If you want to sell your service business, you need to replace yourself as your company’s top sales person.

If you’re like the founders of most service firms, you started your business because you are really good at something. You are credible with clients because you are a subject matter expert. People want to buy services from experts. Hence, you’re probably your company’s best sales person.

Being your company’s top sales person is problematic for two reasons:

1. Your company is dependent on you so there is not much to buy after you’re out of the picture;
2. The type of sales you make render projects that are too technically challenging to be repeat-able and scalable.

For this post, let’s focus on the second problem.

You’re probably good at “consultative selling”. You visit with your prospect and try to understand their needs. You ask deep, open-ended questions and follow them up with more probing. The prospect feels like he/she is being interviewed for the 6 o’clock news.

At the end of the first meeting, you walk away with a very rich understanding of your client’s challenge. This knowledge comes with an expectation from your client that you will use their information to solve their problem. Obviously you need to custom-tailor both a proposal and a corresponding solution to help them. Your deep subject matter expertise makes you want to whip out all of the arrows in your quiver to concoct a complex solution because you’re smart, experienced and you like the mental stimulation of solving a client’s problem in a fresh way.

Variety is the spice of life you tell yourself. Well, go eat a chili pepper instead. Customization is our enemy. Standardization is our friend. And as long as you’re doing the selling, you’re going to be tempted to create a new solution each time.