Free Consulting: Are You An Enabler?

How often have prospects asked you for a quote, a proposal for how to do something and you’ve later discovered that your prospect:

• Took your quote to their present vendor and got their present vendor to match your lower price? Or,
• Took your expertise to their present vendor and their present vendor used your ideas and solutions? Or,
• Took your ideas and solutions and decided to do the project in-house because they could save money?

What do you think the long-term prognosis is for salespeople who keep dispensing their expertise for free? Not very good. This is what we call “unpaid consulting”. So often salespeople are asked for information and proposals and have no idea this is occurring or how to prevent it. They feel anytime a prospect asks for something they need to comply.

There are ways to avoid this, and it starts with asking the right questions upfront, before we ever deliver a proposal or quote.

• Find out what the prospect’s real pains are and what it is costing them so that they can self discover whether it’s worth doing business with you.
• What do they like and dislike about their present vendor and what would prevent them from taking your proposal to their present vendor and having them match it? Voice your biggest fears upfront.
• Uncover the prospect's budget, who controls it, how it’s allocated and when it is available.
• What does their decision making process look like, who will make the decision, when, and how?
• What criteria will they use to determine who will get the business?
• Use a line of questioning such as “Let’s pretend I brought in a proposal where you saw everything you wanted to see, it meets your needs and was within your budget. What would happen next?”

Many salespeople are programmed to want to give away information. They want to impress the prospect with their knowledge and feel good about themselves. Our job as salespeople, however, is to get information, not give it. The rule in sales is that the prospect should be talking 70% of the time, the salesperson only 30%. We need to keep the prospect talking about their needs and pains. Let’s say you are in construction or engineering, for instance, and your prospect asks you, “How would you go about building…?” Before we answer that question, we need to know why are they asking that question, what are they trying to accomplish, and why is that important to them. So often it’s the question behind the question that is the most important. When we give too much expertise or pricing too early, without asking the right questions, we can turn into an “unpaid consultant” and lose control of the sales process.