If you’re a small to mid-sized business services or consulting firm (IT services, management consulting, staffing, payroll services, HR consulting, etc.), then you’re typically faced with these business development challenges:
You can’t instantly become a trusted resource. Over time, you’ve become a trusted resource to your clients. You’ve built your business via referrals. But when you’re reaching out to people who don’t know you, your outreach has to focus on why they should consider trusting you first before you even ask them for a meeting.
Productize what you do to make it easier for your prospects to buy. With the 3-second attention span of decision-makers, make it easy for them to consider what you have to offer. You can’t say, “We’re a consulting firm.” Or, “We’re an IT managed services firm.” Besides optimizing your true points of differentiation (see below), you need to break down what you do into marketable “parts”.
Show how you’re different from your competitors. If you look at the websites of your competitors, you’ll see that you all are saying similar things about yourselves – so what you think sets yourself apart, actually doesn’t in the eyes of decision makers. You have to spend time thinking about your true differentiation as a platform for your business development outreach.
What should a business services or consulting firm’s sales program look like?
Well-positioned and differentiated offerings, a CRM, an ever-expanding target database, ongoing content development and re-purposing (case study, blog post, video, etc.), email marketing campaigns, inside salesperson and sales process.
We do this for our business services clients. Let me know if you’d like to talk more about it.
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