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Blogs I Like: Andrew Sobel

May 23, 2011 By 2 Comments

andrew sobel photoFrom time to time, I pass along my thoughts on blogs or web sites that I read on a regular basis. Hopefully, you can gain as much benefit from them as I have.

Consultant Andrew Sobel publishes an insightful blog at www.AndrewSobel.com that focuses on the business of client relationships. You don’t have to be a management consultant to find this blog helpful. If you’re in a relationship-intensive business, you’ll find something of value on Sobel’s site.

The Voice of Authority

Sobel has worked for more than 25 years as a strategy advisor, executive educator, and coach. He’s written three books on building business relationships, including Clients for Life and All for One: 10 Strategies for Building Trusted Client Partnerships. And he’s written articles for most of the world’s major publications.

He uses his blog and web site to extend the concepts in his books and articles and to bring his latest thinking on developing client loyalty to his readers.

Comprehensive Content

This site offers a range of content from big thinking ideas to specific tactics, like how to have a perfect client meeting. If you read Sobel’s recent series of 10 posts called Things Clients Hate, you’ll have a great check list of things to avoid at your next client meeting.

You’ll also find dozens of articles, archived newsletters, and short video clips on the site.

I think Sobel does insightful work, and he shares his ideas freely. I’ve had an opportunity to interview him several times for Management Consulting News. Here’s a link to our most recent discussion on building client partnerships.

If you haven’t seen his blog, take a look. It’s worth having in your newsreader.

What blogs are you reading regularly?

Filed Under: Client Relationships Tagged With: , , ,

You Know Your Presentation Is Bombing When…

March 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

mindshare consulting

  • You notice that even the summer intern is yawning
  • One of your audience members made an origami dragon from your handout
  • You say “before we get started” after you’ve been talking for five minutes
  • An audience member calls for a coffee break before you’ve finished your introduction
  • When you turn up the lights, you’re asked to turn them down again
  • You start to fall asleep during your presentation
  • Your presentation software crashes and the audience applauds
  • You hear the music from Angry Birds playing in the audience
  • Three of your audience members are in a yoga “corpse” pose
  • An audience members ask to leave because she has to immediately file an expense report
  • You offer to give your audience your slide deck and no one responds
  • You’re forced to  say “please bear with me” at any time during your presentation.

Here are four great resources for ensuring that your presentations don’t bomb.

Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire, by Cliff Atkinson.

Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, by Nick Morgan.

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, by Garr Reynolds.

Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, by Jerry Weissman.

Filed Under: Client Relationships, Speaking Tagged With: , ,

Before Your Next Sales Meeting

March 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

What do you suppose is on a prospective client’s mind before a sales meeting with you? I think an email to you from that prospective client might go something like this:

My team is looking forward to meeting with you and we are excited about the prospect of working together. Before we get going, I’d like to lay out my expectations for our meeting.

To begin with, we recognize that you’re interested in selling your services to us. Here are three tips to make that whole process easier and worthwhile for all of us.

The journey is important, but first we need to be sure of our destination.

Lots of service providers are quick to tell us how their approaches and methods will bring us fast, reliable results. We know that tools and approaches can make a project go more smoothly, but until you’ve really shown us where we’re going, we won’t be listening.

We need to know what the future will look like for us if we complete this project. And we need to know about it in a clear and compelling way. So we ask you to focus first on our destination, instead of how we’re going to get there.

Value breaks down barriers.

In this company, multiple people are involved with the decision to approve any sizable project. And, there’s always someone with lots of questions about why you and why now. The only way my team can mobilize people around our project and break down organizational resistance is with an explicit view of the value we would get from working with you.

Our expected value serves as a motivator to action–it’s the heart of our internal sale. So once we’ve defined a post-project future, let’s work to quantify the value we’ll achieve by reaching that future. Of course, it will be difficult to make those calculations, and we will have to make some assumptions. But people won’t be receptive to undertaking a complex project without substantial value in return.

Give us possibilities.

We have ideas about what we need to do and how to do it, but we’re not the experts. We’ll look to you to open our eyes to the possibilities we haven’t thought of. All we ask is that you recognize that we’re the experts on our business. We want collaboration on realistic options and opportunities, not theories.

Together, we can devise a plan that emphasizes the future state we’re aiming for, expresses the value of reaching that state, and gives us options for how to get there. If we can do those three things, you’ve got a great chance of landing this project.

Filed Under: Client Relationships, Managing Your Business, Selling Tagged With: , , ,

5 Sales Challenges You’ll Face (and What to Do about Them)

November 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Once you identify a sales lead, qualify it, and agree to pull together a proposal, you still face many challenges as you navigate the sales process. In a recent interview for her blog, sales strategist Jill Konrath and I talked about some of those challenges.

