This month’s Alexander Insights feature article is on how to best Coordinate the Selling Team when attempting to sell complex services and solutions to complex clients in complex environments. One of the key players I recommend having on your selling team is the business development specialist--the talented professional that gets the qualified first appointment with the appropriate prospect executive.

From my experience, this is a very important role that many services businesses fail to fill, leaving it to the services seller to handle. In most situations, this is a mistake. The skills of business development and rainmaking are different. Asking the same person to do both is inefficient and demoralizing. Yes, I know a really good BD person is both hard to find and (potentially) expensive, but don’t pass up the probable ROI.

Here is how to do it right:

1. Aggressively recruit. Go after the very best.
2. Make expectations crystal-clear. Provide an approved list of the people you want appointments with within your top prospects.
3. Pay only--but handsomely--for results. For example, pay $2,000 for each appointment set and an additional $10,000 when that appointment leads to business. If you have the right list, this is well worth the money.

I’m quite interested in your success with business development specialists, so please drop me a note and share your experiences.

Tags: professional services, selling services

My fourth commandment of selling services is to commit your high-level executives to action, an absolute necessity for getting serious about services selling. But like so many things, it is easy to understand, yet hard to do. Here is an example of a very powerful way to put this directive into productive action.

A short while ago, I was contacted by the senior vice president of a technology company who was tasked with growing their services business. He related the story of two years of frustration that exemplify what I see so often.

In Year One, the CEO got services religion. He told the organization that selling services, especially selling services contracts, was an absolutely critical, must-do, top priority for the business and that he expected each and every salesperson to sell services every chance they could. I don’t know for certain, but I think he felt that just hearing those words from him was enough to change behavior. However, the results were as expected: very little change and a year wasted.

Year Two, the CEO took positive action by putting a senior member of his team in charge of the initiative, an individual who had solid success leading services within their industry. On his own, this hustling exec went directly to some key customers and sold several deals and demonstrated that it could be done. However, overall the percentage of customers under services contracts was under 30%, well below the desired 70% target the CEO had in mind.

As you’d expect, the CEO’s frustration was growing. The company contracted me to give a keynote speech at their global sales conference to demonstrate the services potential, share relevant examples, provide best practices for selling services, and motivate their salespeople into action. With all modesty, my presentation seemed to connect with the audience, and I believe helped to gain their commitment and increase their motivation to get serious about selling services.

However, one other action taken by the CEO was the prime driver of change: from that day forward, every executive’s bonus was based upon reaching the company’s services goals. It was quite simple, easy to understand, and highly motivational--no services success, no bonus. This organization is well on its way to meeting its services targets.

Is your organization having trouble getting serious about selling services? Try tying your executives’ compensation to services, and you will be happily amazed at what happens.

Tags: selling services, leadership

My first commandment of selling services is to Clarify Complex Customer Issues in which I strongly state the critical importance of always starting with an assessment. How in the world can you make an accurate diagnosis and recommendations regarding complex situations from just one or two client conversations? If you go to your doctor complaining about chest pains, are you comfortable with her recommendation for heart surgery without more data? I don’t think so! You’d expect her to request a personal and family medical history, lifestyle inventory, blood tests, scans, and whatever else might provide insights. Not doing so would be medical negligence.

Your clients naturally have their own biases about their business and their world. For example, think of all the different perspectives of the people impacted in considering new software or hardware in a hospital. The CFO is probably most interested in cost savings. The CNO (head nurse) may well be most focused on improving customer care, with cost not being an issue. A physician may take personal pride in having the very latest, most innovative technology. A lab director may be most concerned with speeding up a cumbersome process. Consciously or subconsciously, each will see the situation differently and shape and articulate their desires from their personal perspective. Furthermore, even the most broadminded, intelligent, altruistic person only has limited information--rarely does he have knowledge of the broad systemic factors that impact success.

Therefore, making recommendations without a thorough examination of all relevant information is selling negligence!
Make selling an assessment as part of your modus operandi and reap the rewards.

Want more thoughts on assessments? Read my article, “The Secrets of the Super Sellers: Always Start with an Assessment.”

Tags: professional services, selling services

In a recent article* I wrote about the importance of providing customer choices, but limiting them to two options or ideally three. Doing so will lead to more sales and happier customers.

Now I’d like to share the best practices on how to do it:

1. Make it standard operating procedure to offer three choices. Require it of your sellers in all they do--from making suggestions during initial discussions to outlining three options in formal proposals. Customers like it, and are more likely to buy if you offer three alternatives.
2. Craft your three options based upon value potential that is easily discernable by the customer. Your comprehensive option should be both broad and deep, and hence will be the most expensive. Your bare-bones option should be the minimum offering that you are still confident in to meet customer requirements. This leaves your high-value option somewhere in the middle. Assuming that all three of your options are strong on value, about two-thirds of your customers will choose your middle choice.
3. Always start with your most expensive, comprehensive option, followed by your high value option, then finally your bare-bones option. This goes against a “logical” sequence from low to high, but this high to low approach has strong emotional appeal. Starting high makes your other two choices seem much more affordable by comparison. I am sure that you have seen this before in other scenarios. For example, if you go into a clothing store to buy a suit, shoes, and a belt, the savvy store clerk will always sell you the suit first. Once you have laid out $1,000 for the suit, paying $250 for shoes seems very reasonable, and a $40 belt seems like a bargain.

*Alexander, James. 2011. “Less Is Better than More: Offering Too Many Choices Is Bad Business.” http://www.alexanderstrategists.com/art_less_is_more.html

Tags: professional services, selling services

In this week's Alexander Insights article, the “The Four R’s of Services Account Management,” I talk about the services account manager's (SAMs) expanding role when it comes to getting new business. In my opinion, having SAMs be more active in selling is an absolute necessity. However, not all SAMs like this change in role. When I discuss this new expectation in my workshops, I am often met with rolling eyes and people sitting back in their chair staring at the ceiling. When I ask what the problem is, I'm often told (sometimes defiantly), “If I'd wanted to sell, I'd gone into sales. I like to fix things.”

My feeling is that this reaction originated from some very early bad experience with salespeople who were manipulators from the Dark Side and not true sales professionals. Probably you, and everyone reading this, can remember at least one time in your childhood where you came across a vacuum cleaner salesperson following a script trying to trick your parents into buying something they didn’t want, or a slick-talking house siding seller similar to Danny DeVito in the movie Tin Men*, or maybe some selling shenanigans you observed in your own sales force (heaven forbid!).

In those situations the seller was only interested in making the sale and making personal gain, showing no interest whatsoever in the potential value to the customer. THIS IS NOT PROFESSIONAL SELLING.

