Knowledge
How to choose a B2B sales consultant
I will describe the situation for a service company in which acquiring new B2B clients relies mainly on the owners, networking and referrals. That is probably more than 90 percent of Polish SMEs.
Before you start looking for a B2B sales consultant, ask yourself a few questions to diagnose what you really want and at which stage of growth your company is.
- Does your company already have a repeatable business model, i.e. do you sell the same thing to many clients?
- Do you only need new sales opportunities (leads), or do you need to organize the sales process, scale it and build a sales team, or all of it?
- What is your level of sales knowledge and awareness? If you are at the beginning of the road, most consultants will be rather fine for gaining basic knowledge. If, however, you already have experience and need to take your sales to a higher level, unfortunately most consultants may not be able to really help.
So before you decide on someone, consider the points below during the conversation. A good business advisor who knows B2B sales should be able to give clear answers on the following matters.
- Who specifically will work with you. Do they have entrepreneurial experience and a broader general understanding of business. Knowing “sales techniques” alone is not enough, nor is being a salesperson or sales director in a larger or different organization.
- Do they know sales mainly from books and the training room, or do they have real, preferably current, experience in acquiring clients on their own. They do not have to be from your industry; if they know their stuff, they will be able to adapt the methods.
- Which areas of sales are within their competence. Ideally if they:
- Can build prospecting and do not rely only on inbound leads. This is where most companies and consultants fail, because they expect leads from your marketing.
- Can design and fill the entire sales process with communication matched to your specifics, from qualification to closing the sale.
- Can manage the sales structure, basing it on a process, numbers and managing them.
- Understand what a business model is and can propose changes to it that will help acquire clients more effectively. It is worth asking for specific examples of when something was modified and with what result. This is particularly important in service companies, because many still have too broad an offer, sell too cheaply and serve too many different clients.
- Do they work based on some methodology and/or system, or do they rather “flexibly adapt solutions”. If it is closer to the latter approach, they may be building their toolkit only on your company.
- Can they explain in an accessible way what exactly a sales strategy contains and why it is important, or do they simply “get down to work”.
- Can they present a rough plan, steps and elements that will lead to building B2B sales in your company.
- What the cooperation looks like. Is the consulting reactive and addresses mainly reported problems, or will you be actively and consciously guided through the next necessary issues.
- The fact that someone has “20 years of experience in sales” usually means little. Often such people first have to be untaught bad practices. Sales change dynamically. “Being used to clients” is not enough.
Red flags are when a company or consultant claims that:
– building sales is simple and quick, you just need to start the cooperation
– you do not have to do anything, and after an initial consultation and adjustment you will have the kind and number of clients you want (mainly lead generation companies claim this)
– we have a tool (AI, an app) or another magic method that guarantees you will win clients
In sales there are no guarantees, and building it requires considerable effort, testing and adjustment to the specifics of your company. In turn, only a repeatable, working sales process is a good signal to think about delegating sales and increasing its scale.
