First of all, in product sales you must fully understand the features and benefits of your particular product. In services sales, you must first completely understand the unique situation your client faces at that moment. Product salespeople use the same set of questions each time to determine if the client is a good fit for their product. Services salespeople use a consultative approach to figure out exactly how to develop a solution for that client’s situation. A great services rep knows how to fit his or her organization’s capabilities to the needs of the client, not the other way around. They have to be able to quickly gain a client’s trust and establish enough credibility that the client invests the time to explain their business problems. Services salespeople spend most of their time listening and asking questions.
That doesn’t mean there’s a completely different approach to each situation. You must know the underlying delivery model for your particular company’s service. In a services sale, you’ve most likely performed 70% of the effort many times before. Just as a product salesperson needs to know the features and benefits, a services salesperson has to know their company’s expertise, best practices, prior successes, and prior failures. For every project we do at my company, probably 30% of our effort is tailored to the specific organization we’re working with. The other 70% are proven processes that we know work in most every situation. We can prove to our clients they’ve worked before, and that they’ll work again for them.
As contradictory as it may sound, an excellent services firm tries to make as much of their service offering as possible repeatable. In other words, you must try to productize your services. That doesn’t mean you will eventually be able to sell just features and benefits. As I mentioned earlier, about a third of our approach is always customized to the client’s specific situation. You might be able to increase that percentage by focusing on a specific business process or industry solution. You may be able to grow that repeatable portion to 80% or even 90%. However, that won’t close the deal. The other factor you must weigh is that the benefits realized from a solution can vary dramatically from client to client. Also your success many times relies on the company’s willingness to adopt your solution. A good service salesperson is a businessperson as well. They need to be able to put themselves in the client’s seat, customize your service offerings to fit the client’s needs, and then leverage your organization’s experience, capabilities, and most importantly, your company’s potential to create a solution that becomes less intangible, and much more tangible.
The hardest part about selling a service is giving the customer the confidence that what they’re buying is real. By demonstrating similar situations and experiences along with your company’s capabilities, you’ll win the deal more often than you lose it. Now, all of this works great once if your company can back it up. As a management team, you need to give your sales team the confidence to put themselves out on a limb. It’s a little disconcerting selling 70% of a solution if you don’t have confidence in your team delivering the other 30%. When it works, though, your organization, services, and sales confidence grows, and your team loves their job because of the variety and challenge.
My last bit of advice is on measurement. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. In the technology industry, we always measure whether we’re meeting deadlines and staying within a budget. Determining a return on investment is a key decision factor with any technology project in this day and age. It’s easy to determine if a car goes fast, or if a piece of software generates the proper report. It’s a little tougher to measure whether your employees are more productive, or if your customers’ experience is more satisfying. Make sure you have a consistent model for measuring ROI when you approach the client. Figure out how to measure success before you begin the project. By developing repeatable processes, you will be able to articulate to a client the expected outcomes and agree on the project’s success.
The key for any successful intangible sale is to paint as clear a picture of the final outcome or product as possible. A good services salesperson is inquisitive; they ask a lot of questions and listen more than they talk. They’re empathetic to the client’s problems and are able build trust quickly to gain more time to build the proper solution. They know how their delivery model supports the client, not the other way around. Finally, service sales professionals believe in their product, expect success, and know how to measure it, and they will prove to their client that they’ve met their goals and provided a strong return on investment.
About the Author
Jon Whitcomb is Vice President of Sales for Digineer Inc., a technology and management consulting firm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mr. Whitcomb has been in sales and marketing in the technology industry for the past sixteen years. In his current role at Digineer, Mr. Whitcomb has led the sales team to achieve 324% growth over the last three years. More information is available at www.digineer.com.