Professional selling is influencing with integrity, making recommendations that are in the best interest of the customer, actively looking for ways to help the customer do things easier, better, faster, cheaper. Guess what? That is exactly what the professional management consultant does, and the technical support rep, and clerk at the clothing store, and the field service engineer, and the SAM at a key customer’s site. In fact, if a customer-facing person is not actively looking for ways to improve a customer’s situation, he is not acting as a professional.

*Great movie, by the way. I’d suggest you show it to your organization as an example of not what you mean by selling.

Tags: selling services, professional services

In talking to services executives in charge of leading their company’s transition from product support services to professional services, a common story line develops:

A. They are very interested in:

1. Learning best practices.
2. Understanding key benchmarks.
3. Showing some results quickly (Hey, there is always job security to consider!).

B. They are always concerned about:

1. Launching new services offerings.
2. Getting the product sales force to sell services.
3. Dealing with cultural resistance (product-centered company mindset).

Does this (or did this) sound like you? Addressing A is straightforward--the core and best practices, key benchmarks, and proven transition methodologies can be obtained (at least the 20,000-feet version) very economically and relatively painlessly. Most dedicated services executives will make the investment to learn what is needed. They will read the books, buy a study or two, attend a workshop, and/or have services industry consultants in for a day to learn trends, issues, and best practices. Excellent start. You are now “in for a penny.”

But are you “in for a pound?” How you react to the potential roadblocks of B will provide the answer. If your responses include comments like these:

• “We don’t have time for market research--we are going to launch these six new services and see what happens.”
• “I don’t have the budget to train people how to sell services--can’t they just listen to a webinar?”
• “Culture is all that smoke-and-mirror stuff! I’ve never seen how it really impacts business results anyhow.”

Sound like you? If so, you are still in for a penny. You also are in for a very difficult time.

However, if your approach to the concerns of B sounds like this:

• “Solid voice-of-the-customer research sets the foundation for our services organization, and I’ll commit some money and the necessary 90 days to do things right.”
• “Most product salespeople can learn to sell (at least some) services once given services-specific training, coaching, and motivation. This is a priority to me, and I’ll work with the vice president of sales to provide services-specific training and coaching.”
• “If I am to be successful, I must deal with cultural resistance. I’ll take the time to think through a transformational culture change plan and spend the money to put it in place.”

…you are in for a pound.

These are two distinct approaches. Which one has the greatest probability of success?

The moral of the story is that anything worth doing is worth doing well. In leading the transition from product support services to professional services, commit the time and money to do it right or you are probably better off (at least from a career perspective) not doing it at all.

Tags: professional services, selling services, leadership

Every boater knows the feeling, the queasiness in the stomach that comes the instant you feel you are no longer in control--stretched (literally) between where you have been (the dock) and where you’d like to go (the boat). Docking line in one hand and boat hook in the other, while your feet continue to move in opposite directions, you immediately grasp the meaning of “between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

In this situation, your immediate actions will determine whether you cast-off on your new intended voyage, tie-off back to the firm ground from which you came, or splash-off “down to Davy Jones” (as old sailors would say). Not a pleasant situation.

As a leader of a services organization, you may find yourself with one foot on the dock and one foot on the boat much more often than you’d like. As you work to steer your services organization ahead to accomplish your goals, you may feel a constant current tugging you back to support the different objectives of the product-side of the house. One foot stretched to deliver profitable services projects, the other foot extended (non-billable, of course) supporting product sales or putting out customer fires.

So what do you do to stay on the course of high performance? My latest study of 157 services organizations within product companies provides some guidance to smooth sailing. The high-performing services organizations had this in common:

1. They did a better job of communicating the services organization value proposition both outside in the marketplace and inside the organization. Hence, you need to constantly be communicating what your services organization does and the benefit it produces for all stakeholders. This is a big part of your job.
2. They had a clearer understanding of how their services organization differentiated itself from competitors. Therefore, get the market intelligence you need to focus your services organization on areas it can distinguish itself with clients (deliver more value and make more money).
3. They were much better at aligning their services strategy with the overall business strategy (this is a best practice). So take the time to meet with senior management on a regular basis to force the question, “How can the services organization best help the business accomplish its mission and achieve its goals?” Sure, there will be times when it is necessary to steer a little off your desired heading, but you can plan for this ahead of time and put contingencies in place.

The natural elements (winds of business change, rising tides of the marketplace, and undertows of competition) are always a danger to pulling your services organization off course. Keep both feet on your boat--plan ahead, anticipate trouble, and steer toward your destination with conviction.

Tags: differentiation, selling services, professional services

A while back I was asked this question: “My professional services organization is thinking of adopting the concept of ‘knock-your-socks-off service.’ Any thoughts on this?”


Well, there is always an exception...here are some socks that deserve to be knocked off!

My response was both fast and direct: “Yes! Don’t do it! Implementing a strategy of ‘knock-your-socks-off service,’ ‘under-promising and over-delivering,’ ‘creating customer delight,’ or whatever you prefer to call it for across-the-board usage is the kiss of death.”

It sounds good--who can stand against great service? But in most cases, when you deliver more than the customer expects, you have wasted resources and made a customer wonder why you are so foolish as to give away services in a highly competitive marketplace. Customers will gladly take additional services, but they won't pay for them. The secret is customer acceptance--clearly defining exact expectations (what they will pay for) and delivering exactly that…no more no less.

With that said, there are two situations when greatly exceeding expectations is warranted. The first is when you have screwed up and service recovery is required. Research shows that fast, no hassle, great service can turn around a bad situation and actually generate customer loyalty. In these situations it is best to jump into the red boots and grab the cape. The second situation is with selected key accounts that you see as critical to your future. Here a planned over-investment makes good strategic sense. Other than these two scenarios, just do what you’ve promised to do and customers will be satisfied and you’ll be more profitable.

Tags: professional services, selling services

As mentioned before in this blog, it is important to stay the course. Things may get worse before they get better; overall sales volume may dip before it goes up. People will complain and look for every possible reason why this selling services thing is a terrible idea. You will need to stick to your guns as people test how serious you are. It is hard to do, but again, firing your number one box seller, Ace Flanagan, when he refuses to try and sell services sends a powerful message.

The other critical fact is that understanding and articulating the invisible is much more challenging than discussing feeds and speeds, features and functions. What you think, what you say, and what you do are different when selling services.

A few people adapt quickly and intuitively, most people, over time, can be adequate at selling intangibles given enough training, tools, and reinforcement, but another group will never quite get it. Not because they are bad people or don’t try, but because they are wired differently. From a sales management perspective, this is a very big deal.

Even if you follow all of this advice exactly as outlined, and I hope you do, about one in three product salespeople will not be successful in selling services. (Hey, it’s not their fault—they were hired to sell boxes.) You should understand this from the beginning and be prepared to help them find new jobs inside or outside the company.

