Selling Professional Services Trusted Advisor（销售专业服务值得信赖的顾问）.pdfVIP

Selling Professional Services 1 Selling Professional Services By Charles H. Green President, Trusted Advisor Associates The best sales thinking in industry at large is well researched, based on sound marketing principles, and has proven successful for many businesses. Buying, it says, is a linear process of problem definition, alternatives generation, and criteria-based selection. Selling is a distinct discipline, consisting of helping the buyer by clarifying information, answering questions and offering implications. The whole process is highly rational. This approach to selling is taught in the best business schools, trained by the best training firms, and written in the best-selling business books. Faced with this successful industrial model of sales, many of us in the professions have come to believe that our clients must buy this way--and that we should sell this way. Yet many of us have that nagging feeling in the belly telling us that it just doesn’t seem to work like that. Most of us deny that feeling because we think it means we are doing a bad job of selling. It doesn’t occur to us that the model itself may be wrong! The truth is, selling professional services is different from other selling. It is more psychological and more personal. The professional services sale is by no means an irrational process—but neither can it be described in rational terms alone. The data— our belly, in this case—are right. It is the Industrial Sales Paradigm that is at fault. There are barriers to seeing things this way. The Industrial Sales Paradigm has been internalized not only by trainers and business schools, but also by senior partners and even our clients! Yet if firms continue to use an ill-fitting model, they are passing up chance