Best Consulting Practices

What is Sustainable for You?

If you're thinking about marketing your training business and looking for advice on how to go about it, one thing you've probably decided is that you "should" be doing something with social media. You may be looking at Twitter or Facebook or blogging, or even an e-newsletter, mainly because you hear about them constantly.

Everybody's doing it, in other words.

Now, when you were a kid, there probably came a point at which your parents told you you couldn't do something you wanted to do, something that some of your friends got to do. And when you said your mom, "But everybody else is doing it!", she replied with something like:

If everybody else jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?

Sustainability Is THE Issue

Evidence-Based Internet Marketing

You may have heard news stories about "evidence-based medicine," and may even have thought that the phrase seemed redundant in some way. Are not the various medical treatments made available only because they have been proven to work?

Not so. A surprising number of complex (and even risky) treatments are based on logical reasoning, to be sure, but not much more. They are applied because it seems they should work, but not because it has been proven that they do work.

And even when they do work, they rarely work equally well for everyone, Sometimes treatments that are good in well-defined situations draw attention and then are over-extended to a much wider range of cases, many of which do not benefit much from the treatment.

Your training business is probably offered many "prescriptions" to "treat" your "marketing condition." Just be prepared to perform your own reality checks, because many of these recommendations are based on reasonable guesses, or what has worked for others, but that does not mean they will work for you.

Pet Peeve: What You "Deserve"

I recently ran across a blog post that included a statement along the lines of "you deserve a professional looking web site for your business." It's probably just me, but "You deserve ..." is one of those phrases that gets my blood pressure up, that hits a sensitive spot that's just been rubbed raw.

Part of my sensitivity is due to the prevalence of this phrase in advertising. You're watching television and as a woman slips into her bubble bath, the voice-over tells us we all deserve to be pampered, we all deserve the smaller, and even the larger, luxuries of life.

Poppycock!

Deserving? Why?

Can You Keep Your Mouth Shut?

As I've mentioned before, I work exclusively with established, successful training consultants. (You can learn the details of how I qualify my target market in the "All About You" section.)

While there are many benefits to all of that experience, there are also drawbacks. And one of the biggest is that after years of addressing training needs for a range of clients, we can often see where we are headed almost from the beginning of the conversation with the prospect. As they tell us their business problems, their concerns about their employees, their ideas about what needs to change, the cogs between our ears are grinding away, and the solutions for the prospect's situation are visible in stunning detail in our mind's eye.

When that happens to you, how often do you interrupt your prospect to suggest paths they might follow? Do you find yourself nodding and shaking your head, as they suggest the approaches they have thought of, giving them feedback on their ideas almost as quickly as they are spoken? Do you take a small opening or question and run with it to lay out your total solution for all their needs?

Or do you keep your mouth shut and let them keep going?

It Is Their Story, Not Yours

Deliver your Message to your Audience

Imagine you run a delivery service, you have a fleet of vehicles, and your dispatch office has this conversation:

"Hello, XYZ Delivery, how can we help you?"

"I'd like to schedule a delivery, right away."

"Very good, we can certainly do that. What are we picking up?"

"I haven't worked that out yet."

"Pardon? I'm sorry, maybe I didn't put that right. What exactly will we be delivering for you?"

"I'm not sure."

"Oooookay, uh, all right, let's come back to that. Whatever it is, where are we taking it?"

"You mean, specifically?"

"Well, yes, you see we have to have an exact location to deliver the ... uh, the whatever ..."

"Oh, I'm not sure where this should be delivered yet. Probably everywhere ..."

A Common Conversation (With Yourself)

This sounds ridiculous, on the face of it, yet it mirrors an internal dialogue that I see consultants having every day. They think about "reaching new prospects" and "attracting customers" and immediately their thoughts turn to the delivery method.

Big mistake. First know whom you are talking to, and what you are talking about. Then, only then, figure out which is the best way to deliver that particular message to that particular audience. And make that decision based not only on "what" and 'to whom," but based on your own skills, styles, likes and hates.

Meow?

Are You Selling Transactions Or Relationships?

Some training consultants mostly sell one-time events. Perhaps they give a workshop or presentation that is fairly self-contained, that you can only go through once. After each event, they need to create a new audience for the next one. And with each event, they have to recoup the marketing and business costs that went into staging the event.

Others work with the same clients, and even the same participants, again and again. They may have a topic that requires regular updating, review, or re-certification. They may have a series of services, where you progress from one level to the next. In these situations, the opportunity to recover those costs of marketing and providing services stretches over a longer period of time. It does not all have to be captured with the very first offering in the series.

The point is not that you should do one or the other, or both -- that is largely determined by the training material you cover, the industries you serve, and similar factors -- but what implications this question has for how you run your business.

Marketing Investment and Your Fees

How much time, effort, and money should you put into marketing your services? What should you charge for what you deliver?

Choosing Your Marketing Tools

Dan Roam has built a substantial consulting business around the practice of using simple, hand-drawn pictures to solve complex problems, a practice he describes in his "back of the napkin" books. He tells the story in one of these books of a long consulting/design session with Microsoft, in which he used fairly crude drawings, photographed from whiteboards, to make the final presentation.

After the presentation, two senior Microsoft executives asked what software was used to create the drawings. Roam thought they were joking, so when he replied with "pen and paper 1.0," he was surprised that the executives went on to ask who made that software!

Of Hammers And Nails

There is an old saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Microsoft is all about software, so that's the first thing that came to mind.

Similarly, I know of a fellow who built a very successful copywriting business almost entirely through cold calling. He then became something of a guru and consultant on, what do you know, cold calling for copywriters. That approach completely dominates his marketing advice.

And it is good advice, for some people. Others advocate e-newsletters as the core strategy, or frequent publication of articles, or free introductory seminars, or some other tool.

And all of them are right, to some extent! They have had great success with these tools, and if you are like them, you can probably have great success with them, too.

Big If