Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

Hourly Rates—Confusing Effort with Results

On one of my very first consulting assignments, I neglected to regularly back up data on my computer and lost an elaborate analysis in a sudden power failure. I bemoaned my lost hours and valuable work to the project manager but, as you might expect, got little sympathy. I did get some good advice though: Never confuse effort with results.

I flashed on that advice recently as I was sitting across the table from a client who asked the inevitable question, “What’s the hourly rate for the people you are proposing for this project?” That led us to discuss if the proposed consultants were “worth” their hourly rate. Sound familiar?

Way too often, such conversations degenerate into how the client can monitor and limit hours—all in an effort to keep costs down—not on how to achieve results.

You can’t blame clients. The hourly rate is the gold standard for pricing in the industry. For decades, professional service providers have trained clients to expect it, and it’s now used extensively to compare consultants.

It’s time to dump the hourly rate once and for all.

To begin with, the hourly rate is a totally bogus number. It’s computed using very broad (and sometimes flawed) assumptions about a firm’s costs, volume and profit. And, many consultants toss those assumptions out the window and discount their hourly rates when they believe doing so will improve their chances of winning a project.

And then there’s the matter of results. You probably know the urban legend about the consultant who was asked to help a client restart a machine that had died and caused a halt in production for a manufacturing plant. The consultant eyed the machine from all angles, circled it twice, and whacked it three times with the client’s rubber hammer. The machine sprang back to life, and the consultant left after fifteen minutes of work.

But, the client was outraged with the consultant’s high-priced invoice. “We could have swatted that machine three times without you.” he yelled. The consultant’s predictable reply was, “Yes, but you didn’t know where to swat it, and that’s why you called me.”

By charging a client for time alone, you completely undermine the expertise you’ve spent years building, and you limit the profit you can justifiably earn. Dozens of pricing alternatives exist that don’t rely on the hourly rate. Look for alternatives that lead to discussions with clients about the outcomes they want to achieve.

When pricing your next project, think results, not effort.

It’s Thursday Morning Live with Jay, Mike, and Tom

Last Thursday, Jay Levinson, Tom Sant and I held our first Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants Webinar for several hundred people. The session, sponsored by Microsoft, covered a lot of ground in about an hour. Topics such as why consultants need guerrilla marketing, which value propositions are winning (and losing) in the market, and what it takes to write a winning proposal are just a smattering of what we talked about.

Even if you missed the live Webinar, you can still benefit from the ideas we kicked around. Listen to the audio and download the presentation slides--at no cost. You’ll also have free access to a sample marketing plan and marketing roadmap for guerrilla consultants.

If you have any questions or comments about the Webinar, I’d love to hear from you.

What is Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants? - Free Download

The old saying, “You can’t get fired for hiring IBM” just isn't valid anymore. These days, clients choose the best consultants, not the best-known ones. Today’s clients seek talent, not firm names. The competition for new work is not between firms, but between people and their ideas.

Consultants’ marketing efforts haven’t changed in response to this reality. In fact, their marketing hasn’t changed much in decades—except to get slicker, flashier and more expensive.

That’s not working either. The competitive battle in consulting is no longer about vying for projects; it’s about competing for relationships with those who award those projects. That’s what Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants is about: how to win profitable work from a new, more discerning breed of consulting clients.

It’s high time for consultants to adopt guerrilla marketing techniques. We prepared the free Guide to Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants that spells out the ABC’s to get you started marketing your consulting practice.

Hats Off to Tim Berners-Lee

What a guy.

Toward the end of December 1990 in a lab in Switzerland, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee brought to life his creation—the World Wide Web. At the time, his colleagues admired his ingenuity, but most people simply could not envision practical uses for his invention.

So, Berners-Lee used his creation to speed up access to the lab’s telephone directory. Some of his colleagues resisted even that use, arguing that what they had was just fine.

Who knew that the tools Berners-Lee had created to define the basic structure of the Web—tools he gave away for free, by the way—would spawn a revolution in how we all work and live?

Ten years later, at the end of 2000, Berners-Lee’s lone Web site had a lot of company: over 25 million Web sites around the world.

In summer 2004, Time magazine named Berners-Lee one of the top thinkers of the 20th century. Berners-Lee recently told the BBC that his invention was “just another program.” Right—and I’m the Queen of England.

No, wait...the Queen of England is involved in the story. In July 2004, Queen Elizabeth II knighted Berners-Lee for his pioneering work. He’s also received Finland’s Millennium Technology Prize.

Berners-Lee is a modest guy, but he clearly sees beyond what most of us see, and he thinks BIG. In an interview in the October 2004 issue of Technology Review, Sir Tim points out that, “Early on, people really didn’t understand why the Web was interesting. They saw it in the smaller scale, and it’s not interesting in the smaller scale.”

Sir Tim currently heads up the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT in Boston, where he is working on his next big idea—the Semantic Web. Well, the world is listening now, Sir Tim. Lead on!