You want to provide your customers with the best service you can, but when that doesn't happen it can be hard to pin down where issues have arisen — especially when there are different teams, priorities, people, and personalities involved.
You need to understand everything inside your business and have everyone working from the same playbook and to the same priorities to ensure you're offering customers your best in every interaction. A key part of that is ensuring that your consultants are proactively feeding into the early stages of your sales cycle.
Your consultants are the experts in their space and know at any point in time what their resourcing, capacity, and upcoming workflow look like. If you want to deliver timely, responsive change for your customers, then your sales team needs to know that your consultants can begin delivering on a sale as soon as it's made. After all, there's no point in selling someone a transformational product or service if it will be 6-12 months before work can even be scoped. So how do you make sure this is consistently happening?
Collaboration is key
Early collaboration between your sales staff and your consultants ensures your customers receive accurate and timely quotes and detail-perfect project scopes, and have realistic expectations about delivery and implementation — including the roles and resources they will need to contribute to the process. The benefits of this are that your business will see improved margins, exceeded customer expectations, and more consistently great word-of-mouth recommendations.
There's a synergy between your consultants and your sales team and unlocking that is the key to growth and success. Your consultants can help your sales team get inside the customer mindset — they know the questions that will be asked, the reservations or difficulties that can arise in software and systems implementation, and the roadblocks that will need to be overcome. Your sales team, on the other hand, know what kind of experience and timeframes your customers have to work to and can help your consultants understand those outside pressures.
Setting yourself up for success
Here are 3 easy steps you can take today to set your sales and implementation teams up for consistent success:
- Set up regular meetings
Communication is the key to success. To do this, it is a great idea to set up regular meetings to discuss campaigns and projects and ensure that sales and marketing goals align with the strategy and capacity of your professional services team. - Encourage conversations
Take the time to share your sales and marketing collateral and data with your professional services team. This will create a conversation and start to fill in any gaps for your teams, which can only strengthen your conversations with clients. This will, therefore, provide your clients with the clear and correct information that they need throughout the sales journey. - Create shared KPIs
Having shared goals and accountability in your team ensures that teams will work together in achieving success for your customers and your business alike. Shared KPIs mean that teams are incentivised to collaborate.
The bottom line
At the end of the day, we all want to help our customers succeed, right? That's why get up every day and do the things we do in our businesses. Embedding great collaboration between your consultants and your sales teams is one of the best steps you can take to deliver on that mission.
And if you're looking for help unlocking the synergies in your business or unblocking tricky communication pathways, we're here to help.
Our expert teams have the right skills and knowledge to identify tools, processes, and solutions that can take your organisation to the next step and blow your customers away. Get in touch with us today to talk about how.