Conclusion

So there you have it—the Five Steps to Selling Services Success. Getting the sales force to effectively sell services is critical to long-term success in seriously selling services. Sadly, the common approaches most executives take to bring about this change just don’t work. To be effective, all aspects of the sales performance system musty be changed, coupled with solid training, backed by strong reinforcement, and supported by a leadership team willing to make some tough calls to make sure that the change sticks.

It takes at least a year to yield meaningful results and often three years to make them effective. Yet, do not despair. Future blog entries will outline the steps to kick-start selling services by getting everyone who touches the customer involved in the selling services process.

Tags: selling services

Very strong training, as outlined in Step Three in the Five Steps to Selling Services Success, is a vital catalyst, and is a mandatory start for changing selling behavior. Remember, though, for almost all of your sellers, this is a very big change, and training won't do it alone. Behavior change takes time and support, so be prepared to invest some time and money into it. Instead of thinking a single two- or three-day training event, craft a learning system with ongoing reinforcement over at least a year.

For example, back up the core sales training with a reinforcement workshop within 90 days to let people share successes and practice new skills in a safe environment. Make sure that the date is announced during the core training, and that expectations for the reinforcement workshop are laid out for all participants. Just letting them know that they are to report on the usage of what they will be learning is a powerful motivator. An even more powerful incentive to get them to do what you ask of them is that they don’t want to look stupid to their peers. This will greatly improve the odds ofthem paying attention and taking the training seriously. If you can’t do a face-to-face reinforcement workshop, at least have a reinforcement video teleconference with the same objectives. Though obviously not as powerful as a face-to-face event, a couple hours of a well-facilitated session will still send a strong signal and advance the selling services cause. If you don’t have video capabilities, then an old-fashioned Webinar can do the trick.

Also, make an electronic classroom available to allow for “ask the expert” dialogue and the further sharing of war stories. Participants may not want to “look dumb” to their management, but if trust was developed with the facilitator during the initial training, sellers will be more open to shoot straight and thus get the help they need to improve.

Consider investing money in providing in-field coaching. You are asking salespeople to perform much differently than they have in the past, and providing one-on-one modeling with real customers and coaching afterward are powerful motivators to personal change. In organizations where sales managers are responsible for hands-on coaching of their people and spend most of their time working with their sales reps, it makes sense to extend their skill set to coaching their people on selling services.

Note, however, that there are a couple of challenges to this approach. First, product sales managers within your company may not be much good at selling services either! Unless they have a different background than their sellers, they probably don’t have the right knowledge, skills, and mindsets to coach the selling of services. Before sending them out to coach sellers on how to sell services, they will need to acquire not only the core training provided to the sales force, but additional training in how to coach. Again, this is another investment, but one that will pay off in the long run.

A second consideration is that in some companies “sales management” spends very little time actively managing salespeople. In these companies, sales managers are often the company’s best sellers and have revenue targets of their own. These individuals are key to the company making its numbers. In these situations it is unrealistic to expect that they will be able to provide the reinforcement requirements outlined above. Not that they are lazy or evil, these folks have big bogies to make if they are to be successful, and that trumps people development every time. For example, I have a long-term client that has built his organization’s success by having a very entrepreneurial approach to selling. The sales managers are the top sellers, and it is in the best interest of the company that they spend a minimum of 90% of their time in front of their customers. They contract me to do in-field coaching of their new hires to help accelerate their learning curve and speed their success. If your company follows this model then you should also look for outside expertise to do the one-on-one, in the trenches, customer-facing sales coaching needed to accelerate selling services performance.

GIST: Behavioral change is difficult, and no matter how good the training is, you won’t get the results you want without strong reinforcement.

Tags: selling services, training

Step Three in the Five Steps to Seriously Selling Services involves training. But, not any run-of-the-mill sales training. To be successful you need to invest in quality, services-specific sales training tailored to the issues and uniqueness of your situation. Generic, off-the-shelf packages have their place. SPIN Selling, Professional Selling Skills, and Strategic Selling are all good basic primers for box sellers, but they don’t cut the mustard when selling the invisible. The mindset, approach, knowledge, skills, and tools are different when selling services. Therefore, you need to put everybody through high-quality, services-specific sales training. Find services experts with training competence and tailor a program specific to the needs of your organization. Make certain that the following components are part of the curriculum: why sell services, how to sell intangibles, selling how customers want to buy, building trust, qualifying great services business, developing services power maps, selling services to the “C” level, compressing sales cycle time, and so forth. To keep things interesting and fun, incorporate lots of opportunity for participation, including custom role-plays built around specific scenarios that the sellers must address. It is important to get your product sellers both competent in their selling services capabilities and confident enough that they will try it with customers and prospects.

An important part of any good training is providing usable tools and teaching participants how to use them. Appropriate tools for selling services include feature-benefit profiles for all of your key services offerings, qualifying checklists, case studies of customers espousing the value of using your services, ROI calculators, and sales call planners.

To maximize buy-in to a probably skeptical group, when I develop selling services training I like to involve the top product salespeople, the Ace Flanagans, in the development of the course. I use one-on-one interviews to understand their thinking. I also conduct focus groups with my client’s best and average box sellers to understand their issues and challenges. I always interview sales management to learn their perspectives and their issues. Their participation will not only improve content quality, but also help gain needed credibility for the training. Even better, when possible I conduct interviews of key people within my client’s key customers to learn their issues, expectations, wants, and needs regarding services, and then I build this into the training. This is an extremely powerful way to drive change, as it is fairly easy to dismiss your own views as biased, but it is difficult not to pay attention when your best customers say they want to buy services!

Tags: selling services, training

There is an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal called "Getting Fit without the Pain." Here's the link.

The article talks about how some individuals desiring to make improvements in their fitness are hiring an expert physical therapist before they get hurt, as often occurs in rigorous training. These highly trained professionals conduct a detailed needs assessment before the individual starts training for a marathon or attempting weight loss or whatever, in order to tailor a program best suited for the individual. Taking the time to learn from an expert up front greatly improves the probability of success while minimizing the possibility of injury and pain. Makes sense to me.

Business Leader Impact

I believe there are some things we can learn from this article from a business perspective.

It is easy to jump on the train of Six Sigma or outsourcing or process reengineering. There are many organizations selling one-size-fits-all approaches that force fit a "solution" into your organization, sometimes without stellar results. In my area of focus, services, I often get hired by executives who have already bought into the philosophy of transitioning their services business from free to fee, and have started taking action with minimal impact. The learning here is that what is a best practice for one organization trying to seriously sell services might be a worst practice for another. An industry pundit would know the variables that impact change and help you adjust accordingly.

So my recommendation? Whenever you are considering taking a major initiative, invest in having a qualified expert conduct a readiness review for you. Here you will learn not only your probability of success and the steps to take, but most importantly, the actions to avoid.

Tags: leadership, selling services

Anyone serious about selling services should be constantly looking for ways to improve their productivity. I have just the ticket. It's the Dragon Dictate free app for the iPhone.

