A Sales Mistake Costing You Money: Proving Technical Expertise

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1411 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

Many accountants think they have to prove technical competence on a sales call.

This belief is based in the reality that clients buy our knowledge, thus we must prove we have the technical expertise prospective clients are seeking. This make sense, in theory, but leads to highly ineffective sales call practices such as:

• Giving ideas away for free

• Long monologues about technical topics

• Holding sales calls that last longer than 30 minutes

The prospective client already believes you are technical competent

Otherwise, they wouldn’t get on the phone with you in the first place.

Think about any service you bought recently where you interviewed a few vendors. Would you have even gotten on the phone to talk about your needs if you didn’t believe they could do the job?

Of course not - no one likes wasting their time.

When you move away from proving technical competence on sales calls, to identifying the prospect’s key problems and framing your service as the solution, you’ll close more deals, make more money, and scale your firm faster.

Here’s how to make the shift:

During a sales call, imagine you are a doctor trying to diagnose a patient… and then prescribe medicine to solve the pain

Your job is to ask the prospect questions to get to the root cause of their pain and then tell them how your service will solve their pain.

This requires you have an established sales call agenda with a series of questions designed to probe the prospect deeper. You want to understand when this pain started, what solutions they have tried in the past, why it’s important that they solve their pain now rather than 6 months from now.

And when you identify the pain?

Don’t give them the answer - instead, tell them HOW your service will solve their pain. Describe the specific steps you will take and what the relationship will look like.

I’ll leave you with this last insight:

Asking great questions proves technical competence by showing you deeply understand the prospect’s problem… get better at this and you’ll find your “technical explanation monologues” significantly decreasing.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

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See you again next week.

Cheers,

Brandon

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