Posts filed under 'Consulting Business'
July 17th, 2008
Consulting is a referral business. Four things you can do today to build referrals:
- Make a list of at least 30 people you have had shared success with. Go back at least 15 years or college/university. Taking the time to go back to your first job is worth it.
- Contact those people and tell them
- What you have been up to
- Here’s what I am looking for, please refer people to if they are looking for my services
- Please let me know what you have been up to and call if there is anything I can do to help.
- Keep their needs in mind and pro-actively notify them if you run across articles, people, events, or opportunities that are relevant or likely to be useful.
- Write 2 testimonials for people in the shared success category in LinkedIn
January 21st, 2008
Forming an advisory board: “it takes a village to make a startup” advises Richard Weber of Semifore. Part of trick to “finding your village” is get into the habit of regularly presenting plans and results to at least kitchen cabinet from day one.
An advisory board is different from a formal board of directors that is created as you take on outside funding (or prepare to take on outside funding). They may be friends, unpaid advisors, or consultants who advice you value and whose expertise and experience typically fills a blind spot in your current founding or executive team. For stock compensation several attendees suggested options in the range of 1/10 of one percent to one percent of the common pool. Advisory boards may meet monthly, or one or twice a quarter. Half of the value can be in the preparation the startup team goes through to present results and plans for next time period, so prior preparation is one of the keys to making advisory boards effective.
November 27th, 2007
I have had two interesting conversations with friends who are frustrated with some of the internal deficiencies within their companies. Both of my friends are accountants, but work for different firms and in different departments. However, they are both part of itinerant work forces and have the same problem. While out of the office, they both do not have access to their local area network. The specific pains within the overall problem were that my friends could not access their email while in the field or obtain information about a customer who was not directly their client. Where there is pain, there is opportunity. Although this problem that has been solved 20 years ago, it was interesting that these 100 million dollar firms were still operating under these business conditions.
Thinking back to last months Sales 2.0 Conference, I thought about one of the breakout sessions that I attended, “Using Web 2.0 Technology to Enable Strategic Selling: A Sales Executive Forum.”
Moderator:
Gerhard Gschwandtner, Publisher, Selling Power
Panelist:
Clarence So, Senior VP Marketing, Salesforce.com
Umberto Milletti, CEO & Founder, InsideView
Lisa Caswell, VP Global Sales & Alliances, Aravo
Below are the questions and answers from the panel discussion that I found relevant to addressing the opportunity to solve my friends’ critical business issues.
Question: Please define Sales 2.0.
Umberto: Sales 2.0 means having a more relevant conversation with your customers. It has always been an information problem. I believe that sales people are ultimately information workers that try to match a customer and their needs to a solution. It used to be very difficult to learn about customers. You would get leads without even knowing who is this company and who is this person. With Sales 2.0 it’s drawing lots of information about companies, their people, and making it relevant to your sales force.
Clarence: As a company grows, it not only becomes challenging to manage the business operationally, but also manage the selling process. Sales 2.0 allows companies to automate operational process, sales processes, offer richer customer support, and an overall better customer experience.
Question: How many technology tools do you use today?
Lisa: Technology gives us different ways to collaborate. Sales models have shifted from pushing or pulling to co-creation. Technology allows us to co-create the sale with the customer. Internally, we use several technology tools, but only two for our sales team: Salesforce.com and InsideView. With these tools, we can track the customer relationships, account relationships, and history. Historically, getting everyone on the same page has been a problem. Now, we have common dashboards, reports, and a place to access data to align everybody objectively. This helps us get rid of the anecdotes and use data to drive decisions.
Question: Is a sales more an art or a science?
Lisa: I think the ratio is 85% science and 15% art. If you track the number of phone calls to the leads, to the close rates, and measure what you learn, you take more of a systematic approach than feeling your way through it.
Clarence: I think the ration is 70% science, 30% art. I believe sales is more science because you need metrics to measure your effectiveness. For example, measuring our web presence. We live and die by our website traffic. We drive everyone to the website and measure how many people are bouncing, who is downloading the white papers, how much time people are spending on our site.
