Consulting

In selling consulting understanding wins more work than persuading

It’s time to listen and understand the explicit needs of clients. This means that turning up to a meeting with a prospective new client and presenting a slide show of your subject matter expertise is just plain missing the point. I think consulting is about the difference you make and not what you do. So presuming that you can present someone with what they need before you really understand their explicit needs suggests a level of complacency that will dent your success.
You may be familiar with the results of this approach. Usually your enthusiasm will result in the client asking for a proposal. You will put this into your pipeline and you will tell your boss the good news. Then at each pipeline review you will be explaining why the decision has moved back another month. This is because you haven’t managed to determine the explicit needs of the client as you were too busy telling them what you did. The proposal probably contains everything that you will do rather than what difference you will make. You will also be focusing on the day rate rather than the value and find that what was once easy access to key people has begun to disappear.
There are a number of approaches you could adopt and the one I would recommend is SPIN. It sits nicely alongside the consulting process and mirrors the steps of a professional project management approach so is accessible to those involved in deep delivery. It also works for the super sales types so can be a common language for the whole practice or business.
With this approach you are now ready to put together your value proposition tree which need to be market, client and sponsor specific. I’ll put together a short review if there is demand for it.

In the mean time remember, you get more consulting work if you see to understand rather than try to influence.

© 2009 Biologize.