Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

Do Your Clients Know This?

It’s estimated that more than 40 percent of employed workers plan to begin job searches during the next 12 months, and almost 25 percent are already looking.

This study, conducted by Yahoo/HotJobs, is unscientific but shows a noteworthy trend.

Most people are looking for new jobs because they’re not happy with their current compensation. And almost half of the respondents believe their current jobs offer "no potential for career growth." The news gets worse: One in four people feels underappreciated as "valued employees."

Imagine feeling stuck in a job, unappreciated and underpaid. That’s a dangerous combination, which leads to unnecessary turnover.

Some employers risk getting blindsided by this trend, so it’s a compelling topic for discussion with most any client. 

Should You Read Naked Conversations?

The short answer to that question is yes.

I’ve just read a pre-publication copy of Naked Conversations by unabashed blogging evangelists Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. Don’t miss this book even if you and/or your organization haven’t yet jumped into the blogosphere.

Scoble and Israel hammer home the point that blogging and other forms of social media are transforming how businesses communicate with customers, suppliers, and all their constituencies. And many would agree with them.

But this isn’t a one-sided, navel-gazing tome on the virtues of blogging. This book is full of hard-hitting advice from dozens of successful bloggers on what makes some blogs work and others flame out.

The book itself is like a blog on steroids, but with a natural thread through the topics that leads the reader easily from one subject to the next. It’s more of a conversation than a traditional book.

Throughout the case studies, the authors let the voices of the bloggers shine through, giving the reader a sense of the issues each company faced. When the authors agree or disagree with how a business handled a situation, they let you know—in a civilized way.

Scoble and Israel boil down their research and experience to help businesses understand the nuts and bolts of blogging without going geeky on the reader. They’ve got eleven tips for a successful blog, how to blog your way through a crisis, and an update of Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto.

Make no mistake—this is a business book. If you’re blogging now, read it for the hundreds of insights you’ll uncover. If your organization isn’t blogging, use this book as a discussion starter for deciding whether blogging is right for your company.

The book will hit the online bookstores in January 2006, but you can add it to your wish list now. You can find out more at the authors’ blog, Naked Conversations.

Would You Say This to a Client?

I've written before about how easy it is for consultants to let meaningless words and phrases slip into their marketing communications. Here's an example that belongs in the marketing hall of shame:

“Our expertise in On Demand Business can help you cope with an ultradynamic marketplace by developing an innovation-driven strategy which increases agility as it blunts commoditization. We can even help you better execute your strategy in play.”

That's a direct quote from a consulting firm's recent ad in the Wall Street Journal. Sorry, but I have no idea what the sentences in that ad really means.

I ran the passage through the jargon-busting tool, The Bullfighter (www.fightthebull.com), which had this to say to the ad writer: you “shower readers with gratuitous, interminable and often weighty if not impossibly labyrinthine prose."

In a face-to-face meeting with a client, would you say anything like the nonsense in that ad? I doubt it. Then why write that way?

Your marketing communications should say something meaningful about who you are and what you can do to help clients. That's what they want to know--not how much mind-numbing jargon you can fit into an ad.

Building High Performance Teams - Engaging Key Stakeholders

A stakeholder is anybody who is critical to your project’s success, can block your project, or will be impacted by your project. Acknowledging that--just like in “Six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon”--everybody quickly becomes a stakeholder one way or another, we are focusing on key stakeholders who can have the most serious impact if you ignore them.

The key to engaging stakeholders is to see your project from their perspective, then involve them in how you will involve them. 

Start by being clear:

• Why are they key stakeholders?
• What is their current attitude toward your project and what do you need it to be? (Remember, sometimes neutral is good enough.)
• What do you need from them?
• What are their likely concerns about your project?
• What would they say would be wins for them from your project?

Based on this, what is an involvement strategy that may mitigate many of their concerns and possibly give them some of their desired wins? But that is only the first step. 

More importantly, discuss your assessment with them…what you think their concerns are and what they would like to get from the project. Validate them--you may get a valuable surprise.

Discuss how you would like to involve them. Knowing that you care about their concerns will go a long way towards getting them on board. 

You can also work with the team to create a collaborative process roadmap for the project. This roadmap supplements the task-oriented Gantt chart by providing an approach for how people will collaborate to accomplish project objectives. 

This perspective helps the team plan for how key stakeholders are to be involved in the process (including who’s involvement may be limited to certain roles), the key agreements to be reached between specific groups or individuals at each stage to keep the project on track, and the results to be produced as an outcome of the collaboration.

Building High Performance Teams - Launching the Team

How long do you usually spend on a team launch? An hour? Two hours? Is the launch a meeting to tell everybody what needs to be accomplished? If so, you’re thinking about it all wrong. 

Launching a team can take anywhere from a day to a month…with incredibly valuable work being accomplished during that time. My previous post was about chartering a team; answering the key questions that a team needs to be in agreement on. 

A team is not launched until the sponsor, team leader, and team members can shake hands on the charter.

Developing and agreeing on the details of the project plan as part of the launch process allows team members to decide what are realistic, albeit challenging, goals that they are willing to commit to. By doing this, they are much more confident about negotiating and making commitments to project goals. Because they have truly negotiated what they believe can be accomplished to meet important needs of the organization, they are willing to support each other and work extremely hard to fulfill their commitments. 

