It’s been lost in the couch all this time. Along with a few safety pins and some spare change, that little piece of sales expertise you’ve been missing might come in very handy.
There are few things more frustrating than spending hours on a challenging jigsaw puzzle and coming up one piece short.
Building a professional services firm is also challenging. And frustrating. It starts with a few practitioners—experts—who do everything. Then you add more hands to do the work. And someone to manage the books. Then HR and IT and maybe marketing. These are all important functions of your business and someone needs to be focused on them for things to get done properly.
So what about sales? In your firm, is sales the missing puzzle piece?
You understand that sales is important… in concept. But you don’t use the word sales, you don’t sell, you don’t have salespeople, and the whole idea of selling makes you uneasy and uncomfortable. After all, salespeople are pushy, slimy, and tricky.
So it’s not really missing, per se, but more like you didn’t have it in the first place, and maybe you didn’t even want it. But let’s assume that sales is important. Let’s consider the fact that your expertise alone is not going to help you grow your business the way you want to, so somebody should be paying attention to sales. So let’s rethink this.
Marketing has it
Your first thought is that marketing does this. Marketing has a really big umbrella with many things under it, so maybe sales is there. But marketing and sales are not the same. One can differentiate marketing and sales activities this way: marketing is one-to-many and sales is one-to-one. That doesn’t mean that marketing is never one-to-one and that sales is never one-to-many, but generally it holds true. This Hubspot post and this article and this one expand upon the difference between the two if you need someone else’s thoughts on this.
So if marketing isn’t doing sales, and if the sales function is truly “missing”, what does that mean? Most of the time, that means that sales is not formally recognized and prioritized, nobody is focused on it, nobody is overseeing it, there are no formal processes in place, and the sales function has no defined “center” or shape.
Accounting and HR have all of these things. Service delivery has all of these things. Marketing likely has resources and processes and some defined responsibilities. Sales… likely not. Ok, so it might be missing after all.
Actually, you had it all along
Yes, it was right there in front of you the whole time. Maybe you just didn’t recognize it or realize that you were selling. You were having those one-to-one conversations all along. If so, what are some other things that you and others could or should be doing that might indicate the presence of a sales function? What can help you find sales? Rather than looking under the couch, try some of these:
- Client Account Planning – Important, existing client accounts deserve a plan. In sales, Account Development Plans have three main objectives: deepen existing relationships, establish new relationships, and uncover new business opportunities. Since the practitioners have the closest relationships with their clients, this is their responsibility. This is not the job of marketing.
- Advancing new business opportunities from Qualification to Close – This is traditional sales work that takes Qualified Leads and advances them through your sales pipeline to Close through a series of activities and conversations. This takes more effort than most would realize, and this work falls squarely on the shoulders of the people doing the selling. There is rigor and organization and process in this. There is a right way and a wrong way for this work to be done.
- Outbound prospecting – Prospecting is the finding part. This seems like marketing, but it is very targeted, proactive outreach by a single practitioner, calling or emailing or meeting with other people to uncover new business. Each of your experts should have a list of professional contacts with whom they communicate regularly. And they should also be exploring ways to grow their network and connections through referrals and introductions.
Marketing can play a supporting role in all of these things, but none of them are, by definition, marketing. It’s up to the expert to do them.
So real selling is kind of lost, or missing, or at least a bit foggy in most professional services firms. For the reasons above, and also for the simple fact that experts don’t sell. But you can find sales if you look hard enough, and maybe if you ask for a little help.
Wainwright Insight provides fractional sales management and consulting to organizations who want to take control of their pipeline and build future sales leaders—but could use a little, part-time expertise. I work with professional services firms, and the experts in those firms, who need to get better at chasing and winning big deals when the stakes are high.