If you feel like you’re not reaching your full sales potential as an organization, you might consider hiring a sales consultant. But what exactly can a sales consultant help you with? And what are the advantages of hiring one over, say, just doubling down on your internal training?
What Does a Sales Consultant Do?
Let’s start with the basics. What does a sales consultant actually do?
As you might expect, different sales consultants and consultancies are going to provide different types of services and have different approaches. However, you can usually anticipate at least the following from your sales consultant:
- Analysis. First, your sales consultant is going to objectively analyze your current approach to sales. They’re going to talk to your salespeople, review your processes, and study the tools and techniques you use to land sales. They’ll have an objective and unbiased approach, helping you figure out exactly what’s going wrong and why.
- Advice. Obviously, your sales consultant will also offer you advice and direction. What is it going to take to fix this sales strategy? What do you really need to improve to see better results?
- Training and education. After that, most sales consultants will offer at least some training and education, possibly only to sales managers, but perhaps to employees directly as well. The nature of this training and education will depend on the weak points exhibited by your sales staff.
- Connection to resources. Some sales consultants will also help you get connected to other resources. They may recommend other experts or other tools that you can use as part of your overall sales improvement strategy.
- General assistance. No matter what, consultants will usually help you in general ways, such as helping you brainstorm new ideas for experiments, helping you put together new sales process documents, and more.
- Management. Sales consultants can also help you manage the team directly. Depending on the nature of the relationship, your consultant may step in and provide coaching and direction on an individual basis.
- Review. Towards the end of your relationship, or at least during a specific period of your relationship, your sales consultant will undergo a thorough review. They’ll take a look at your metrics and how they’ve changed since the beginning of the sales consultancy. They also make evaluations to see if you have followed all their advice. If you’re still not getting the results you want, or if you’ve deviated from the original plan, this is an opportunity to make corrections.
The Benefits of Hiring a Sales Consultant
These are some of the best benefits of hiring a sales consultant for your organization:
- New knowledge. Consultants are there to educate the people within your organization and provide them with new insights and new ideas. Because most sales consultants are seasoned veterans in the sales game, they have years, if not decades of experience to back them. They can teach you things that you might not be able to figure out on your own.
- Outside perspective. Just as importantly, sales consultants offer an outside perspective. When you’re trapped within one team or one organization, it’s easy to feel stuck in an echo chamber. Rather than succumbing to groupthink, you can break out of your shell and listen to someone who is completely outside of your organizational culture.
- Improvements to lead generation and conversion. Most people hire sales consultants because they’re looking for very specific, measurable results. That usually boils down to improvements to lead generation and/or conversions. While these aren’t guarantees, it is very common to see improvements to both lead generation and conversion if you follow your consultant’s advice.
- Employee confidence. Working with a sales consultant can also improve your employees confidence and morale. Employees feel like they’re in the hands of an authoritative expert, and they get access to more tools to help them succeed.
- Quality assurance. Sales consultants are incentivized to get measurable results for their clients. Happy, satisfied clients are much more likely to use them in the future or recommend them to other businesses. When you hire a sales consultant, they’ll likely commit themselves to helping you revitalize your sales strategy; they may not explicitly guarantee specific metrics, but they’ll be committed to helping you get the best possible results.
Is It Worth It?
Hiring a sales consultant is highly advantageous and can solve several sales-related problems in your business. The biggest problem is that certain sales consultants can be expensive. So is it worth the money?
That depends heavily on your current organization, the results you’re currently getting, your goals, and the consultant you hire. But many organizations do find it worthwhile to hire a sales consultant; even though they incur a temporary expense, they end up multiplying clear sales results many times over.