The alternative, which we see all too often, is the forced march--teams “agreeing” to mandated goals that they do not believe they can accomplish. When they fail to achieve the results, they feel that they have only confirmed their original belief that the goals were unrealistic. 

In the process of chartering the team, you need to work with the team members to develop their capacity to build agreements, listen to each other, and to speak out effectively. Building “soft” skills is not effective when done in a vacuum. Providing tools that team members can immediately apply as they struggle to get points of view across and develop common goals and approaches is the best way to embed these skills. 

A team is launched when they have committed to the goals and know how to engage in constructive conflict.

How Successful Is Your Team?

In their 1993 book, The Wisdom of Teams, John Katzenbach and Douglas Smith point out that “the disciplined application of team basics is often overlooked.” And a deficiency in those basics can easily sabotage a team and its performance.

This week, Marty Rosenthal, my colleague, friend, and Director of Organization and Process Excellence at Intuit will post his thoughts on what it takes to create high performance teams. His first of three posts is below.

Building High Performance Teams - Chartering the Team

What is the difference between the team that was a high point in your career, and the ones that you may be spending your time pulling out of the ditch today?

Often, it is taking the time up front--the time teams never have because deadlines are so tight--to ensure that you and the team can answer, and agree on, some simple questions about what you are doing, why you are doing it, how you will accomplish the work, and who is involved.   

If the team is already clear about the answers, and in agreement, this will take virtually no time. If you surface disagreement or misunderstanding, it may take more time--but significantly less than the time involved in rework and “team building” to get back on track later.

The key questions a team should answer include:

•    Purpose: What is the purpose for this team? Why is this work necessary and important and what are the consequences for the organization if we do not succeed?

•    Goals: What are the measurable results needed to achieve the purpose (and by when)? What are the constraints we need to work within?

•    Aproach: What is the plan? What operating mechanisms will we use?

•    Roles: How will responsibilities for specific team functions and tasks be distributed?  What is the role of the sponsor? The team leader? Team members?

•    Complementary Skills: What is the team composition that ensures the right combination (across team members) of knowledge, ability, and experience required to perform effectively? How will we address any gaps?

Answers to these questions provide the framework necessary for effective collaboration, enabling the team to get the work done. 

Getting the Most from Your Marketing Investment?

Who knows.

A group of people aim to find out and let you know the results. You just have to participate in their confidential survey.

This study, Increasing Marketing Effectiveness at Professional Firms, is co-sponsored by Expertise Marketing LLC and the LawMarketing Portal. The research questions were developed with help from senior marketers at large and mid-sized professional service firms.

The group wants to find out the answers to three questions for you:

• What key marketing initiatives do professional service firms evaluate?

• How effective are their measurement/evaluation tools?

• How do professional marketers overcome the many obstacles to measuring and evaluating results?

The 20-25 minute confidential questionnaire is directed to senior marketers in a broad cross section of professional service firms worldwide, including: accounting, architecture, numerous consulting specialties, engineering, executive search, law, and many others.

If you participate, you will get a complimentary copy of the full report, which will be available in January 2006.

This study concludes in 30 days so if you want to participate, do it soon.

Take the survey now.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact:

Suzanne Lowe – President, Expertise Marketing LLC
www.expertisemarketing.com, 978.287.5080

Larry Bodine – LawMarketing Portal director
www.LawMarketing.com, 630.942.0977

How to Put the Value in Value-Based Pricing

If your consulting work generates improvement to the client’s bottom line, should you share in that good fortune? Or should consultants just be hourly guns-for-hire?

Clients and consultants alike stand to gain from value-based pricing. The client gets a consultant who stays focused on measurable results and a real partner in exposure to the risks of a project. The consultant has an opportunity to share in the financial gain the project achieves and to be more to the client than hired help.

Value-based pricing is not just a different approach to billing. It gets to the heart of your relationships with clients.

This month, the Guerrilla Consultant points out some of the ins and outs of pricing on value rather than on the hours you contribute to a project.

Read the article.

Uh-Oh!

In a recent study by analysts at Wetfeet, students interested in pursuing a career in Management Consulting were asked:

"Please select up to 3 factors that make your top ranked company appealing to you."

Of the 800+ responses, only 2 people said that "Ethics" was one of their top 3 factors for choosing a consulting firm. The category "Other" was rated more highly than "Ethics."

When Smaller Is Better

Facing mounting pressure to achieve more and more, faster and faster, business leaders grasp at big-bang solutions. But initiatives for large-scale change often fail because employees and managers lack the ability to implement the grand schemes planned at the top.

In this month's issue of Management Consulting News, Robert Schaffer explains a different way to succeed with large-scale, complicated changes: the Rapid Results approach. Schaffer is coauthor of Rapid Results! How 100-Day Projects Build the Capacity for Large-Scale Change. He tells us how to take clients’ big projects, tackle them on a small scale to achieve measurable results quickly, and then build on that success.

Read the interview with Robert Schaffer.

Check out the November issue of Management Consulting News.