I don't know about you, but I hate typing on iPhone's tiny keypad. Thanks to Dictate I no longer have to! All I need now is a relatively quiet area and to speak moderately into the iPhone. It does a great job of capturing my words almost 100%. This improves my ability to communicate at least 400% faster. Now that is a big deal.

Whether you're a seller of services, a services manager or any professional you will gain tremendously by using this handy tool.

Please let me know your thoughts and experiences with other other productivity tools like Dragon, or anything else you found, to make you more successful.

By the way I wrote this through dictation and did not have to touch the keypad at all.

Tags: selling services

Step Two: Align the System with the Strategy

Adjust your sales performance management system (objectives, tools, rewards, consequences, and feedback) to align with your new services selling strategy.

A. Fitting performance specifications. First, make it crystal clear that selling services is now an important focus of the company and an important required responsibility of the sales force. These expectations should be translated into quantifiable services sales goals (how much, what type, when) and should be in place and outlined in all sellers’ quotas and in their performance plan.

B. Adequate resources. You must have the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools supported by quick and easy access to your knowledge management system and internal experts. Most of this is best introduced through training, as discussed below.

C. Minimal interference. In all probability, you have just added more responsibility and more work to your sellers, but have not taken away any of their product sales quotas. To give your sellers the time to learn and practice how to sell services in the field, you need to minimize or eliminate secondary expectations. For example, for the first six months, ask the marketing department to eliminate all requests of the sales force, minimize the amount of time you expect sellers to take executives around to visit customers— unless those visits include services sales coaching by the executive—try to hold off involving your salespeople in task forces, and reduce required paperwork and all the other things that keep them out of the field selling services along with products. Minimizing interference will not only free up time for your sellers to learn how to better sell services, it also will take away excuses for non-performance.

D. Appropriate consequences. First, add a carrot—link the achievement of services targets to lucrative incentives. You can scale back later. In an attempt to get the attention of your sales force, make sure you are paying a higher percentage of bonus on services compared to products. In addition, tack on some highly visible bonuses (five-day cruise for two, twin Harleys, country club memberships—whatever gets their interest) to generate some excitement when your box sellers make good services sales. Your best sellers like to compete among themselves, and this is a highly visible way to do it. If you really want to generate maximum interest in selling services, make sure the spouses are aware of the incentive program. They can apply pressure that sales management can never match. Second, add a stick—put negative consequences in place if services selling goals are not met (no trip to the Bahamas for the services slackers, no product bonuses if services sales goals are not achieved). Punishment is a strong word, but necessary nonetheless. If your top product seller, Ace Flanagan, does poorly at selling services, put him on probation and let him know that job security requires services sales maturity. You will be sending a strong signal.

E. Quality feedback. The faster you get reliable performance feedback to people, the more likely they will self-direct their behavior to meet expectations and gain the positive incentives. Ideally, your sellers should be able to access their performance-to-goal anywhere, anytime. And, of course, management attention, encouragement, and coaching will increase the probability of repeatable, sustainable performance. Start every sales meeting with the selling services review of performance to demonstrate its importance and generate motivation.

The above process seems logical, doesn’t it? These are classic, proven steps of how to change people performance. Yet I rarely see organizations that address all of these points from the start. Most executives will set services targets and provide solid incentives, then expect/hope/demand that selling behavior changes. It will not. The gap is too large, and the change is too scary. Without meaningful ramifications for not selling services, you are wasting your time. The result will be dismal (if any) increases in services sales and a year of frustration for management.

The important thing to remember here is to do all of these steps, or don’t do them at all. But often management is very reluctant to put negative consequences in place around not selling services. (Maybe all the sellers will revolt!) Even if they put the negative consequences in place, it takes a steel-backed sales executive to keep the top-producing product seller (and his or her spouse) from making the trip to Rio for not selling enough services. (Maybe he will quit!) Finally, most product sellers, no matter how effective they are in that role, find it hard to transition to selling the invisible.

GIST: Getting the sales force to attempt to sell services is only effective when:

• Objectives and metrics requiring them to sell services are a part of the selling package.


• Lucrative incentives are in place for selling services.


• There are meaningful negative consequences if their selling services objectives are not met.


• Management actually enforces the significant negative consequences if selling services objectives are not met.


• If you put a gun to their head, the sellers could effectively sell services on their own.

Tags: selling services

If you want to change selling behavior--in this case, selling services and not giving them away--you must address all the factors that impact seller motivation.



Step One: Remove Excuses

Most salespeople weaned on selling products say that selling services:

• Lengthens the sales cycle, thus jeopardizing their 30- and 90-day numbers.

• Raises the overall price, thus making the deal more susceptible to competitors.

• Lowers their income potential because, compared to the price of products, services are small change, and time spent on services takes away more valuable time spent on products.

• In addition, most product salespeople will not say it, but they feel that selling services challenges their abilities, as it is much different than selling products and, actually, a little scary.

Since none of these stated reasons are not correct, is it any wonder why services and solutions sales performance is so poor? Let’s review each of these assumptions from the viewpoint of serious services sellers—those who truly understand it:

• Lengthens the selling cycle, thus jeopardizing their 30- and 90-day numbers. False. Top sellers understand that services are a vital part of the customer’s value proposition and need to be sold with the product at the time of the product sale. Furthermore, when selling complex solutions, selling some services up-front (e.g., an assessment or audit) can actually compress the overall solution selling cycle.

• Raises the overall price, thus making the deal more susceptible to competitors.

True and False. Of course the overall dollar amount increases when more offerings are provided. However, properly done, the value potential of a true solution increases dramatically. As your organization performs services, credibility and trust rise, lowering the possibilities of competitive inroads.

• Lowers their income potential because, compared to the price of products, services are small change. Really False. When your selling arsenal only includes products, you are quickly viewed as a commodity seller, where price becomes the customer’s hammer and you become the nail. Your percentage of wins goes down, and you are totally susceptible to competitors who know how to sell services and solutions. When you sell solutions, both your deal size and your win rate increase.

• Challenges their abilities, as it is much different than selling products and, actually, a little scary. True. Selling services and solutions effectively is different, more difficult, and initially frustrating to those used to transaction selling. Top sellers understand this, accept it, and do whatever it takes to improve their capabilities; it is as much an attitude as it is a set of skills.

Whether product sellers actually believe these points or just use them as company-acceptable excuses, they must be addressed head-on. So find the figures that demonstrate that services can be sold. Use respected companies that successfully sell lots of services as proof, compare your results with what your competitors have done, and present research showing that customers value services and want to buy them. This information is readily available, so use it.

