Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

When a Client Says "No"

An unfortunate reality of our business is that we don’t win all of the projects we propose on. Dissecting your sales process to learn why you lost a project is not fun, but it’s a great way to sort out—and put to good use—the signals you’re receiving from the market.

This month's Guerrilla Consutant article discusses how you can convert today’s bad news into future wins.

Enjoy the article, and let me know what you think.

What Makes a Presentation Great?

Gene Zelazny has been a consultant to consultants for more than forty years. As the Director of Visual Communication at McKinsey & Company, his influence on McKinsey’s visual style is legendary. In the September issue of Management Consulting News, we asked Zelazny for some tips on creating the perfect presentation.

Read the interview with Gene Zelazny.

Also this month:

• In his column, “The Writing on the Wall,” Alan Weiss explains why he wants consultants to “just stop whining” about the business.
• David Maister tells us what he has learned about how to use his Web site to promote his consulting practice.
• Kerry Patterson and Eric Patten give us three strategies for managing through any project setback.
• Plus—why writing a book changes everything for a consultant; how to avoid rookie mistakes when leading a meeting; the benefits of taking time off; and what to do when major technology initiatives promise more value than they deliver.

Beginning this month, MCNews is airing its first podcasts. Debbie Weil, corporate blogging consultant and author of The Corporate Blogging Book, covers the ins and outs of that subject. Jeff Thull talks about why value propositions fail. We’ve also got podcasts on lead generation strategies that work and how to create successful client communication programs.

Read the September issue of Management Consulting News.

Anatomy of a Web Marketing Makeover – Hung up on Numbers

(Note: this is part of a series of posts on the marketing makeover of a consultant’s Web site.)

Although we’re weeks away from needing to check how my client’s site is doing in the search engines, it’s worth taking a minute to discuss what the numbers mean – and what they don’t.

It’s a mistake to get too hung up in how well your Web site ranks in the search engines. What really matters is if the site is doing what you need it to do for your business. Is it bringing you leads? Impressing prospective clients?

That being said, however, you still want to know how well your site is performing for certain key phrases. If you know it’s ranking highly for a phrase, but your stats show that you virtually never get traffic from that phrase, then you know you’ve got some work to do.

To see how you’re doing you can continually Google your phrases and see if your site shows up. This gets old really fast. My favorite free tool to make this easier is Digital Point’s Keyword Tracker and Ranking Tool. You do have to have a Google API (basically, this means permission from Google) to use it, however.

MarketLeap has some neat free tools including one that shows if your site shows up in the first three pages for several search engines. You’ll notice that the top three search engines (Google, MSN, and Yahoo) may rank your site differently.

Dedicated SEO professionals have a bag of tricks that includes for-fee tools that generate reports for clients. Plus, there are lots and lots more free tools with varying degrees of usefulness.

-Andrea Harris, Minerva Solutions –

Building Strong Relationships on High Performance Teams - Team Self Assessment

Successful teams are most consultants' lifeblood... without them, even your best recommendations go nowhere.  Besides launching a team well and  enrolling  support from the right people,  it is critical that you  establish an environment that creates strong working relationships between team members.

It ain’t about ropes courses…. developing strong working relationships on a team is not something you do by holding an event.  It starts with the chartering process we discussed in a previous post in this series — the process of building agreements about what the team will accomplish, negotiating with the leader, the sponsor and each other, and working together to begin to deliver products sets the stage.  Making commitments to clear goals that you have been part of setting establishes the foundation for working together.  Once the team is launched, I focus on several things.  Today I will talk about team self assessment.

Techniques such as the Before / After Action Reviews used by the military or a simple Plus / Delta (what worked that we should continue to do and what should we change) is a powerful tool for the team to use to continuously self assess, become comfortable giving each other feedback and learn to pay attention to and apply the feedback.  What makes it work?  There are three things:

• Start with clear written desired outcomes for each meeting.  This is a key part of successful meeting design.  Team members feel good about working together when they accomplish things.  Having clear goals and well run meetings helps them focus on what they need to accomplish.  It also sets them up to analyze what worked and what did not work at the end of their meetings.

• Facilitate the debrief process so that the team digs into root cause of why something worked well or did not.  Don’t just accept the surface statement response when someone says “such and such worked well”.  Ask them “Why?” or “Say more”.  Get them to explain what it was that team members did that caused a positive or negative result.  Remember, we want to identify what we can do, do differently or stop doing, to improve.  Even more important, bring the results of the debrief back to the next meeting and have them review what helped and what they said they want to do differently at this meeting.

• Periodically (maybe every 4 - 6 weeks) schedule an hour with the team to review all the plus / deltas or after action learnings from the prior period.  Help the team identify trends: where they are making progress and where they may still be getting stuck.  Where they made progress, help them identify how they did      that.  Is there a good lesson learned there to share with other teams?  Where they are still stuck, have them identify the cost of not solving this and dig deeper to understand what is getting in the way of solving it.

It ain’t about no ropes course....  What else have you found helps build strong relationships on teams?