through a dry spell and even business owners and hear the above scenario played over and over again.

Second Scenario

As a new consultant or experienced consultant going through a dry-spell, you decided to take the time to study a little about sales and attend a sales training seminar. You discover that everyone is a “natural born” sales person (even you) and that you have been selling and persuading people all of your life.

You discover that “anytime you persuade someone to do something they were not thinking about doing before they met you…you sold them”. You just used other words to describe it instead of the word selling -- words like persuading, influencing, consulting, counseling or teaching.

As part of the sales training you discover that by combining a Letter of Introduction with a follow-up telephone prospecting call you increase your propensity to obtain business. You learned how to develop an effective telephone message (script) that tags-on to the Letter of Introduction you developed so there is a coordinated, common message being delivered to your potential customers.

You also learned that part of prospecting is a “numbers” game and ...that some of the seeds you plant today will take root immediately in your prospective customer’s minds and some won’t take root until some time in the future. However, you also learned that if you don’t plant them today…you won’t have a future.

As part of the training, you discovered how to develop a continuous, sustained “Trickle Mail” prospecting system so that you plant seeds every single day. You learned that a smaller mailing, followed by a phone call works much more effectively than a mass mail-out with no follow-up. Your prospecting efforts begin to kick-in and you finally get the opportunity to sit with a prospective client.

During the seminar, you learned how to develop and deliver an effective presentation, which includes a Six - Step Sales Presentation Model and persuasion skills. You also learned how to develop rapport easily and effortlessly. You discovered how to uncover your client’s needs, problems and desires through effective Qualifying skills and probing questions. You also discovered how to take the benefits of your talents, abilities and recommendations, match them with your potential client’s needs, problems and desires and present it in such a way that they now understand “why” they need to hire you to help them.

Within a couple of minutes of first meeting with your client, you know how you can help them. However, you've learned that you should not give them your recommendations until you have had time to develop a comprehensive proposal and practiced how you will present your ideas and recommendations to them.

You learned that you should schedule the next appointment before you leave the first appointment, because -- the chances are much greater that your customer will keep an appointment already scheduled …than make an appointment that has not yet been scheduled.

You return on the second appointment, give a professional presentation on the benefits of following your recommendations and attempt to close the sale. Of course, your customer will probably give you an objection. In the past, you may have viewed the objection as a “no,” thanked them for their time and left. But because you learned several techniques for Overcoming Objections, you easily and professionally overcome the objection, ease your client’s concerns and seamlessly Close the sale.

Summary

Learning Selling skills enables you to do more effectively, what you have been doing all your life…persuade people to accept your point of view, ideas, opinions, belief, product or service. It gives you a strategy, a system and a roadmap that you can adapt to your product or service to help your client make the best decision for their business…hire you!

Learning Sales techniques does not make you more manipulative anymore than learning martial arts makes you more dangerous -- unless you choose to use them in the wrong way. Sales training does give you a set of essential tools that enables you to present you and your business in a persuasive, positive, professional manner.

With each new skill-set and technique you learn, develop and use… you increase your propensity to sell your potential customer. If you learn how to: (1) prospect more effectively, (2) develop rapport more easily, (3) discover your customer’s communication style and personality type, (4) properly qualify your customer, (5) present your recommendations and ideas in terms of benefits to your customer, (6) overcome objections, and finally (7) close the sale, you increase the odds that your potential customer will do business with you and not with your competitor. Each new skill ratchets up the chances of your success.

Doesn’t it make sense to put the ball in your court as often as you can?

Should a new consultant or even a seasoned veteran learn how to sell? Absolutely!

Visit my website and check out the Training Schedule to find out when my next public sales training seminar will be and you will learn all this and more.