My business contacts and blog readers have heard from me quite a bit lately because I’m actively promoting my quarterly webinar series – Jumpstart Your Rainmaking. I’ve been sending out email blasts, writing more blogs about Rainmaking, and telling everyone I know about this. Why? Because I’d like to fill the virtual conference room. As you know from reading my blogs, even though I’ve been building my business for years, the Rainmaking training part of my business is relatively new. The multi-state part is over 15 years old. And I’m trying to draw some attention to the new.
There’s a section in my Rainmaking training where I discuss sales mindset, and why sometimes it’s difficult to get into the sales mindset. That’s because cold-selling can be hard. And honestly, selling the Rainmaking training has been harder than I thought too. It’s different than selling multistate tax services. So, I thought it would be a good discussion.
When is selling easy?
In a perfect world, everyone would want your services. Actually, more to the point, in a perfect world, the people who need your services would want to buy those services from you. That’s when selling your services is easy. It’s when these things align:
- People want and need your service;
- You have the inventory to supply the service in a timely and accurate manner, providing real client value. In the professional services world, that generally means that we have the time to dedicate to this new project;
- You and your customer can easily agree to a fair price for the service; and
- Your customer trusts you – either because they’ve known you from prior experience or you’ve come referred by someone that they trust.
As these factors all come together, it’s not hard to make the sale. The customer knows they need your services, they know you are the right person, you have the time to dedicate to delivering a quality project, and at the end, a fair fee will be charged – leaving everyone feeling good about the project and the experience. Hopefully, we’ve all been part of such an experience – both from the buyer and the seller side.
When is Selling your Services Challenging?
In the imperfect world in which we live, all of the items above may not always align nicely. That is when it’s more challenging to make a sale:
- Your potential customer doesn’t understand your service and/or doesn’t realize that she needs it. Now you have to spend time educating the buyer about what you sell and why they need it. That makes the sales process much longer because it feels as though you have to convince them to buy something that they don’t think they need.
- You have competition. Assuming they do understand what you sell and even think they may need it – you’re not the only one out there providing the service. So, your potential customers may want to shop around. Again, now you are on the side of having to convince them that you are the best option.
- The pricing discussion becomes frustrating. Maybe, because of the competition, you have to lower your price. Now you may feel that you are giving your service away cheaply or that you’ve been treated as a commodity;
- Since you really don’t know your customer that well, it’s hard to develop the trust necessary to close the sale.
Let’s Make it Easier
Because of all these potential hurdles, it’s important to have a process or roadmap for developing prospects, developing relationships with current clients and referral partners, having a systemized process of reaching out to them, and ultimately getting to the table with them. Once your pipeline becomes more referral-based, people will know you, recognize they need your services, and buy from you. It takes many of the uncomfortable items above out of the process.
But it doesn’t happen by accident. You have to put a plan in place and keep yourself accountable to your plan, so that you don’t get derailed when you get busy and you always have projects in your pipeline.
It is with these things in mind that I developed my Jumpstart Your Rainmaking training. Part of the training includes a 3 part webinar series, which we offer quarterly. In that training – one week an hour for three weeks, we discuss how to re-frame your sales mindset and put yourself out there as a trusted business advisor, not a salesperson! We address how to identify your perfect target client and how to reach out to them in various ways. And most important, perhaps, I share a system of goal setting, tracking and accountability related to your prospecting efforts.
How can you participate? Join us on December 7th, 14th and 21st. Our year end special price is just $99. Really! Just $99 for three sessions and a plan to take with you into next year. I hope to see you there. Click here to find out more and register!
Here are some links to some previous blogs which provide additional information about the program.
Rainmaking – Kicking off Another Webinar Series
I really hope you’ll join us! Register today, before I change my mind on that crazy $99 rate!
