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Managing Sales...Avoiding the Famine

VHQ Article - Managing Sales (MC).pdf

As a practice owner or consultancy practitioner you are likely to be dealing with projects that are of high value, have a long lead time and are potentially very complex. This situation creates some real tensions for businesses that are trying to maintain growth. How do you maintain a balance between nurturing new prospect, delivering projects and maintaining a healthy sales pipeline?

If you do not have separate, dedicated functions for business development, sales, account management and delivery then the onus usually falls on the consultancy team to try and perform all of these tasks. And it's not easy - they may simply not have the tools, skills or inclination.

Let's assume that expanding the non-fee earning headcount isn't yet an option - we need to keep our overheads as low as possible - we need to work smarter. So, how can we become smarter at nurturing prospects, managing sales opportunities (for existing as well as new clients), working the sales process and maximising lead conversions?

VHQ Solutions advocates a two pronged approach;

Contact Management

For VHQ Solutions Contact Management covers a wide range of sales oriented activities. In particular we stress that it includes the actual identification of new contacts and leads right at the start of the process as well as more obvious tasks such as recording interactions with contacts and allocating tasks.

Our experience suggests that e-marketing techniques are rapidly increasing in importance for consultancies. The truth is, however, that for many small and medium sized practices, direct marketing and referrals from business networking still lay at the heart of lead generation.

For many of our clients the key to success has been to recognise that contact management is a company-wide activity. Having all your business contacts in one place - not as individual consultants' personal contacts on their laptops - means the company can access these for e-shots, mailings and other marketing activity.

We have had cases where centralisation has highlighted that different members of the consultancy team were in contact with the same potential clients. Pulling information together and then sharing it allowed them to immediately improve their relationship with prospects and clients, eventually working together to identify more opportunities.

We recommend establishing a system and a set of business processes that:

Some routine aspects of Contact Management can be turned into administrative tasks handled by a PA secretary or even outsourced to virtual administrator. However, consultants still need to participate in capturing information and taking responsibility for their allocated tasks. The important thing is that their burden is reduced and they have a variety of simple options for managing contacts.

As your consultants establish and nurture relationships with their contacts (including existing clients) some of these will become genuine sales leads and need to be managed effectively if they are to turn into contracts.