Sales for Non-Sales Professionals: The Consulting Quandary

These past four weeks, we’ve discussed sales or sales-like transactions embedded in social spaces, passion projects, and not-for-profit campaigns. Perhaps the context is as simple as setting a date up with a friend, or as complex as changing someone’s attitudes toward climate change. Take advantage of what sales can teach us, even if your first instinct isn’t to think of what’s at hand as a sales transaction. Shake off the “sales is dirty” bias that pervades many enterprises.

How does the conversation shift if you work as a consultant? In this realm, you have usually trained in business either as an undergraduate or through a graduate program; your company may even sponsor your MBA degree. My college friends who went into consulting were natural leaders, good at naming systems and articulating solutions, and I assumed they were comfortable being in for-profit business. Their jobs usually came with the promise of travel, and the rewarding novelty of different client accounts.

Yet there’s a high turnover in consulting, with most employees staying at their first firm for just 2–4 years. Some people tire of long weekdays and serving external clients in other time zones, so they search for in-house roles or seek opportunities at other firms. But there’s an elephant in the room: sales. People jump into consulting excited to build their expertise and offer it to clients, without understanding the need to drive business by expanding engagements with existing clients or finding new clients. Then they leave, because they’re not comfortable with procuring sales. How can we change this pattern?

BY ANY OTHER NAME

Before consulting, there was auditing. Auditing is objective, outside accounting that emphasizes financial data. If auditing shows the what of fiscal struggle then consulting names the why that, once recognized, can lead to a solution. When process inefficiencies are tanking the bottom line, a consultant can suggest where to make cuts or optimize them using best practices. Given poor returns on the marketing budget, a consultant can identify where customer acquisition is going wrong. Consultants also create holistic portraits that capture core organizational values such as workplace culture, leadership styles, and messaging. By cross-pollinating a client’s specific challenges with expertise and creative insights, a consultant can lay the groundwork for improving performance.

Naming how to solve a problem is great, but a strategy is useless without tactical moves to back it up. That’s why many clients are open to additional engagements to implement recommended solutions. Most firms have a portfolio that includes helping companies with staffing, IT support, supply chain, certifications, and other organizational issues. Whereas auditing and consulting relationships are kept separate to prevent conflicts of interest—meaning that if you hire a company for one, you don’t hire them for the other—consulting can be and often is nested inside a larger array of professional services.

A question every consultant needs to ask themselves about their role is: am I expected to only deliver on a scope of work, or am I expected to grow and nurture relationships? Consulting firms expect their professionals to become trusted advisors by way of their functional expertise. Some firms expect their professionals to parlay the role of a trusted advisor to help clients solve additional known—and sometimes previously unknown—challenges, which leads to a larger engagement with the firm’s professional services teams.

Maestro Group helps companies achieve more by showing teams how to shift to a sales mindset. Rather than treating sales as the burden of a small cohort, we believe sales are every employee’s responsibility. Many consulting firms agree, yet the notion of adopting a “sales mindset” causes some consultants to balk. But a “sales mindset” doesn’t require pushing a product or service at every turn—the exact opposite. Having a sales mindset means such qualities as asking open-ended questions; demonstrating the curiosity and empathy that makes someone a trusted advisor; and bringing executive presence to the interactions you have, whether virtual or in-person.

AIMING THE SPOTLIGHT

Let’s say you’re sitting down with a prospective client, the director of a major arts non-profit who wants to know whether their day-to-day functions are in line with the strategic plan they adopted five years ago. You spend the first twenty minutes of your thirty-minute meeting describing new systems your firm employs for gathering information. These innovations range from nuanced tracking of email and social media click-throughs to interview technologies that connect you with a broader spectrum of the non-profit’s constituent base. You’re surprised when her reaction is muted. She has no questions. Later, the contract goes to another firm.

What went wrong? You focused on the features—the bells and whistles of how your firm’s services work—rather than the benefits, the outcome for your client. Don’t tell them, “We have precise software for measuring click-throughs.” Aim the spotlight on learning which events and announcements are attracting the most community interest, and which demographics they’re serving with each programming channel. Do your research and identify their values, their underlying motivation of where they base their confidence and pride in work. Mention the Catalogue for Philanthropy, a leading third-party evaluator that steers a lot of local donors and whose endorsement tends to measurably increase larger grant allocations, and which hasn’t listed their organization in over a decade. Your advice can help them get back on its pages.

For many consultants, both when discussing their own services and in helping their clients describe products, it takes a lot of practice to separate out features, benefits, and values from one another. But you must slow down and do that work. Furthermore, the science around serial positioning tells us that people’s conversational attention is most oriented toward what is offered first and last; attention dips in between. As part of shifting to a sales mindset, you need to not only differentiate between features, benefits, and values—you need to order talking about them to place “benefits” first or last, not in the perilous middle.

DON’T FORGET TO CASTLE

When Maestro Group talks about game theory, we use a symbolic image of a chessboard. As part of improving at chess, a player has to learn that not every move can be an attack. Sometimes, your motive is to lock in a defense; sometimes, you’re freeing up resources toward a future offense. To “castle” is to do both, elegantly, by simultaneously re-positioning your king and one of your rooks. This move is usually executed early on, since neither piece can have been previously touched. An amateur may think of castling as a pro forma move that does nothing explicit to advance progression on the board. Experienced players know it is usually essential to freeing up the lateral muscle of the rook, while protecting the vulnerable king.

Often, consultants and sales professionals go headlong at providing a fix to their client’s challenges. You’re doing this for the best possible reasons—you want to help, and you think you can help fast. But think of this as prescribing treatment for a symptom before you’ve even diagnosed the real problem. In response, your client may become suspicious of any solution offered before they’ve had a chance to fully state their circumstances. This can happen on a conscious level because they know they are withholding information, or on a subconscious level because they haven’t even realized all their relevant pain points yet. In chess terms, this would be akin to moving your powerful queen out too early, without any supporting pawn structure.

What’s the alternative? As I said earlier, shifting to a sales mindset doesn’t mean pushing a product or service at every turn. Just as you can castle, you have an elegant alternative. Pause. Develop your position on the board. Listen in your full capacity, leaning forward if that gesture can be seen, or providing affirmative cues if audio-only. Before offering a response, consider whether you understand what they are and what they aren’t saying. Use that open-ended question to prompt the client for more information, digging as deep as you can to gauge hidden concerns.

The consultant’s quandary, as it turns out, isn’t a quandary at all. What’s ironic is that really talented consultants love to demonstrate their expertise as trusted advisors when it comes to helping—then avoid demonstrating that same expertise, if it feels like it has an associated price tag. The key is understanding what your responsibilities entail, including sales, and embracing the options and techniques available to achieve those goals. If that still feels a little beyond your reach, the Maestro Group can help.

We can help sales professionals and non-sales professionals alike. Reach us at mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on training, coaching, and consulting.