Short interview excerpt (recorded April 17, 2014) in which a host asks Mark Donnolo for advice for "seller-doers"—professionals who both deliver services and are responsible for sales. Donnolo advises reframing selling as advisory work: act as a scout/advisor who helps clients identify risks and solutions; if you genuinely help clients, sales will follow. The core message emphasizes mindset (helper/advisor) and approach over aggressive sales tactics.
Chapters
Many of our members are what I call them, seller doers. So they know how to do what they do very well. But they also are responsible for bringing in new business and sales and marketing. And they tend to struggle with it. That's not something they like. So that gets put on the back burner a lot of the time. So I was wondering if you had any advice for them to help them become more comfortable with it, Any tips for them?
Yeah, I went through the same thing because I came up through professional services in advertising and then in consulting. And I've always found professional services to be a curious profession because you come up as an expert in a certain area. So you're an expert in some very typically, some advisory area. And as you become more of an expert and you move up in the organization or as you start your own firm, you then are responsible for creating business. And if you come up and you become a partner in the firm, all of a sudden they say to you, okay, well Mark, you need to go out and sell x million dollars worth of business. And you go, what? What am I doing there? I was an expert at such and such. Why do I need to sell? So it is kind of an odd transition because when you're used to being the professional and the expert, it's hard to switch over into sales mode. I recall years ago when I was going through that transition, my old boss had some good advice for me because I said to him, you know, I'm not comfortable with the sales thing. I'm not comfortable going out and selling consulting. And he said, no, no, no, no. He said, you're thinking about it all wrong. It's the mind frame you have to have. It's not that you're selling, you're an advisor. And what you are to your clients is you're the scout and you're the person who needs to be out in front and you need to be telling them what they need to watch out for and what they should be doing. And, and by advising, the sales will come out from that. And so as I think about it, I think about it a little bit differently in terms of mind frame and approach that what I want to do is I want to help the client and I want to help them solve problems and I want to push their thinking and I want to help them create something that's going to be useful to them. And the actual sale, the actual close is incidental. That comes after that. If I'm going out trying to sell something that's not nearly as successful for me or for my client is if I'm genuinely trying to help them. But I know in the end it's going to result in a sale. So I think it's a lot. A lot of its mind frame and I think a lot of its approach, approaching it as a helper and as an advisor rather than as a salesperson.
