The First Commandment of Selling Services:

Clarify complex customer issues
by James A. Alexander, Ed.D. 

This is the first in a 10-part series on the 10 commandments of selling services. 

The issues of professional services are usually ambiguous, often interrelated and sometimes baffling. That’s why clients get your professional services organization (PSO) involved — to provide not only subject-matter expertise, but also critical thinking, along with a neutral perspective gained from multiple engagements in very similar and very different situations.

This is where sales professionals and their sales teams have the greatest opportunity. They not only add value through communicating capabilities and enabling relationships but also create value through intellect and experience, combined with just the right level of creativity. This initial phase of account involvement is where I believe the professional services sales professional earns his or her keep.

Clearly identifying and defining the problem is more than half the battle. If you don’t get this part of the selling process right, your chances of getting the business are slim. Worse, though, is defining the issues incorrectly but still getting the engagement. This is how you create customers from Hell.

In this scenario, all you can hope for is discovering your error before it is too late, then apologize profusely and pour resources into the fray in an attempt at service recovery. Worst case, and one that appears to be happening more, is that the customer implements the wrong solution and is highly dissatisfied with the outcome, your firm loses money trying to correct the uncorrectable, and you end up with a great loss of time, money and industry reputation.¹

The logical path to clarifying complex customer issues is simple. Take these three steps:

1. Do your homework. 

Before even attempting to schedule the prospect meeting, do some homework. 

Selling Sin: Doing little or no up front research and relying on your great intellect and formidable questioning skills to clarify customer issues. 

If the prospect is important enough to meet, it is important enough to do a little research. The following is the minimum requirement for your preparation in having a prospect conversation. 

Review your internal knowledge base: If your prospect’s organization is a past or current customer, access salesforce.com or whatever you are using for a knowledge base to gain insights from history. It is not uncommon that customer issues from a few months or a few years ago still linger on … The customer may not have accepted past recommendations or following the recommendations might not have delivered the hoped-for results. Augment this record review by talking to others in your company who know the prospect and gain their insights. 

Search online: Next, dedicate at least an hour to an online search. If your prospect is a publically traded company in the U.S., start by digesting its latest annual report. The first two to five pages are a treasure of information for sellers to get up to speed fast. 

These paragraphs outline the successes and non-successes of your prospective customer’s recent history, the trends, challenges, goals and initiatives that those on the top see as critical to future success. This provides you with a framework and direction as to how the benefits of your services might help your prospect achieve its goals. 

Tap your network: Take the time to learn from your peers and contacts outside of your organization. If you know other people inside your prospect’s company, give them a call to get a feel for both what’s going on and the current priorities. If you know other non-competitive sellers who deal with this organization, take them to lunch and pick their brains. Test your assumptions out on people who can provide worthwhile feedback. 

At this point, you should know your company’s history with the account, the account issues and priorities, the goals the customer wishes to achieve and knowledge of the decision-makers. You are now ready to schedule the appointment.

2. Confirm what you know and question what you don’t. 

Make every minute of your initial prospect conversation count. 

Selling sin: Walking away from the initial meeting without a full picture of the prospect’s biggest challenges. 

Demonstrate respect by targeting the conversation around the most important things to your prospect such as biggest challenges, most important opportunities or personal goals. 

Position your offering: Take control of the call, express your goal for the meeting and share your assumptions about your prospect’s important issues. Once the prospect confirms your assumptions, you have earned the right to start probing to see if there is a probable business fit. 

Use the four I’s probing strategy: Here is a highly effective probing model that I teach in my selling workshops, called the Four I’s Probing Strategy: Issues-Importance-Impact-Investigate 

It goes something like this: 

Issues

Seller: “Mr. Prospect, if I’ve heard you correctly, your top two issues for this coming year are meeting the new reporting requirements and standardizing the systems with the new companies that you have acquired. Is that correct?” 

Customer: “Yes, you have it.” 

Importance

Seller: “Let’s take meeting the new reporting standards … Is that important to your success or just nice to do?” 

Customer: “Oh, it is important all right. Accomplishing that is one of my goals for the year.” 

Impact

Seller: “I see. Please tell me, what is the impact to you if you don’t get it done?” 

Customer: “Well, my bonus is tied directly to it. I’ve promised my kids that I’d use that money to put in a new swimming pool. If I don’t come through, it will not be pretty at home.” (You observe the blood drain from the customer’s face.) 

Investigate

Seller: “Yes, sounds critical … I’d hate to be in that situation myself. Mind if we spend a few minutes talking about how we could work together to investigate this further?” 

Customer: “Of course!” 

This probing model is simple but powerful. It keeps you in charge of the sales call, shows respect to the customer and only takes a few minutes. Give it a try — I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

3. Turn your first sale into an assessment 

Once the prospect is warm to the idea of investigating the issue together, your sales call objective becomes getting the customer to agree with having your organization conduct an assessment. The more complex the issue, the more inexperienced the prospect is in dealing with this type of issue, the more that an assessment should be a requirement to moving forward. 

Selling Sin: Allowing your prospects to diagnose their problem and prescribe the cure. 

You are the expert, not the customers. It is good to know what they have tried in the past to address the issue and what the results were. It may be a starting point to learn the prospects’ thoughts on the root cause of the problem and what they feel might be a way of dealing with it, but that is about it. 

No self-respecting professional makes a recommendation without valid data, and a 30-minute conversation with one individual will not give you the information you need to make viable recommendations regarding complex situations. 

Receive these assessment benefits: The value of conducting an assessment is huge. Done properly, it provides the facts and the figures, the potholes and the possibilities, the baseline to begin and the realistic rewards that can result. Furthermore, involving customer personnel in the assessment provides a richer context to the findings. You will also learn how much change the customer can realistically accept.

Even if the ideal solution is to scrap an existing system and start over, it would be futile to recommend it if you learn that there is no way the customer would do it — a modest change that a customer will accept always trumps the grand solution that it will never accept. 

Finally, by involving key customer players in the assessment, you start building relationships — relationships that will give you the edge in getting the business and give you the edge that the implementation will deliver on your promise. 

The question is, why wouldn’t you start with an assessment? 

Use these best practices:

• Always do your homework. If it is not worth your time to gather facts up front, then making the call is not worth your time either. 
• Create and formalize an account-probing strategy, such as the four I’s strategy. Make the best use of your time and account personnel by asking planned “high-yield” questions, with appropriate follow-ups to crystallize and deepen understanding. 
• Require an assessment up front with every prospect. Along with gathering the necessary technical information, include a broad base of account stakeholders made up of executives, functional heads, technical experts and users.  
• When your competitors are entrenched, use a special type of assessment, an audit, to break their hold on your prospects. Use industry benchmarks and best practices; use the audit to show the missed potential of your competition. This will open the door to a willingness to change. 
• Capture and convey internal learning and experiences through a user-friendly knowledge management system. Make it easy for everyone who touches the customer to learn from experiences. 

Remember stuff rolls downhill. Before making recommendations, always start by clarifying complex customer issues.

1999. Few clients “very satisfied” with consultants. Consultants News. Kennedy Information Research Group.

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About James Alexander

James Alexander is founder of Alexander Consulting, a management consultancy that creates and implements professional services strategies for product companies. Contact him at 239-671-0740 or alex@alexanderstrategists.com, or visit www.alexanderstrategists.com.