OUR APPROACH

GETTING CLARITY ON WHAT “SALES” MEANS TO YOUR FIRM

How We Deliver This Service

In our experience, re-thinking what sales means to your organization requires intentional effort. The goal is to define an approach to selling that everyone at your firm believes in and is committed to adopting. This is step one in sales transformation. There are other steps that will follow, such as sales training. But step one is to get clarity about an approach to selling that you believe in firm-wide.

Our approach to creating this clarity includes 3 primary phases:

• Brainstorming with your executives to understand how you view sales today, using our proprietary Professional Service Sales Litmus Test tool
• Introduction to consultative selling, the servant’s heart and the 8 key areas of a professional sales function
• Adoption of a sales mind-set, a specific approach to selling and a commitment to becoming professional sales people

Brainstorming With Your Executives

In this phase, we come to understand how your executives view sales today and why. We ask them to relate stories about great experiences they’ve had with sales people and also terrible experiences they’ve had with sales people.

We also leverage a proprietary tool we’ve developed called the Professional Service Sales Litmus Test (PSSLT). The PSSLT helps us gauge your sales mindset today by sampling the opinions of your team members across 8 key sales drivers. The PSSLT includes an online component where your executives complete a survey of questions related to the 8 key sales drivers. We score your individual and collective answers to establish your PSSLT baseline today.

We then compare your PSSLT baseline to the PSSLT baseline from other organizations who have achieved success in consultative selling. The outcome of this phase will be a clear description of the gaps between how your organization conceives of sales and how organizations who have adopted best practices think of sales. This clarifies the gap that we will help you cross in the phases that follow.

Introduction To Consultative Selling

In this phase, we introduce three key concepts: consultative selling, the servant’s heart and professional selling responsibilities. These ideas will help you develop a healthy mindset for professional service consultative selling.

At The Shattuck Group, we have defined a proprietary sales methodology we call the 7 Stage Consultative Sale. We introduce each of the 7 stages and show you how this approach produces great outcomes for your clients and your firm.

We also introduce the concept of the Servant’s Heart, which is unique to the professional services world. We help your executives reconnect with why they entered your service field in the first place and what gives them satisfaction in serving clients. We introduce a 5-question motive-checker that allows them to examine their motives in every client engagement.

We also unveil the 8 core areas where you need to make decisions to produce an even more successful sales function at your firm. Those 8 areas include:

1. Ideal client definition – who are you best suited to serve and why?
2. Prospecting and lead generation – where will leads and deals come from?
3. Pipeline development – when are deals qualified and included in pipeline reports?
4. Sales stages – what stages must a prospect pass through to become a client?
5. Formal training – what training programs might you invest in?
6. Tools & support – what CRM will you deploy and how will you train users in it?
7. Quota setting – will you establish quotas and if so, what incentives and penalties will it include?
8. Reporting – what metrics, besides revenue, will you track and how will you do so?

The outcome of this phase is that you will develop an understanding of tools, process and professional selling best practices, all of which you’ll use in the next phase.

Adoption Of A Sales Mindset

In this phase, we help you make decisions about how you want to constitute a professional sales function at your firm. We examine each of the 8 core areas of professional selling and help you define your approach – what you’ll actually do on a day-to-day basis. We ask your team members to commit to specific actions and to a strategic plan.

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