How to Serve and Sell (and Sleep at Night)

If you're like most service professionals, you regard selling as a necessary evil. Without it, you won't have the opportunity to serve, and while there are those who seem to excel at both, the typical advisor finds selling to be an uncomfortable exercise in manipulation. Initial meetings with prospective clients usually go something like this:

• If your prospect is reasonably sophisticated, you will have to sell them on hiring you (over your competitors).
• If they aren't, you'll have to sell them on paying your fees (rather than the discounted number they had in mind).
• Then, you'll have to sell them a new set of expectations (since the results they envisioned when they walked into your office were probably unrealistic).

In my Practice Boomers interview with best-selling author, speaker, and industrial psychologist Mark Goulston, he describes the impact that this dilemma can have on your prospect. Listen to this 90 second excerpt to hear what he has to say about it.

Mark Goulston Interview

The full interview is available exclusively through Practice Boomers membership, but here's a quick synopsis of Mark's solutions:

1. Ask more questions than your competitor would. Seek to understand your prospective client's dilemma as thoroughly as possible. The key to excellent service is often buried in the details.
2. When speaking with your prospective client, give up any attachment you may have to "closing the sale." Focus on helping them toward the right solution (even if it isn't you). This removes much of the tension created by the reluctant salesperson.

What's your take on this subject? Do you embrace your role as a salesperson, do you resent it, or are you somewhere in the middle?