My second commandment of selling services is to Communicate the Invisible, in which I point out the many--and major--differences between tangible products and intangible services, and what an effective seller must do differently to sell services.

A really big selling sin involves expecting customers to connect the dots--to understand issues, concepts, ideas, and services that they have little or no experience with. It is up to the services sales expert to help the customer make those connections. The best services sellers are masters at turning feelings into facts and concepts into cash through the use of stories and analogies.

Here are a few behaviors that I’ve observed the very best services sellers deploy:

1. Convey the importance of immediate action. Confirm that the issue being discussed is a business priority and also a personal objective of the customer, thus requiring immediate action.

2. Provide both positive and negative case examples that the customer can relate to in order to bolster your cause, spotlighting what businesses and individuals gained by taking action or what they lost by not taking action. Actively involve the customer in:

• Exploring the potential positive impact on both the business and the individual of addressing the issue.
• Exploring the potential negative impact on both the business and the individual of not addressing the issue.

3. Use a financial calculator to quantify the impact of taking or not taking action. Let the customer provide the inputs to the financial calculations using figures and terms relevant to his or her personally. Whether ROIs or TCOs or Net Present Value, it is good to make some suggestions, but let the customer come up with the numbers.

Explain your methodology in detail using already-developed figures and diagrams, or manually put them on the whiteboard with the customer, describing each action and the rationale for each step.

Break things down into stages to make it easier for the customer to understand, and then ask him to think through how it would work in his organization. This lowers anxiety as he applies the concept to his own reality.

Share examples of similar customers facing similar issues and how you tailored your approach to meet their unique needs and made them successful.

Predict where potential problems may occur, and then explain your remedy to pre-empt each issue and explain the actions you will take to minimize both time and hassle for the customer.

4. Share best practices. Customers find it reassuring that you have enough experience to know what the best practices are and that they are incorporated into your approach. By asking the customer how these best practices can apply to him, it helps him both relate cognitively and connect at an emotional level. This is a real confidence builder and something that can be made quite visible in the mind of your prospect.

5. Communicate stories and analogies that your prospect can understand and relate to. For example, the prospect may never have purchased a service contract for his equipment, but he may have purchased a service contract on his company’s copier. By asking him the reasons for his decision, he can better relate to the benefits of uptime, convenience, no hassles, etc., of your offering. If he has no business experience with service contracts, he probably has some personal experience, such as purchasing an extended warranty on a high-definition TV or other large purchase. Explore his thinking and relate it back to your offering.

In addition, a customer may never have purchased a business assessment before, but he can probably relate to the need for a physical checkup before taking on a new sport or strenuous activity.

Furthermore, if you find yourself in a competitive position, you might make the medical analogy that your organization is not a general practitioner but a heart specialist, and thus the most appropriate choice for an important decision such as the one the customer is facing.

Other non-business analogies can help bridge the familiarity gap as well. For example, if you know your customer is a big football fan, you can use the concept of “the huddle,” “going deep,” “game plan,” and many others as a way to relate the importance of ideas in terms the customer can understand.

6. Provide write-ups of high-recognition reference accounts that tout the value of you and your offerings. This acts as a shortcut to decision making. The more complex and unfamiliar the situation to the customer, the more he will look to references to help him decide. If two or three well respected people in well respected companies with similar issues are happy with your offerings, your customer will likely be willing to accept the premise that he will be happy as well.

Apply these concepts and you will become a master of selling the invisible.

Tags: selling services

My first commandment of selling services is to Clarify Complex Customer Issues in which I strongly state the critical importance of always starting with an assessment. How in the world can you make an accurate diagnosis and recommendations regarding complex situations from just one or two client conversations? If you go to your doctor complaining about chest pains, are you comfortable with her recommendation for heart surgery without more data? I don’t think so! You’d expect her to request a personal and family medical history, lifestyle inventory, blood tests, scans, and whatever else might provide insights. Not doing so would be medical negligence.

Your clients naturally have their own biases about their business and their world. For example, think of all the different perspectives of the people impacted in considering new software or hardware in a hospital. The CFO is probably most interested in cost savings. The CNO (head nurse) may well be most focused on improving customer care, with cost not being an issue. A physician may take personal pride in having the very latest, most innovative technology. A lab director may be most concerned with speeding up a cumbersome process. Consciously or subconsciously, each will see the situation differently and shape and articulate their desires from their personal perspective. Furthermore, even the most broadminded, intelligent, altruistic person only has limited information--rarely does he have knowledge of the broad systemic factors that impact success.

Therefore, making recommendations without a thorough examination of all relevant information is selling negligence!
Make selling an assessment as part of your modus operandi and reap the rewards.