In our business model, everybody comes to the website at some point. I know down to the decimal point how many percentage of leads I get inbound through the website. We model how everybody comes in and then try to automate as many as possible. It’s a very substantial operational modeling process that we run. Once you get in through the website we use Salesforce.com and assign the leads.
Gschwandtner: With all the technology that’s out there, we should not forget that the purpose of business is what, to create a customer. How do we create a customer, by helping the customer win. How do we help a customer win? We need to understand. A lot of companies are still arrogant and say I know what our customers need and want. This is height of arrogance and ignorance. We need to know what is on the customer’s dashboard, what metrics they are looking for. If we don’t know what is important to the customer, we have no leverage point for having a conversation.
My thoughts: If everything above is true, then why do my friends have this problem? With all the tools, customer information and resources available, how come someone has not closed a deal with these accounting firms and upgraded their IT infrastructure? How come these firms do not have any team collaboration technologies? Is it because most financial firms have IT departments that assume employees should have access to company applications and data stores only while they are on company premises and connected to an internal local area network? Maybe the partners have not re-thought their business processes in light of what’s now available? Perhaps when the partners were paying their dues on detailed project work many of these technologies were not widely available, and their concept of the work has been shaped by that. These all seem like opportunities for selling. It seems obvious that if you have people in the field, they need access to the firms resources.
November 14th, 2007
How do you plan when you are in a small software startup? Big company planning models are not just overkill, they are not appropriate for small firms. Startups need a lightweight planning and development model to thread the narrows between “just do it” and “let’s study the problem a little longer.”
We use an one-page planning model. The one-page business plan is different from traditional models. It’s an ACTION plan. Traditional models are out of date by the time they are finished! That’s one reason why they don’t work. They are also very general, trying to fit everyone, as a result are never really useful.
But a one-page model is not a vehicle for raising money or soliciting investment - that requires a different approach. This is an operating plan. The important thing here is the process of planning, developing a better understanding of the business and the options available.
- Define and understand yourself, your competencies, your product, and your customer.
- Identify your immediate, mid-term, and long term goals as well as an action plan to reach them
- Clarify and clearly state your business model and path to revenue
Here’s 3 tips to make it usable.
- Keep it simple and usable.
- Stick to one page.
- Use bullets to jot down ideas. It is not about writing volumes.
Our Idea to Revenue workbook has individual worksheets. Each key concept is presented in a tight, one-page question-and-answer format. We also guide you through the process in the Idea to Revenue Workshop.
October 30th, 2007
Getting feedback after engaging with a client or even after an introductory meeting with a prospect is important. A couple of survey tools that we use are iContact and Survey Monkey. They are easy to use and low cost. Survey Monkey has some nice templates. The survey tools are useful when you want to ask the same fixed set of questions of several dozen to several hundred folks at once.
Here are our basic feedback survey questions:
To help us calibrate and improve our engagement model and the quality of our advice, please take a few minutes and answer three questions for us. Looking back on our conversation and e-mail exchange could you outline briefly (can be just one phrase or sentence)
- The three most useful concepts or suggestions that you took away from our conversation or subsequent e-mail
- The three least useful (or even worthless or counter-productive) concepts or suggestions that you heard in the interaction.
- Up to three specific changes that you have made in your strategy or engagement process as a result of our interaction (again can just be a phrase or one sentence).
If we don’t get an answer we will typically have someone who had little or no involvement in the project call and follow up to ask the questions over the phone. Because they had little involvement in the project it’s unlikely that client will be dissatisfied with them personally and more likely to share feedback. In general the combination of a personal e-mail and a personal phone call will get you the most information.
October 29th, 2007
e-News for Small Businesses is a free electronic mail service designed to provide tax information for small business owners and self-employed individuals. Subscribers receive information about important upcoming tax dates for SB/SE customers, what’s new for small businesses on the IRS Web site, reminders and tips to assist small businesses and self-employed taxpayers with tax compliance issues, IRS News Releases and special IRS announcements that pertain to SB/SE customers.
If you haven’t found an accountant for your business taxes now is the time to get your files in order and interview a few based on other business owner recommendations. If you are based in Silicon Valley and are interested in our advice, talk to Ogden Lilly at Boitano Sargent and Lilly.
