A Consultant’s Guide to a Winning Sales Pitch
There are 49,195 businesses listed as management consultancies in U.S., according to Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. If you add a similar code for Engineering, Accounting, Research and Management, then that is another 331,921 businesses or nearly 400,000 potential competitors that consultancies have to navigate! Adding unique value to clients and communicating this value through all the noise can be challenging. Your consulting pitch matters.
Over the past few months, I met with a number of 9Lenses customers in the consulting space in an effort to understand their challenges and goals. It didn’t take long until I started to hear a pretty consistent refrain; “I’ve got to define and articulate our value proposition, and create a compelling pitch to win new business.”
While that challenge is not necessarily unique to the consulting industry (we at 9Lenses are refining our own value proposition), the data in SIC revealed that it might be a particularly acute issue in this industry. To help tackle the sales pitch, this will be the first in a two-part blog post with thoughts on the challenges and steps to creating a winning sales pitch.
For the top consultancies out there, a sales pitch is probably less of a challenge as these businesses have rightly built a reputation on long standing performance, thought leadership, and talent. However, for individuals at these firms looking to establish their own book of business, for those breaking out on their own, capitalizing on a particular expertise, or just in growth mode, new business is not won without describing the value you promise to provide and how you will deliver on that value.
Whether you are presenting to a boardroom of executives or at lunch with a referral, your pitch will be vital to helping your potential clients see the pain you will help them solve and will help them remember you in the cacophony of pitches they are likely to hear.
Consulting Pitch Mistakes
Before we outline the steps for creating that winning pitch, it’s important to sidestep a few mistakes we’ve seen and heard that often prevent consultants from differentiating and winning new business. Three mistakes in particular require your attention:
Talking about yourself too much
This is true in any situation where you are meeting someone for the first time or looking to establish a long-term relationship. How many dates are scuttled by a person talking about himself/herself too much? Aziz Ansari has a number of great anecdotes in his book, Modern Romance. One story in particular, delivered in his usual voice over genius, describes a date where both participants essentially recite their resume in an awkward attempt to begin to get to know each other. The result was that both walked away wondering why the date was a failure and began looking for their next match.
The same is true in your sales pitch, if you stand up there talking about your history, your client list, or worse, your geographic location, you’re going to lose your audience and miss an opportunity to establish the long-term relationship you are looking for. That’s not to say credibility doesn’t matter, who you are and your expertise gets you in the door, but you’ve got to lead with your understanding of your client and their goals if you want to get to a proposal.
Not having a clearly defined value proposition
“What keeps you up at night?” This question is the best example of not having established the value that you provide to clients. If you’re working at McKinsey and have the ear of the CEO, the resources, and the broad knowledge to solve whatever comes out of the client’s mouth next, then please disregard this section.
But for the rest of us, asking that question demonstrates that you haven’t done your homework to anticipate the client’s challenges and chances are the answer will put you on your proverbial heels. Perhaps an important nuance here is that this does not mean that you should not be focused on the client’s objectives. You absolutely need to have both your goals and your client’s goals aligned to establish a long-term engagement.
However, by asking an open-ended question to get to those goals, you are opening that conversation up to issues that potentially can’t be solved, that are outside of your core expertise, or simply aren’t profitable.
Instead, consultants need to stake a claim on what value they provide and how they provide it. Your consulting pitch then becomes a method of teaching your clients why your value is important and what it will help them achieve. The outcome will be that you both have a shared objective; solving their problem with your solution.
Believing you’re unique when you’re not
Ok, let’s say you are convinced – you know that you need to start your conversation with your client, the challenges you will solve for them, and how you will do it. But why should they buy from you? If you get through the first two stages and someone asks that question, chances are, the value you’ve staked a claim on is a crowded space and that your client can’t see your difference.
Don’t tear up your pitch yet, it could be that you’re just so familiar with your solution that you’re differences are not as readily apparent to the client.
The above issue is not uncommon and CEB has gracefully diagnosed this as “proximity bias.” Anyone with identical twins might understand this better. The parents of twins are likely to see the differences in their children clearer than those less familiar with them. So while parents can tell twins apart, to others they look identical.
Just a shot in the dark, but many consultants are likely framing their pitch along the lines of “We help companies capitalize on great ideas, to create change and deliver world-class results.” So are the other 399,999 consultancies out there.
Your pitch needs to guard against that, do your research to stake a claim on what you do differently. For 9Lenses customers, that means developing a digital framework that they run over time, using the benchmarked data to create teaching points. This quickly develops into a differentiated value proposition that only gets stronger with each engagement they run with clients.
So hopefully, you have some more insight into what not to do when refining your consulting pitch. Check out part 2 of the Consultant’s Guide to a Winning Sales Pitch to learn how to structure your consulting pitch to teach your clients, stand out from the crowd, and establish a renewable business model.
Developing a unique sales pitch that works is a not an easy proposition.
