How To Find High Margin Ideal Clients (3 of 3)

In part one of this series, I gave you a simple, practical structure for identifying who your Ideal Client is.

If you are going to spend valuable time selling to prospects, it makes sense that you are in front of the best potential prospects at all times.

In part two of this series, I gave you some simple systems so that you can secure meetings with your Ideal Clients.

Now, in part 3 we will look at how you sell value when you are in front of one of your Ideal Clients.

The NEW Consultative Selling Blueprint

The new Consultative Selling Blueprint is a simple four-part structure. It’s important that you follow the structure sequentially.

DESTINATION

First, you need to identify the results/outcome (the destination) that your client is trying to get to. There is always some ‘endpoint’ that the customer has in mind. Your job as a consultative seller is to uncover your client’s destination.

EXAMPLE: You are talking to a prospect about a marketing campaign that they are looking at running with your business. The goal is to improve their results over previous campaigns.

• YOU: In the context of your marketing campaign, what are you trying to accomplish?
• CLIENT: We need to increase the number of clients in our loyalty/ membership program.
• YOU: In which specific areas of your membership program are you looking to get a better result?
• CLIENT: We are looking for a net increase in members, which means we need to try and re-engage with lapsed members and we need to acquire brand new members.
• YOU: And where would success show up first?
• CLIENT: Our first priority is to re-engage with lapsed members.
• YOU: Great, shall we focus on that first?
• CLIENT: Sounds good!

DISCOVER

Your next step is to uncover the problems and frustrations your customers are experiencing.

EXAMPLE: You are still talking to the same prospect about their marketing campaign.

• YOU: What’s your biggest concern in the context of improving your response rates from this marketing campaign?
• CLIENT: Generally, the response rates in the industry are going down, and the cost of postage is going up. I’m worried about the impact all of this will have on my budget.
• YOU: Can you talk me through what you’ve tried previously?
• CLIENT: We’ve tried changing the format to reduce costs, and we tested a couple of new concepts.
• YOU: And what difference, if any, did that make?
• CLIENT: We got a bump in response rates from the new concepts, but they were more expensive to mail.

DEMONSTRATE

Now that you understand the issues the client is trying to resolve, you need to start demonstrating your ability to solve those issues for your client.

We have a range of strategies for doing this. One way to do this by using the ‘value connection’ strategy.

Your goal with the Value Connection process is to link your capabilities (products and service) to the issues you previously discussed with the prospect. The structure of the conversation looks like these examples

John, (ISSUES) margins are getting squeezed right now because most salespeople are simply looking for opportunities to quote. You can’t sell high-margin value-added services doing that. (BENEFITS OF YOUR SYSTEM) The New PX12 Consultative Selling System will improve your sales conversion rates by at least 10% and improve your margins by at least 3%.

(ISSUES) Email response rates have been in decline recently because people have too much junk in their inbox. (BENEFITS OF YOUR SYSTEM) The personalized cross-media campaign we are proposing should increase your response rates by 20% and lead to a significant increase in the lifetime value of your clients.

DELIVER

Finally, we get to the fourth step in the new Consultative Selling Blueprint process.

Normally, when we think about delivery, we think about delivering the products and services our customer purchased.

The concept of delivery means something completely different when you are using a consultative selling approach.

Ultimately, the customer is investing in your products and services in order to achieve some measurable objective.

The focus of the first 3 steps in the consultative selling process (Destination / Discover / Demonstrate), is to focus on business outcomes.

In your conversation, you want to put the problem before the product.

You need to connect the dots between the things you sell and the issues that the customer is trying to resolve.

After the sale has been made, it’s important that you check back with the customer to see what results they got.

FREE Resource: I produced a special CONSULTATIVE SELLING CHEAT SHEET that I give my private clients to use. It will help you uncover the issues your prospects are trying to solve.

You can download it for free from the link in the comment section below.