Best Consulting Practices

The Marketing-Product Arrow

Whether your training business provides live seminars and coaching, or recorded training events (like webinars), or e-books and self-study products -- or all of the above -- you need to do some kind of marketing to promote those products and services, to bring them to the attention of prospects and clients.

When should you do that?

Marketing First?

There are many advocates of the marketing first approach. This is the view that you shouldn't go to the effort of creating a product if there is not a market for it, if you don't have interest. Market first, produce the product/service if someone signs on the dotted line.

What Good Is Your Experience If You Don't Leverage It?

I spend a lot of time on this blog harping on "target markets," and my target market is experienced, successful training consultants (see All About You for more about my idea client).

If they are so successful, why do they need help marketing their training services?

Starting Over ... And Over ... And ...

The problem is that too many consultants recreate their sales process time after time after time.

When they come into contact with a new prospect, perhaps from a referral, perhaps through visibility and reputation, the conversation, in many ways, might as well be their first sales experience. They have nothing prepared in advance to give to the prospect to move the conversation along.

What would they have prepared? Oh, say ...

Bundling Benefits For You And For Your Client

Selling your services in bundles or packages can be good for your business.

But have you ever thought about how it could be good for your clients?

Taking the Long View

With your experience as a training professional, you can anticipate needs and options that could really help your clients, but that will not be evident to those clients for some time, perhaps well after the "main event" that is at the center of your project with the client.

For example, I recently had a conversation with a training consultant about an assessment he provides to financial institutions, helping them see when practices at the front lines have drifted away from the strategies they have received from their management. He knows that when management sees the "gaps" in alignment between these two levels, they may recognize a need to improve their communication tools and patterns before they get to training on specific topics, processes, or procedures.

Custom Versions = Higher Rates

Many training consultants have a fair number of "canned" products and services, standard offerings they deliver to clients again and again. This is one of the reasons, really, that businesses hire experienced training consultants, the ones who have figured out what works and what doesn't, the ones who have learned from their experience to develop superior material.

But then the client asks for some changes.

For example, you might be asked to replace your generic case studies with more realistic, more specific cases drawn from the client's industry, or even from their own company history. You may be asked to revise the terminology you use to bring it into alignment with standard terms your client uses. You might incorporate specific forms, products, or other aspects of the client's operations.

All this is excellent, it is what we like to hear. Employees will be more likely to apply what they have learned, when they return to their posts, because they do not have to do any "translation." It indicates that your client is looking for better results, and it is always fun to get a client who really cares about the outcomes of the training they provide.

Customization, Work, Value, Price

Offer a "Questions Asked" Guarantee

The "no questions asked" guarantee is a powerful enticement to buy. You probably respond to that enticement when you are shopping for retail items or business services and supplies, and many people who sell a lot of information products have found that offering a guarantee can increase sales.

Now, you may not be comfortable with the word "guarantee," or, depending on the types of services you offer, you may find other ways to let your prospects know that you stand behind your products and your work. However you express your assurance of quality, you probably think of the "no questions asked" guarantee as the ultimate assurance, as the gold standard for backing a product or service.

But could the "questions asked" guarantee be even better?

Certainly, provided you clearly explain to your prospects what that means.

Why Your Clients Will Welcome Your Questions

Certainly it is convenient for a client to get a refund, partial or full, with no hassles if they are not satisfied with your work. And in the long run, it can save you time as well: no haggling, no arguing, just move on.

But many times just a question or two can reveal a small change that could make a big difference in client satisfaction. Giving up your right to ask any questions eliminates one of your most powerful sources of feedback, your access to additional information about your clients' experiences that could point the way to a more successful product or service.

The secret is to make it clear that you will honor every claim, under your guarantee, quality assurance statement, or whatever you use. Every claim, no push back.

The key thing for your clients to understand is that while they have to answer a question before they get their refund (or product exchange, etc.), they do not have to have the right answer -- there is none -- just their answer.

A Tale of Two Whys

Information + Structure = Value

If you have been successful as a training consultant, you know that there is a lot more to this business than just dumping information in participants' laps. Effective communication requires decisions about what information to include, and what information to leave out or simplify. It demands structure, a sequence of information that leads to comprehension and, hopefully, application.

That's why the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in your client's companies are often so ineffective at sharing their knowledge. When the clinicians, or the engineers, or the programmers come into sales training, say, they overwhelm the sales force with details that are of little use in the selling conversation.

As a skilled trainer, you are used to putting together existing information in the right way to achieve a desired effect. You repackage information to enhance its value.

(Indeed, even when my own clients, trainers themselves, talk about my "wordsmithing" a white paper or a marketing give away, they often assume that I achieve results for them by the skilled choice of the right words. But it has much more to do with choosing the right subset of information, and then structuring that information for the best outcome.)

All of this probably seems fairly clear, if you are an experienced trainer. You may not realize, however, that gathering and structuring information, products, and services you already have is truly a service to your prospects and clients.

Gather, Structure, and Serve Your Clients Better

Strangers to Clients IV: Customers Before Clients

Continuing with our "filtering" or "sifting" model of the marketing process for independent training consultants (overview here ), we come to the stage where someone actually buys something from us! But that does not necessarily mean we sell a huge project, contract to deliver weeks of seminars, or end up writing a core curriculum for a large company.

It might mean we sell a moderate-length electronic document, charge a modest amount for a conference call, offer discount rates to participate in a short on-line course, or provide an assessment or diagnostic tool at a highly affordable price.

How We Got Here

"Customers," in this model, are the next stage of evolution after "fans." We started by crafting a description of an ideal client, and being firm with ourselves about defining a target market.

With that target consistently in mind, we found ways to make ourselves visible to that market, to broadcast our information to audiences within that market so that they became aware of how we think, what kind of work we do, what we offer. If that broadcasting was done well, if we delivered a truly useful and interesting message -- and not just sales pitches -- some individuals in that audience went beyond just listening or reading, and took deliberate action to find out more about us.

That makes them fans, people who make the effort to come to us in some way. It could be an e-mail or call, it could simply be a visit to our web site, but they are giving us the opportunity to convince them we can help their business, and if we have samples of our thinking, skills, and knowledge, if we offer content that rewards them for visiting us in some way, we strengthen their trust in us.