Best Consulting Practices

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.

Is Your Web Designer On Your Side?

You may have a variety of "helpers" to whom you delegate key tasks in your consulting business, not only to save time, but to supplement skills you may lack. Having someone build and maintain your web site is among the most common of these, but writers and administrative help can also be valuable.

And I strongly encourage you to look for ways to delegate tasks that others could perform more efficiently, so you can concentrate on the parts of your business to which you bring, and from which you extract, the most value.

But delegating tasks is not the same as abdicating responsibility for core decisions about your business and how it interacts with your prospects and clients.

The Question: "Why?"

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:

Marketing Content Life Span: Consumed, Recycled, or Re-Used?

"Marketing content" refers to a wide range of things. Think of it as anything that a prospect or client could read, listen to, or watch that helps them see how working with you will benefit their business.

For the typical training consultant, this could include white papers, web pages, audio or video, newsletters, e-mail campaigns, blogs, social media, special reports, published articles, direct mail (postcards and sales letters), diagnostic tools, surveys, and more. Indeed, this embarrassment of riches is exactly the problem: there are plenty of options, so you have to choose to do some things, and not do, or at least postpone, others.

Add to that the reluctance many consultants feel about writing or creating content, about coming up with ideas of what to say and finding the time to get it in print (e- or otherwise) or audio or video, and you have a major challenge.

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.

Is There an Order to Your Marketing Efforts?

If you looked at the various marketing and selling activities you practice, whether that involves mailings, newsletters, articles, calls, or conversations with prospects, would it matter what order you listed them in? Are they unrelated to each other, a random collection of actions that you tackle as they come to mind, or as time frees up now and then?

Or does the prospect typically experience a sequence of contacts, each one setting up the next?

One-Timers

The first challenge is having a range of activities to put on your list. Some consultants only try one thing -- they send out e-mails to strangers, for instance. You can't put just one thing "in order."

Others are what we might call "serial one-timers." They are susceptible to the latest fad, and they only market when they are desperate for business. So at one point in the year they send out a flurry of e-mails. Six months later they make a bunch of phone calls. The next year, they write newsletters, or blogs, for a few weeks, until they get busy again and abandon the effort.