Desperation Does Not Work

Given our recent economic woos, Many senior executives are asking their key client facing people to be more aggressive in the market place.  For example, many partners in professional services firms we work with are feeling the pressure to engage their clients, focus on building a pipeline of prospects and most importantly close new sales.  And for many professional services firms whose services where highly valued and utilized prior to the economic crisis and before – consultants are rusty, at best, in ramping up the mindset to sell.  Yet many partners and senior executives being asked to engage in more selling have never had to do it this intensely their entire careers!  This creates a particular challenge for many firms who feel the need to speed up the selling process in order to get results.

Now before I say anything else, it must be reinforced that there is a lot right with reinforcing a sales oriented culture.  To be even more candid – pipeline development and harvesting needs to be your philosophy in good times as well as challenging ones!  Hopefully the wake up call that has been ignited from these challenging times will continue as a standard operating approach. (more…)