October 16th, 2007
“The more I heard that I couldn’t make it, the more I was determined to do it. I never liked being told that I’m not good enough to do this or that.” Archie Griffin
Entrepreneurs “need to be a little crazy” if you believe Barry Moltz. They get advice from well meaning friends and family that consists primarily of admonitions to stay on the beaten path: “Don’t quit your day job” or “Stay in school” to recall two, the latter normally a good idea (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell are convincing counter-examples but not a representative sample). But those friends are not normally entrepreneurs.
There was a nugget I extracted from Fortune’s November 2006 profile of Larry Sonsini that helps to explain his success in advising strong willed entrepreneurs:
“I don’t take orders well,” says T.J. Rodgers, the founder, chairman and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. “But taking advice from Larry Sonsini is easy. He’s professorial. He’s nonjudgmental. ‘You can choose to do this, you can choose to do that, and these will be the consequences.’”
It’s a sound approach when working with entrepreneurs: present likely consequences and the reasons why you believe that they will ensue.
Dharmesh Shah was complaining in July of this year that the customer is not always right and that “In most cases, our understanding is much higher than that of our customers.” He is selling to startup and small businesses who can’t figure out whether to accept his firm’s advice. He identifies four concerns that they may have that will prevent them from following his advice:
- What’s in it for you?
- Do you understand me?
- Are you really an expert?
- Did the expert make the call?
It’s a good blog post even though his frustration shows through a little too clearly. He offers two choices: you can be a “trusted advisor” (to borrow David Maister’s phrase) or a “responsive assistant.” He closes with “Have you ever had to tell a customer they were wrong? How did you handle it?”
My answer follows, slightly amended from the comment I left on September 20 on his blog (and with formatting restored).
We offer strategic advice and business development consulting to early stage firms.
As such we fit your model of “trusted adviser” to entrepreneurs. In my experience it’s very difficult to tell an entrepreneur “you are wrong” (and have them listen and change their actions) because they hear this from so many of the folks around them (”get a real job”, “your idea will never work”, “no one else does it that way”,…) that they are no longer sure who to trust. In some instances this is like waving a red flag in front of a bull: we meet entrepreneurs who are more interested in proving someone else wrong (typically from their last company) than in building a company.
We work with them to estimate the likely future impacts of present decisions and understand the likely consequences. I find that a simple plan or decision tree can do more to illuminate the situation for an entrepreneurial team than any amount of telling. It’s normally the question that gets them to think through likely consequences that is more likely to change behavior than statements like “you’re wrong” or “this is a mistake.” Although we still try the other approach from time to time to see if it has started to work.
We also try and follow Russell Ackoff’s “decision record” approach where we treat decisions as experiments and write down our hypotheses (”guesses” or “informed judgment” depending upon your perspective) about results in advance and then review them against measurable outcomes after enough time has passed.
True expertise means that you should be able to explain:
- the symptoms you looked at,
- symptoms you discarded as not germane,
- the diagnosis you have reached,
- the differential between the customer’s relevant symptoms and your diagnosis versus other potential diagnoses,
- the prescription (advice) and how to apply it,
- and a prognosis or range of likely outcomes.
In some sense it’s less about who’s right and more about developing a shared understanding and shared situational awareness. Trust is built over time through competence, commitment, and care. You have to find a model that let’s you work with a customer in a way that earns their trust.
I think you also have to distinguish between decisions that are values conflicts (e.g. we want you to misrepresent a product or service to the point where you are knowingly committing a fraud) and decisions that are less than optimal, or may not necessarily get good results but are not in conflict with your values.
At the end of the day it’s still their company and it’s distinct from yours.
August 24th, 2007
- Text Treatments: text logos are simple, the company name is always right there. Most high tech logos are text treatments, they are clear and simple. With text logos you have instant impact, customers don’t need to decipher anything. Another benefit of text treatments are logo aspect ratio comes naturally with words. They always seem to work whether you are shrinking or stretching them. Examples are Google, IBM, Intel, and eBay.
- Icons: symbol logos can be recognized faster, our brains process images quickly than words alone. But they require more work and $$$ on branding and presence before people have the connection between symbol and company. Examples are Nike’s swoosh, Apple’s apple and Linux’s penguin. Notice these logos have nothing to do with the companies product: they are about being different and being memorable. They are also very simple designs.
