By Joanne Sammer
Last year, shortly after submitting a well-received proposal to the president of a Fortune 500 company, Ellen Carberry and her colleagues were invited to propose on several big engagements resulting from the company's multimillion-dollar investment in e-commerce. Once the work on those engagements began, Carberry continued to talk to other lines of business within the company to find other proposal opportunities.
"This particular client went from never knowing us to booking a significant amount of revenue throughout the year," she says. "We developed relationships in all five of their main lines of business, and were invited to propose on about 11 opportunities."
Sounds like the kind of business development victory that any consultant would envy. But Ellen Carberry is not a consultant. She is vice president of business development for Internet strategy firm Mainspring. In other words, she is a salesperson.
Sales: driver of growth or five-letter word?
As firms look to garner market share in the rapidly growing consulting industry, they are increasingly relying on people like Carberry to help drive that growth. Indeed, driving growth is a major reason why Mainspring and other fast-growing firms have wholeheartedly and unabashedly embraced sales as a key driver of their rapid expansion.
"Traditional firms have grown 20% to 30% year after year, where the partners eat what they kill," says Mark Verdi, Mainspring's senior vice president of operations and finance. "Companies like Mainspring that are trying to grow at rates in excess of that on a quarterly basis need people behind the scenes filling the pipeline of opportunities" to fuel that growth.
Other firms have followed suit in a variety of ways. "The industry is well into the transition to some form of full-time sales force," according to Ford Harding, president of Harding & Company, a Maplewood, NJ–based consulting firm. Of course, this can be good news for both consultants and their firms — as long as no one utters that "S" word.
"Firms are more open-minded about it than they used to be, but the anti-sales orientation runs deep," says Harding. This is particularly true among older, more established firms that have embraced sales more gingerly and are very careful about the semantics involved. "It's not sales; it's full-time relationship management," insisted Mike Peters, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner. "Selling in the consulting organization is the kiss of death." PwC has a full-time business development staff of 150, a number that Peters expects to increase steadily as the firm continues to grow. And, showing that sales is not total anathema among the consulting ranks, about 20% of that sales force is made up of former consultants. See "If you can't beat 'em" on page 54.
Whatever they call it, firms and their consultants must find ways to work effectively with these increasingly prominent sales forces. "There is so much competition and so much opportunity in the marketplace," says Wendy Lea, vice president of OnTarget, Inc., a Dallas-based marketing and sales strategy consulting firm. "Just showing up and doing good work is not enough."
Leveraging a sales force
Consultants moving up through the ranks would be well served to learn how their firms' sales forces work and how they can leverage this resource as they build their books of business. After all, firms are not looking to omit consultants from the sales process, but to use their time more effectively and efficiently.
"It's really not efficient to have partners doing cold calling and lead generation," says Mike Driessen, managing partner with Grant Thornton in Houston. "Nothing will ever be closed without a partner being involved, but to sustain growth of 25% or more, you need professional salespeople spending 100% of their time looking for opportunities." Driessen estimates that Grant Thornton currently has 10 to 15 professional salespeople throughout the firm. The firm expects to add another salesperson for every $10 million in growth.
Working effectively with a sales force means understanding how they work. After all, firms are using multiple sales approaches, from telemarketers who simply set up meetings for consultants to senior-level relationship-builders who are plugged in to a network of CEOs. "There is the salesperson who acts as an opportunity identifier, who then brings in a partner and senior technical people to move to close the deal," says Harding. "There is also the executive salesperson who is a senior person himself and brings in other people as needed to close business, but maintains the relationship himself." Each operates very differently, with the former, like Carberry, more likely to hand off a qualified opportunity to a consultant, while the latter acts more like a traditional rainmaker and truly owns the relationship.
Carberry, for example, starts by initiating conversations with target companies designed to identify that company's issues. Once she does this, "we immediately bring in the consultants and hand over the prequalified opportunity," she says. By briefing consultants on the client's issues, the consultants can orient their comments and preparation accordingly.
The ability to leverage a sales force can also be helped or hindered by area of specialty. "The sales model has varying degrees of effectiveness based on the services you're offering. There are some service areas that are more conducive than others to a direct sales model," says Peters. Of PwC's three primary areas —business strategy, performance improvement, and technology — "the latter two lend themselves a little more to a sales model. The business strategy area is really more partner-centric."
Overall, as in any relationship, there must be some level of trust between consultants and salespeople. "You have to trust the sales force enough to give them your leads so that they can set up the appointments," says Driessen. "If you do that, educate them about consulting, and work with them, you are going to really start to leverage your time."
The firm must also play a role here in managing the leads the sales force generates. For example, senior managers positioning themselves for partnership are likely to depend on the sales force to provide a certain volume of leads to help build their books of business. If the firm does not take steps to ensure that those leads are forthcoming in an equitable fashion, that can hurt the sales force's credibility.
Eventually, consultants in the New Economy may not have any choice but to learn how to work with a sales force. Because a growing number of e-business projects often do not require large consulting teams to be at a client site for long periods of time, cross-selling becomes more difficult. "In this world, our consultants are not on-site longer than eight to 10 weeks, so somebody has to have the ongoing relationship with this client," says Carberry. With consultants working in highly leveraged models doing short-term engagements, the onus for doing so falls on the sales force.
Staying connected
Above all, consultants need to keep the lines of communication open with a sales force to create a healthy working relationship. If nothing else, talking to each other can help make sure that the sales force is working to keep the client's expectations in line with what consultants can deliver. Beyond that, consultants need to recognize that working with a sales force is all but inevitable. "The stigma that selling is bad is becoming pass
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