Want more thoughts on assessments? Read my article, “The Secrets of the Super Sellers: Always Start with an Assessment.”

Tags: professional services, selling services

In a recent article* I wrote about the importance of providing customer choices, but limiting them to two options or ideally three. Doing so will lead to more sales and happier customers.

Now I’d like to share the best practices on how to do it:

1. Make it standard operating procedure to offer three choices. Require it of your sellers in all they do--from making suggestions during initial discussions to outlining three options in formal proposals. Customers like it, and are more likely to buy if you offer three alternatives.
2. Craft your three options based upon value potential that is easily discernable by the customer. Your comprehensive option should be both broad and deep, and hence will be the most expensive. Your bare-bones option should be the minimum offering that you are still confident in to meet customer requirements. This leaves your high-value option somewhere in the middle. Assuming that all three of your options are strong on value, about two-thirds of your customers will choose your middle choice.
3. Always start with your most expensive, comprehensive option, followed by your high value option, then finally your bare-bones option. This goes against a “logical” sequence from low to high, but this high to low approach has strong emotional appeal. Starting high makes your other two choices seem much more affordable by comparison. I am sure that you have seen this before in other scenarios. For example, if you go into a clothing store to buy a suit, shoes, and a belt, the savvy store clerk will always sell you the suit first. Once you have laid out $1,000 for the suit, paying $250 for shoes seems very reasonable, and a $40 belt seems like a bargain.

*Alexander, James. 2011. “Less Is Better than More: Offering Too Many Choices Is Bad Business.” http://www.alexanderstrategists.com/art_less_is_more.html

Tags: professional services, selling services

In this week's Alexander Insights article, the “The Four R’s of Services Account Management,” I talk about the services account manager's (SAMs) expanding role when it comes to getting new business. In my opinion, having SAMs be more active in selling is an absolute necessity. However, not all SAMs like this change in role. When I discuss this new expectation in my workshops, I am often met with rolling eyes and people sitting back in their chair staring at the ceiling. When I ask what the problem is, I'm often told (sometimes defiantly), “If I'd wanted to sell, I'd gone into sales. I like to fix things.”

My feeling is that this reaction originated from some very early bad experience with salespeople who were manipulators from the Dark Side and not true sales professionals. Probably you, and everyone reading this, can remember at least one time in your childhood where you came across a vacuum cleaner salesperson following a script trying to trick your parents into buying something they didn’t want, or a slick-talking house siding seller similar to Danny DeVito in the movie Tin Men*, or maybe some selling shenanigans you observed in your own sales force (heaven forbid!).

In those situations the seller was only interested in making the sale and making personal gain, showing no interest whatsoever in the potential value to the customer. THIS IS NOT PROFESSIONAL SELLING.

Professional selling is influencing with integrity, making recommendations that are in the best interest of the customer, actively looking for ways to help the customer do things easier, better, faster, cheaper. Guess what? That is exactly what the professional management consultant does, and the technical support rep, and clerk at the clothing store, and the field service engineer, and the SAM at a key customer’s site. In fact, if a customer-facing person is not actively looking for ways to improve a customer’s situation, he is not acting as a professional.

*Great movie, by the way. I’d suggest you show it to your organization as an example of not what you mean by selling.

Tags: selling services, professional services

As savvy politicians and insightful leaders know, there is always a “90-day window” that opens after any significant change. This window is the time frame in which change adoption is the most critical--late enough for individual performers to have some familiarity with the effects of new roles, organization structures, and processes, and early enough so that organizational inertia has not stepped in, blinding individuals to objective evaluation and limiting their openness to the necessary enhancements required of any new effort worth doing. How this “time of correction” is dealt with has a marked effect upon long-term results.



Yet, it’s amazing to see, in situation after situation, this marvelous opportunity wasted on endless meetings on tactics, discussions with no plans, and speeches with no action. Soon the chance to move ahead is twittered away as the window closes, returning the old “way we did it before” behaviors and the mindsets that shape them.

So, adopt the mantra of sea captains of old preparing for an important voyage: “There is not a moment to lose.” Favorable winds can quickly shift direction, and incoming tides always turn to outgoing tides, making navigation difficult or impossible.

When the winds of change blow open the window of opportunity--be ready. Act as if you are facing an outgoing tide, making your every action advance your agenda while you still have the water to make headway. This is the time to lead, not manage; to be bold, not meek; and to move fast, not slow. Your dash and daring will yield confidence and commitment, speeding the voyage to success while keeping your best sailors from jumping ship.

Tags: leadership