From the category archives:

Growing Your Practice

Six ways to turn a cold call warm

by Peter Osborne on October 4, 2010 · 0 comments

Guest poster Michael D. Brown is co-founder of Consultant Launch Pad. He has worked in the chemicals industry for more than 30 years, 12 of that as a consultant.

I am not a fan of cold sales calls to generate new consulting business.  I am especially not a fan of spending to travel for cold calls.  The odds are long and often very discouraging.  Having said that, it should be known that the second largest project of the 500 or so in my consulting career came from a cold call (through an incredible series of events involving perfect timing and an East Coast “storm of the century” — truly a once in a lifetime occurrence).  So if you cold call, do so with the odds in mind and the slim possibility of a nice payday.

 Why are the odds so poor for consultants who cold call?  Simple.  Because consulting is a very personal business, and relationships matter.  If there is no pre-existing relationship, then the ability to consult for that client is slim until the relationship evolves and matures.  

Instead I like warm calling.  A warm call to me is meeting with a client with whom I have developed a casual (though not necessarily close) relationship AND who has interest in my consultant services and has invited me to share more about my offering.  Warm calls are no guarantee, but the odds are considerably better than cold calls.

So, where do you find warm leads?  As E.F. Hutton used to say, “You earn them.”  You can earn them from many different marketing efforts including:

  1. Networking, networking, networking! – enough said.
  2. Speaking at industry events on topics related to your practice, such as industry trend or outlook, in a way that showcase your expertise and opinions (do not blatantly pitch your company).  Plus, industry trade groups sometimes will cover your travel expenses to speak at their events.
  3. Blogging about your practice with good case histories or ideas.  Web traffic is a great way to turn cold leads to warm leads at minimal cost (and no travel cost!)
  4. Reaching out to writers for trade journals and offering to help them write articles in which you are quoted.
  5. Direct mail (hard or email) campaigns which can sometimes have surprising effects and can be managed at reasonable costs.
  6. Asking a client at the end of the project for a referral, which could include a specific request for a Recommendation on LinkedIn.  Recommendations are particularly valuable if they include the keywords that a prospective client might use to search for someone with your skills.

Some of you may be wondering about cold calling to start relationships that might mature into business far down the road?  Sure, if you aren’t generating enough warm leads, then cold calling may be the last resort.  But do so only when you have completed all your client commitments, followed up on your hot leads, and worked your warm leads, and then do so by keeping an eye on travel expenses.

How do you pave the way to turn a cold call warm?  Any other suggestions?

Michael Brown is president of StrategyMark Inc., which provides consultant services to the specialty chemicals industry.

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HARO: Free publicity for subject-matter experts

by Peter Osborne on July 30, 2010 · 0 comments

Letting people know you're out there is the first step to establishing your credibiity as a subject-matter expert.

So you’re a new consultant — or you’ve been in business for awhile — and you just can’t seem to get traction against more established competitors.  And you don’t have  a lot of money to advertise or to hire a PR person to promote your brand.  And you worry that part of the problem — to steal from the theme song from Cheers — is that nobody knows your name.

Well, one alternative is subscribing to the Help a Reporter Out (HARO) service.  HARO says that every day it  ”brings nearly 30,000 reporters and bloggers, over 100,000 news sources and thousands of small businesses together to tell their stories, promote their brands and sell their products and services.”  It says it has published “more than 75,000 journalist queries, has facilitated nearly 7,500,000 media pitches, and has marketed and promoted close to 1,500 brands to the media, small businesses and consumers.”

HARO is completely free.  The process is simple: You go to their site and sign up.   What you’re signing up to receive are three e-mails per day with a list of stories that reporters and bloggers are working on, complete with a description of the story and a contact link.  If the story seems to be in your area of expertise, you click on the link and respond to the inquiry.  Very easy.

Now keep in mind that a lot of people subscribe so you may have some competition.  You can limit the e-mails to only topics that are in your wheelhouse. And you can normally set your watch by the arrival of the HARO e-mails and it’ll take all of a minute to quickly check the topics.  And speed of response often matters; a lot of these people are on deadline.

Take a look and give it a try.  But keep in mind that the reporters and bloggers are not necessarily your friends.  If you’re not prepared — and that includes thinking through how what you’re saying will look in print, searchable and on the Internet for eternity.  A few tips:

  • Anticipate the questions you might get and prepare talking points.
  • Keep those talking points short, but be quotable (i.e., don’t be boring).
  • Avoid abusing your competitors.

Please feel free to add additional tips or ways to improve your chances of helping a reporter out.

HARO is entirely free to sources and reporters, and unlike a majority of social media services, is independently owned and funded and has been profitable since day one. In addition, HARO serves as a vital social networking resource for sources, reporters and advertisers who use the service at www.helpareporter.com .

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8 Strategies for Marketing Success

by Peter Osborne on June 22, 2010 · 1 comment

Someone recently asked me to explain what made me a “good marketer.”  I had never heard the question phrased quite that way before and stumbled through an answer.

Later on, I realized I built a class around that very question 11 years ago.  So I headed down to the basement and pulled out the class handout.  We had spent more than three months asking that very question of some of the best marketing minds in the bank and organizing their answers into what turned out to be eight categories.

