Recommended Book – Winning the Professional Services Sale

wpss_cover_250px_white Tony Bettencourt, one of my closest friends, is the chef/owner of Sixty2 On Wharf, an award-winning, Italian-inspired restaurant in Salem, MA. I always enjoy hearing him talk about his visits to other Italian restaurants he respects because, while the chefs might all draw from the same list of fine ingredients from this one particular part of the world, each outcome bears the unique stamp and flavor of the chef that created it.

I’m thinking about this as I write a recommendation for Winning the Professional Services Sale by Michael McLaughlin. My area of focus is selling and marketing professional services, so, when I opened the book, I felt like Tony must feel when he walks into another Italian restaurant. This is my area. My tastes are discerning. I can be picky and I’m easily turned off by sloppiness, lack of talent, and underwhelming execution. On the other hand, I’m open minded (at least that’s what I tell myself), and I’m always waiting to be pleasantly surprised.

Definitely in the second camp with Winning the Professional Services Sale. Michael McLaughlin has done a fabulous job. Full disclosure: Michael writes for my publication, RainToday.com, and we’ve known each other professionally for a number of years. You can bet, however, that if he wrote a bad book I wouldn’t be talking about it here on my blog.

Here are five things I like about Winning the Professional Services Sale:

1. Like a good chef, he displays a deep understanding of the fine ingredients of sales success in professional services. Professional services has its own dynamics and nuances. Throughout the book, Michael confirmed for me that he knows what he’s talking about. That he ‘gets it.’ Lots of people who write about this area don’t.

2. He’s not afraid to challenge some of the industry cliches and central orthodoxies. Everyone knows that relationships close sales, right? Michael says insights and capabilities—not relationships—close sales:

Suggesting that a strong client relationship is important to the services sale is like saying humans need oxygen to survive. Everyone knows that it’s more comfortalbe, even more benefitcal to buy from someone you know and trust. But it’s easy to overestimate the power of those relationships, especially when it comes to selling services. The days of clients automatically handing work to their favorites when the way of the three martini lunch.

3. It’s easy to scan lists. I admit it. I’m a scanner, and I appreciate lists like “The Roots of Service Risk,” “Making the Case for Change,” “Seven Buyer Remarks You Don’t Want to Hear,” and so on.

4. It’s comprehensive without being surface level.

5. It’s readable. So many business books put forth actually worthwhile ideas packaged up in a sea of run-on sentences, split infinitives, and convoluted structure. Michael does a good job of making the pages flow from one to the next. As my colleage Adam Tokarz might say, “Shakespeare wept.” Maybe not quite, but it’s accessible and written in a conversational tone that works well with the content.

Winning the Professional Services Sale is one to add to the summer reading list. Nice job, Chef.