This has to be one of the toughest things you’ll face in business. But you can get through. We reckon the key to surviving times of uncertainty - crisis even - is persuading clients that you can weather the storm better together. Here are 7 ways to sell to clients who find themselves under stress. 

1. Be kind and supportive.

Be your client's friend, sympathetic ear, shoulder to cry on. You too want their business, job or career to succeed. You have a privileged insider’s view - shared ground that you can build on. It’s a unique position to be in. 

You can show strength to build your relationship and help your client through it. A lot of our life in consultancy is about making clients look good, and this is more important than ever in uncertain times - put yourself in their shoes and think what would help solidify their position internally, and how you can help them achieve it. 

2. Fight fear.

Consultancy is often a fear-based purchase. 

Sometimes a client is struggling with acknowledging that they don’t have the answers, but seeking external help might be perceived as a weakness by their colleagues. You can mitigate this by positioning yourself as true experts with a temporary role to play. 

Clients can also fear picking the wrong advisory firm, with the risk that it’ll reflect badly on their judgement. Help them de-risk, by providing materials they can use internally, such as your testimonials and case studies. And offer for them to speak to your existing clients as part of the engagement process - this will build confidence in their decision. 

3. Position yourself as the credible alternative to the Big Firms.

Smaller firms are often less expensive than the big multinationals. By using your services, your clients can be seen to be helping to get the best value, rather than taking the safer, perceived-to-be-easier option, as encapsulated in the old saying: “Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM”. 

With a reputation for rolling out the same answers regardless of the question (every problem is a nail if what you provide is a hammer…), the large consultancies are not always seen as being innovative or bringing genuinely fresh thinking - and this gives you a great opportunity. 

You can manage any perceived risk from working with a relatively unheard-of firm by reinforcing your sales and marketing materials with testimonials. They can be as short as a one- or two-sentence quote. 

4. Innovate with pricing.

While “value based pricing” has fallen out of favour lately, mainly because it was seen as consultants trying to profit from short-term performance spikes in their clients, there are still plenty of innovative pricing models you can adopt to make the decision easier for your prospects. 

Find genuine ways to share the risk of the project - obviously both the downsides (fixed fees) and upsides (results delivered). When doing this, show confidence in your effect on your client’s business performance by offering longer timescales for the results to be measured, with interim payments as appropriate. 

5. Bring ideas. Lots of them.

Clients value not only the fact that you’re thinking about their challenges, but also the fresh perspectives that you can bring (and, frankly, that they can present as their own!). 

Run sessions with your team to stimulate new ideas and initiatives for your clients. Prepare well, to maximise the time input from the attendees. Write up the outputs, scoring the ideas using criteria such as difficulty, impact, relevance and so on. Then ask the client for a short session to take them through the best ones on a “no commitment” basis. Leave them with the ideas to do what they choose with them. 

6. Prepare the defence for your client.

Expect, and be ready for, your client getting questions such as: “Why are you using those expensive external consultants when people in the XYZ department are being cut due to a reduction in budgets?”.

As before, position yourselves as true experts who are needed on a temporary basis, not a long-term replacement for the client’s staff. And help your client sell the project internally, by suggesting wider internal communications about how the assignment will help the company / department overall and make it stronger going forward (therefore hopefully requiring less of a cut to budgets than if the project did not go ahead). 

7. Create a burning platform.

Build the case as to why either doing nothing or waiting is a worse option than acting now. Demonstrate the benefits that will accrue from the project, and why you’d want those benefits sooner, rather than later. And offer bite-sized chunks of work to get started. This can keep proposals under procurement thresholds, and early phases can be used to build the case for larger subsequent phases. 

Stay close

We hope you won’t find yourself in a ‘nobody’s buying’ situation, despite the uncertainties we are living through right now. Of course any of the approaches we’ve described can help in good times too, and the stronger and closer your relationship in good times, the more likely it is to survive less predictable times. 

We at Metis have lived through some interesting times, as the Chinese curse has it. Our hard-won success is coded into the software that we built to help us run, grow and sell our own consultancies. We’d love to show you how it can help your business.  Take a look at our website for more info, and get a no-obligation demo here. 

And do let us know what you think.