Furthermore, several of the remaining steps also address these excuses and reinforce the message that, when properly done, selling services is good for everyone. In the next blog entry we’ll delve into Step Two. In the meantime if you want all the details on services selling success, please feel free to buy a copy of Seriously Selling Services from this site, or from Amazon.com

Tags: selling services

Here’s the scenario: Senior management has bought into seriously selling services and wants to get moving on it. When advised by a services expert that selling services is “way different” from selling products and requires special actions to succeed, they respond that they have a good sales force, and a good sales force can sell anything—just tell them what to do and back it up with solid incentives. They decide to kick off this initiative at the annual sales conference. See if this situation strikes a chord:

The Big Boss strides toward the podium and gazes out upon the entire sales force huddled in the banquet hall, awaiting word on the new launch. The Big Boss soberly rolls into the presentation, banging the drum of doom about lackluster performance, the challenges of the marketplace, and the potential wrath of stockholders if things continue as is. The figures formulated by the consulting firm hired to build this case spell out the problems (in PowerPoint, naturally) in cold, hard figures. The message is clear: Sell more, better and faster—
change or die.

But just as quickly, the atmosphere changes. The Big Boss dramatically stops the presentation and smiles broadly at the audience. Then, on cue and as if choreographed by a TV producer (it probably was), the balloons drop and the band begins playing something like “Back in the High Life Again.” (Note that if the meeting is in Las Vegas, live animals come on stage.) Next, animated slides (yes, more PowerPoint) proclaim the dawn of a new era, the Golden Age of “Total Value Solutions” (or something like that—they all sound the
same, don’t they?). TVS, as it is quickly dubbed, will be the touchstone, the compass, the blueprint for trekking the treacherous path from the abyss and leading the company back to its former greatness and beyond. As the four-color glossy listing the new expectations of the sales force and the new compensation program is passed out to everyone in the hall, sellers are asked to stand up and swear their personal allegiance to the “Six Selling Steps to TVS.”

On the outside, the salespeople smile broadly, nod their heads, and quickly start using new TVS catch words, enthusiastically applauding the visionary leadership at the front of the room. Ace Flanagan, the company’s top product seller starts a standing ovation.

On the inside, the salespeople are quickly doing two things. First, they do the math on the new compensation program. Their rough calculations show that even the big percentage spiff on selling services is small potatoes when looking at total compensation. Yes, it would be nice to make a few extra bucks, but it is probably not
worth the effort. Second, they are weighing the seriousness of what is being said. If you meet your product quota, no one will slap your wrist for not making your services number, will they? This is a product company, right? Besides, this looks like just another Program-of-the-Month. The salespeople decide to talk the talk and wave the flag when asked, but keep a low profile and do business as usual. “This too shall pass” becomes their unspoken mantra.

Fast-Forward
As the year goes by, an obviously frustrated senior management continues to beat the drum of TVS, but sales of services hardly improve at all. Extra bonuses are promised, threats are made, but at year-end nothing much has changed, and the promise of selling services is lost. The grandiose launch has been a total failure. Furthermore, senior management has lost some credibility, while the product-is-everything culture has been solidified even more. What was supposed to be a game-changing venture ended up being the Flavor-of-the-Season that sales accurately anticipated.

What went wrong? In a perfect world, all of us in business would behave altruistically, taking care of the customer first, the company second, and finally, our own needs. The business case for seriously selling services is strong. But in reality, that’s not the way it works. Although everyone may cross their heart, swear allegiance, and drink the Kool-Aid at the global kickoff, it will take much more than that to change selling behavior.

Salespeople, indeed all of us, behave in ways within some ethical boundary that maximize personal gain as easily as possible with a minimum of hassle and stress. This is not a question of values, but a fact of life. I know, I know, there are cultural and situational factors that impact the degree to which altruism is practiced, but it is a reality nonetheless.

For example, in organizations that primarily reward sellers on gross sales, sellers are highly motivated to do whatever it takes to sell the product at the possible expense of everything else. So would you if your desired lifestyle depended on it. If they don’t sell services, oh well. If they give away services, big deal. Getting the product sale is the prime consideration. Why should they change? For the good of the services organization?Forget it. For the good of the company? No way!

GIST: If you want to change selling behavior (in this case, selling services and not giving them away), you must address all the factors that impact seller motivation.

Here are some proven best practices of executives that have successfully guided the transition to seriously selling services:

1. Create a sense of urgency. When people are reluctant to do something, they will come up with every excuse imaginable to put it off. Change is time-sensitive, and prolonged hesitation only makes things more difficult. Leadership is needed to trumpet the cause and build the emotional momentum needed to break the status quo and get things rolling. To demonstrate urgency and show your seriousness, initially host highly visible weekly updates on progress. Personally call and write people to ask how it is going. Put this at the top of your to-do list each day. Publicly publish selling services success performance so that everyone can see progress. To emphasize the criticality, publish results versus targets not only quarterly, but monthly, weekly, even daily. Break it down by division, geography, even by salesperson in order to build the necessary momentum of change. Remember that when you are challenging the status quo, fast is better than slow.

2. Tie executive compensation to seriously selling services success. Make seriously selling services a core objective tied to compensation for the entire executive team. Yes, you “get it,” but your executive colleagues may not. These are the same people who achieved their success and power through the very system you are trying to alter dramatically. Remember that it is rare for the ruling class to support the revolutionaries, so the case for change must be seen as the only choice for organizational survival. Everyone will be watching for the slightest wavering at the top to justify stalling or just plain non-compliance, and the best way to prevent this is a one-for-all-and-all-for-one approach to compensation based upon hard numbers and firm time frames.

3. Make heroes out of those who attempt the change. As I’ll discuss in greater detail later, this is a scary change for many people, and you want to look for every opportunity to reinforce their new, seriously selling services behavior, even when the results aren’t as good as you like. Make it a point of singling out those who are doing what you request of them at your weekly feedback sessions. Send them notes and copy everyone, publish their success in internal newsletters and magazines, and give them small incentives to keep them going. Early on, it is the little things that matter.

4. Give zero tolerance for slackers. Here is the scenario: It is year end, and overall you have made good progress with selling services. However, your top seller, Ace Flanagan, has blown the doors off his product quota, doubling his target and selling twice as much product as anyone else. However, Ace didn’t come close to reaching his services quota, ending up at 28%. Your vice president of sales doesn’t want to rock the boat and risk losing Ace, so he suggests business as usual, paying Ace full commission and bonuses.

What a great opportunity! After telling your vice president of sales thanks but no thanks, you have a one-on-one sit down with Ace. First you thank him for his product sales contribution, but then quickly state your major disappointment in his services performance. You confirm that this is the new strategy, it is vital to the company, and that everyone is expected to contribute. You are sorry, but he will not get any bonus, he and his wife will not be going to Bora-Bora as part of the President’s Circle, and if he misses his quota next year, he will be fired.

