• Failing to return a legitimate email request within a day. NO ONE is so busy that they can’t return email messages in a day, unless you are allowing all kinds of spam to intrude or are spending all your time on “social medial platforms.”
• Neglecting to establish a future time and date certain. “Let’s make it Tuesday at three, I’ll call you on your private line,” is not a hard language to learn, like Mandarin or Tagalog. Throwing away momentum with “Let’s talk again soon,” or “I’ll wait to hear from you” is simply slovenly.
• Dealing with people who are easy to see but can’t buy, and rationalizing why it’s okay to do that. Virtually no one in training or HR can approve a major project. At best, they have limited “event” budgets or are intermediaries. And they tend to be rude and obnoxious, which is why they’re in HR.
• Consistently making grammatical and punctuation mistakes that reveal the writer is an amateur. In modern printing, only one space is skipped between sentences, not two (which is a throwback to typewriter days). Commas and periods go within quotation marks at the end of the sentence, no exceptions. If you can’t learn to correct poor writing at your age, why should anyone expect you can consult well?
• Procrastination, especially with prospects. There is not reason in the world—no reason—why you can’t turn around a proposal after a meeting within 48 hours.
• A pecuniary mental set, that impels one to use mail instead of Fedex, a raspy old phone instead of a modern model, and to question whether it’s worth spending money to travel to see a legitimate buyer. No one ever made a million in revenue by cutting costs, and you can take THAT to the bank!
• Hanging out with blowhards and bloviators. The people giving the loudest, most inflexible, most complex advice are almost always people who aren’t successful but just claim to be. (Hint: Take a look at their clothing. The sign of a successful person is expensive, well-tailored casual clothes and accessories.)
• CFO: Creating False Overhead. Unless you are running a several million dollar practice, you don’t need a virtual assistant, advisory board, full-time bookkeeper, sales and marketing assistant, or general factotum. Having a staff doesn’t create a consulting practice. It creates a welfare state.
• Spending more than 30 minutes a day on social media sites. I don’t care about those people who claim they landed a $50,000 “deal” on Plexico or Faceup, and I care much less about the “marketing experts” whose source of income is, gee, telling you how to market on social media. (But what have they DONE?). If you’re selling to a corporate buyer you are not going to make a living doing so on Chainedin, but you will be able to spend a lot of time there avoiding things like networking at events, publishing in the trade press, and speaking at conferences.
• Being afraid to ask for repeat business, referrals, references, and testimonials. If you’re working with a true buyer and doing good work, and you’ve prepared that buyer, there’s no reason in the world not to ask for that person’s continuing good will. In our business, that good will is best expressed through referrals (ever send someone to your doctor or accountant?). If you don’t ask, you seldom get. (Or at least you miss out on a lot you should have received.)
• Not establishing a support system. Your spouse, significant other, extended family, close colleagues, friends, or whomever should be assembled into a support unit, so that you know when you’ve done well, you receive candid, solicited feedback when you could have done better, and you have people with whom you can commiserate. Otherwise, unsolicited (usually worthless) feedback will have far too great an influence on you.
• Carrying around too much of others’ baggage and not creating your own. Consultants often have strikingly low self-worth. You can’t live without baggage (we all need clothes and “stuff”) but it should be baggage you create with clothes that fit you today and stuff you can really use tomorrow. I’m weary of consultants lamenting, “Why should they listen to ME?” If you feel that way, then I don’t know why they should listen to you, because I’m getting tired of listening to you. If you don’t think you’re good and act that way, why would I ever be interested in hiring you? The first sale is to yourself. If you can’t make that one, you’re in the wrong business.
© Alan Weiss 2010. All rights reserved.
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