When I began training to be a BA, I never dreamt that I would need to be a salesperson too, in fact, I’m glad I hadn’t realized that as it may have deterred me from, what is for me, the most suitable and fulfilling career that I could have wished for.
Over the last few months, I have worked alongside the CEO, Business Unit Heads, and other senior stakeholders to deliver a Competency Framework for 6point6. The framework acts as a blueprint that sets out all the competencies needed per role to establish and run the business successfully on a day to day basis. This project has given me visibility of all the roles, levels, and disciplines that make up a prosperous consulting firm and has allowed me to see what skill separates the junior, mid-level, and senior roles throughout the organization. The answer is simply this: the ability to sell. The better you are at selling, the more senior you are likely to become, and this is true across the whole business, it doesn’t just apply to Business Analysts.
Luckily, my first BA role was in the public sector where the idea of making money had a minimal impact on my role, but in recent years, I have been working in two contrasting commercial environments. This is where I realized that in a sales-related role pressures can vary vastly across sectors for BAs.
It’s fair to say that the last few years have been the most challenging for me as an analyst, although I can honestly say that this has been the time in which I have learned the most about being commercial.
The truth is that the more commercial the environment, the more your analysis and sales skills come under scrutiny. It’s not enough to be a solid analyst in this environment if you really want your career to excel or even remain buoyant, you need to be able to ‘do sales’ too. To succeed, you need to admit to any deficiencies and awaken a new skill set as an accompaniment to your usual analysis work.
If you’ve found yourself in a similar position, you may wish to explore the concept of selling and how it can impact your role as a BA. The following thoughts are from my experiences and may help you with your own BA sales journey:
Your attitude always needs to be positive – aim to be helpful and informative, not pushy. Know that it’s okay to be your genuine self, you don’t have to morph into a different person overnight. You are there as a BA above all else and need to show that you are an experienced analyst and know your stuff. Relax and do what you are best at.
Aim to make a consistently good impression with prospects and clients and make a concerted effort to look sharp and be prepared for every meeting.
If supporting the sales process is new to you, ask your best salespeople for any tips that may be useful. Perhaps you can ask to shadow them during a sales engagement.
Have a go and learn what you can, don’t be afraid to ask for feedback on your performance. We can always improve and raise our game!
Once you have the opportunity to work closely with your salespeople on the front line; understand that they may have different personalities, views, and approaches to your own. They will at least have very different objectives, in fact, some might say that salespeople bring the jazz hands and you bring the substance when selling, but whatever the analogy, you need to work together with mutual respect to understand how to give your organization the best chance of selling professional analysis services.
You need to work as a team to target the right markets and organizations, establish how to differentiate your services from the competition, analyze how to solve client pain points, and keep leads warm.
The sales team will always be looking for ways to highlight your greatest selling points and you can help them with the following tips:
As with any project, you need to be well-read but when you’re in a commercial environment you need to do even more on a much grander scale. As soon as a potential sales prospect appears on your radar you need to learn about the organization, their industry, and the competition. Start by researching the business, conduct simple ‘What, why, when analysis’ to understand the basics, locate or map out their organization chart and use LinkedIn to find out who the key people are that you need to engage with. Understand their business model and critical success factors and find out what you can about their product or service roadmap.
Once you have this information, run an internal session with the sales team and other stakeholders involved in the process to share your findings in preparation for the next engagement.
Your sales team will want to ensure that the prospect is worth pursuing before committing resources to any further work. They may do this by employing one of the following sales techniques to qualify and prioritize the deal in relation to other sales leads:
BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs, and Timeline) is a sales qualification methodology that helps to determine whether a prospect is a good match for you based on their budget, their ability to buy from you, their need for your product, and the purchase timeline.
CHAMP(CHallenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritisation) is thought to be a modern version of BANT and describes key questions that need to be answered to better qualify leads and close sales.
SPIN(Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff) is an acronym relating to four types of sales questions designed to bring a prospect into interest and through to a sale.
Regardless of the method used, if the opportunity is not worth pursuing at this stage, you may still wish to leave the door open for something more fruitful later. Now that you’ve had the chance to understand their business you can use that knowledge to suggest analysis opportunities in the future and set up regular check-ins to keep in touch.
In sales, there are two personas: Hunters and Farmers. Hunters chase brand new sales leads and aim to close as many deals as quickly as possible, whereas farmers look to source more business from existing clients and do this through the development of long-term client relationships. A strong sales team will no doubt utilize and balance both approaches, and as a BA you will be able to help both scenarios in the following ways:
You often only have one chance to make the right impression with a new prospect, even with new faces from existing clients. This adds a lot of pressure; you need to ensure that your workshops are engaging and fill the audience with confidence in your ability to understand, analyze and deliver quality outputs, you don’t want to deter people from buying from your organization. If you have ever read the book ‘Pitch Anything’ by Oren Klaff, you will understand what I mean by this. You need to hook people into what you are selling, help them to relax enough to let their guard down, and clearly demonstrate how your offerings can be used to resolve their issues. You need to do all this while remaining calm, humorous, and professional. Sounds easy right? It isn’t necessarily easy for everyone, but solid preparation is the key to successful workshops.
At the end of the workshop, ensure that you have summarized pertinent points from the session and your next steps clearly, try and leave your prospect with something of value and follow up with professional documentation from the session.
Any documentation you share externally needs to be of an excellent standard, look professional, and be error-free, tidy, and consistent. This advice applies equally to internal clients but is of paramount importance when you are trying to sell your services externally. The following points act as a checklist for all of us but may be particularly helpful for entry-level BAs who are bravely diving into the pre-sales process:
As you progress through your BA career you may find yourself in a leadership position. This will naturally involve a greater focus on selling BA services. You will need to work closely with the marketing team to put together BA offerings and create Go-to-Market strategies. It will help to understand how much money your BA function is currently turning over each year in comparison to targets defined by your CFO. You will need to identify value propositions for your offerings and align them to your identified target markets.
Selling may not be for every BA, but even if you can improve your sales technique a little it has the power to enhance your career exponentially.
It would be a mistake to assume that you don’t need to worry about sales as a commercial BA but ultimately, there is nothing wrong with letting your genius shine through your solid analysis work either. It just helps if you can sell or at least apply some commercial acumen.
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