Ian works with professional service firms - consultants, lawyers, accountants, surveyors, architects and coaches - to help them attract more clients and win more new business. Many professionals are highly skilled at what they do - but are not sure how to best market their capabilities and are uncomfortable in selling situations. Ian helps them get comfortable and competent at marketing and selling their professional services - helping them to grow their practices and build fulfilling careers. You can catch Ian's latest thinking at the Selling Professional Services Blog

Professional Service Firms are probably the least likely of all businesses to know what their results next March are going to look like. Most professional service pipelines look rather more like a cliff edge than they do a smooth flow.
Part of the reasons for this are inherent in the nature of professional service businesses. There’s [...]

The natural inclination when faced with the question “what’s next after CRM?” is to ask “Hey, how about actually doing CRM properly first?”
But Tibor beat me to it and has already posted on that.
So I’ll attempt to gaze into my crystal ball. But only a little. I believe that trying to look to far out [...]

For professional firms there are a myriad of potential collaborations which can help deliver greater sales.
Lawyers, for example, can collaborate with accountants, financial advisors, bankers, consultants and other advisors to do joint seminars, create joint service offers or simply cross refer business.
Consultants collaborate extensively with technology and software providers to provide joined-up implementation solutions for [...]

It’s easy to snigger at people who try to buy their way to happiness with a bit of “retail therapy”. In fact we know from the research of psychologists Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich that experiences make people far more happy than buying things – so their efforts are rather misplaced.
But perhaps we shouldn’t [...]

One of the most enduring and dangerous myths in business is the myth of the natural salesman. The guy who could sell anything to anyone.
The problem is not that such a person doesn’t exist – if he does, I’d love to meet him (or her). Instead, the problem is that those of us who don’t [...]

As Colin Wilson pointed out in Presentations – The Secret Ingredient, in one sense sales presentations are all about you: the client gets to see you in action and to build trust in you and your team.
But just as importantly, sales presentations are all about them. The way you build trust is to focus on [...]

It seems strangely ironic that the end of our two week festival of posts on Pitching has been marked by the untimely death of veteran TV pitchman Billy Mays.
My fellow Sales Bloggers have quite rightly highlighted the flaws in the pitching model – particularly that it is a combatitive model of selling rather than a [...]

Without doubt, asking smart questions is one of the keys to successful selling.
And for those selling complex products or services which require positioning or tailoring in line with the client’s business issues, it’s critical to use your questions to understand those business issues.
When I first started selling large consulting projects over a decade ago it [...]

During the late 90s and early 00s I made my living improving sales processes. I lived and breathed process maps, metrics, re-engineering workshops and implementation plans.
So what I’m going to say may sound a little sacreligious – but over the years I’ve come to believe that sales processes just aren’t that important.
Now don’t get me [...]

Professional Services are somewhat unusual in that the key sales tasks are almost always carried out by non-salespeople: the professionals who will supervise or perform the piece of work being bought.
As a result, what motivates them is often quite different from what motivates “normal” salespeople. Often, for example, by the time they’ve reached a stage [...]