The Fifth Commandment of Selling Professional Services

Coordinate the selling team
by James “Alex” Alexander, Ed.D.

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

Yes, I grant that there are a few highly talented sellers who have the capabilities to do it all: fluently discuss all issues on all topics and communicate the appropriate and powerful value proposition to everyone from the board to the bench. However, even your star sellers shine brighter when you provide them with strong support to help carry the selling burden. Yes, even Batman has a butler.

Selling sin: Trying to sell it all.

But 99 percent of sellers can’t do it all, and organizations that expect sellers by themselves to effectively sell complex products, traditional services and professional services into complex environments with complex customers are kidding themselves and committing a selling sin.

Top sales organizations provide ample selling horsepower support for their sellers. Let’s examine what’s required to sell complex services and solutions.

Getting the business

Top organizations use a team approach that requires four main roles to get and grow business. Responsibilities are as follows.

Research analyst: A critical aspect of effective prospecting is having access to the right information to qualify the potential, gain the initial appointment and converse effectively with the prospect.* Your top sellers understand the importance of conducting industry and account research, but with the ongoing pressures of 90- and 30-day numbers, few will take the time to do it right.

Furthermore, isn’t the time of your best sellers better spent elsewhere? Why not use recent business school graduates with strong computer and analytical skills to do the task of research? They will do the job better and at far less expense.

Research analysts do the upfront research on the selected prospective account. They examine all available information and determine market/industry trends, issues, core and best practices. They explore specific account issues such as business challenges, opportunities, priorities and defined initiatives in place. Their background analysis on the senior management team defines both individual business issues as well as desired personal wins.

Assuming that the information passes minimum qualification standards, they create a report that contains “must know” facts about the industry and the company, charts showing trends, a stakeholder analysis showing the business issues and personal wins of the prospect’s key players and recommended problems/opportunities to explore. A quality job by the research analyst greatly improves the likelihood of getting appointments with the right people in the right accounts for the right reasons.

Business developer: The business developer has one job — to open doors and establish a beach head within a targeted prospect. Using the report from the research analyst as a starting point, business developers use their business acumen, industry contacts, strong communication skills and personal tenacity to make account entry.

Rainmaker: After the business developer sets the stage and makes the appointment, it is now up to the rainmaker to make things happen. Called an account manager in many product companies, hopefully, the rainmaker is a consultative seller and strong in business acumen and building trust.

In a traditional professional services organization, this role usually falls to a seasoned partner. Whatever the title, rainmakers, often with supporters, confirm the prospects’ issues and importance, demonstrate competence, outline a go-ahead strategy, build confidence and urgency, create relationships and ultimately close the business. Competent rainmakers are experts in understanding personalities and have a professional presence that communicates knowledge, trust and commitment.

Specialist: In most scenarios, the rainmaker leads the selling team, bringing in a specialist or two as necessary. Often, specialists will be experts in some aspect of technology. For example, a common practice within many technology companies is to assign dedicated specialists, who are usually product/technology experts in a pre-sales capability (e.g., system engineers or system architects), to product salespeople.

In most of these situations, the seller addresses the commercial side of things and the pre-sales specialist deals with a technology counterpart on the issues under discussion (e.g., data migration, customer relationship management (CRM), network security). Often, their role is to define statements of work (SOWs) to propose to the prospect.

If the described specialists have a good understanding of services, all the better. They may be able to aptly communicate the value of services and position them correctly with the prospect. If not, as in many cases, management should involve another specialist from the services-side in getting the initial business.

Depending on the issues, needs and goals, that person could be a consultant with deep knowledge of the services being positioned (such as an assessment), the actual services account manager (SAM) who would handle the account once the core solution and services are sold, or maybe a manager from one of the services groups able to clearly articulate the value of the prescribed services.

The emphasis has been on technology and services, but depending on the situation, the rainmaker might bring in a specialist from a range of areas. The specialist could be from finance, operations or maybe a senior executive from your company, who “specializes” in talking business opportunities with select prospects.

The specialist need not be employed by your company. For example, in my business, if it takes having expertise in acquisitions, I bring in an experienced acquisitions pro to be part of both the selling and delivering side of the engagement. If my client wants deep expertise in telecom, I add a former telecom executive to my team. I do whatever it takes to add value and sell the deal.

Selling Sin: “Planning on the fly.”

You have taken great pains to get a lot of horsepower on your selling team, possibly flying in busy specialists from all around the country or the world for a key prospect meeting. If you add up all the opportunity costs, you could easily have tens of thousands of dollars invested in time alone.

With that said, I’m amazed to hear “Let’s meet in the customer lobby 20 minutes before our meeting to talk things over” or “Just follow my lead” before entering the board room. This is just crazy. If it is worth involving people, it is worth planning and practicing a dry run, complete with handling questions and objections.

Growing the business

Once the rainmaker closes the deal, the best organizations make a significant change in roles and responsibilities. The major task of the rainmaker is done, and that person’s valuable skills are best served in selling more new business in other accounts. Maintaining some contact at high levels within the account is appropriate to keep a pulse on the business and maintain relationships, but the rainmaker should turn the heavy lifting over to the SAM to nurture and grow the account.

Selling sin: I do the selling around here!

My experience is that the best rainmakers gladly turn over the day-to-day running of the account to the SAM. They realize where their value lies — in new business. However, often the weak sellers find it difficult to let go. One hears them espousing, “That’s my account, and I do the selling around here!” My guess is that they are scared that others in the company will find out how inept they are. It is management’s job to clearly define this role shift and adjust the performance management system accordingly.

The SAM’s job is a big one: to oversee and help ensure that the service/solution lives up to expectations; to make sure that come renewal time, the account signs up again for the recommended services plan; to make sure to present more opportunities; and sell more offerings and to turn the account into a referenceable champion of your company and all that you offer.

This is a challenging task, especially in situations where constant technology problems can tend to justify the SAM as a continual firefighter, reactively jumping from one escalation to the next. To avoid this, it is important that SAM teams contain adequate technical people, those people willing and able to deal with tactical problems quickly while the SAM spends the majority of his or her time proactively addressing strategic opportunities.

Specialists on this will vary but in large, complex accounts, it often makes good business sense to have a dedicated technical account manager (TAM) on the team, ideally reporting to the SAM.

Four best practices for coordinating the sales team

1.      Institute a semiannual account planning system that clearly identifies roles, responsibilities, expectations and timelines.

2.      Make each team member personally responsible for building and managing a relationship with his or her client counterpart.

3.      Change the reward system to award team performance as well as individual performance.

4.      Conduct cross-account sharing with other teams at least every quarter.

Effective team selling takes lots of planning and preparation, but top sales organizations accept this as a necessary requirement and excel at coordinating the sales team.

Distinct best practice: In a high-performance organization, everyone sells everything.

The very best companies instill in all employees that it is everyone’s job to help market/promote/advocate/sell their company and all the offerings it provides to everyone. From the researcher in a lab to the help-desk professional in the support center or the receptionist in the lobby, everyone positively or negatively influences the buying, not only the buying of your products and services, but the perception of your brand. Understanding and acting on the idea that selling is an important part of everyone’s job is a distinct best practice of a few elite organizations and something to strive for. You will notice that within these elite companies, people treat everyone, including partners and suppliers, as highly-valued customers. How about your company?

*For the interested reader, I provide details on this topic in “The First Commandment of Selling Services.”

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About James “Alex” Alexander
Alexander is founder of Alexander Consulting, a management consultancy that helps companies create and implement professional services strategies for product companies. Contact him at 239-671-0740, alex@alexanderstrategists.com or visit www.alexanderstrategists.com.
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