Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

Aim at Foot…Shoot Repeatedly

AOL, the beleaguered online service, is probably glad that the month of June is over.

Besides aggravating many long-time customers by inserting ads into their emails, AOL execs found themselves in the spotlight for shooting themselves in the foot—again. In the now famous “I want to cancel my account” episode, AOL subscriber, Vincent Ferrari, battled mightily with a service rep to shut down his account.

Ferrari recorded his tussle, which circulated widely, and it landed him an interview with Matt Lauer on Today. AOL execs apologized to Ferrari, discussed the story with the media, and fired the customer service rep.

AOL’s self-inflicted wound reveals the perils of unleashing an aggressive sales strategy using customer service staff. Granted, most customers expect to hear some sales pitch when they talk to a service rep. But tenacious efforts to sell something to a customer seeking service violate a simple rule of marketing: customer service is a better marketing opportunity than a sales tool.

Customer support, of course, is an enormous expense for most businesses, and it’s tough to ignore the sales opportunity that presents itself in any interaction with a customer. But why not take advantage of the power of customer goodwill and word-of-mouth marketing by offering error-free service, rather than an unwanted sales spiel?

By focusing on service, and its marketing benefits, a business may not wind up on YouTube, Digg, or Today. But that could be the ideal outcome.

A Consultant’s Worst Nightmare

When he was President of Columbia University in the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower engaged the services of a consultant to review the collegiate organization and make recommendations on how to improve its performance. Upon receiving the report, Eisenhower commented that the report was “the most expensive and least-read document the University’s library ever acquired.”

Ouch.

Sadly, that kind of consulting nightmare didn’t end when Eisenhower held his post at Columbia. Since then, countless stories of consulting project meltdowns have hit the grapevine, leaving the “responsible” consultants—and their clients—with bitter feelings, payment disputes, and a lot of unfinished business.

The fact is that both client and consultant are responsible for projects that go wild. In  this month's issue of The Guerrilla Consultant, we’ll discuss a few steps clients can take before hiring a consultant that can prevent a project disaster.

Read The Guerrilla Consultant.

What's Next in Consulting?

No one can predict the future of our business but Fiona Czerniawska, consulting industry strategist, gets it right most every time.

Czerniawska isn’t certain she knows exactly why the surging demand for consulting services isn’t leading to higher fees, but she gives us a few solid theories in the July issue of Management Consulting News.

She also lets us in on the trends in value-based pricing, marketing, and she tells us which firms are winning the thought leadership race. 

In their second article for Management Consulting News, Kerry Patterson, coauthor of Crucial Conversations, and his colleague Eric Patten have advice for consultants working to breathe life into a project vision: spend as much time teaching accountability as creating the vision. Patterson and Patten give us a roadmap to confront issues of team performance while keeping projects on track.

In his column, “The Writing on the Wall,” Alan Weiss draws the important distinction between what buyers need and what they want; suggesting that consultants who address a buyer’s need move quickly up the value—and fee—curve.

You’ll also find articles on how to craft the direct mail marketing letter, start a consulting business, and engage senior executives in any client organization.

Read the July 2006 issue of Management Consulting News.

Read the July 2006 issue of Management Consulting News.

Theodore Levitt (1925-2006)

Theodore Levitt, who transformed the world of modern marketing, passed away last month at the age of 81.

Levitt’s groundbreaking manifesto Marketing Myopia, originally published in 1960, disputed the idea that slow growth in some industries was a result of market saturation. Instead, Levitt cited a “failure of management” as the culprit. He suggested that businesses endangered their futures by defining themselves too narrowly.

He noted that the railroad companies, for example, "let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business instead of the transportation business."

Levitt wrote and lectured on marketing “intangibles,” differentiation, and he coined the term “globalization of markets” in the 1980s.

In addition to writing eight books on marketing, Levitt authored twenty-five articles for The Harvard Business Review, which puts him next to the late Peter Drucker as the most prolific contributor to the magazine.

Levitt published a collection of his most influential essays in The Marketing Imagination, which should have a spot in every marketer’s library.

Though he is gone, Levitt's legacy lives on.