WHY YOUR FIRST SALE SHOULD BE TO YOURSELF

YAY! – You have booked a meeting with a prospective client. After the initial call with the prospect, you are excited. You feel this prospect fits with the ethos of your business, As you get closer to the meeting date, the nerves start to set in..

After all, this prospect is such a good fit, you would really enjoy working with them. But what if I don’t sign them up at the meeting? Will they go away thinking I'm too expensive?

Now the self-doubt has set in. It is often this self-doubt and fear of rejection that leads HR Consultants to undersell their value. Offering pricing that proves sub-optimal in the long term.

FEAR OF REJECTION

This fear of rejection is understandable. Many HR consultants start their careers as a technician. Working within a single business and being focused on providing the service. Thinking about the sales side, and convincing people to buy the service would never have been on your radar, that is until you decided to set up on your own.

The truth is we all suffer from at best a fear of rejection at some point, at worst a little bit of imposter syndrome may creep in. This is because ultimately, we are used to working away in the background and a sales situation feels uncomfortable to us at first.

THE VALUE OF A SALE

When I started my business, I found that I was discounting my services without being asked due to the fear of not converting a sale. I soon realised that this was not a practice I could continue with if I wanted to scale the business.

It was this experience that led me to evaluate my mindset around sales. Below I detail some tips to help you do the same.

MAKE THE MOST IMPORTANT CHANGE

#1 Appreciating your own Value. 

What value do you put on your time and knowledge? How many years has this knowledge bank taken to collate? How many mistakes have you made in the past, that you have learnt from?

There’s something very important that you need to realise about your services…

They’re valuable!

They’re so valuable that a lot of people will want to take advantage of them. And because of that, you should never feel uncomfortable about selling those services. You know that they bring something special to your clients, so have confidence in them.

The truth is prospective clients smell fear. If you are not confident in the value that you bring to your clients, this will show when you talk to your prospects. If you are not sold on the value of your services no one else will be.

Realising your value and being able to confidently communicate it to your prospects is key. Allowing you to successfully convert sales at a price that reflects the value exchanged.

#2 Identify your unique proposition

To help you to appreciate the value that you provide you need to identify what is unique about your service proposition.

Being comfortable with this will enable you to confidently describe the benefits of engaging you to look after their HR.

If you cannot articulate this to your prospect they will think that the service you provide is no different from any other HR provider. They will then most likely judge your offer solely on price.

If you are not sure what makes your service unique review your competitors and compare what they are offering to your offer. The differentiating factor may simply be down to your expertise in supporting a specific industry. Or it may be your skills in a specific HR service.

The important thing is once you understand what makes your services unique. Leverage it in your marketing and sales meetings and make it work for you!

#3 Ask Questions!

When you are offering services, this meeting is all about building a relationship with our prospect. Understanding what motivated them to reach out to us is critical to us being able to understand how we can help our clients.

This is our opportunity to ask questions, similar to a traditional sales approach. But, we are not looking for an opportunity to launch into our pitch. We need to get to the bottom of whether:

A) We can help

B) Whether the prospect is a good fit for us

If the answer to either of these questions is no, we should not be afraid to say no and to refer them onto another provider.

If the answer to these questions is yes, we can then present our offer to the prospect confidently. Knowing that we have qualified them during the meeting.

At no point should this meeting feel like a pressured sales opportunity for either party.

#4 Practice, Practice, Practice

Practice makes perfect.

Remembering everything you need to ask or the finer details of your packages and sales pitch is a tough ask. You will undoubtedly forget elements in your first meetings. It is important that as much as possible you can commit as many elements of your sales process to your muscle memory.

Practice your sales meetings with your partner, your children, your parents or even your dog. Try to get feedback (maybe not from the dog) on how you have performed. Maybe even record the sessions so that you can review them and tweak your future performance.

The more you practice the more confident you will become and the more natural you will appear to your prospects in sales meetings. This, in turn will lead to an improved conversion rate.

#5 Embrace a No

If you NEED the sale you won’t get the sale

If you go into a sales meeting feeling like you need to convert you will come across as desperate.

Refocus your mind so that a yes at the end of the meeting does not matter to you. This may seem counterintuitive. But by being less focused on a yes outcome you will relax more, and your personality will show through, at the end of the day people buy people.

A no from a prospect is not the end of the world. It just means that ultimately, they were not a good fit for your offer and so not a good fit for you. 

SELL TO YOURSELF

In the end, selling is as much about mindset as it is technique.

You’ve likely spent much of your career as a technician, rather than a customer-facing Consultant.

As a technician, you’re all about providing the service, and less about convincing people to buy it.

That mindset needs to change.

You need to approach selling as an opportunity to provide value to the people who need it. And to do that, you have to recognise the inherent value that exists in what you have to offer.

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways that I can help you to increase your value to clients, realise higher prices and achieve greater profitability.

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