Supporting Processes For Sales

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of a sales process for boutique consultancies and listed some of the most common components it may include.

Yes, having a process to sell is critical. But as your consultancy grows (from a solo or micro firm with 1 or 2 people to a boutique with a team of 3-12), there's something that will require more and more of your attention: the processes that support sales.

The main ones are:

• Goal-setting: A process to set effective sales goals, aiming to bring in the right number of the right projects with the right kind of clients.
• Monitoring: A process to review your pipeline, which helps you allocate marketing resources and ensure your team is neither over nor underutilized.
• Incentivizing: Processes to increase accountability, often by frequent and transparent KPI reporting and tying individual targets to compensation.

It turns out that putting those support processes in place is as important as formalizing your sales process. The reason for this is simple: Those support processes add "skin to the game".

You get no benefit from systemizing a sales process. You get the benefit of following a systemized sales process. For this exact reason, I don't agree to sell any training work anymore before clients read and understand the problem of standards.

Adding those capabilities to your consultancy is not a complicated science, but it takes work. If you're interested in learning more about them - as well as best practices that work for boutique consultancies - feel free to drop me a line.