Successful client consulting skills

Overview

This course has a simple objective: to help the participants anticipate, identify, create, and develop sales opportunities using the consulting communication model.

Training objectives

As a result of this course, participants will be able to:

Identify and develop more and higher quality business opportunities, more proactively and accurately
Stop selling on price and help customers make better buying decisions by creating compelling value propositions
Use key consulting tools, including a variety of structured and advanced questioning techniques to uncover opportunities, need areas and business criteria - confidently and efficiently
Create value messages, differentiating your ideas and solutions clearly and accurately, with client-matched value statements
Involve the client at all times, and to a far great degree
Create and deliver persuasive messages based on value and agreed business improvements and solutions

The skills developed over the two days will add value to all the participants’ client meetings and client relationships.

Audience

All business development consultants and sales staff.

Format

A highly interactive two-day course involving practical exercises, role play, case studies and, if possible, specific examples from your company.

Special features

The more advance access the trainer has to examples from your company, the more focused and beneficial will be the participants’ learning experience.

The expert trainer

Graham specialises in providing high-quality consultancy, coaching and training in sales, sales management, customer service and personal productivity. He has a long career in sales and was a top-performing IT and solutions sales professional and sales manager. His most recent full-time role was as Managing Director of Sales Productivity and Development for Thomson Financial, helping develop a large European sales force.

His work has taken him all over the world and involved him in working closely with hundreds of different organisations from all business sectors, his client list including such organisations as BT, Vodafone, AT&T, Orange, Pfizer, GSK, Boots, Unilever, American Express, Thomas Cook, Apple, Sony, Motorola, Cisco, MFI, Barclays Bank, LIFFE, Abbey National, Prison Service, Home Office, Law Society, BBC, Daimler-Chrysler, Citroen, Weetabix, Nikon, Shell and many, many others. In addition he has written over twenty books published in several different countries, including Companies don’t succeed – people do!, 90 Brain Teasers for Trainers, Customer Service Games for Training, Sales Training Games, Telephone Tactics and Working Smarter.

Known internationally as both a trainer and a popular motivational speaker, he believes that effective learning has to be interactive and challenging. All his learning events are built around practical exercises, role play and case studies. His training style focuses not on just explaining new ideas or developing new skills, but also on motivating people to use them and to develop themselves as individuals. This approach gets results, as the following comments from course participants show:

‘Brilliant course, really interesting and very focused to my job role and day to day work.’

‘Took away some very good ideas that I can use every day… good examples too.’

‘Very confident in the subject, and amusing too. Made the course very interesting. A very clear sales model to use going forward.’

‘Full of useful hints and tips which I will apply to my job.’

‘Extremely well presented and structured’

‘A very intensive course and a lot of concrete tools provided.’

‘Useful data, tools and insights; engaging and interesting as always.’

‘Very good… contained everything we do on a regular basis and problems we have come across… the exercises made it very interesting too.’

Course outline

Client consulting skills – an introduction
- How you can add value by adopting a consultative approach
- The benefits of client consulting skills – to you and the customer
- Six key skills that you must master to be successful
- The mind-set of a consultant – three core principles
Focus on the customer – the key to gaining trust and credibility
- Getting time with key people; ‘selling’ your meeting to the customer or client
- Capability statements – how to develop and use them effectively
- Doing your homework – checklist of things to know before you meet the client
- How to structure and manage the customer meeting effectively
Developing needs and sources of value
- Earning the right – getting customer agreement to answer consultative questions
- Using high-impact questions to identify specific and detailed needs and requirements
- How to use professional active listening skills to actually change the way clients think about their issues
- Identifying detailed and relevant sources of value – pain and gain issues
- Advanced drawing-out skills
Understanding and influencing customer criteria and priorities
- Tools and techniques to lead both you and the customer to new levels of understanding of the problems, issues and solutions
- Developing a client’s potential ‘solution image’
- Learning to read and project thoughts and ideas through body language and non-verbal communication
Persuade through involvement
- Option-generator – testing your ideas and solutions through discussion and interaction
- Increase your influence by using proven persuasion techniques
- Discussing and quantifying potential concerns before they occur
- Words that sell – how to use compelling and subtle descriptions and suggestions to lead customers to your favoured solution
Putting it all together
- Case studies of successful consultation and user interaction
- Effective follow-up and progressing opportunities
- Consulting toolkits and examples based around segments, user workflows and solutions

Sales and customer service

Time to talk?