Category Archives: Business of Consulting

Here’s a simple model to methodically organize yourself to attract the best, highest potential prospects and monetize your relationships with them on a continuing bases.

First, determine who your best customers are. Who has the most money and the most motivation to invest in your value proposition? They will be in categories D and E on the Market Value Bell Curve, below: serial developers and total immersion people (“hand tens”). You are better off with a small target audience of these highly qualified buyers than a huge list of irrelevant people toward the center and left.

Second, use Market Gravity to attract these people to your offerings. There should be at least four or five gravity “spokes” that you can employ with great effectiveness. Direct  your gravity efforts toward those on the right side of the bell curve.

Third, use the gravity to draw buyers to a comprehensive Accelerant Curve, where there are low barriers to entry but also the opportunity to use your services immediately on a high fee, low labor intensity basis. Maintain “vault items” which you uniquely possess. Build the Accelerant Curve by constantly producing intellectual property and creating thought leadership.

You can find more detailed descriptions of these steps on this blog, on my website, in my workshops, and in my books and CDs. The key is to clearly identify your best prospects, attract them, and then incorporate them into an increasingly intimate set of offerings.

You might call this the “unified field theory” of successful marketing in consulting.

© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.

I usually include in my speeches  and workshops the admonition to focus on true economic buyers and, therefore, eschew at all costs the HR department and its concerns with “deliverables” and hourly rates and the fad-of-the-month. There is an occasional exception, and I’ve run into exactly two in 25 years of consulting, not quite enough to challenge the rule.

In fact, I have an open offer to find me three HR executives who spent their careers in HR and were promoted to the CEO position of a Fortune 500 company over the past five years. I think they’re sightly rarer than unicorns. General counsels, actuaries, sales vice presidents, manufacturing general managers: yes. HR executives: no.

I was explaining this at a recent Million Dollar Consulting® College, and someone actually googled the notion and career path, and couldn’t find anyone. In fact, he turned up this reference about why HR executives can’t become CEOs!

http://www.drjohnsullivan.com/newsletter-archives/51-why-vps-of-hr-never-become-ceos

There are some wonderful people in HR, but there are also people who have been marginalized by their own organizations, who tend to apply brakes instead of acceleration, and who are in love with training programs and participants’ smile sheets instead of effective interventions and actual measurable results.

My advice to consultants hasn’t changed for years, and shows no prospects of having to change: Find the economic buyer, usually a line executive, who has need, budget, and the urgency to act.

© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.

I don’t really care, but loyal reader Eric May does, and he asked me to post this question to see what kind or replies he’d receive. So have at it!

We are victims today of a refusal to make tough decisions, but perhaps not the decisions most people might consider.

Ever since World War II and the advent of the Baby Boomer generation, the mathematics were inexorable: Safety nets created in the 1940s which depended on about a dozen people at work for every retiree and an average lifespan at 65 of fewer than five years were obsolescent. We reached a predictable point—today—with about three people working for every retired person, the latter having a lifespan at 65 of perhaps 20 more years. (And we have the unheard of phenomena of many people retiring in their 50s or even 40s in uniformed services, and huge disability claims with lifetime payments.)

We can reduce debt until the cows come home, but that won’t help the equation. The challenge for countries, companies, and families is growth.

I’ve never seen anyone cut their way to growth. You can forestall bankruptcy, you can eke out a lower quality of life (“I’m sorry to ask you to stand, but we’ve sold our conference table in order to make a few bucks”), and you can try to last until someone else has to make the tough decisions. Those tough decisions, however, aren’t about cutting costs.

They are about how to increase the top line.

Countries, companies, and wage earners all need to improve their revenues. Countries can do this through exports, taxes, innovation, job stimulation, and so on (some have tried it through conquest). Companies can do it through expansion, new products and services, new markets, higher prices for more value, and happy customers (some have tried it through conquest—acquisition). Individuals can do it through improving their marketability, promotion, better jobs, entrepreneurialism, more education, and working harder and smarter.

All of us have to provide goods and services attractive to others with high value, so that price competition isn’t always an issue. We need to encourage prudent risk taking, innovation, and speed. Government regulation, corporate bureaucracy, and individual cynicism are the antithesis of growth. They are retardants, a brake permanently set.

My car has the largest brakes of any production car in the world. That’s because it can go so fast, it needs massive breaks to bring it to a halt. But that’s only until I step on the accelerator again. The car didn’t come with the brake set and impossible for me to release.

We need to hit the accelerator, explode the top line, and understand that the old mathematics are defunct. No one has the right to consume wealth without also creating it. And you don’t create it by reducing your spending or vision.

We need leaders who understand that and can make tough decisions about growth.

© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.

Listen to this interview to learn:

• When are the best times to ask for a business referral.
• Specific language to use to get good referrals to great prospects, and why that’s important.
• What other options you can offer a buyer who is satisfied with the value you’ve added.
• How to lay the groundwork for receiving a referral.

• How Alan used referrals to personally invite Marshall Goldsmith and David Maister as presenters at his Thought Leadership conference.
• The importance of community for professional and personal growth.

Go to the interview page on billringle.com or listen here:

• Review your hiring and development processes and procedures for clarity, especially if others are routinely involved.

• Compensation must be appropriate for the firm and for performance. Most people can easily be evaluated by whether they meet, fail to meet, or exceed expectations.

• You should have clear metrics for ALL client engagements, so that progress and quality can be assessed very quickly even if you personally are not involved.

• Separate yourself from the business. You have goals, legal issues, financial issues, relationships, and so forth which may or may not coincide with those of the business.

• You need rainmakers for the acquisition of business. Very few people have the capacity and ability to be expert in both business acquisition and delivery. The former are far more valuable.

• Qualify prospects as early as possible against an ideal profile so that you waste minimum time.

• Consistently coach your team, especially your best people.

• Make your own policies (e.g., payment, cancellation, reimbursements, access, etc.) crystal clear to employees and clients.

• Attack small problems early, don’t ignore them and allow them to roll into huge snowballs or an avalanche.

• Always remember that we’re in pursuit of success, not perfection.