Times change; economies ebb and flow.  Millions of trees have died in the search for answers to that question.  But the answer never really changes.  I won’t list all the tactics that made up the bulk of the class, but here are the principles, tweaked a bit to apply to new and experienced consultants:

  1. Always remember that we’re in business to (Fill in the Blank). In our case, it was Make Good Loans.  For others, it might be Streamline Processes, Implement Software Solutions, or Drive Traffic to Your Website.
  2. Be absolutely committed to knowing everything about your Target Audience. We were affinity marketers who worked with alumni associations, sports teams, professional groups, and a host of other partners.  The most successful marketers went beyond being credit-card experts to being experts on their groups and the group’s constituents.  That’s more difficult for marketers with a broader target audience, which makes No. 3 even more important.
  3. Everything begins with the “list” (or audience). Having a great product doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t know where to find the buyer.  It’s OK to have multiple lists with different messages.
  4. Design compelling offers with a simple creative message. Two of the most important messages here were Offer is More Than Price and Your Great List Won’t Mean Much if the Offer Isn’t Clear and Valued by the Customer.
  5. Try lots of things.  Test in a disciplined manner… Basically, remember that if there’s no control there’s no test and behavior is more important than opinion.
  6. …And keep what works.  Measure your results. You need to share successes and failures.  I was reading a book the other night where the author was criticizing another author who had focused only on his big successes.  We often learn more from our big failures…and those lessons learned are even more important if we share them with others.
  7. Challenge everything. Never stop trying to make things better.  Pay attention to the details. Part of this is about a commitment to “publishing.”   I doubt there’s any such thing as the “perfect test.”   Get to market quickly.  Mail less more often.  Make sure the affinity is “in” the package.
  8. Spend wisely.  It’s real money. This may have been a bigger deal back in 1999 when marketing money flowed more freely, but this is really about putting some analysis behind your decision to test.  What do you hope to achieve and what’s the cost in your best-case and worst-case scenarios?

I have followed these principles over the years, and made sure that the people who worked for me did the same.  And that should have been my answer when I was asked what makes me a good marketer.  I’m disciplined and I make sure I know my audience.

Did we miss something that doesn’t fit into one of these categories?  Please let me know if you’d like me to elaborate on these strategies in future posts.

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Reduce choice to improve your sales results

by Peter Osborne on June 22, 2010 · 0 comments

Are you giving your prospects too many choices?

I believe that if three different people raise the same issue over the course of a week, it’s worth listening.   Today’s idea is Limit Choice.

It started with coming across Groupon, which is one of those businesses where customers are a great deal on a single item.  The deal depends on either a certain number of people taking it or it’s there until the supply runs out.   I signed up and while I haven’t bought anything yet, the deals are great and I anticipate I will participate before too long.  But I did subscribe to their feed.

A few days later I was listening to an interview where Gary Vaynerchuk, the author of “Crush It,” was offering some advice to start-ups.  He’s a bit over-the-top, but one of his pieces of advice had to do with simplicity and limiting choice.  Gary was talking about how he had tested the “Groupon” model in one of his retail wine stores by replacing a rack near the front that held 10 bargain wines with just one.  The result?  ”We’re crushing it,’ he said.  ”We’re selling these bottles at a staggering rate, one that trumps residual loss of not selling many products in that space.”

All this ended with a conversation with another consultant about one of the key “rules” we followed when offering credit-cards through the mail in a previous life.  We tested everything and inevitably found that Choice Suppresses.  The more variations on a card offer — different designs, different pricing, different value propositions — the fewer responses we received.

This concept is very important as you launch and market your consulting practice, particularly if you expect to have a portfolio career where you work for a number of different clients.  As I look back on the past year, I think I threw too many things against the wall when marketing to prospective clients.  I had a one-page document with 10 different “core competencies” across three categories.  It’s too many and I believe I’ve probably lost prospects who might have benefited from my skills but got lost looking at the others.

Try this exercise:  List your marketable skills and points of differentiation (i.e., segment the different ways you can solve a prospect’s problems).   For each skill, list specific prospects and/or places you can find prospects (e.g, a specific LinkedIn group, association membership lists).  Create separate landing pages on your website for each skill and link them from customized marketing pieces.

I’ll close with a link to a blog I wrote elsewhere that includes a great clip from the movie City Slickers reinforcing the importance of reducing choice and focusing on that one thing that differentiates you from the competition. 

Think about places where you might be offering excessive choice to customers and what impact that might be having on their buying decision.  Are there opportunities to reduce the choice — perhaps by careful targeting of benefits or skills — and actually increase response?

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30 Second Launch Pad: Develop clear goals

by Peter Osborne on June 17, 2010 · 0 comments

Patricia Debski

Patricia Debski is a principal at Roadmap Marketing LLC, where she brings more than 20 years of business, product, and marketing experience to helping companies get more out of their marketing dollars and drive results from their marketing strategy. She was most recently at the DuPont Company where she held leadership positions in the Building Innovations and the Printing and Publishing businesses.  For more information on Patricia, you can go to Roadmap Marketing’s website or her LinkedIn profile.

What do you know today that you wish you knew when you were starting out?   That you need a supportive but self-imposed infrastructure  (think an office, a schedule, meetings, formal objectives, etc.)  and defined energy sources  (besides caffeine – think networking, taking a class, attending a seminar, learning about an industry, etc. ) to keep you moving towards your defined goals – making sure you have defined goals!

 What was your most important decision starting out (e.g., financial, organizational, marketing)?  Rather than go it alone, I contracted with an existing consulting firm (3-4 yr old) for work and committed to supporting another small firm that needed my talents and was an outlet for my interests in working with smaller businesses (vs. corporate).   Also, I had already been volunteering my time and experience with other small businesses, either on an advisory committee or  in a business and marketing coaching capacity, which not only kept up my network, but gave me credible experience in the small business segment.
 
Can you offer one piece of advice to help a new consultant get through the first six months?  Be clear on your revenue and personal goals – do the upfront planning work and create quarterly (and monthly) goals with tasks and keep it in front of you. Always refer back to it.  I kept a funnel picture to track prospective clients and noted where they dropped off, where they advanced to a proposal, and which ones committed.  The picture keeps you grounded on what’s really happening.

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