5. Stay the course. There is a good probability that 90 to 120 days into the transition to seriously selling services that performance will actually go down. If you are doing the right things, giving lots of training, involving people in the process, and allowing for the inevitable lost water-cooler time, overall sales could well drop. Anticipated services sales may not materialize as people try to figure out how to do it, and product sales will drop due to lost time out of the field and the lowered productivity that comes with the deer-in-headlights stare when people are passively aggressive.

Don’t panic! If you give up now you will never get services off the ground and you most likely will never regain your level of past product sales. Suck it up, stand tall, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Tags: differentiation, selling services

Do it right the first time—conduct a strategic alignment assessment where you consider how services can best contribute to organization success balanced against your existing capabilities, your customer issues and needs, and your competitive position. This is too important to the future of the organization not to get it right. Confirm your services strategic role today, and get the facts to demonstrate what the role needs to be in two years. This can be done quickly and economically, and the benefits can be huge:

• Base decisions on facts, not best guesses.

• Align your services with the practices and processes most appropriate for your strategy.

• Focus on the realistic, not the wishful.

• Involve senior management and other team members in the process to develop momentum for future changes.

• Benchmark your performance against others to monitor your success.

• Save yourself headaches and hassle.

Once you’ve got the strategy right, it’s time to take a serious look at your commitment.

Tags: professional services, selling services

I’ve seen a group of top management review, discuss, and approve tens of millions of dollars for new plants all within a single 30-minute meeting. I’ve also seen this same group of executives agonize over the course of several meetings and several months over spending $60,000 to launch a pilot services project that would validate the services assumptions and business model that all agree is vital to long-term business success. Amazing when you first think about it, but remember the backgrounds of these executives. They have grown up in products and have been successful because of their knowledge learned running product companies. They have the experience and the insights to make competent, correct product decisions quickly and confidently. However, as pointed out, services are a different business, and as any of us would do when faced with something out of our expertise, the tendency is to cautiously go slow and keep a very tight rein on funding.

Yes, you should look for low-hanging fruit that doesn’t take large investments, and target quick wins to help pay your costs. If there are doubts about the value of services within your organization, then conducting a pilot is a low-investment, low-risk way to confirm your services assumption and demonstrate its value.

Please resist the temptation to cautiously cut corners in hope that magically a new business will sprout and bloom without adequate fertilizer, water, and grooming. Don’t do it. Anything in life worth having requires a commitment of time, money, focus, and sweat. Remember, you are creating a new business! If your senior management group is not willing to invest to build a services capability the right way, then save your energy for better times. As Lou Gerstner, past chairman and CEO of IBM, said in his book, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance:

In building services, there’s no such thing as a toe in the water. When you take this plunge, it’s full-body immersion…I’ve said repeatedly that this is the kind of capability you can’t simply acquire (though our competitors keep trying). The bet you’re really making is on your own commitment to invest both the years and the capital, then build the experience and discipline it takes to succeed.

GIST: In for a penny, in for a pound.

Hopefully, I’ve made my point. There are many obstacles that can cause a selling services initiative to stumble, and like any meaningful change, it takes stalwart executive support to make it successful.

If you have any serious hesitation now, don’t launch the selling services initiative—you will do more harm than good. Remember: In for a penny, in for a pound.

Tags: selling services

As in any business, if you don’t get the strategy right, it is darn near impossible to get the marketing right, the selling right, or anything else right—stuff rolls downhill.

My research in the technology industry confirms this criticality and expands it to the realities of being embedded inside a product company. A key differentiator that separates top-performing services organizations within product companies from everybody else is their ability to better align their strategy with the mission and focus of the parent organization. Of course this makes perfect sense, but doing so is a constant challenge.

The repercussions of non-alignment can be quite severe, as there is nothing worse than doing things really well that shouldn’t be done in the first place. For example, maximizing utilization rates can be an important target of a mature, free-standing professional services organization (PSO), but if the appropriate strategy of a PSO is primarily that of supporting the parent company by helping to sell products, the goals may be in conflict to the overall detriment of the company. As the quality folks say, “optimizing one group [the PSO in this case] while sub-optimizing the organization.”

Strategic alignment means determining which of three possible strategic roles of services best supports the overall business mission. Take a look at it from your perspective. Which phrase best describes your company today?

1. Product-enablement. The purpose of the services organization is to make sure that the product works as intended.

2. Product-enhancement. Along with product enablement, the services organization is expanded to contribute to profitable revenue by providing additional value-adding services that impact customer functionality, process effectiveness, and efficiency.

3. Services-led. The company pushes services and pulls products.

Number one, product enablement, is pretty straightforward. The role of services is to support the product, help get the business in pre-sales, help keep the business through successful installation (or implementation or commissioning or start up), and troubleshoot, where needed. Products have been, are, and will be the dominant focus. Enough said.

Number three, services-led, is also easy to understand, as the organization pushes the benefits of services and services-led solutions first, and then pulls along their products. Here we emphasize development of new and unique services offerings, encourage the sales folks (and everyone) to sell services, and manage utilization.

Number two, product enhancement, is the tricky one, being betwixt and between, neither fish nor fowl. In this strategy, senior management wants to have its cake and eat it too. This is a philosophy I admire! However, this is not easy to do. Let me give you an example of the pressure this strategy puts on the services organization. This is a summary of what I often hear from services vice presidents far too often that really exemplifies this challenge:

On Monday I had my review with the CEO, and she assured me that my mission was to support the company by profitably growing services revenue while keeping our customers happy. This was just what I wanted to hear! On Tuesday the vice president of sales stopped by, really concerned about services pricing and the need to ‘value-price’ (code word ‘deep discount’) services to help land strategic business. I laid out my best defense—my mandate to drive business, the need for the sales force to really sell value—but in the end I lost the discussion as I knew I would. Sales trumps services every time. My profit margins just took a hit. Bummer.

Then on Wednesday morning I was called into a crisis meeting and ordered by the CEO (the same person I talked with Monday) to board a Boeing to Boston with my best technical experts to fix the problems at Galactic Enterprises and not to come back until the client was satisfied. Never mind that my people were committed to other projects, and of course, it wasn’t billable; it was for the ‘good of the company.’ Forget about what was said, this is a product company first. I just have to live with it and try and make my numbers any way I can.

Running a product-enablement business requires constant vigilance toward efficiency. Hence, the entire services organization is focused on keeping things lean and low cost. Implementing a product-enhancement strategy requires a focus on effectiveness—balancing the requirements of profitable growth with the necessity of helping to sell products on one hand, and keeping customers satisfied on the other hand. Constant negotiations with sales and other executives are required to deliver on the duality of expectations. Running services in a services-led organization requires emphasis on innovation, as the services component is recognized as the greatest potential value contributor. Emphasis is on the creation of unique services that differentiate the organization from the competition. Marketing and selling push services and pull along the products.

Obviously, each philosophy requires different capabilities and mindsets to optimize performance. So being absolutely, positively sure of the strategic role of your services organization is vital to running it appropriately.

