A note from John: this post comes to you from Everett Sizemore at Inflow, who also wrote the monster Prioritizing Your Marketing Channels post. I asked Everett to write this post because I have seen a number of Inflow’s sales cycles and am very impressed with how consultative they are in their process. I believe that this is paramount to the success of consulting businesses who charge a premium for their services. Because they charge a premium, they can afford to have fewer clients and thus selecting those clients is crucial to their success. Here’s Everett.

As the marketing director for Inflow, an eCommerce marketing agency in Denver, I have the opportunity to work closely with the sales team from initial contact all the way up to delivering the proposal. This post outlines the general chain of events as a lead comes in, goes through our consultative sales process, and – hopefully – becomes a good client.

When a new lead comes in asking for a specific deliverable or service, our first objective is to find out why they have decided this particular thing is what they need. This is fairly common with most professional services:

Nurse Patient Dialogue About Antibiotics

Or how about this one…

mechanic

It would be easy to sell boilerplate SEO audits, content audits and conversion optimization site reviews as products. That seems to be how a lot of clients expect to interact with agencies these days. There is a strong pull toward creating a menu of services from which prospects can choose as if they were at a restaurant.

 

But we don’t sell products — we sell solutions and results.

A consultative sales process takes the time to educate potential clients about what their options are, and even goes so far as to recommend the appropriate solutions based on hours of in-depth research.

Obviously, an agency can’t afford to do this for every unqualified lead that comes in so one of the keys to having a consultative sales process is being able to quickly evaluate leads so you can weed out ones that you’re probably not interested in signing on. Notice the title says “better” business, not “more” business. We accomplish this with a “project fit matrix,” which will be covered in more depth below.

This is how we currently approach the sales process at Inflow.

 An Outline of Our Sales Process and Documents

  1. Lead Form
    1. Schedule a consultation, speak to an expert, contact us, etc.
  2. Send a Consultation Discovery Form
    1. A “lead” here is defined as someone who requested our services and/or a consultation.
    2. Sent to leads along with a link to Mike’s calendar to schedule their call.
  3. Getting to Know You Call
    1. Fill out any blanks in the “Client Discovery Form” during this call.
    2. Spend far more time “listening” than talking in most cases.
    3. Remember, they contacted YOU. This is not a sales call. The goal is to find out what they need and if it is a lead for whom we want to develop a presentation and proposal.
  4. Develop a sales presentation focusing on their needs, which includes:
    1. Custom Insights and our recommended approach
    2. What it’s like to work with Inflow
    3. Budget and goals/KPIs
  5. Develop/Customize a Proposal
  6. The Official Sales Call
    1. Screen Sharing to deliver the Sales Presentation and Proposal
    2. Proposal editing process, if necessary
    3. Signatures
  7. Congratulate yourself for landing a new client.

What Happens Once the Proposal is Signed

  1. Sales debrief with the team
  2. Work with client to fill out the New Client Intake Form
    1. Contacts, partners, more business specific needs
    2. Access to GSC, GA accounts if not already provided
  3. GA Audit and Setup, benchmark collecting, referral spam blocking, etc.
    1. Possible GTM Setup
  4. Kick-off call with both teams
  5. Now the real work begins!

Pre-Call Information Gathering

We gather info as soon as we can in the sales process by using progressive profiling and lead scoring. Our form questions change depending how much we know about the prospect. Their lead score goes up automatically as they interact with more of our content. We round out contact information with tools like Hubspot’s CRM and Sidekick.

The next step is to apply the lead to our “Prospect Fit Matrix.” This involves looking at their business model, site, code, platform, indexation stats and a few tool reports. It takes about 15-30 minutes and gives us a general idea of how likely the prospect is to sign on and be a good client for us. There are sometimes leads that are obviously not a good fit from the start, and we may not bother applying the Prospect Fit Matrix to them.

If they are not a good fit, we do our best to refer them to a trusted consultant or agency, often via Credo.

If they are potentially a good fit, we spend a lot of time digging into the potential project during the sales process. We eventually might spend anywhere from 4-8 hours of staff time (communications, research, preparing presentations and proposals, etc.) before a proposal is delivered to the client. This is why it is essential we qualify our leads.

phone-call-consultation-prep

We then schedule a conversation within the next few days. It typically lasts 30-45 minutes, but some really good ones have gone on for more than an hour. As long as we don’t have another call scheduled, we like to answer as many questions as the prospect wants to ask.

We come prepared with a few highly actionable, customized, specific takeaways that demonstrate the following:

  • How we might help them
  • What we’d recommend
  • Our passion for eCommerce marketing
  • Our deep experience in technical eCommerce marketing
  • That we value their time enough to do our research and come prepared

We also talk a lot about goals in these first calls to make sure they align with available budget, timelines and opportunities. If not enough time is spent here, there is a risk of having misaligned goals, which doesn’t typically end well.

Know When to Say No

I used the word “better” clients instead of “more” clients in the title because that is what a consultative sales process does for us.

We put a lot of work into our sales process to make it a beneficial exercise for both parties. If the potential client is not willing to also do the work to make sure it’s a good fit, it’s probably not a good fit.

And if a lead gets all the way through most of the sales process, only to go elsewhere, the process itself will have provided them with some value and will have saved us from signing a client that is unlikely to be happy with our services.

A Consultative Sales Anecdote

A PPC prospect came to us with a well-optimized and decently performing AdWords account. They wanted to increase conversions by 10x on the same ad spend. This might be possible if the account was in bad shape, so we dug in. Fortunately for everyone, we found there wasn’t too much else to squeeze out of the account.

They were willing to pay us and get started right away, but we couldn’t talk them into more realistic goals for PPC, or to invest in another channel, such as Content Marketing.

In the end, they went looking for another agency who will probably take the work. But we don’t feel bad about it, even with the time invested.

We don’t like to set our team up for failure when they thrive on being successful for our clients. This is why a consultative sales process is about more than improving closing rates or signing on “more” clients. It’s about signing on the “right” clients, even if that means spending a little more time educating and consulting during the sales process.