Best Consulting Practices

Does Your Prospect Have a Name?

Nothing makes us feel more virtuous than announcing (to ourselves) our intentions to market and sell our services. This week, or this month, or this whatever, we are going to "e-mail prospects" and "call potential clients" and "prepare that mailing piece for prospects" and more.

So let me ask you: what are the names of those prospects and potential clients? Are you thinking of "Mary Smith" and "George Brown"? Are you talking about "the training director at XYZ" and the "owner of Small Business, LLC"?

If not, will you have anything to show for your marketing efforts, at the end of the week or month, beyond failed good intentions?

Why We Don't Make It Personal

There's a reason that so many consultants are happy planning their contacts with "prospects" but hide under the bed when contemplating "calling Mary" and "e-mailing George."

The simple fact is that vague definitions of "marketing activity" make us less accountable to ourselves for actually pulling the trigger on those activities. Preparation is important, of course, but I'm willing to bet that you know from your own experience how easy it is to prepare and prepare and prepare as a way to avoid actually doing anything.

Much of that comes down to fear of rejection, to anticipated embarrassment. When you think of doing a mailing to "prospects" it is easy to visualize some of them (albeit as shadowy, silhouette figures) responding to you. When you visualize Mary or George, it becomes easy to see them saying "No" to your overtures, and that hurts, even before it happens.

To tell the truth, that's one reason why so many consultants are pinning all their hopes on online marketing -- web sites and Twitter and Facebook. It's a matter of relief. Those things make you feel like you're getting your message in front of a lot of prospects, but it is easy to get a lot of "hits" without getting any business. It is easy to attract a lot of "tire kickers" that are not qualified to be included in your target market.

Individualize Your Targets

It takes guts, frankly, to make your marketing a more personal activity. You have to be willing to attempt to build a relationship with an individual, not with a vague pool of visitors or crowd of followers.

When you start looking for individual prospects, of course, you return to your target market, you start qualifying your prospects ... and you stop wasting a lot of effort on people who are never, ever going to pay for your services.

If you plan to take action, in the next week or two, to build your consulting business, you can put out some Tweets that might -- might! -- be seen by a good number of followers. You can send materials to lists of companies ("ABC Corp, Attention: Training Dept.").

Or you can identify three specific names of qualified prospects and choose a way of getting in front of them.

The latter approach will take a lot more work, and -- very, very important -- will be emotionally challenging. It is much more stressful, and you have to face that.

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:

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.

Filter, Don't Funnel, Your Prospects

You may be using contact management software, and if so, it probably has a feature that lets you track your "sales funnel." Or you may be reading a lot of books and blogs on marketing, and you're probably encountering the "marketing funnel" again and again. It is one of the most persistent analogies out there to explain the marketing/selling process.

Too bad it's wrong.

Time for a Reminder

I come back to this topic now and again, because this ubiquitous model of marketing and selling actually obscures what you should be trying to do with your consulting business. A funnel will do nothing to help you extract your target market, your best potential customers, from a world of strangers who start out knowing nothing about you.

Here's the difference between a sound marketing/sales process and a funnel:

Good Intentions: "Here We Go Again!"

If you are like many training consultants, every once in a while you suddenly become keenly aware of the need to market your services. Maybe business is down, maybe you just periodically realize that your clients come to you too randomly to be relied upon, but you decide that more regular, more systematic marketing would be good for your business.

So what do you do?

You "resolve" to "be more disciplined." You become "more determined" to "try harder."

Or to put it differently ...

You set yourself up for failure by paving another street in your own particular Hell with good intentions.

Do You Repeat Other Failures?

Blah, Blah, Blah vs. Blah, Read, Blah

It is hard for many training consultants who hate writing, or who at least find it a very slow process, to understand how written content can save them time and advance the sales process. ("Written content" could include white papers, newsletters, articles, blog posts, give away planning and diagnostic tools, web pages, and even, for our purposes, podcasts and video clips. It is any "canned" information from you or about you.)

They know, if they take the time to think about it, that selling training services is a long process of building trust among prospects. Unlike a machine or furniture or software or any of a host of things that are sold to businesses, training depends on somewhat intangible individual characteristics. Your prospects know that beyond your knowledge (which is the necessary starting point), your style, your communication skills, your enthusiasm and your ability to infect others with that enthusiasm do much to produce whatever results you will achieve for them.

And it takes time and extended contact for the prospect to get a feel for those personal qualities that are going to make all the difference.

The Blah, Blah, Blah Approach