Winning more clients isn’t just about selling harder—it’s about selling smarter. These 4 ways consultancies can improve sales focus on building trust, clearly defining client problems, and qualifying opportunities effectively. By combining strong conversations, value-driven thinking, and structured processes, consultancies can increase conversions, strengthen client relationships, and create a more predictable and successful sales pipeline.
For clients to buy your services, three things must usually happen:
1. The client must be convinced of your expertise and ability to solve their problem or help with their opportunity. If your marketing has done its job, and passed on thought leadership, case-studies and testimonials, much of this will have already been achieved. But in the first interaction with the prospect, it remains crucial for whoever is leading the sale to truly wow the prospect with their understanding of the client challenge/opportunity, how it is affecting their firm and the potential solutions. This is crucial in framing your firm as the most likely to help the client but will also help you in negotiations.
2. Both parties must clearly agree on and understand the problem and challenge. The consultant and client should help each other understand benefits of getting the solution right and consequences of doing nothing. This will help considerably when discussing pricing.
3. The client and project must be qualified. This means asking whether there is budget for the project. Does the client have the authority to authorise spend? If not, what do you need to do to convince that person? What priority is this for the client and when is the project likely to start? What are the key dependencies and milestones? This information will help you weight the opportunity in pipeline calculations and better help the client start the project.
These things may not necessarily be done in any order and can be spread over several meetings.
The next step, if possible, is for a discussion to be held around the value of the project if it is done well.For value-based pricing, this is crucial, but even with other forms of pricing, it is useful to understand and emphasise the true value of the project to the client (financially, psychologically, personally, reputationally) before moving on to the pricing discussion.
For value-based pricing (discussed shortly), this conversation might end with a price range for the project, for example, ‘given the value of the benefits we’ve discussed, how about I develop some options for you priced between £250,000 and £70,000?’. A range is useful because it allows you to give the client options.
If you only give the client one price, they only have two options: to go ahead or not. If you give the client several options this increases the chance of a ‘yes’, but also allows you to remove options during negotiations instead of cutting your price for doing the same thing.
Your own sales process will of course be more detailed and tailored to the different clients and services you sell.
It might include:
- Processes of engaging different clients
- Guidance on client conversations and relationships
- The sequence and timing of passing on thought leadership and testimonials
- Key events in the sales process
- Creating innovation during the sales process
- Weekly firm sales meetings
- Scripts or structures for sales calls
- Templates for proposal writing
- Using and managing the pipeline
- Training and mentoring on all of the above
For some firms, sales also includes other activities. A few years ago I wrote a paper on how McKinsey & Co. sell without selling.This was very often by exercising ‘soft power’: alumni relationships, free resource on steering committees, sponsoring conferences, working with top universities, secondments with key clients, and working on think tanks. Whilst no small firms have the resources of McKinsey & Co. it is worth thinking about how ‘soft power’ might work in getting your name in front of key clients.
As the organisation develops, you should increasingly prioritise monitoring, supporting, incentivising, and goal-setting alongside sales processes. One of my interviewees opened up the weekly sales meetings held by seniors so that juniors could dial in and listen. This helped juniors realise how important sales was in moving up the organisation and encouraged them to pursue leads of their own.
[1] O’Mahoney, J. and Sturdy, A. 2016. Power and the diffusion of management ideas: the case of McKinsey & Co. Management Learning 47(3), pp. 247-265.
[2] Of course, McKinsey partners still need to sell. The firm have a ‘2:4:8 system’: every Director in the firm is required to be working on two assignments, be in the process of proposing for four more, and in communication with eight more prospective clients