Consultants with very technical expertise are often foisted into a position that is equal parts marketer and equal parts salesperson. Those are difficult positions to master on the fly and often require skills and personality traits that might be not be complimentary to your experience. However, your journey to becoming that world-class closer may not be as long as you think. An article by Steve W. Martin in Harvard Business Review, “7 Personality Traits of Top Salespeople”, outlines some pretty identifiable skills for consultants that may just require honing over time.
Changing Your Mindset
The biggest change to get in the door may come from your mindset. There’s no doubt that the most utilized method of new sales for consultants (particularly those in the market we are addressing) is to use referrals. However, that doesn’t mean you become an order taker; use your opening with these referrals to take control of the conversation and follow this process as a guide.
(Note: I’ve spent a large portion of my career with CEB, so I am a Challenger Sale believer and I’ve developed collateral and training at a few organizations with that methodology in mind, including at CEB. The advice that follows is based on that methodology for proper attribution.)
Guide To A Winning Consulting Sales Pitch
Specify the problem you solve
The CEO of Waze, Uri Levine, said it best:“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution, and the rest will follow.” Uri sold Waze to Google in 2014 for $1.1 Billion, in case you needed convincing that he knows what he’s talking about.
Whether you are using a pitch deck or sitting across from a client over drinks, I recommend grounding the conversation on the problem you see for the client or the market.
A quick note of caution: Earnestness for your understanding of the problem can often lead to a soliloquy of your thoughts that issue. Keep those data points in your back pocket. The key will be to ask probing questions to lead your client to the problem themselves or to better understand how the problem plays out at their organization.
Further, probing questions and active listening are the two toughest skills to master, in my opinion, in any working relationship. You can’t hit someone over the head with the problem you’ve identified. However, you can frame your conversation in a way that the client is more receptive to learn more.
Prove the pain – in terms of cost
First, pry an opening in the client’s mind that they may potentially have a problem. This is your chance to create that head-turning moment that changes the nature of your relationship with the client. Take that data out of your back pocket and build your business case. If you are able to identify a problem the client didn’t know they had or didn’t know how bad it was, you will be able to establish that trusted advisor role that will keep clients coming back to you when issues arise. The first tenant of the Challenger pitch is to teach your clients something new about their business in a manner that leads back to your unique difference.
The hardest part of this conversation is the research and data needed to provide the head turning moment. We don’t have an exact science or technique to actually measure the pain in clients (yet). However, consultants I have seen do this well establish a diagnostic for their engagements. They create a standard set of questions to identify problems or gaps in knowledge. They run these diagnostics over time, and each client that participates helps them build a benchmark on those data points and consequently a teaching point for future clients. This is why staking a claim on your value proposition is so important. If you are always chasing a new problem, you will never have the data or teaching points to support future clients or your pitch.
It’s also a fundamental reason that consultants use 9Lenses. They can digitize their frameworks, execute, and build that benchmark all on one platform.
Build the ideal solution
You’ve now identified the problem for the client and established how it is really painful or costly; the next challenge you have is neither your solution nor your client but the status quo. Forbes outlined the issue succinctly; the competition is not your biggest threat at this stage, it’s overcoming the status quo. If you’ve done your job of quantifying the problem, the ideal solution you build for the client should be clear, prescriptive, and look like you are taking work off the client’s plate. The key here is to build a way forward that demonstrates contrast to the previous or existing state.
The client needs to be able to visualize why this ideal solution is better and your materials should reflect that.
There is one important trap to overcome.
The knock I hear against consultants is that they are somehow repackaging a stock solution that is not particular to the customer. The second tenant of the Challenger pitch will serve you well – Tailor your pitch.
Make sure the ideal solution you outline is tailored to the customer. Use data points or descriptions that include phrases and processes you’ve uncovered in your questions or heard directly from your client. While your framework for uncovering the problems may be the same, the solution should be based on the data the client provides. This is true even if your approach to the resolution is something you’ve done before.
If you’re a doctor and you’ve diagnosed a particular malady and resolved it successfully in the past, you’ll use the same process for a similar diagnosis in the future. Consultants follow a similar path, but each diagnosis and resolution should be tailored to your patient, err… client.
Actually demonstrate your unique benefits
Now that you have overcome the status quo and your client is in the decision stage of their buying journey, it’s important to demonstrate why you’re best suited to provide the solution at hand. It’s everyone’s favorite time– you’ve now earned the right to talk about yourself (cue Toby Keith or the Alan Parson’s Project).
If you’ve clearly defined your value and have made your differences clear to the buyer, you’re only a signature away from that new deal and a consulting sales pitch that can be reproduced.
This may seem like a long journey to get someone on board with your solution. However, remember two things that will make this process worthwhile:
- The fastest way to new business is through your current customers. The time spent up-front becoming that trusted advisor will pave the way for new business. This making it easier to acquire the next time.
- Compounding is an incredibly powerful force. In this case, I don’t mean financial but human compounding. Relationships get more powerful over time. Clients are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt if you’ve demonstrated ability and results in the past. Leverage this for your referrals.
If you’re interested in developing your own diagnostic that you can productize, scale, and build a business around, contact 9Lenses.
See for yourself how our cloud-based platform is helping consultants to differentiate with a winning consulting sales pitch.
