Decades ago, when I started building banking markets, I faced a dilemma. I had to develop leadership and sales skills in people that went to college to learn how to be rewarded financially for their deep knowledge skills, not management or growing a client base. Adding call sheets, pipeline tools, and growth expectations into the daily routine of a banker’s day was met with great resistance.
Today, I see this when developing leadership and business development strategies for companies within the professional service industry. The professionals like accountants, bankers, architects, and engineers being held accountable for proposing and closing deals, will sometimes exclaim, ‘I did not go to school for this!’
As the professional service industry continues to grow, finding talent that can demonstrate leadership skills or the powerful combination of expertise and salesmanship is becoming harder. Executives in the professional services industry are staring into an abyss of a talent gap. They are being forced to offer new applicants some type of shiny objects to attract them or feel like they are paying A grade salaries for B grade talent.
The hard truth: The calvary is not coming with a wave of great applicants for the foreseeable future. Professional service firms that have a strong internal development program can use this as their biggest competitive advantage. Here are four main areas that should be focused on in developing the leadership and sales skills of professionals.
First, professionals must focus on learning empathy. Empathy, in short is one’s ability to put themselves in another’s shoes and feel how they are feeling. In most cases, a client is consulting someone in the professional services arena because of their expertise. Professionals can sometimes get a box check mentality in giving a presentation and forget to understand that on the client on the other end might be scared, unsure, or is trying hard to keep up. Unintentionally putting a customer in a vulnerable position like this, where they might feel like they are being talked over, can lead to quiet resentment. After the potential client says they will think about the proposal, the professional may never know why they did not win the new business.
Prior to making a proposal to a customer, these individuals should think about utilizing basic preparation tools such as reverse role playing, designed to put themselves in the role of the client. They can also present to someone that will ask a lot of questions and get them comfortable with the anticipated back and forth dialogue. More advanced techniques could be cross-mentoring with sales and marketing groups.
The second opportunity for development is active listening. Take an engineer for example. They go to school to see a challenge, develop a solution, make recommendations, and they take a lot of pride in this. Therefore, proposals can sometimes become more robotic and need to be ‘heard’ from the client’s perspective. The ability to see how a client is reacting during a presentation is powerful.
Professionals that develop milestones in their proposal to check for understanding, can create opportunities for the potential client to get involved. I would tell bankers to never be afraid to stop a presentation after a client ask what seems like an irrelevant question and simply ask, ‘So I have a better understanding, tell me WHY you asked that question’. The follow up answer is usually the thing that may have held them up but were too afraid to ask. Never move a proposal forward until all concerns of this question have been answered.
The third opportunity is taking a holistic approach to the customers needs. Professionals typically do a great job in explaining the solution, but their ability to show context to the solution is powerful. To be able to take a professional’s deep knowledge and demonstrate that they have thought well past the initial request is a skill that can help organizations grow rapidly. In part, what clients want to know when they consult a professional is to know what they do not know.
In today’s environment, I am seeing this as one of the biggest opportunities to grow a professional service firms because clients feel like they are co-creating solutions. When these professionals can present their deep knowledge in the form of story and a holistic approach, the combination can be powerful! Huge clients can be won with perfecting these techniques.
Lastly, professionals must have pacers in their life. Pacers are people that are put in their professional life to rapidly develop the soft skills and leadership skills that they need. Pacers help to understand the skill the professional is trying to nurture and push them-to keep them on ‘pace’ for achievement. You can see a fuller definition I gave to over 2,000 business leaders and how it can be used within organizations (starts about 1 hour 19 minutes into the video). Click HERE to watch. They may not have gone to school for leadership and sales, but pacers bring the education to them.
It is our responsibility as leaders to find, nurture, and show the path to our future leaders, and to give them the education that they did not go to school for!
Larry Young is the owner of Boiling Frog Development, a business development strategy firm that helps organizations find the sound of their dream clients’ voice. He helps them to focus their business development right in the center of that target market by aligning strategy and sales. For two decades, Young has been helping companies grow their income statements. Larry Young is an author of Walk the Sales Plank, a professional speaker to conferences and corporate events, and regular guest on tv, radio, and national podcast.
