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Bill Caskey: mailto:[email protected]

Bill is a sales development leader and experimenter. His ideas about selling are convictions about life, money and meaning. He has coached sales professionals and executives for over 20 years. And his philosophies and strategies have fueled explosive growth in sales and profits for clients.  Click here to learn more about Bill Caskey.

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Professional Services Sell, Too…

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“Oh, Bill, we don’t sell at our accounting firm. We prefer to wait until the phone rings with referrals. Besides, selling is so unprofessional.”

Believe it or not, I actually heard that once–from a CPA. Can you feel the fear in his voice?

Absurd I know, but talk to some young attorneys or accountants today–or anyone who sells professional services–and rarely will they say they’re prepared for selling. It was never taught in grad school–so it must not be important.

In fact the way they get around it is they call it “marketing.” Well, let’s set the record straight. Selling is the discipline of communicating your value (solutions) to a potential client with the intent of determining if they have a need for it.

If you’re a professional services deliverer (technical / subject matter expert) you sell, every day.

Whether it’s talking to new prospects, getting referred by your current clients, uncovering problems your clients have, or getting a fee increase, you are selling.

In my work with services firms, the first thing they must do — and the only point of this message –is reframe the discipline of selling. Right now, you must start thinking of selling as the “finding and solving of problems.”

Once you do that, you will be set free.

You won’t have to convince, persuade or defend your price. You’ll be liberated to go find problems. If you show up and the prospect loves his current lawyer (insert “supplier of your product” here), has no problems now or doesn’t anticipate problems, then he is not a prospect. And you can leave. Don’t stick around and tell him how great you are and how smart you are (we know you are).

I’ll go even one better than that—become effective at articulating that position to your client. Say to him, “I have no idea if I do anything that could be of service to you, but here’s the kind of people we work with–with these issues–do you fit?” It may not be quite that straight, but it’s pretty close.

If you really believe you help your clients solve problems, then you are obligated to ask for referrals.

If you don’t, you’ll leave a lot of people on the sidelines, unable to take advantage of your value. You’ll leave them laying in the muck of their own pain.

So you see, it’s time to ask for referrals and go find problems. Stop selling and convincing and start solving. You’ll get paid a lot more for that anyway.

What Do You Need To Be Good At?

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What do you really need to be good at to earn more income in selling? After many hundreds of hours of reflecting, I’ve come up with “7 Core Competencies of the High Performing Sales Team.”  I’ve even attached it to this post.

How to Use It                                                                                                 If you’re a sales manager, there is a page near the front that you can use to assess your people. If you’re a sales executive, read through the detailed descriptions of each of the areas and assess yourself–honestly.

Download CoreCompetencies.pdf (12 ppg)

Integrity Demands Integrity

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You get what you tolerate. Agree. But how can you limit what you tolerate from others? You can tolerate nothing but high integrity and high intent from yourself. Here’s how it works: You go see a prospect hoping to sell something. You are behind this quarter and need the sale.

He begins his ‘lying dance’ which results in you reluctantly agreeing to quote him on your solution. You want to get out of the ‘game’ but you can’t. Why? Because you are operating out of :low integrity: which is why you can’t expect anything more from him. We can only get what we give. You had an intent going into the call that was about “selling him something to meet quota.” How high is that intent?

That’s why when the sales people I coach come to me and say their customer is lying to them, I always say “Why did you force him to lie to you?” You force the behavior you get. Later we’ll talk about how to adopt the “high intent” mentality.