Selling Services

Sales under-performance can cause major dislocation to your viability. Historically many organisations suffering from this have perceived it as indicating a skills deficit, and commissioned a training solution – only to find that the problem still exists.

The situation is actually rather more complex than it first might appear. Under-performance is caused by a combination of three factors:

The Organisation
e.g. the environment, the resources, philosophy and communication

The less these factors are in harmony, the greater the chance that under-performance will continue - regardless of how much training is provided.

Whilst training has a part to play in effective solutions, more commonly major improvements to performance can be achieved by the re-focussing of resources and a clarification of processes. “Selling Services” undertakes detailed analyses of service suppliers’ operating procedures, skills resources and environments to identify just what is holding back sales growth and to enable us to recommend cost-effective changes.

“Your approach to consultative selling helped us to identify just where we were going wrong in marketing our services, and exactly what to do to put it right.
All in all, we found the time with you inspiring and enabling, and can’t recommend your mentoring highly enough.”
Virginia Moyles, Training Contracts Manager
Moy Valley Resources, Co. Mayo, Ireland

CASE STUDY T1
MEETING AN IN-HOUSE TRAINING NEED

A medium-sized consulting group in the Midlands that specialises in Mechanical Engineering was concerned that its team of 5 Associate Consultants was frequently experiencing difficulties in identifying their Prospects’ real Decision Makers. It was felt that they were losing opportunities because their services were being pitched to people either too high or too low in the ‘Buying Centre’. They wanted to know how this could be remedied.

"Selling Services" agreed to investigate the issue and met with the Associate Consultants to learn of their practices and feelings. It quickly became apparent that although they were indeed specialists in their field, they were very conscious of lacking a systematic and effective method of identifying and accessing key people within the Buying Centres (i.e. the Decision Maker and the various internal and external Influencers). Without this, they were wasting huge amounts of time and effort approaching people who lacked the authority to buy. They'd discovered to their cost that organisational heads commonly delegate this function to senior - or middle managers - but finding them was the problem!

A two day programme was devised to address this, and held on two consecutive Tuesdays. Within just 3 weeks, reports started to come in, suggesting that the skills they'd been taught were starting to be applied - and with some degree of success.

Two months later, a follow-up half-day programme was delivered with the aim of disseminating the experiences gained by the Consultants and to ‘chivvy up’ those who’d only been paying lip service to the techniques. This short session proved most valuable, for now the teaching started to come from within the group itself. The more enthusiastic Consultants, were able to prove to their colleagues that the new techniques actually did work, but only if they were applied with diligence and intelligence.

Since then, the organisation has reported that they are delighted with our support, for although one of the 5 Consultants is still reluctant to take the learning ‘on board’, all of the others are doing extremely well and indeed, two of them now consistently far exceed their previous successes – both in terms of value and number of contracts secured.

CASE STUDY T2
IDENTIFYING AND REMEDYING STRUCTURAL/PROCESSES WEAKNESSES

A medium-sized organisation selling professional services was hoping to add a further dimension to its portfolio. They had initiated a marketing effort but it was producing confusing results. They asked us to verify that:
(a) a market did indeed exist for their new offering;
(b) that the organisation possessed the resources to promote and deliver these services to their desired professional levels and;
(c) what steps they should take to make success more probable.

Our investigation revealed that there was indeed a potential market for this service and that competition for the business of target clients was not daunting.
We also discovered that very little time had been given to planning the process (e.g. identifying suitable segments; communicating effectively to Prospects; job role clarification; building and managing their Customer Contact Database; measuring outcomes; etc). Furthermore, divisions in the management team had resulted in less than universal support for the project.

We recommended that:

• a written strategy be devised, (to which all parties would subscribe), in particular identifying the revenue aims of the project; the proposed target segment; allocation of appropriate resources; and some up-skilling.

• a proven Client Contact Data Base be obtained and utilised;

• an effective monitoring system be installed to enable successes and weaknesses to be quickly highlighted;

• a Client Retention strategy be created to ensure that no more clients were lost, and to maximise the loyalty of remaining clients;

• and the whole effort to be headed up by someone with a proven track record in the marketing of services.

The client took these recommendations on board and has since implemented them all, resulting in this fledgling project now going on to become a major additional revenue stream.

To discuss how we might help in ensuring your services produce more gratifying results, please contact us at consult@sellingservices.co.uk or call us at 01460 239 020.

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