Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

A Whole New Mindset

Brendon Connelly, the Slacker Manager, reminds us in his post that keeping your perspective on the mindset of those around you is smart advice for marketers--or anyone for that matter.

At Beloit College, they prepare a "Mindset List" for each incoming class of Freshmen. The class of 2009 Mindset List has 75 items on it.

Here are some of the interesting items from the mindset of this year's Freshmen:

• Boston has been working on the "The Big Dig" all their lives.

• Iran and Iraq have never been at war with each other.

• Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker have never preached on television.

• Aretha Franklin has always been in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

• The Starship Enterprise has always looked dated.

Great post, Brendon. Thanks.

The Worst Kind of Consultant

I recently read the 300+ page book, Rip-Off! The scandalous inside story of the management consulting money machine, by UK-based author David Craig.

This isn’t a review of the book, but I want to challenge some of Craig’s claims.

Craig paints the consulting industry with broad, black strokes, citing routine incidents of lying, falsifying results, plagiarism, greed, manipulation, and more. It’s not clear if the author is using a pen name, and the book is shrouded in secrecy, providing no way to deal with his allegations.

The author relates his first-hand knowledge of unethical, underhanded, and illegal behavior toward clients, but he goes to great lengths to disguise the consulting firms on whose behalf he supposedly spent twenty years perpetrating gross breaches of ethics on unsuspecting clients. He uses shorthand to describe his employers using fictitious firm names like the Butchers or the Baby Butchers. It’s not clear if this entire book is a work of fiction.

If this is a non-fiction book, it seems a cowardly way for the author to make a pseudo-stand against the companies that feathered his nest for twenty years, and who was guilty over and over of the very sins he’s now revealing to the world.

Let me give you an example. The author asserts that the “real art of management consulting is taking a situation, where a client probably had no intention of buying any significant work, and emerging a few short weeks later with a multi-million dollar contract in your hands.”

Craig and his teams would “manipulate” the client to agree to purchase a large consulting assignment using a technique called “First Phase Studies.” The client was expecting a short-term and reasonably priced assessment of some aspect of the company’s business performance

But in the 100+ First Phase Studies Craig claims to have conducted, his role “was to ensure that around 90% of these studies led to major consulting assignments.”

Of course, consultants do offer clients diagnostic reviews to help uncover the root cause of business problems, and consultants would like those diagnostic activities to result in additional work. But Craig’s approach is clearly over the top, including detailed sales scripts for consultants to follow to improve their odds of landing the next piece of work, whether the work was needed or not.

The author can claim that he was carrying out the wishes of others, but that’s a cop-out. Ethical and honest consultants don’t behave in this manner.

But I wonder how the author lived with himself knowing that he breached multiple ethical boundaries for more than two decades.

Are you out there David? Can you shed some light on why you behaved this way for so long? I just don’t understand. 

Should Consultants Blog?

Maybe it’s beside the point to ask if consultants should blog given that so many already do—including this one. But when I recently read an article claiming that all professional service providers must have a blog, I was struck by the author’s all-or-nothing tone.

Hundreds of thousands of blog posts have dissected the power and benefits of blogs, so no need to rehash that subject here. But should every professional service provider author a blog? I don’t think so.

No offense, but some of the greatest consultants I’ve met are mediocre writers. They can work wonders with client executives, consulting teams, and even prepare snazzy PowerPoint presentations. But they shouldn’t try to write blogs.

And some consultants already create a high level of client demand for their services using other channels. They don’t need blogs to attract more clients.

In some industries, blogs just may not matter to clients. If the purpose of a business blog is to reach your targeted audience, it’s best to know someone out there would want to read your stuff. Any one of us could rattle off a number of industries where blogs are still an oddity, not a fixture.

And finally, to paraphrase Doc Searls, you need to be a good blog reader before you can be a good blogger. Even though anyone can have a blog running in minutes, that doesn’t mean everyone should.

I’m a big fan of blogs. But I believe every business and individual is different, with unique strategies, tactics, customers, suppliers, and employees. Black and white advice glosses over important nuances that can make the difference between success and failure.

I believe consultants should blog, just not all of them.

Blog Business Summit

Last week, I spent some time at the 2005 Blog Business Summit in San Francisco.

The meeting covered every imaginable element of business blogging, including how to choose a blogging engine, design a corporate or personal blog, build traffic, and stay on top of what others are saying about your blog.

The question that many asked was how do you find a "voice" for your blog? Darren Barefoot and Molly Holzschlag answered that question in detail. One blogger summarized Darren and Molly's thoughts in the post, blog writing style.

Many thanks to Summit speakers Dave Taylor, Debbie Weil, Rebecca Blood, DL Byron, Robert Scoble, and Steve Broback.

Some of the presentaton slides are available from the Blog Business Summit site.

More summit meetings are planned, so visit Blog Business Summit to learn more.

