Best Consulting Practices

Sell Your Clients More Than Money

Some time ago, I was hired to develop training materials for a large company that was itself contracted to provide training for a healthcare product firm, located in another city. Since we were not all in the same place, a series of conference calls brought me, my direct client, and their client together to manage the project.

When the project manager was delayed for one of these calls, he put an assistant in charge. But in the end, I was the one who knew what was happening, what was needed, and I was the one who really guided the meeting.

After that meeting, and again after another one where the same thing happened, my client explicitly acknowledged that my ability to keep the project going when he wasn't available was a big benefit to them. It wasn't just avoiding a delay. It was that the project manager could have confidence that I would represent his views accurately and professionally to their client in all my interactions with anyone involved in the project.

In other words, the benefit was not just "productivity" or some kind of "output" that had financial ramifications.

You Need a Secret Shopper

When people get tired of getting e-mails from you, or or are annoyed by your blog feed, or when they get frustrated with your web site, they do not say goodbye.

They just disappear, with no farewell note to say how you could have kept them with you.

Side Effects

These days, we have a lot of tools to stay more visible with prospects in our target market, and with our ideal clients. Among the best are automated feeds and e-mail subscriptions, where interested parties automatically hear about new posts, new group discussions (e.g., LinkedIn), or comments and other interactions with followers.

Our web sites get ever more complicated, with more and more links, sometimes with interesting "special effects" to draw attention, forms for feedback or to subscribe for e-mail updates or site feeds, and perhaps different sections or pages for different audiences.

All of that complexity means there are plenty of ways for things to go wrong.

The Target Market of your Target Market

One of my most consistent themes on this blog is the value of defining your target market. Concentrating on pursuit of your ideal types of clients, rather than hoping to appeal to everyone under the sun, makes you more efficient, allows you to charge more appropriate fees, consolidates your status as an expert in your field, and affords opportunities for recycling services and marketing content for maximum return on the effort you put into them.

Focusing on a target market helps you explore your clients' needs in depth, leveraging similarities across clients to develop a deeper understanding of, basically, why they need you.

Now, take that "why" one level deeper.

Target Market²

Why You Should Keep the Snail in your Marketing Mail

However you get the word out to prospects (and customers) about your training business, there's a good chance you think the days of real, physical mail are long gone. But if you are relying entirely on electronic methods to deliver your message, you could be making a big mistake.

Mail Is Valued

We assume that because the volume of physical mail is declining, the value of mail is also declining, but that's just not the case. Both soft and hard data point to the value people place on receiving items in the mail.

One survey showed that a little over one-third of businesses asked thought consumers "value their mail," but when the consumers themselves were surveyed, two-thirds of them said it had value. Businesses are abandoning mail, as one marketing strategy, faster than their recipients are.

Consider:

Why Your Client Needs a To-Do List

If I asked you for a couple of brief case studies showing off your most successful training projects for clients, what are the chances they would sound something like this?

"I did this, then I did that, then I did this, then the client was very happy."

By "sound like this," I mean your story would capture all of your actions and put them front and center. But it might be hard to see what the client did, how they contributed to their own success by building on the training services you provided.

We vs. I

A story about what "we" did, meaning you and your client working together, is inherently more interesting. And if it is true, that is, if you can really identify actions by the client that supported your own contributions to their success, you can probably point to outcomes with some staying power.

Your opportunity to build that more compelling narrative lies at the beginning of your project, at the front end of the client relationship. From the very start, your case study has to shape up as,

Help Your Prospects Visualize Their Results

What can your prospect visualize after you have spent a little time in conversation with them?

They can probably envision some activities that you are going to perform. But can they visualize, with equal ease, how their business will be different? Can they see how their employees will be more efficient, or their processes more effective? Will communication, or sales, or customer service, or some other aspect of their work, well, work better?

Unfortunately, with many consultants the prospect gets better and better at visualizing what the consultant will be doing, as the conversation continues. But their vision of how their business will change stays rather vague for much longer.

And that's going to hold back sales.

Why Invest In You?

How Your Web Site Can Work Without Great Search Results

Using a web site mystifies many training consultants.

Google recently reported that a majority (63%) of small businesses do not have a web site, and that number would probably be higher among training consultants. Then you can add in the web sites that are "underemployed," that are clearly just place holders, or that have dated material on them from when they were first set up -- probably in a desperate flurry of marketing activity when business was down -- a couple of years ago.

Start reading advice about a business web site you are likely to be seduced by the notion that the purpose of your web site is to help people find you, that is it all about "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) bringing perfect strangers to your site, which is so beautiful and sexy that they book you on the spot.

Dream on. One notion I have little tolerance for is one-size-fits-all approaches to marketing, or to running your consulting business in general. There are many kinds of businesses where being discovered in a search is a major component of marketing, a key to success.

But I do not believe that most training consultants fit this model. For this industry, the small or one-person training consultancy, the best use of a web site is often:

To make it convenient for people who have already heard of you to learn more about you.