- Keep it Simple: like many other types of design, the best logo designs are elegantly simple. They shrink, stretch, or twist without losing their intangible emotional resonance. Color may add to the design, but they still look great in black and white. In fact, most logo designers use grayscales to do the initial design, then move it to color. They have to look good on your business card, on literature, and on your website.
We’ve already blogged about how adding a logo to your business cards and website improves your credibility (and makes you more memorable), we used logoworks and were very pleased with the results.
August 20th, 2007
We are offering our “Getting More Customers” workshop this fall in collaboration with the Professional and Technical Consultants Association (PATCA). The workshop covers ten proven marketing techniques for growing your business: attendees will select one or two that fit their style and develop a plan to implement them in their business in the next 90 days. As a part of your workshop registration, we will also follow up via e-mail and brief phone calls at two weeks, four weeks, 8 weeks, and 13 weeks to help you track your progress. You will leave with a one page action plan, a workbook, and 90 days of access to a private workspace with the workshop materials to enable you to execute one or two marketing strategies to bring your business more customers.
The techniques covered are appropriate for professional and technical consultants and early stage software firms. This is a real workshop that has about two hours of presentation and two hours of individual and small group exercises. Past workshop attendees have been pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t just a sales pitch for our services but an actual working session where they are able to learn about some proven techniques and then develop a plan to use one or two in their business starting immediately. We also include breakfast and lunch breakout sessions to give attendees a chance to network informally and de-brief on what they have learned.
This will be the third and final time we will offer this workshop in 2007. Our full workshop schedule is here: http://skmurphy.com/services/workshops/
Date: Saturday, Sept 8, 2007 8:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Location: Keypoint Credit Union Center, 2805 Bowers Ave., Santa Clara, CA 95051
Cost: $75 PATCA members, $95 non-members, $95 guest of member
Register here
Agenda:
- 8:00 AM Breakfast & Registration
- 8:30 AM Workshop begins
- 12:30 PM Lunch & De-brief
Seating is Limited to 18 so please register in advance
August 8th, 2007
The sales process may seem like a simple exchange - you convince a prospect to accept your product or service in exchange for their money. However, there are a number of overlapping processes running to get you to that point.
A few thoughts about one of them: the process that prospects go through to decide if they are going to buy from you. Jerry Weissman has framed this as Understand, Believe, and Act.
First a prospect must understand what you have to offer. This is straightforward when your product is a better, faster, cheaper version. But this is much more difficult when it is an innovative technology. Demos and sales pitches become critical. We joke that “If you are looking for smarter prospects who will understand your offer, then maybe your demo sucks!” Sadly, this is often the case (we have even had to apply it to our pitches from time to time).
Presenting an innovative technology in a way that’s understandable to a prospect is never easy. The language, the problems, and why it is better must be grounded in the prospects world. If you give a prospect a feature list, some will be able to “get it”, but not many. To reach most prospects, you must start from a problem that they know they have, and offer a solution they can understand.
Secondly, prospects must believe that your innovative technology will actually deliver them the benefits you promise. New technology always brings risk. They may risk losing their job–or at least putting a “dent in their career”–if you don’t deliver! The first people who will trust you are folks with whom you already have a prior shared success. They know you can deliver. Usually these people are the source for your early sales. When your first clients say “I used it and it worked” to their friends they give you credibility. Eventually you must get to strangers referring other strangers to buy. Testimonials on your website are critical for prospects believing your claims. Testimonials, like your demo, must be in the language customers use and from people who are credible.
Only after they understand and believe will customers ever act. But they act on their own cycle, whether it’s a certain point in the product development process, a certain time of year, or a phase of the moon. It’s their timing! Your challenge is to make sure they remember your offering when they are looking for it. For this reason you need a method of reminding those people that you have a solution. We call this percolating. This is the function that applications like Salesforce provide: you can set up a sales campaign to remind you to contact everyone who is percolating every 6 weeks or so (or whenever they wanted to hear back from you next). Another method we have seen work well are newsletters. If you can help your prospect and send them something useful every 6 weeks, people will join the mailing list and remember you when they have a problem you can help them solve. Be there when they are ready to act.
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