How Professional Service Firms Can Think Strategically about Selling

Here’s the 2nd post of my four-part Q&A with Ford Harding about professional service firm cross-selling and increasing a firm’s revenues from strategically appropriate clients

Lowe: Regarding the idea of “thinking strategically about selling solutions,” is “cross-selling” a simple way to get at the gist of the issues?

Harding: Cross-selling means selling multiple services to the same firm, in multiple geographies or multiple functional areas.  There are ways to that that are strategic, and ways to do it that are very tactical and not very effective.  It is like networking – you can do networking that gets you nowhere, or you can do networking that gets you something.

Lowe: My own focus is to help professional firms do a better job of pursuing a bigger “end-game” in the marketplace.  In order to do a better job, professional firms must ask questions like, “how can we ascertain the client’s available spending levels?” or “How can we get past the client’s fragmented way of spending money?”  What are the characteristics and processes of the firm that does think strategically about cross-selling? 

Harding: At one end is what some people call “clean-sheet of paper” selling.  You go into the client and you hear what the client needs and you design, from scratch, a solution to the client’s problem, and you package it and sell it to them.  At the other end are professionals who practically say, “I sell nails, and if you don’t need nails, I can’t help you.” But to go from being very functionally focused on “I sell X” to the clean sheet of paper selling – is an impossible step in one leap. From habit, you have a lot of people who have grown up in a silo and understand how to sell something small. Now we tell them they are going to integrate and cross-sell, and they are at a loss at what to do.

There is a half-step in between the clean-sheet-of-paper sale and the single service sale and it can be very effective for a firm, which is what I call selling solutions sets.  A solution set is where you take all of your services that relate to a particular client need, say an acquisition or merger, and when the merger takes place, everybody is affected within the client organization. The CEO – s/he needs certain things; the head of HR needs certain things, the CFO needs certain things and you can package a solution from the various parts you have and you sell somewhat of a different mix of things to different people.

But you sell the total solution to the CEO: “we are going to help you solve the merger integration, and we are going to put a package together that will take care of all these areas with “one-stop-shopping.” This solves one of the big problems of fragmented strategy implementation, and helps avoid a lot of finger pointing.  If you sell solution sets, there’s no finger pointing.  Much of what I’ve just described is in the new edition of my book Creating Rainmakers.

Next time:  How to overcome cross-selling hurdles – inside, and those that clients erect