Tips for Fractional HR Sales and BD

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
1

Happy Wednesday,

I am in Sales and BD for a Human Resource Consulting Firm. I am new to my role and I am curious if anyone has tips on selling a service vs a product. Getting stakeholders on the phone these days is not an easy task so I would love advice.

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Hi @SElliott77,
Thank you for reaching out to the Community!
And congratulations on your new role :slightly_smiling_face:
- Which type of tips are you exactly looking for please to sell services?
- On which precise area (emails? phone calls? online services?) do you need the Community to contribute regarding sales tips?
I also wanted to invite a couple of subject matter experts to this conversation @johnelmer, @HubDoPete and @himanshurauthan do you have any tips to help @SElliott77 please?
Thanks and have a great day!
Bérangère

3

Hi Summer,

An interesting question! One much broader than the usual “How do I?” in HubSpot.

I can only share my opinions based on my experience selling both products and services to businesses.

I’m assuming from your message that you have prior experience selling products, and now you are selling HR & Sales services.

Selling a service is the start of a relationship, whereas selling a product in the traditional sense is a transfer of ownership. Both are similar at the beginning because you are addressing the customer’s need.

  • Identify the problems that your customer has and the value of solving it for them.
  • If your product or service solves these problems then you have the right to charge a portion of the value of solving it.
  • Prospects respond better to solving the problems they have than hearing about product or service features.
  • Using the HubSpot flywheel model, plan how you will attract, engage and delight your prospects.
  • Employ HubSpot tools to apply positive force to the flywheel (Buyer personas, Campaigns, Content Assets, Landing Pages, Marketing Email Workflows, Marketing-Sales handoff, Sales Email Sequences, Sales Tasks, there are many tools)

In terms of selling a service, the quality of that first engagement sets the tone for the relationship.

The better you Discover their goals, plans challenges and timeline the better you can position your service to solve them. That is typically followed by some form of demo/planning call to show how your service will solve their problems. Try to lower the bar that allows customers to try your service, and of course back it up with proof (testimonials/reviews/case studies) from successful customers your prospects can relate to.

Once the service is running, take a “Customer Success” approach to ensure they are delighted.

Software companies faced this problem 10-20 years ago when evolving from selling software in a box of discs, to software as a service (SaaS). This is how 'Customer Success" was born. It’s also part of why HubSpot runs this forum, it is all part of HubSpot’s services for Customer Success.

Reading up on Customer Success should be valuable - because selling a service (like SaaS) means continually selling, until for whatever reason, the customer eventually “churns”

I hope that helps!

best

Pete