What is Client Builder Selling?

Client Builder Selling™ is a straightforward, consultative system for sales and business development designed to meet the challenges of the 21st century.  Our proven, principled approach to selling incorporates the most effective sales strategies and tools known today and is equally beneficial to parties on both sides of a transaction.  It is a collaborative process that requires the mutual agreement of both buyer and seller at every step along the way.

The Client Builder Selling Process is made for people that sell solutions to problems, regardless of whether those solutions comes in the form of a product or a service.Client Builder Selling isn’t just another conceptual training program concocted in an ivory tower that sounds good in theory but doesn’t work in the real world.  Our practical, real-world strategies have been tried and tested on the street to ensure that they really work the way we say they do.

Client Builder Selling simplifies the sales process and puts control in the seller’s hands.  It gives business owners, independent professionals and salespeople a practical, proven, repeatable process for taking a lead and turning it into a new or expanded business relationship.   It also helps a seller differentiate him or herself from their competition throughout the sales and client development process.

Using the Client Builder Selling process you can expect to:

  • Be more effective at prospecting
  • Gain greater access to decision makers
  • Reduce the time spent chasing unqualified prospects
  • Weed out non-buyers early
  • Minimize your customer’s tendency to shop your proposals.
  • Reduce the length of your sales cycle
  • Eliminate the trap of being an “unpaid consultant”
  • Overcome a prospect’s tendency to “think it over” and gain quicker decisions
  • Improve your closing ratio
  • Eliminate the need to discount price to win business
  • Negotiate more effectively
  • Increase the size of your average sale
  • Manage complex, big dollar deals more effectively
  • Develop better relationships with prospects and clients
  • Improve internal communications
  • Increase overall morale

At the core of the Client Builder Selling process is a series of seven steps held together by something we call Advance Agreements.

The Client Builder Selling Process

Step 1 – Preparation

The objective of the Preparation Step is to gather sufficient information about your market and the individual prospects within it to begin to qualify a particular prospect and make the very best possible impression on your initial sales call.

Step 2 – Diagnosis

The objective of the Diagnosis Step is to determine whether the prospect has pain – a compelling, personal, emotional reason to acquire your product or service. You not only need to ascertain whether your prospect has a problem that you can help solve or an opportunity that you can help them capture, but also whether they acknowledge those problems and opportunities and feel that they are compelling enough to take the necessary action to solve them.

Step 3 – Investment

The goal of the Investment Step is to reach an agreement with your prospect that they are not only able, but willing to make the necessary investment to fix the problems they uncovered in the Diagnosis

Step 4 – Decision Process

Although the questions asked in this step are extraordinarily simple they are often overlooked.  As a result, salespeople frequently find themselves presenting to people who do not have the authority to make decisions.  In the decision process step our objective is to uncover the who, how, when, when, why and where of the prospects decision process.

Step 5 – Commitment

Small businesses and the salespeople who work for them frequently invest lots of time, energy and money in the preparation of proposals or presentations they give to prospects. Before going to the time and effort of preparing a proposal or planning a presentation, you want to make certain that your prospect is committed – committed to solving the problems you helped them uncover in the diagnosis step, committed to investing the time, money and effort needed to gain your solution, and committed to making a decision in timely manner.

Step 6 – Presentation

The objective of the Presentation Step is to bring the deal to outcome by delivering the proof your prospect needs and asking them for their decision.  Believe it or not, the Presentation step is often the shortest step in the entire process.  The decision to buy is typically made long before you get to this step and many times the presentation isn’t even necessary.

Step 7 – Confirmation

The objective of the Confirmation step is to strengthen your agreement with the buyer and eliminate and lingering “buyer’s remorse”.  It is also when you should establish the expectations you have for one another and how  the failure to meet those expectations will be handled.

Advance Agreements

Advance Agreements are the mortar that holds the process together.  They are specific understandings between buyer and seller as to what will take place at each and every step in the sales process.

There are three simple rules for following our client development process:

  1. 1. Never skip a step to get to any other step.
  2. 2. Make sure you and your prospect are in the same step at the same time.
  3. 3. Don’t leave a step until you are sure that you have completed that step.

The whole idea behind the Client Builder Selling process is to only present your solutions in the context of how it will solve your customer’s most compelling problems or opportunities, within the investment parameters they have shared with you and in a manner consistent with how they make their purchasing decisions.  This should only occur once the prospect has agreed to make a decision one way or another at the time you present your proof or within a mutually agreed timeframe.  Without a linked sequential process you simply can’t do this.

One Last Word About the Client Builder Selling Process:

Larry Lewis, the owner of Client Builder Marketing, is the creator of the Client Builder Selling process.  Larry started his sales training business in 1996 as a franchisee of the Sandler Sales Institute.  Like SPIN Selling and other selling systems that preceded it, the Sandler Selling System had a lot going for it.  However, after David Sandler’s death in 1995, many of Sandler’s strategies and tactics began to grow stale and outdated especially with the expanded use of technologies like voice mail and the internet.  In addition, many of Larry’s clients found certain elements of Sandler’s system to be too difficult to execute and many of Sandler’s techniques were perceived as overtly manipulative.

In response to these concerns, Larry began to incorporate more and more strategies and techniques from other selling experts – people like Neil Rackham, Bill Brooks, Jeff Thule, and the Miller-Heiman organization – into his training.  Finally, after seven years, he sold his Sandler franchise and developed a selling system of my own – the Client Builder Selling Process.

The Client Builder Selling process is a selling system tailor-made for small businesses that sell solutions to problems regardless of whether those solutions come in the form of a product or a service.  It incorporates the best sales practices Larry has experienced during his 20+ years as a sales professional along with everything his clients have taught him over the last 14 years as a sales and marketing coach.   Client Builder Selling is a selling system that recognizes the realities of doing business in today’s highly competitive, global economy.  It’s a process that is honest and straightforward.  In short, it’s a selling system that works.

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