I thought I’d elaborate on five of the challenges in my latest newsletter. In short, those five challenges are:

  1. Manage Perceived Risk
  2. Respond to New Decision Makers
  3. Craft a Compelling Win Theme
  4. Understand How Clients Use a Sales Proposal
  5. Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot

If you want the full story, click over and read the article in this month’s issue of The Guerrilla Consultant.

Filed Under: Selling, The Guerrilla Consultant Tagged With: , , ,

Make One Small Change in Your Sales Presentation

February 24, 2010 By 2 Comments

By some accounts, more than 40 million presentations are given every day. Many start off something like this:

“Good Morning, I’m Eric Snooze from Global Interactive Services and I just wanted to start off by saying say how happy we are to be here today and to assist you with this critical effort. In case you don’t know about us, we have fifteen offices in strategic centers around the world. We’ve been in business since 1985, and our people undergo hundreds of hours of training in seven areas of specialization…”

By this point, you’ve likely lost the attention of half your audience. But Eric’s presentation would likely go into even more detail about his company before moving on to the real reason he was there—the client’s issue. Thousands of sales presentations start just like Eric’s, even though that is arguably the worst way to launch an effective one. Unfortunately, old-school sellers cling to this type of introduction.

Even if the standard seller-centric opening is short (which it often isn’t) many of your attendees aren’t really tuned in. Besides, if you’re making a sales presentation, the odds are good that your audience has some clue what your company does. Remember, they don’t really want to hear about you, even though they may say they do. They want to hear about themselves. So, they’ll listen to a self-serving opening, but they may not really hear it.

Here’s another way you might introduce yourself:

“Hi, I’m Eric Nodoze from Global Interactive Services, and I thank you for your time today. We’ll cover three topics this afternoon, beginning with what we know about your issues. We’ll discuss that topic and refine our understanding. Then, we’ll review options for how you might address this issue, with an emphasis on how we can work together. Finally, we’ll wrap up with a short review of Global Integrated Services and why we think we’re well-suited to assist you.”

With a simple shift in emphasis, this opening lets your listeners know that their concerns will be up first, and that they won’t have to endure your spiel until you’ve satisfied them that you know what they are up against. Once you’ve done that, don’t be surprised if your audience members want to hear more about your company.

Here’s a rule of thumb for your presentations: Focus on buyers’ issues at least 75 percent of the time, including right from the start. With conscious effort on your part, a presentation that is mostly about them can still answer all their questions about you, without the usual dull recitation.

If your audience doesn’t already know the basics about you, that is, your name and company, then supply that information and get on with it. Or, better yet, have someone else, preferably a client team member, introduce you very briefly.

If you want an easy, effective way to make your sales presentations stand out from those of your competitors, ignore the wisdom of the crowd. Always lead off with an emphasis on your client, not you. Your audience will be pleasantly surprised.

Filed Under: Selling Tagged With: , ,

Perspective

January 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It’s hard to remember how many sales planning meetings I’ve attended where the first topic was “What will it take for us to win this sale?” It’s a standard question and an easy way to start such meetings.

But that question gets meetings off on the wrong track. Why? Because as soon as you ask what it takes for you to win, your ideas focus on what’s best for you, not on the client’s need. The result is a ho-hum  sales proposal that emphasizes your experience, track record, and the quality of the proposed team. That’s not a formula for a winning proposal in today’s market.

If you want to avoid a run-of-the-mill sales proposal, try changing the first question you ask. Instead of focusing on what it will take for you to win, ask what it will take for your client to win. When you do that, your thoughts turn to how you’ll help clients address the issue from their perspective, not yours.

That shift will free your mind to more clearly see the client’s opportunities, risks, and barriers. You’ll uncover more creative ideas for addressing the client’s issue, find new ways to engage with the client as you explore your proposal options, and design a more insightful proposal.

You’ll still need to demonstrate that you are the best firm for the job, but the change in your perspective will take you a long way toward that goal. Ask what it will take for your client to win, and watch your own success grow.

Filed Under: Proposal Writing, Selling Tagged With: , , ,

The Highest Priority for any Sales Meeting

September 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

What’s your number one priority for a sales meeting? You always need to demonstrate your expertise, build trust, and figure out what your client really needs. In spite of these imperatives, your top priority in any meeting should be to reduce uncertainty for the client.

No matter where you are in the sales cycle, your client has questions (usually lots of them). In introductory meetings, the client’s uncertainty and questions may focus on your capabilities or personal chemistry.  Later on, the client’s uncertainty may be more about your proposed solution, your fee, or how you’ll manage the project.

