Knowledge Exchange is a weekly series of educational articles that we encourage you to share and discuss with your colleagues and network. This month, we’re offering advice for successfully selling your services.
Some might say you have a major advantage in sales if you wear multiple hats in your business: You understand what your business does so well that you can answer any question and refute any objection.
Unfortunately, knowing your services inside and out doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to sell them. Communicating value to sales opportunities in a way that closes deals is a true skill.
While a good salesperson can sell just about anything, there are subtle differences in the ways you might approach selling an intangible service versus a physical product. In service sales, the prospect can’t hold and examine anything before making their decision.
This means the interactions you have in the sales process are even more rooted in trust-building. In this context, it’s essential to base sales conversations in transparency and empathy to help the potential customer envision a better future state.
That future can feel much farther away for someone considering doing business with your firm than it would be if they were buying something they could take home and enjoy right away. Think about how much easier it is to imagine your life with a new car than with a functioning marketing and branding strategy for your business.
In the sales role, it’s your responsibility to pull this imaginary state closer to reality for the person who needs your services.
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Pinpointing the right way to sell is such a universal challenge that it’s been the subject of endless books and methodologies. There are so many to choose from that you might experience decision fatigue trying to find the one that’s most applicable to your business. And even when you do find spot-on expert guidance, the toughest part is applying it. Once you pick up the phone or go to write your next email to a prospect, you could revert to bad habits and forget everything you learned.
Here, we’ll look at three popular, effective sales methods and how to draw inspiration from each to ramp up your service sales.
Neil Rackham’s SPIN selling approach has been around since he published the "SPIN Selling" book in 1988. In it, he lays out a strategic framework designed to enhance the effectiveness of sales conversations.
SPIN stands for the four types of questions sales reps should ask:
With these four question types, you can uncover your prospect’s pain points and shift the focus from what you offer to what they need. SPIN selling is known for facilitating a more human approach.
Selling a service can be especially tough in the early stages of discovery, and that’s often the case because it’s hard to know what questions to ask to overcome initial objections — or radio silence. When a conversation is at risk of going cold, the SPIN selling approach will help you warm it up with thoughtful inquiry.
“Why” questions are some of the most powerful for a service-based sales team. Ask why your prospect engages in their current processes, and you may help them discover that they aren’t sure and need your help.
Dive into the best practices of SPIN selling with this guide from Mailchimp.
Keenan, author of "Gap Selling," proposes that successful sales is all about understanding the “gap” between a prospect’s current state and desired future state. To get there, he explains that a sales rep must perform a thorough discovery, actively listen and identify opportunities to position their product or service as the solution that will bridge that gap.
This approach goes a bit deeper than some traditional sales methods because it can require bringing the prospect’s awareness to negative outcomes they don’t yet realize they’re experiencing — or don’t yet feel the pain of. It’s all about framing your business as a way to get someone to where they want to be in a faster and smarter way.
An example of identifying the “gap”:
You draft custom, sustainable building plans for commercial construction companies. A prospect comes to you because they’re preparing to build several new office buildings and would like to save on energy costs and be the first in the area to offer premium environmentally friendly office space.
Following the gap selling approach, you first learn everything you can about the prospect and the business. In discussing the history of the company, you find out they haven’t attempted fully sustainable construction in the past because they fear the costs outweigh the benefits. Yet, they have a desire to build more exclusive properties with in-demand features and modern materials.
The gap is the space between their current reputation and what they envision the company becoming with this fresh new building style. Read more about how to close the gap in this guide from Gong.
"The Challenger Sale" is a book and methodology by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon. It’s become popular for presenting the unconventional advice that a salesperson should challenge a prospect’s beliefs and assumptions. This can feel risky because it means pushing people beyond their comfort zones, which can seem counterintuitive at first.
As a proactive challenger, your job is to teach your prospect about their problems and offer solutions from a new angle. You’re essentially a thought leader providing value through your expertise and provoking new ways of thinking.
One of the core components of B2B challenger sales is teaching for differentiation, which means teaching the prospect something new about their own business. In a professional services context, this looks like quantifying what they’re losing every day, week or month that they’re not actively solving their problem.
For example, if you’re selling web design services to a small interior design business, you might estimate the amount of monthly web traffic they’re missing out on every month that they don’t update their website for accuracy and SEO. Using this figure in your sales conversations could make the prospect uncomfortable, but it should also make them realize the cost of inaction.
Gartner shares insights on how to incorporate differentiation messaging into a sales playbook.
Get more advice about sales strategy and meeting today’s challenges in our other Knowledge Exchange posts and learn how to automate your sales processes with an advanced sales management tool.
