If there are that many steps, there are too many steps. And there is one common denominator in each and every one of  those steps. You. So we need to wean you off your personal involvement.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “No. That’s absolutely impossible. My business is too complex, there’s so much detail. I need to speak to the client individually and really understand their needs.”

And yes, there are certain business situations that call for that. But not every time, and it’s not the only way.

So, here are the reasons we need to fire you from your sales team.

1. The greater the dependency on you, the weaker your business. You’re putting a lid on your income because you become a bottleneck when everything must go through you.

2. Too much personal investment in a potential client weakens your negotiating position. If you met someone out of the blue who says, “I like what you’re doing but will you do it at half price?” you would probably respond, “No way. Who do you think I am?” But you’d likely put it more politely than that.

But what if you’ve had prior phone conversations with a client, submitted proposals and had meetings? Now you’ve gone quite far down the path.

And after you have invested your time and your resources, the client comes back to you with, “We really like you. We really want to work with you. But we can only afford half of what you’re charging.”

You’re more likely to waver because at that point you’re already invested in the potential sale. Then you are faced with the agonizing decision of cutting your losses completely, or accepting the low fee and hoping for more work later on. That’s not a position you want to be in.

3. Too much personal involvement in a sale creates a false expectation for your client relationships.
Has this ever happened to you? You receive great and attentive service from a sales person before you purchase something from a company. Then, the moment you hand over your cash it seems like they’re not interested in you anymore.

You may think you would never treat customers that way, but you run the risk of this happening if you give a lot of personal attention to people before they become a client. Because you can only do that as long as you’re not busy.

Sooner or later, when your business is at capacity and you’re working with many clients, you’re not going to have the time. Something will have to give. Or you will be so focused on bringing in new business that existing client relationships will suffer.

So, be aware of the dynamic of your business relationships with clients. Be available, of course, but keep it realistic and professional.

4. The final reason we need to fire you from your sales team is that you can’t be duplicated. I love working with clients one-to-one, helping them figure out solutions to their problems. But as my business has grown, I’ve had to pull myself back from those types of conversations. I can’t sustain that level of service on a personal basis throughout my whole business. So now the people that get one-to-one attention from me are the people in my mentoring program.

The key is to eliminate at least some of the one-to-one activities that you’re currently doing to generate new business. Remove your personal self as much as possible from the manual labor and intense personal involvement of getting new clients.

Fire yourself from your sales team and focus on finding tools and resources that will attract more clients with less of your time.

Step One: Set a Consulting Appointment

To make time spent on the phone setting appointments more productive, skip the sales pitch and offer to review their current product use. You could say, for example, “I’m glad to hear you’re currently outsourcing your payroll. That’s a great way to save your company time and money. What I’d like to do is review your payroll services and help you identify any additional savings opportunities.”

Notice that I didn’t say, “I think we have something you need to buy.” Today’s business managers are swamped with sales calls, and their first response to your hard sell will be “No!” Offering your services as a consultant, instead, lets them know they’ll benefit whether or not they become your client. That’s a very effective way to gain access to business managers already buying from your competition.

Step Two: Be Ready to Serve

How can not making a sale be of benefit to either you or the prospect? Here’s an important concept to learn as you build your business: Once you acknowledge that not every person you meet will become a client, you’re free to serve them in ways that will make them remember you.

In other words, take the pressure off yourself to make every sale and start looking for ways to serve the people you consult with. Can you help them save money? Do you have industry-specific knowledge that will help their business become more productive?

If you’re able to think creatively about problems plaguing their business, you instantly gain credibility with frustrated owners and managers. By removing the need to “sell, sell, sell!” your mind is free to create solutions of real benefit to prospective clients.

Here’s the takeaway: Approach your consultation appointments with an attitude of service to decrease client skepticism and open doors to future business. Help prospects without demanding a sale to keep yourself front-of-mind when they’re seeking new vendors.

Step Three: Lead Them to the Best Solution

It’s possible your product or service really is the best solution for their business. By honoring your promise to act as a consultant rather than a sales rep, you position yourself to lead them to that solution. Here’s how…

- Ask questions designed to uncover their current solution and its cost.
- Find out how well the solution is working and what they would like to change.
- The information you gain automatically tells you if your product or service will be of benefit.

