The I Hate Selling Book : Business-Building Advice for Consultants, Attorneys, Accountants, Engineers, Architects, and Other Professionals

234 Pages·1994·3.28 MB·English

by  Allan Boress

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The "I Hate Selling" Book
Business-building Advice for Consultants, Attorneys, Accountants,
Engineers, Architects, and other Professionals
Allan S. Boress

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This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the
subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in
rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert
assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boress, Allan S.
The "I hate selling" book: business-building advice for
consultants, attorneys, accountants, engineers, architects, and
other professionals / Allan S. Boress.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8144-0245-3
1. Selling. 2. Consultants—Marketing. 3. Professions-
-Marketing. I. Title.
HF5438.25.B665 1994
658.85 -dc20 94-33738
CIP
© 1995 Allan S. Boress.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or
in part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of AMACOM. a division of American
Management Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
Printing number
10 9 8 7 6 5

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To
Dad
My hero.

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CONTENTS
Preface: How This Book Will Help You Become New-Business Driven ix
Acknowledgments xix
Part One: Professionals and Selling 1
1 3
Why Service Providers Don't Sell More Business
2 10
The Eight Universal Traits of the Top Business Producers in the Professions
3 18
Selling Ain't Marketing—But You Need Both to Survive in the 1990s and
Beyond
4 23
The Three Biggest Mistakes Professional Service Providers Make—and the
Easy Way to Avoid These Costly Blunders
Part Two: The Sales Examination 31
5 33
Conducting a Sales Examination: The Six Diagnostic Tests to Determine
Whether a Client Is Sold 90 Percent of the Time
6 40
Testing for Positive Chemical Reaction
7 55
Tender Loving Care: Satisfying Emotional Needs, Wants, Desires, and Musts
8 78
Conducting a Financial Diagnostic and Nurturing the Desire to Pay
9 89
Anatomy of the Decision-Making Lifeline

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10 107
Looking Good and Locking It Up in the One-Call Sale
11 137
Take Two Aspirins, but I'll Call You in the Morning
12 160
The "I Hate Selling" Professional's Black Bag of Presentational Tools
13 185
Rx for Sure-Fire Closes-Just What the Professional Orders
Part Three: Enhancing Your Selling 195
14 197
Triumphant Telephone Selling: Reach Out and Touch New Business Arteries
15 210
The Master "I Hate Selling" (Hey, This Could be Addictive) System in Action!
Index 217

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PREFACE: HOW THIS BOOK WILL HELP YOU BECOME NEW-
BUSINESS DRIVEN
This is not a rehash of some sales book you've already read; rather, it was designed from scratch with
you in mind. This book offers you a systematic approach to selling, one that has proved to be a real
winner for people who sell services (rather than tangible items).
I wrote this book to help you and other professional service providers avoid the pain and suffering I
experienced in the process of building my business. The skills and strategies presented will work for
any professional service provider, including architects, accountants, doctors, attorneys, engineers,
consultants, and those selling professional services for companies. Even those interested in changing
jobs will benefit from this book. I created it to show you how to become a master of the art of selling
professional services.
I wrote it for people who hate selling—as I do—but who have to do it anyway.
Specifically, in this book you'll discover how and where to:
• Sell more business by being a better qualifier, presenter, and closer
• Spot many more sales opportunities
• Outsell the competition in a competitive situation
• Boost your closing percentage to over 90 percent
• Get buyers to dose themselves
• Find new business right now

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• Overcome the pain of failure and rejection (finally!)
• Write custom-designed proposals that the buyer will want to see and buy immediately
• Get beyond selling on fees
• Create custom-designed presentations that will win the sale for you
• Find out, specifically, what the buyer's motives are without guesswork
• Get people to open up to you
• Determine if people are committed to action, and how to create that commitment
• Close the sale in a way that's painless for you and the buyer (and invisible to the buyer, too)
• Stay motivated
• Emulate the ways in which the top business producers in the professions have built their practices
• Use the telephone most effectively
• Determine if people can do business with you, or if you're wasting your time
• Build personal chemistry, and have people want to buy from you
• Discover and influence the decision-making process
• Listen in such a way that people will tell you exactly how to sell them
And much more, including showcase dialogues to help you witness how these techniques work in real
selling situations.
Why Should You Read This Book?
That's for you to determine for yourself. After fourteen years of training thousands of consultants and
people from all of the other professions, I've found that the ability to persuade someone to buy is the
greatest skill in the world. In the end, it determines who will make it to the top of his or her profession.
After reading this book, you'll know more about selling professional services than 99 percent of your
competition. I promise.
What are your career goals? This book will help you reach them.
Rainmakers and Divining Rods: Selling What You Don't See
New business is the lifeblood of every professional service firm. Some firms are going out of business,
being forced into mergers or bought