Tags: selling services

My services research confirms the critical importance of understanding and addressing the product company culture. I asked this question, which produced the following data:

What was (or is) the single most significant challenge your organization faced (or is facing) in building and selling services?

58% Culture Change

8% Acquiring Capabilities

7% Selling

6% Marketing

5% Senior Management Commitment

4% Obtaining Funding

4% Intra-Service Conflict

2% Project Management

1%

As you see, culture change dwarfs all the other obstacles that must be dealt with for a product company to be successful in building and selling services.

Seriously selling services requires a serious change in thinking about the business. Services now must be viewed as an equal offering of the organization, a true value-adder, the potential differentiator in the marketplace, and an important contributor to profitable revenue. Executives now must view products as customers have for a long time—as commodities that take a secondary role in a total solutions package. Services management and services employees must now vie for the respect that they may not have held before. This is not an easy transition to make, as it flies directly in the face of the tried and true.

Furthermore, certain departments are more threatened than others, as different internal groups, possibly product marketing or engineering, for example, feel that making services more important makes them less important. Transitioning to a more services-friendly, services-are-good-for-our-business mindset confronts internal tradition, established ways of thinking, and embedded power that will work together to try and squelch the selling of services.

Often it is true that the very things that made you successful yesterday are the same things that hinder your success today. Bringing about this services business mind shift is a leadership challenge of the highest order.

GIST: Set the compass heading to north, then stay the course, constantly bringing back the needle in the face of high seas, stiff winds, and changing currents.

Tags: differentiation, selling services

As already noted, big-time change targeted at making major improvements in organization performance is tough. Yet, making the transition to seriously selling services is often on a more difficult order of magnitude. Two factors drive this:

• The Invisible Factor. The first factor is the extreme difference between products and services. Products are tangible; they can be seen, felt, and easily quantified. However, services are intangible; they are invisible to the producer, the seller, and the customer. Evert Gummesson, a services researcher, probably said it the most eloquently: “Services are something that can be bought and sold but can’t be dropped on your foot.” The challenge of dealing with the added complexity of intangibility alone raises the bar.

This distinction has a fundamental impact on how one produces, markets, sells, delivers, services, and measures the performance of services offerings and the success of the services organization itself. What may have worked extremely well in managing a traditional product company often will be ineffective in running the services component. Hence, different characteristics and competencies in people must be sought, different management support systems must be created, and different metrics to reward performance and guide the enterprise must be developed. For example, even if all the recommendations in my book are followed, an estimated one-third of your product sellers will never be successful selling services! This is a significant management challenge.

• The Culture Fights Back Factor. The second critical factor is the significance of dealing with organization culture. Any manager who has been around for a few years understands the power of the company culture to resist change, even change that is necessary for survival. The culture will do whatever it can to maintain the status quo. Aggressively selling services in a product-thinking, product-acting business is a full frontal attack on the existing culture, and the defensive mechanisms of the organization will resist any way it can.

The fundamental problem is that, in most cases, the people running the show got there by being exceptionally good at making, marketing, and selling products. Products are their expertise, and this expertise got them promoted. Their past successes built around products helped create, develop, and nurture the culture—a culture that lives, breathes, and reinforces products-related success while shunning other alternatives to business. In this setting, services were regarded as necessary evils that were tolerated because they were a requirement in supporting products. Service was traditionally a cost center, and services were things negotiated and often given away either to make a sale or to keep a customer happy.

Seriously selling services requires a serious change in thinking about the business. Services now must be viewed as an equal offering of the organization, a true value-adder, the potential differentiator in the marketplace, and an important contributor to profitable revenue. Executives now must view products as customers have for a long time—as commodities that take a secondary role in a total solutions package. Services management and services employees must now vie for the respect that they may not have held before. This is not an easy transition to make, as it flies directly in the face of the tried and true.

Tags: differentiation, selling services

There are ten common obstacles that occur time and again when organizations and the people who compose them attempt to do things differently are outlined below...

1. Not tied to strategy.

2. Seen as a fad or quick fix.

3. Short-term perspective.

4. Political realities undermine change.

5. Grandiose expectations versus simple successes.

6. Inflexible change designs.

7. Lack of leadership regarding change.

8. Lack of measurable results.

9. Fear of the unknown.

10. Inability to mobilize commitment to sustain change.

Source: Ulrich, David. 1996. Human Resource Champions. Harvard Business School Press.

Do you recognize any of them? I don’t believe further elaboration is required. Needless to say, all must be recognized, and steps need to be put in place to deal with each of them.

Tags: selling services

Ponder Point: If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.

Let’s face it, for most product companies, getting serious about aggressively building, marketing, and selling services is a big deal—a major change. The troubling truth of the matter is that about three out of four major change efforts fail to achieve and sustain the desired objectives (Alexander, 2004). My own experience in advising organizations confirms this, and your personal experiences probably do as well. Think back over the last few years during times when you experienced the launching of initiatives (e.g., implementing an ERP or CRM system, adapting Six Sigma, going “Lean”). How many of these efforts have brought about the lasting value intended at the time of announcement?

And anyone who has participated in an organizational change effort knows the tension that develops and the resistance that naturally occurs when the people of the organization are asked to behave in new and different ways. Productivity immediately drops as water-cooler conversations (both face-to-face and electronic) speculating on the impact and political ramifications of the change and the always-present “what’s going to happen to me?” take a priority over the mundane tasks of meeting customer requirements. In addition to the obvious loss of focus and efficiency, other multiple “costs of resistance” take their toll, touching everything from loss of key employees to lowered corporate credibility to stifled innovation.

Would you like to stop giving away or discounting services? Would you like to increase your revenues of both services and products? Would you like to build trust-based relationships that create loyal, profitable customers?

Join Us for:

Selling Services: Tools and Techniques for Top Performance
A two-day, hands-on workshop for everyone tasked with selling services.

August 12-13, 2010
Denver, Colorado

You’ll learn how to sell more services easier and faster from James “Alex” Alexander, a recognized services expert, a master at sales effectiveness, and a top-notch instructor. The course is peppered with lessons learned from star services sellers, best practices in selling services, and proven models and tools that work.

Participants will be actively involved in exercises, discussions, demonstrations, and role play, all linked to selling services success. You will leave the session with enhanced persuasion skills, effective selling tools, and the energy and confidence to accelerate your personal success.

LEARN MORE

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is for anyone accountable for selling services. Dedicated services sellers desiring to be more effective, product sellers wanting to win more business, account managers with sales targets, sales and services managers tasked with growth and customer satisfaction, and executives striving to differentiate their business through stellar sales capabilities. If selling services is a part of your job, you will benefit from this course.

How You Will Benefit
The workshop is designed with one goal in mind: to help you and your organization sell more profitable services easier and faster.