Tip #12 of 25 - Solve the Right Problem

Almost forty years ago, Warren J. Wittreich wrote in the Harvard Business Review that “often a client who wishes to purchase a professional service senses that he has a problem, but is uncertain as to what the specific nature of his problem really is. The responsibility of the service firm is to identify that problem and define it in meaningful terms.” 

Twenty years later in The Secrets of Consulting, Gerry Weinberg recalls the first law of consulting taught to him by a colleague, Roger House: “In spite of what the client may tell you, there’s always a problem.”

If the first law of consulting is that there’s always a problem, the second—which is trickier—is to be sure you’re solving the right problem. Otherwise, you’re just covering symptoms with a flimsy band-aid that will surely fail—more likely sooner than later. That’s the stuff that gives consultants a bad rep.

It’s easy to get sucked into “how we’ll deal with this problem” too quickly. With competition breathing down our necks, it’s tempting to conjure up a solution before the problem is truly understood by the client and the consultant.

The result is often a misguided and a potentially failed project. Most clients are facing issues of such complexity that off-the-shelf solutions can easily be a recipe for disaster. Now more than ever, we need to be guided by Wittreich’s wisdom and remember our responsibility to identify and define client problems in a meaningful way.

The Myth of the Generalist

“To thrive, specialize.” Jack Trout told Management Consulting News.

Some consultants believe that to fill the sales pipeline with prospective clients, they must position themselves as generalists. To cast a wide net and be as many things as possible to clients, they try to sell the notion that they can solve any problem that arises.

It’s easy to see why this strategy seems logical, at least on the surface. Many firms have made their mark by offering a general set of high-priced services to willing clients. The mega-firms are called “one-stop shops” for just about anything clients need. But what underlies that generalist veneer in most firms are groups of highly specialized consultants, focused on what they do best.

Of course, these specialists can expand their scope to help clients solve other business problems—and they do once they’ve struck up a client relationship. But they open the client’s door and mind by demonstrating undisputed expertise on the issue facing the client, not by emphasizing a “jack of all trades” strategy.

As Trout pointed out, “Clients are looking for the best of breed when choosing consultants. They’ll pick one consultant for creative work, one for strategy work, and another for change management projects. The client will use consultants they perceive to be specialists in a coordinated way to achieve the total result they’re after.”

Visit Fast Company's BlogJam

To celebrate the second anniversary of its Blog, Fast Company is hosting BlogJam 2005.

I'll be guest blogging there, with many others, today and tomorrow.

You'll find two posts today "Why HR Can't be Left to HR" and CEO:Career Ending Opportunity

 

When It Rains, It Pours

Most consultants would love to be so busy that clients are lined up waiting for their services. The reality is that many consultants are likely to experience, at some point, the feast or famine syndrome: streaks of challenging, profitable work, followed by stretches of the doldrums with little paid work in the pipeline.

Can you smooth out the ups and downs of this syndrome? Read this month's issue of The Guerrilla Consultant to find out.

How Not to Write a Press Release

Score another one for corporate babble. My e-mailbox contained a press release announcing that two companies--which will remain nameless--were joining forces to offer something “special” to the market.

The press release headline jumped from the page:

"Proven Identity Management Experience Combined With Context-Based Identity Services Unlock the Value of Existing Information Assets for Fine-Grained Security, User Administration, and Federated Identity."

Huh?

Granted, I’m no expert on writing press releases, and some aspects of technology, while important, are bound to be incomprehensible to the layperson.

But no press announcement about a product or service should be so opaque. After all, if you want media coverage, you need to present a compelling story in your press release that is newsworthy and understandable.

It’s a waste of time and money to throw a generic, jargon-laden press release into the ether. And the PR people producing such drivel should be sent back to “Value Proposition 101” before being allowed to write for another client.

Before you begin to write a press release, ask and answer at least these basic questions: What’s really different about the offering? How would a media person use this information? How might your story benefit the media person’s readers? Is a press release the best way to communicate what you have to say? What do you want the press release to accomplish?

With those answers in mind, you’ll be able to craft a communication that has a much better chance of grabbing coverage than if you send out the typical buzzword-based press release.

Daniel Pink on A Whole New Mind

Free Agent Nation author Daniel Pink is back again with A Whole New Mind. In his recent interview in Management Consulting News, he talks about the growing importance of right-brain skills for consultants and other professionals.

He says “The scales are tipping away from what it used to take for people to get ahead—logical, linear, left-brain, and spreadsheet-type abilities—in favor of abilities like artistry, empathy, and big-picture thinking, which are becoming more valuable. Left-brain skills are still absolutely necessary in our complex world. They’re just not sufficient anymore.”

Pink goes on to say that consultants need to think about whether they are doing the kind of work that can be offshored or automated. “Accountants, for example, may become this generation’s blue-collar workers. They are imperiled by cheaper workers overseas, and by the ability to put many accounting measures into a system of rules in a piece of software,” he says.

Take a look at the interview with Daniel Pink and let me know what you think.