Sales Consultancy: What does it mean?

Sales consultancy is what I do, it is what I live and breath. Not a day goes by in which I do not see a report, create a plan for a company wide problem or put together a sales strategy for a company that wants to grow. It’s great, I love it, I enjoy solving problems, having to think about turning a problem into an opportunity and hearing how it develops.

There is some confusion as to what a sales consultant actually does. A lot of sales reps in this day and age belief they are a sales consultant. Maybe they will be in the future, but at this moment they are a sales person.

Sales Consultancy everyday

So a typical day for me, is to get up and look at my to checklist. I write my checklist the night before and I tick it off every day, this gives me the drive to push on each day. It brings some structure to my life and makes me accountable to me.

Despite the rumours, I do not work with many businesses. I work with a small number of companies so I can give them my total focus. You tend to be working in the background for these companies, they do not need you every day, you will be working on a project or two for them. You will tend to have progress meetings with the client to show your work and push some ideas around.

The progress meetings are a great measure of where you are at, where the client is and whether you are on the right path.

Meetings

On your journey in sales consultancy you will have a number of meetings. The main ones that you encounter, are pitches, discovery, progress and presentations. Pitches come in different forms, this can be over the phone, by email, or any other form of communication. It is literally to get your foot in the door.

Discovery is different, you are already become familiar with the client and they have invited you in for a meeting. This is where a consultant starts to earn their crust, you listen and ask questions until you find the problem. You then look at the problem and start to work towards if this is the real problem and what it means.

Progress meetings are different and not always required, if you are working on a long term project like implementing a strategy to improve staff retention. This is where you arrange meetings, weekly, monthly to discuss the topic and create a logical structured solution. This probably a good time to mention, if your first idea does not fly, however committed you are to it, don’t take it personally.

Presentations are finale pieces. This is where you will potentially meet people from further up the hierarchy or potentially a wider scope of the hierarchy in a business. Additionally, this is where you get real and genuine feedback as to whether your solution moves forward.

How Sales Consultancy works

The way that sales consultancy tends to progress with me, is that I will contact a company. The company and I will go and back and forwards creating a meeting to site down with them regarding the problems they face, this will be an opportunity or a threat. Again this is where you will get to the root of the problem, is it stunted growth? Staff retention? Post metrics?

I will then agree to take the information and create a plan, or a series of plans. Every consultant tends to have structure as to how they offer their solution. I will go into more detail into how I work in other blogs, but it tends work from a number of assumptions and then use a logical structured approach.

Using statistics from the industry, company or similar source we can use it to draw around the problem. With sales industry experience, this becomes easier over time as you have probably come across the problem in the past. This will then create a number of solutions, some of them will merge, but you tend to aim for having three offerings.

After this you will present your ideas or have a progress meeting. Then you will move forward with the solution that best suits that business. This is a very basic overview, but it gives you an idea of how it works.

If you would like to hear more about sales consultancy, then please hit the like and comment, or equally get in contact.