Brief Overview of Workshop Topics
Includes 15 Hands-on Tools and Take-Aways!

• The 7 business reasons why you need to sell services
• The technology assimilation gap
• The business development process
• The challenges of selling the invisible
• The biggest seller mistakes
• Buyer’s Reality: What’s diffèrent about buying services?
• The 10 Commandments of Selling Services
• The changing expectations of customer-facing personnel
• 5 reasons why using technical talent is such a good thing
• Choosing which of the six levels of selling expectations is right for each customer-facing group
• How to coordinate services selling efforts to avoid hassle, bad blood, and potential chaos
• Compressing sales cycle time
• How to sell to executives
• The six secrets of the super sellers
• Qualifying great business
• Why a fast no is better than a slow yes
• Using the Six Trust Builders to accelerate trust
• The four trusted advisor competencies
• Core relationship skills
• The 10 persuasion steps
• The 10 step process to selling services success
• The buying process
• Key events
• The committing process
• Profitably managing key accounts

LEARN MORE

100% Satisfaction Guarantee

Tags: selling services, training, workshop

Business consultants like to talk about adjacency strategy (Zook, 2004), the strategy of building upon an organization’s core competencies in one market to transport those capabilities to an adjacent, but different market space. For example, a company with specialized battery technology designed for the automotive industry could potentially attempt to build upon that battery expertise to develop and sell to the marine market. The same possibilities hold true with services. For example, an energy utilization assessment developed for the automotive industry could be adapted for the marine market. Taking advantage of your past experience and expertise can crack new markets and expand profitable revenue.

GIST: Services adjacency strategy can be a powerful component of any growth blueprint.

To summarize, services have proven themselves to be able to contribute significant value to many, many product companies through profitable growth of both products and services. Properly executed, strong services capabilities can increase customer satisfaction and generate customer loyalty. In addition, for some companies, having the right portfolio of services helps smooth the entry into new markets. Finally, in some cases, having an arsenal of new or better services can create competitive differentiation.

Tags: selling services

Depending on the maturity of your industry, your competitor’s strategy, and your competitor’s dealings with distribution, services can differentiate you in a really big way. The more complex your products, the more they cost the customer; and the more mission critical they are to your customer’s business, the more the value-packing promise of services. Leading services researchers note from their studies that more and more companies in tough competitive markets are looking at services to yield competitive advantage (Brown, Gustafsson and Witell, 2009). If your competitors don’t have full portfolios of strong service offerings or if they don’t know how to sell them, this is a huge opportunity for you if you embrace the challenge.

Give your customers what they need, want, and will pay for while locking out everyone else.

GIST: Services are the drivers of market dominance.

Tags: differentiation, selling services

Want to see a CFO’s eyes light up? Watch her face the first time she grasps an understanding of the predictable, repeatable sales that come from a services business built upon service and support contracts coupled with a finely tuned professional services capability.

This is pure joy to a bean counter. The services annuity stream makes life a whole lot easier for all of management, as it helps to take the guesswork out of business financials and becomes an early warning, leading indicator of organization success or failure.

GIST: Strong services help you manage your business more effectively.

Tags: professional services

Sadly, sometimes products are positioned to the customer with these words coming out of the salesperson’s mouth: “Our products don’t break. You don’t need any additional services,” or “It is so easy to implement our software. Just read the manual and you can do it, no worries.” This is all a bunch of baloney, especially if you are dealing with a fairly complex situation, an important customer process,
and/or the customer has little if any familiarity with the implementation.

Rare is the product that will not need some type of service in its life cycle, whether a tailored implementation, ongoing maintenance, software updates, refurbishing, and on and on. Not positioning this reality of life with the customer upfront is negligent selling.

Services appropriately sold up front greatly improves the probability that:
• The product will work the way it is supposed to work the first time.
• Greater functionality of the product will be utilized.
• Irritated customers ringing the bell of the fire engine, escalating their concerns up your organization ladder, will be greatly minimized.

GIST: Selling services upfront saves your organization, time, hassle, and money over the long term.

Tags: selling services

Here is a bit of blasphemy: Most customers view your products as commodities! Regardless of how truly unique or elegant or innovative your products are from your perspective, in most all buying situations, customers see no meaningful difference in the top two or three products in any category, across all industries, across all geographies.

Yes, I understand this may not be 100% factual, but from the perception of the customer it is true. Hence, the old adage comes into play: Perception is reality. Kind of a sobering thought.

Once customers have determined their short list of the two or three potential products or bundles of products that they will seriously consider buying, they almost always cast their product ballot based on what they believe are the best services that surround the product—services that will best ensure the product works as promised, keeps working, and does so with a minimum of hassle and added expense. It is important to note that, in many cases, they will pay a premium for your offering if they understand the higher value your services bring to them. In essence, they vote with their pocketbook.

Furthermore, if your salespeople were strategic and sold an assessment early in the buying process—before needs were clear and products were specified—the probability of you getting the product business later on is greatly improved, giving you the chance to shape the final recommendations early while building relationships with people key to the final purchase.

Tags: selling services

Would you like to stop giving away or discounting services? Would you like to increase your revenues of both services and products? Would you like to build trust-based relationships that create loyal, profitable customers?

Please join me for...

Selling Services: Tools and Techniques for Top Performance

August 12-13, 2010

Denver, Colorado

This essential workshop is for everyone tasked with selling services. I'll be facilitating the two-day hands-on session to show you how to sell more services easier and faster. The course is peppered with lessons learned from star services sellers, best practices in selling services, and proven models and tools that work.

Participants will be actively involved in exercises, discussions, demonstrations, and role play, all linked to selling services success. You will leave the session with enhanced persuasion skills, effective selling tools, and the energy and confidence to accelerate your personal success.

Hope to see you there. Learn More

Tags: professional services, selling services

No, we're not channeling James Brown. In today’s digital age it’s important to give people what they want, when they want it, the way they want it. We get that. Anyone as serious about selling services as we are can’t ignore the important social media, which act as both a dispenser and collector of valuable information. Check us out!

Facebook link is here

Linkedin and Squidoo (perhaps Twitter) will follow shortly! For now, on behalf of everyone at Alexander Consulting, I hope you will actively participate in these exciting new mediums.

Unleash Your Hidden Sales Force
If it takes a year or more to get the product sales force effectively selling services, what can companies do in the meantime to generate results? Most executives can’t wait that long!

Relying entirely on the product sales force to drive services is not a good idea. There are several things one can do to kick-start seriously selling services. My latest book, “Seriously Selling Services,” shows you how to tap into your hidden sales force—what it takes to get your technical talent competent, confident, and committed to seriously selling services.

Pick up a copy of “Seriously Selling Services” to learn how you can unleash your hidden sales force. Available at SeriouslySelling.com or Amazon.com.

Click here to learn more or to purchase. Quantity discounts available.

Tags: professional services, selling services