Sales and Sales Management Blog

Five Ways to Make Coaching Professionals to Sell More Effective
by Ford Harding

At professional service firms (accounting, actuarial, architectural, engineering, law, management consulting firms and their like) sales management is one of the many responsibilities of practice and office heads.  These people must also market the firm’s services, sell work, do billable client work, run their offices or practices, and do many other things.  Often, they are rainmakers, the word used in the professions to describe super salespeople.  They don’t have much time for coaching.

The people they coach are also not typical salespeople.  Generally, they are more highly educated, are initially recruited for technical or creative rather than sales abilities, and sell on a part-time basis while doing billable client work.  Not having chosen their careers with a desire to sell, they are only asked to do so after years of providing services to clients who respect their expertise and listen to them.  Expected to stand up to senior client executives when necessary, many are strong-willed.  In short, their experiences and interests are not designed to make them effective sellers.

It is hardly surprising, then, that sales coaching in the professions is often ineffective.  Having spent years coaching professionals to sell, Harding & Company suggests the following to get better results:

1.  Supercharge your marketing meetings: Weekly or monthly marketing meetings in most professional firms are deadly.  Deadly!  They consist of one participant after another reeling off lengthy and meandering descriptions of the work they are pursuing.  Fifteen minutes into the meeting, 90% of the participant’s have zoned out, thinking more about what they will say when it comes their turn or about the client deadline they are rushed to meet, rather than about what the current speaker is saying.  This is wasteful.  Wasteful of the participants’ time and wasteful of perhaps the greatest opportunity available to the practice or office head to coach.

Except in special cases, reports on current pursuits should be limited to 60 seconds each.  Time freed up this way can then be devoted to building morale by recognizing successes, drawing lessons from participants’ recent experiences and some just-in-time training.

2. Recognize that different people will succeed in different ways.  Rainmakers tend to feel that their method for making rain is the only or the best one.  They have their own history of success to prove it.  They sometimes don’t realize that what works for them, when they are at the peak of their careers with established reputations and client bases, is not necessarily the best for more junior people with different personalities and capabilities.  I recently heard one highly successful rainmaker advise more junior staff members to “nuke” clients who got in the way by going over the clients’ heads to their bosses and reporting the obstacle.  It worked for him, but few of the more junior people could have pulled it off.  There would be disastrous consequences had they tried.  I have often heard rainmakers say that a particular professional doesn’t speak up enough at sales meetings.  The person in question is often a great listener who becomes an effective seller exactly by not speaking up too much.

3.  Help them recognize small successes: Developing a client base and a consistent flow of new work is a marathon not a sprint.  Staying power over time determines success as much as anything.  Aspiring rainmakers often judge their success only in actual new business won, e.g. the big successes.  But business development is an area where big successes will not come less you have many small ones along the way.  By recognizing the small successes, rainmakers can see the progress they are making, and those small successes sustain them between the big ones.  When aspiring rainmakers learn to do the same, they have taken a big step towards their ultimate transformation to rainmakers.  Part of your job as a coach is helping them recognize and celebrate small successes as they occur.  Did the aspiring rainmaker meet the CFO at an important client?  That’s a solid small success.  The CFO doesn’t realize it yet, but he will know the aspiring rainmaker for the rest of his natural life.   Only death will set him free.  Did a client open up and share confidences with the aspiring rainmaker for the first time?  Or did he spend an afternoon on the golf course with her for the first time?  These are small successes, too, and the aspiring rainmaker needs to learn to see them as such.

4.  Help them depersonalize setbacks, failures and ambiguous messages from the market:   Professionals as a group are extremely hard on themselves.  In their client work most expect to succeed 100% of the time.  (Litigators and executive recruiters are examples of exceptions to this general rule.)  Though they logically know that they cannot expect to succeed at winning every sale, emotionally, lack of success feels like failure.   When something doesn’t go right, they quickly blame themselves.  When a prospective client doesn’t return a call, they assume that if reflects the client’s lack of interest or dislike..  If a client hires a competitor, they assume that is must be due to some personal failure.  Certainly, they must learn to evaluate their own sales performance, but instinctively beating oneself up after every perceived setback will quickly drive a professional away from selling.

Good sales coaches help aspiring rainmakers depersonalize those things which should not be taken personally.  Unless you do this, as many as half of the people you coach will give up long before they can expect to see results.

5.  Help them protect the time they need to develop business.  Professionals cite lack of time as the most serious obstacle to their rainmaking more often than any other reason.  Time can be a real problem or just a handy excuse, and often it is both.  Expected to make their clients happy and to achieve high utilization rates to ensure their firm’s profitability, they feel intense pressure to put billable client work before all else.  Indeed, they are often told to do so, both in so many words and indirectly in the way that many small decisions are made about how they use their time.  If they feel diffidence or aversion to selling, lack of time is an easy out.  Unless you help them overcome the time issue, you will be an ineffective coach.

As the preceding paragraph suggests, there are both logical and emotional aspects to the problem, and your coaching must address both.  So, you can suggest practical ways that they can get business development benefit from billable time.  For example, suggest that Instead of calling a client with an answer to a question that they go see him.  They will have a different quality of conversation if they do.  Suggest that while visiting a client that they drop by the office of one of her colleagues to say a quick hello.  You can help them find activities to unload to make time available for business development.  For example, some professionals need to offload assembling their travel expenses to an assistant.  You can help them organize their effort, so they can use scarce time more efficiently.  For starters, they need a consolidated and regularly updated contact list.

But these logical steps won’t remove emotional barriers.  To do that you must help the aspiring rainmaker reset priorities.  A conversation with one young professional revealed that his primary need to sell more work derived from a need to make partner so that he would have the financial resources to pay for the education of four children.  We took the picture of his children down from his bookcase and placed it next to his phone with the understanding that he would look at it, whenever he was tempted to avoid making business development calls.  He began to make his calls consistently. 

If your sales coaching is not as effective as you would like, perhaps you should revisit your priorities, too.  If you write a clear one-or-two-sentence statement of why developing more rainmakers is important to you, perhaps you will find it easier to find the time to focus your attention on the effort and to try these steps.

Ford Harding in the founder of Harding & Company which helps professionals make the transition from doing and managing client work to selling it.  He is the author of Rain Making: Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field [Adams Media] and Creating Rainmakers [Wiley].  His blog can be found at www.HardingCo.com/blog and he can be reached at fharding@HardingCo.com