What You Say When Selling Better Be Different Than What You Do During Delivery …

… Or you won’t get any clients and if you do you won’t retain them

Whispering Wisdom

During the buying process, empathize with your prospect on where they think they are and show them how to get to where they want to be.

During delivery, enlighten your client on where they really are and inspire them to get to where they need to be.

Follow this path and you will have prospects lined up around the corner wanting to buy and you will retain those clients for as long as you deliver value.

A costly mistake that consultants and fractional leaders make all the time in the sales process is to tell their prospect what they think. You might think that is just being honest but I’ll tell you it is misguided.

The big mistake you’re making is believing that one critical thing you have to communicate to your prospect is your genius. You understand the situation better than your prospect does and you have the magic answer as to how you are going to save the day. Wrong.

The most important thing you have to do in the buying process is establish empathy. Your prospect has to feel like you “get them”. No one will work with a consultant who doesn’t understand what they are facing and feeling no matter how brilliant the consultant is.

You don’t establish empathy by telling the prospect that they don’t understand their current situation and they don’t have a clue about where they need to get to. Instead you must help your prospect articulate how they see where they are and where they want to be. Here’s how to do that:

This isn’t your first rodeo when it comes to addressing the issues that are important and urgent to your clients. Tap into your experience, expertise, and insight to create 4 groups to describe where your clients fall on the issue they want resolved. Think about an objective assessment that describes levels where clients can be grouped as struggle, mediocre, good, and great. After you present the 4 levels to your prospect, ask them 2 questions:

1. Where does your prospect think they are now?
2. Where would your prospect like to be in the future?

Here are the levels I use when I talk with consultants, fractional leaders, and coaches about client acquisition.

When the prospect tells you where they are and where they want to be, it becomes their gap not yours. They now own their gap. When you have a gap, you want to close it. When someone else has a gap, that’s their problem not yours.

You will only pay in time and money to work with someone if they can help you go from where you are to where you want to be. But this isn’t sufficient to retain your clients once your prospects buy.

The conundrum for consultants and fractional leaders is that accepting where your client thinks they are and working to get them to where they believe they need to be once you are hired and doing delivery will not end well for you. You are being brought in because you have expertise, insight, and wisdom to address the issue at hand.

Doing simply what the client thinks they need is unlikely to get them the results they expect you to deliver.?You must switch from empathizing with the prospect’s point of view during the buying process to persuasively speaking truth to power during the delivery phase.?Otherwise, it will be congrats on getting the client but sorry that you couldn’t retain the client. You will have left them with a bad taste in their mouth and your reputation will suffer as a result.

Alternatively, if you tell your prospect the truth during the buying process, you won’t turn many of them into clients. You’ll do great at retaining those few you have but you won’t have enough to keep you out of struggle city.

Once you’ve turned the prospect into a client, you have to accelerate building trust so you can enlighten the client to the truth of where they really are and inspire them to get to where they need to be. Fail to pull this off and you will fall short of the outcomes the client wants and you will definitely receive the lion’s share of the blame.

If you can’t flip this switch from how you get the client to how you deliver for the client, you’re in the wrong line of work.

Contact me to discuss how to get more clients and then retain them.