Selling Your Services During Covid-19

The past six months have been difficult for many businesses, including design professionals. Projects have been put on hold or stopped and restarted on a loop.

Covid-19 has created fear for architects and engineers that - if work runs out or revenue drops even a little - there will be a need to lay people off. Design professionals are having a hard enough time keeping top talent without having to lay them off due to a shortage of business.

Joe Diliberto directly responded to those fears in a video interview last month. Joe has worked in corporate, in the startup world, and has had his own business - Sandler Training - for the past 15 years, working with professionals in a variety of industries, including architecture and engineering.

"The essence of what I do is work with companies to look at how they are going to market in terms of expanding their client portfolio," said Joe. "Do they have any sort of process or methodology versus just winging it.

"A lot of it is bringing some discipline to the process of building your business."

Part of Joe's interview was published in a video last week outlining a three-step framework for generating new business:

1. Look at activities
2. Generate meaningful conversations
3. Have the right mindset

Watch the full video here and leave your thoughts with a comment!

Redefining 'Selling'

Joe digs deeper into the idea of sales with his framework, suggesting we start by redefining the word "selling."

"The definition of selling should be this, and it has to be sincere and real," he said, "our job as a design professional is to have meaningful, significant conversations to help people make decisions. It's as simple as that."

Joe went on to explain that the sales process is made up of a series of micro decisions.

"It's almost like dating," he said. "Imagine that you go on a dating site and you find a person that's compatible. You say, 'Hey, I'm really enjoying this conversation, would you be comfortable grabbing a cup of coffee in broad daylight in front of a lot of people?' That's an easy decision to make, right?

"But if instead I said, 'Hey, I really enjoyed meeting you, how about I come over to your house for dinner tonight, I'll bring the wine.' It's like, 'Whoa, partner.'"

Dating on LinkedIn?

We could use the same analogy on LinkedIn.

As a LinkedIn user, you've probably received a larger-than-usual number of direct messages attempting to sell you something, especially in this Covid world.

Typically these people are complete strangers, looking to move from "meeting" you to selling to you in a matter of seconds.

"Set a meeting for me," "Do this for me," -- it's a lot. Even if we're partially interested prior to the reach-out, it's easy to decline after the forceful ask. Joe puts this in great perspective, articulating that we need to see what we're selling as change.

"Maybe it's change from one of our competitors, maybe it's change from them doing some of the work internally, maybe it's change from: do they really need an architect to design something or not," he said. "We're selling change."

Selling Change: Three Questions

Joe breaks down the art of selling change and the three questions we should be answering for a potential client during the selling process.

Question 1: Why should I do something different from what I'm currently doing?

Capture the attention of a prospect by showing them why they should change their behavior in the first place. If we don't start with the why, we won't get anywhere in the conversation.

Question 2: Is the impact bad enough that I should do this?

How much will the prospect benefit if they take us up on our offer? If taking the trouble (or spending the money) to work with us doesn't have enough of an upside, the answer should be no.

Question 3: Why should I be doing this with you, or your particular design firm?

We may convince the prospect that a change is needed, but we also have to convince that person that they should work with us to implement that change.

The Breakdown

Taking a look at those three questions, Joe says the breakdown happens when we try to answer Question 3 without addressing Nos. 1 or 2.

"We start pitching or trying to talk about why it's a great idea to do business with us (but we really need to do) the groundwork to figure out: do we really understand the problem? Do they really need an architect or an engineer?" he said.

"If it's sincere, we're going to be going through the process to help them make the best decision, and we've got to be comfortable with it (potentially) not being a good fit."

We have to be willing to educate others - or "edusell," as Joe calls it - to help them understand how to buy our services.

"We've interviewed high level buyers and executives and CEOs and the question we ask them is: what do you look for in a person that's in there to sell your services to you?" said Joe. "They said, 'I want somebody that challenges the way I think about things.'"

We shouldn't, however, tell a prospect what we can provide in the context that they're doing it wrong. It implies that the prospect doesn't know what they're doing but we do.

Instead, Joe suggests third-party stories.

"'Let me share with you how some of our other clients have made that decision' and walk them through how other clients have made the decision to pick you," he said.

Constant Conversation

It seems that the more conversations we have that guide people toward those micro decisions, the more contract options we will have.

Instead of desperately taking any project that comes our way, we can select the projects that make the most sense for us because we have ample opportunities.

"When you have these conversations, there's always a little image in my mind that helps me facilitate the conversation," said Joe. "We sell our services every day, but people don't buy our services every day. (It comes down to helping them) learn how to buy our services."

About Zachary C. Waters, AAI

Zachary C. Waters began his own insurance firm with two goals: to simplify the complexities of professional liability insurance and to empower clients to be proactive about dealing with unpredictable, potentially severe events in their business. Working primarily with architectural firms, Waters provides an unconventional, modern approach to liability insurance. To learn more, send him a private message on LinkedIn.