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out, or slowly disintegrating before the owners' eyes because not enough new clients and new work
are coming in.
Today, as the founders and rainmakers of numerous firms retire (or hope to), many see that their
partners and staff simply aren't interested in or capable of growing the business.
Most firms were started and grown by entrepreneurs. Work was sold because it had to be in order for
the founder to eat. Often, these entrepreneurs did such a good job of bringing in work that they had to
hire others to help them with the workload. Customarily, those hired were not entrepreneurial by
nature, but technical—they became service providers because they liked the kind of work the
professions offered, not because they wanted to sell business.
The purpose of this book is to help you avoid some of the pain and suffering I and others have had to
endure in the process of learning how to sell professional services effectively. My goal is to assist you
in becoming much more comfortable with and successful at what I consider the Greatest Skill in the
World. I hope to give you a much different perspective on what selling services really is.
My Promise
If you diligently follow the suggestions in this book, your sales success ratio, based on the experience
of others who have done so, will improve to over 90 percent. Your pain of failure and fear of rejection
will be permanently removed. And you will produce a great deal of new business in a very short
period of time.
Why? Because there is no theory in this book. Over the past fourteen years as a sales, marketing, and
client-retention consultant, I've had the good fortune to work with and get to know some of the best
business developers (rainmakers) in the professions. In this book, you'll learn, systematically, what
they and other highly successful business generators do to sell much more business than their
competitors.
First, Some Background Information
I hate selling—with a passion! However, I do like it when people buy my services. Have you ever
worked in a retail store? I have. There is a definite difference in the way retail businesses sell their
products as opposed to the way professional service firms sell their services. Besides having the
customer come to them, the retail salesperson has

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something tangible to show the customers. They can see it, feel it, smell it, touch it! They can identify
the superiority of a product. Service providers who are selling and marketing are at a distinct
disadvantage because they are not able to effectively show or present their intangible services.
After college, I worked in outside sales, which was quite different than retail. In outside sales, I had to
find customers who didn't necessarily want to see me. Worse, people tried to manipulate me, lie to
me, didn't show up for appointments, cancelled orders, and had bad credit. Face it, people treat
salespeople differently than they treat other human beings! I felt used and abused.
Salespeople face a life of emotional ups and downs: the thrill of the sale, the agony of rejection and
feature. It's this emotional roller coaster that causes approximately eight out of nine people who enter
the field of sales to leave it. I did, too.
After a couple of years of misery, I went back to school at night. In 1976, I passed the CPA exam. At
that point, I wanted to get as far away from customers and selling as I possibly could.
But was I shocked! From the very beginning of my career in public accounting, I found out that not
only would I have to bring in business to attain the level of partnership, but I was selling every day!
CPAs—and other service providers—whether they realize it or not, are always promoting their ideas
to the client ("I think you should consider doing something about this excess inventory you have lying
around."), to their bosses ("I need a raise."), to their co-workers ("Can I please get this typed?"), and
to the IRS. Let's face it: who makes it to the top in any firm? Those who bring in business!
In 1980, I went into business for myself. It dawned on me that selling was a skill, just like public
accounting and tax consulting. And, since I had become quite good at these skills, I felt that the skill of
selling also could be learned and made easier. I bought every book and tape I could find on the
subject. I took all of the courses, read all of the magazines. I was determined to learn how to sell.
The Greatest Skill
In November of 1980, I realized that selling is the "Greatest Skill in the World." You may recall that
that was when we elected one of the greatest salespeople of this century, Ronald Reagan, to the
presidency. It's generally accepted that he was not elected based on any special technical expertise
that he had demonstrated as governor of

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California (which is a good selling lesson for all service providers), but because we liked him better
than the other guy.
Mr. Reagan, you'll remember, left office with one of the highest satisfaction ratings of all time. He was
such a good salesman that George Bush was elected president on something called ''repeat business."
That's right: 80 percent of the voters interviewed in the exit polls who had voted for Reagan in 1980
voted for Bush. Your clients would kill for that kind of repeat business!
Using the Wrong System
Little that I read about selling worked for me. I wasn't positive, enthusiastic, or eloquent in the way I
spoke or in my presentations. I had never been popular in school. My idea of a good time is being left
alone to think and read—1 don't really care to talk. I didn't consider myself a "people person." I was
an accountant and a consultant. Because of those traits, I needed to create a methodology that I could
feel comfortable with, and still get the job done.
I realized that every "professional" selling system I came across was initially developed to help
salespeople sell tangible products, like office copiers, to purchasing agents and office managers. What
I'd seen and heard had basically been schmoozed up, given technical language, and made more
complicated. It seemed like those teaching "professional selling" had basically exchanged the word
salesperson for the word professional.
I was selling an intangible product, consulting services, to business owners, CEOs, and managing
partners of professional firms. Using the incorrect selling system was as wrong as hiring a corporate
attorney to defend you for murder in a jury trial.
In selling services, you must realize that people buy other people, not professional firms. There is no
copy machine or computer for clients to see or touch. No matter what firm you work for, prospective
customers buy because of the individuals who will be interacting with them—they have no other source
of reference.
Firms that are much more qualified to do the work, big-name firms, often lose to less competent or
less well known competitors because clients wouldn't know a good audit, piece of software, or legal
brief if it hit them in the face. Clients can only gauge results, and the way the service is delivered. And
the results can't be evaluated until after the professional is hired.
Therefore, instead of sales training per se, I began to study those masters of the art of selling services:
physicians. Doctors don't sell,

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