Your challenge is to uncover and address those areas of uncertainty, while recognizing that these concerns shift as the sales process unfolds. Fail to overcome this challenge, and you will surely lose the sale.

Like other sales challenges, there’s no silver bullet for this one. Your ability to observe, sense how people are reacting to you and your team, and understand how your service impacts the client will help you generate an effective strategy.

That strategy will be situational. Sometimes, you’ll focus on demonstrating your expertise; other times you may highlight the benefits of your solution. The trick is to know what aspect of your offer to emphasize and when to do it.

Do you know what your clients are uncertain about?

Filed Under: Selling Tagged With: , , , ,

Yes, You Heard Me

August 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Whenever a client project goes badly, you naturally look for reasons in the decisions you made along the way. Sometimes it’s a project management issue; other times the cause is scope creep, poor leadership, or incompetence.

Often, you can trace the root of troubled efforts back to misconceptions or misunderstandings on the front end of the sales process. In every selling situation, you strive to understand the client’s issue, and that’s where the trouble may start.

By the time a sales meeting is set up, both buyer and seller are likely to be motivated to design a solution quickly. The buyer may be under pressure to resolve the issue, and the seller wants to reach closure as soon as possible. When everyone is in a hurry, look out.

One result is that the seller may be too inclined to confirm the buyer’s interpretation of the issue, instead of independently verifying what’s really happening. In fact, some clients may be too impatient to let you do that. If the client is wrong about the real problem, though, it’s likely that any solution will miss the mark. And when it does, don’t expect the client to take responsibility.

The last thing any seller wants to hear is to slow down the sales process. But, in some situations, that’s the best strategy for ensuring that you’ll have a profitable sale and a happy client. Listen carefully to what the client says about the issue, of course, but make sure to draw your own conclusions. Otherwise you’re risking the long-term success of the project and the client relationship.

Filed Under: Selling Tagged With: , ,

When to Give Up on a Sale

January 6, 2006 By

Many consultants know intuitively when they’ve hit the wall and a prospective client isn’t going to buy. Others give up too early, while still others keep hitting their heads against that wall. So when do you stop trying to convert a prospect to a client?

At a minimum, you should plan three to five sales discussions with a prospective client before throwing in the towel. Research shows that a prospective client’s first opinion is often incorrect, and that it’s not until the third exposure that the client can fairly evaluate proposed benefits. Assuming you’ve made the value of the offering clear, that’s when the client’s positive thoughts are most likely to outnumber the negatives.

The key is to keep the door open so you get to the third presentation, whether that’s in person, by phone, e-mail, or other mode. Consider staging how you communicate your marketing and sales messages to your prospective clients. Use the first interaction to spark interest, the second to clarify value, and the third to respond to concerns and ask for the sale. That sequence isn’t set in stone—your client’s needs must dictate how you proceed.

Of course, you won’t always need three meetings—sometimes once is enough for a client to buy. But even if a client says yes in the first meeting, don’t assume it’s a done deal. There is a chance that client will decide not to buy after the initial decision.

At some point, though, it’s best to call it a day. If you’ve given four or five sales presentations, you may still close a sale but, by then, the odds are working against you.

Filed Under: Selling Tagged With: , ,

Ignore the Moose Head

June 15, 2005 By

At one point in my career, I was lucky enough to land an office with a jaw dropping view of Chicago and Lake Michigan. That view was stunning no matter what weather descended on the Windy City. Like most consultants, though, I didn’t spend much time in the office.

When I did, that panoramic view was one of life’s pleasures, but it was also a two-edged sword.

Whenever I met with potential suppliers of products or services, I knew the first ten minutes would be consumed by a discussion of “the view.” I could almost set my watch by how much time it would take before we started the meeting. Before long, I had an unconscious script for those first few minutes.

Don’t get me wrong–I don’t have anything against some small talk in a business meeting. But there’s too much mindless chit-chat in many first-time meetings.

Many consultants are trained to scan a prospective client’s office for some non-business, common ground to kick off a conversation with and build “rapport.” If the consultant notices a moose head on the wall, or a framed picture of the client falling over the finish line at a marathon, that’s likely where the conversation will start. It’s equivalent to the “view” conversation, and like me, the client will robotically retell the relevant story for the umpteenth time.

There’s no need for all work and no play. But I think it makes sense to get to the meeting topic quickly and save the banter for later. If you’ve got thirty minutes, why squander a third of that time? Get to the point, and save the small talk for the end of the meeting. Most clients will appreciate that approach, and through the course of your meeting, it’s likely you’ll find other, more interesting topics for small talk than that tired old marathon story.

Filed Under: Client Relationships, Consulting Process, Selling Tagged With: , , , ,
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