Think Like a Consultant to Sell Beyond the Sale
A few columns ago, we talked about the power of questions to keep a sales conversation focused on customer problems and needs. We even came to a tacit agreement (didn’t we?) that an effective sale can’t happen without asking questions – that questions allow us to gather information, diagnose a prospect’s biggest business problems and craft a cure for them.
All of that sounds innocent enough, but if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that approach to sales is a step down the path of consultancy – not just consultative selling, but truly consulting with your customers, far beyond what’s necessary to sell some servers or software.
Peter Drucker once wrote that the greatest strength of a consultant is to be ignorant and ask questions, and that’s just what I’ve been advocating all this time. I’ve been leading you down the path of becoming that dreaded “c” word to your customers and prospective customers. But why?
If you’ve been in the IT game long enough, you’ll probably guess that this is about margins. After all, consulting is really just another word for professional services, right? And everybody knows professional services have those killer margins.
That’s all true, but it’s not the point. You see, nearly anyone can sell the products and services you’re selling. And nearly anyone can compete with you on price.
But does anyone else out there have your brains? If so, you might want to give George Romero a call. But if not, you’ve just stumbled upon the most powerful product you can sell – your unique ideas, perspectives and experience. In short, your brains.
If you can take ideas like the ones presented in this series of articles or from any source of your choice, make them your own and then fit them into solving your customers’ toughest problems, you’re well on your way to that Holy Grail of sales – customer entanglement. And there’s no more powerful way to add value for all your partners.
When you act as a consultant – that is, offering your unique perspective, experience, skills and knowledge to your customers to help them do things better, faster and cheaper – you’ll not only have repeat buyers, but you’ll have customers who don’t WANT to do business without you. They’ll want you at their sides for every decision – from long-term strategy to short-term tactics.
And when their business decisions – informed by your wise advice and enlightened self-interest – lead to IT purchases, who do you think they’ll want to buy from? It won’t be a conversation about price. It won’t be a conversation about speeds and feeds. It might not even be a conversation at all. It’ll be an automatic sale, a natural outcome of a mutually trusting, beneficial and entangled relationship.
And you’ll have the “c” word to thank.
Give some thought to how you can take consulting to the next level with your customers and prospective customers. Are you taking every opportunity to add value with the power of your brains? Are you doing everything you can to help your partners, both upstream and downstream? Are you creating entangled business relationships that last beyond a transaction? If the answer to any of those questions is no, take some time to figure out what’s holding you back and how you can remove those obstacles.
Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant
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