Here are the two possible scenarios for completing your consultation appointment:

1)    If you can truly be of service, let them know you have ideas for significant savings and set a follow-up appointment to present them.

2)    If you find their current solution is sufficient, leave them with helpful information about their industry, market or business processes.

Whether you make an immediate sale or not, you’ve cemented yourself in their minds as someone willing to help. When issues arise that their current vendor can’t resolve or they’re required to rebid services, your name will naturally come to mind.

When sales stagnate or your client list keeps fluctuating, try using the consultation approach to set the stage for new business. Skip the hard sell and learn to ask questions that allow you to create solutions. By positioning yourself as a consultant, you’ll soon be seen in a whole new light by those in need of your services.

It’s so frustrating isn’t it, when your prospects do not share your sense of urgency? So what can you do to stack the sales odds in your favour and get things moving?

When I started my fledgling training company back in 1996, one of the first hard lessons I learned was that I did not have the funds to finance long decision-making time, and unfortunately in some cases it was going to be 6 or 12 months before I saw any real business gains. I knew that I was going to be out of cash well before that point. So I needed a way to turn things around – fast.

So, in desperation, I said to myself, “Well, what if I just run a one-off day on my specialist subject, and do it as an open programme? I’ll hire a room in a hotel and do the training.” So I started offering a one-day training on cold calling.

I had accidentally stumbled across a valuable technique. I discovered that running my own open courses helped position me as an expert and gain invaluable experience ‘in the field.’ It gave me an opportunity to ‘showcase’ my expertise. There were some people who came on the course and said, “This is great. We need to do this in house.” And so it sped up the process of landing large sales contracts.

From the clients’ point of view, the advantage for them was that they could sample what I was offering at much lower risk. If they sent one or two people to an event and they didn’t like it, then there was no great loss. But imagine if the whole sales team had been taken from their usual duties to experience a training programme, delivered in-house, that wasn’t suited for their needs? That’s a nightmare that no sales director or training manager wants to contemplate. So you’ve got to lower the risk for them.

When you package your expertise and deliver it via a live event, you immediately change the sales dynamic. Instead of you having to wait for months for a decision, you gently nudge your contacts into taking action. That’s because, by their very nature, live events have a limited availability. If you’re selling in-house training or consultancy, the main frustration you experience is injecting urgency and getting people to act. But if the only way they can experience you is via a live event, you immediately have a built-in deadline and built-in scarcity.

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned about marketing and selling over the past 10 years is that you MUST give people a reason to act NOW. First of all you need to recognise that your biggest competition, whether you’re selling to organizations or individuals, is not the other training company or the other consultant or coach down the road. It’s the status quo. Most people would rather stick with what they know than take the risk of making a change and getting it wrong so it’s really easy to keep putting you off. One of the reasons open workshops, seminars and training courses work so beautifully for speeding up the decision making process is because they have two elements which have been proven time and time again to both give people a reason to act and increase urgency. 1. Limited availability 2. A deadline.

When you’re selling a bespoke solution, it’s a challenge to credibly build these elements into your proposal, but when you’re selling open programmes, they are an intrinsic part of the package. There are a limited number of seats in the room, and the course is taking place on a specific date. Once the places are gone, they’re gone! Once the date has passed, the opportunity is gone.

Now, most people who are selling training, coaching or consulting do not exploit these elements to their advantage, but if you do, you can transform your business.

So what happened to me, completely by accident, was that as I started packaging my in-house training into an easier to buy, off-the-shelf solution such as a one-day programme, it generated immediate benefits. I got the primary cash-flow coming from bookings for my training course, followed by the secondary benefits of bookings for in-house trainings.

If you are a trainer, coach or consultant, you MUST seriously think about offering your expertise via an open seminar, workshop or training course. Even if training isn’t your main service, and your long term goal is consulting clients, if you build an event around a technique or a skill that you can teach prospective clients, it WILL stimulate follow-on business. And, if you market it the right way and it will put immediate cash in the bank too.