Posts filed under 'Consulting Business'
July 29th, 2010
We focus on strategy and business development for software startups. We’ve been fortunate to develop strong relationships with firms who also serve startups but offer complementary services, as well as firms who focus on larger clients but whose expertise is also of benefit to startups.
We work with a number of partners to create value for our clients. We take a long-term view of each partnership, believing that establishing close, mutually beneficial relationships with our partners is the best way to give our clients the best service possible.
We have been doing joint projects with Chris Finnie for more than six months and she has proven to be a very effective collaboration partner.
A lot of people can string words together. But not everybody can do it in a way that positions your company and your product. That communicates a meaningful benefit to your target audience. That drives sales. Chris can. With more than two decades in high-technology marketing, she is quick to understand new technologies. She can scope out relevant benefits and the competitive landscape, with a full appreciation for marketing messages that support the business strategy, just as fast. Chris is a successful business manager and owner with deep experience as an agency creative director.
Chris has added a lot to our messaging capabilities and brings a complementary set of skills in copywriting and copyediting to our team.
July 22nd, 2010
I was recently interviewed by Floyd Tucker of DreamSimplicity Marketplace and now have a transcript courtesy of SpeakerText (which I have edited for clarity and added hyperlinks):
FLOYD TUCKER: Good morning, this is Floyd Tucker with DreamSimplicity. I am here with Sean Murphy, the CEO of SKMurphy, a consulting firm that focuses on high tech startups. Sean, you started SKMurphy back in 2003 and now have a team of six consultants helping high tech startups generate a repeatable, scalable business. You are also the founder of Bootstrappers Breakfast, which is now in eight cities.
Sean, thanks so much for being with us.
SEAN MURPHY: Good to be here.
FLOYD TUCKER: Sean, you have a passion for entrepreneurs: what drives your passion to work with bootstrappers and startups?
SEAN MURPHY: The neat thing about early stage startups is that everyone is really customer-facing.
It’s a small boat, there’s no place to hide. And for that reason, you are more able to take risks to get somewhere. You can’t stay where you are: you’ve got to move forward.
Big companies can solve harder problems in some sense, but they’re typically more constrained by politics and by other kinds of challenges. Small firms tend to be more innovative and more energetic.
FLOYD TUCKER: OK. Is there a certain formula for startup success or is each one unique and blazing their own trail?
SEAN MURPHY: Each team is unique. They have unique skills, unique talent, and a unique background. That being said, we normally a see five stages that teams go through.
FLOYD TUCKER: What are some of these milestones that you’ve been seeing?
SEAN MURPHY: In the beginning the real questions are:
- “What’s the problem we’re going to solve?”
- “What’s the product we’re going to develop?”
That’s the formation problem.
To get open for business you’ve got to figure out who’s going to be on the team. Who’s going to be part of this company?
Once you’ve got the team set, your next question is who will be the early customers. Who is your customer?
If you can close some business, you can now say, is there a niche we can identify, is there a business model we can sketch out here? Pricing points, all the things that are involved in actually creating a sustainable business.
And finally, when you’ve got it sustainable, can you make it a scalable business? Can we scale this up? Can we transition from heroic efforts to routine, excellent performance?
FLOYD TUCKER: I understand the formation around a product, and of course be open for business. Can you tell me a little bit about the early customer stage?
SEAN MURPHY: We just spend a lot of time on this. It’s a very different sales style than you’ll see later on. It’s a conversational sales style. It’s much more about understanding the problem.
You’re trying to solve three equations, three unknowns:
- Are you talking to the right people?
- Do you have the right features?
- Do those features translate into benefits that are going to be useful to them?
FLOYD TUCKER: What’s involved in the scaling up stage?
SEAN MURPHY: This is actually a hard problem for a lot of founders. Because most people don’t go to startups to create processes and establish structures. They go to startups to make their own rules and to improvise new solutions.
So the challenge is really the transition from the heroic to the routine.
I think the other aspect of that is that the people that tend to do well in the early stages of a startup tend to be generalists. To prosper, to scale up, you’ve actually got to hire specialists that are good in a particular position.
And you’ve got this transition to the need for more process and the need to hire specialists, so things are not as fun anymore. Now, they may be much more lucrative, but they’re not as fun.
FLOYD TUCKER: I feel I have a good understanding of the roadmap that we’re talking about. Can you give a couple of examples of some of the common issues that you’ve seen?
SEAN MURPHY: A lot of people when they start companies are in the grip of a vision. They see this full-featured product. They see this Death Star or “Swiss Army Chainsaw” that’s got all this stuff, right.
And the reality is that customers are only going to buy for one or two reasons.
So you really have to focus on “what’s the least that we can do to start to be able to sell?”
Because if you’re bootstrapping, you have to sell sooner rather than later. So what’s going to move the needle for the customer.? And it’s ultimately where you’re going to get their perception of value.
So the challenges are:
- slimming your features,
- understanding what the customer’s time table for buying is, and
- understanding what the customer values about what you’re offering.
FLOYD TUCKER: Given the fact that most startups have limited resources, with time, money, personnel being issues for them, why should they look to outside advisors?
SEAN MURPHY: Founding teams bring a lot of passion to what they’re doing. There’s often what you might call “a full and frank exchange of views” around certain topics.
It can be useful to have people you trust, whether it’s friends, acquaintances, people you have worked with. On an informal level, you can bounce ideas around with. That gives you a kind of emotional perspective, or emotional distance, right?
Formal advisors can do the same thing for you; they may also be more familiar with some of the early market issues.
As you formalize that process, half of the value is actually in the team coming together, agreeing on a set of objectives, agreeing on a story and then getting feedback as a result. It’s half in the preparation and half in the delivery. So I would say it’s perspective, it’s getting used to setting targets formally.
FLOYD TUCKER: So, Sean, as founders get closer and closer to market, what are some of the things that you see them getting stuck on?
SEAN MURPHY: Many times, the founders, in the beginning, will sell to people that already know them. And so, a couple of things happen as a result:
- They really don’t really understand why people buy. Because it could be that they were more “a friend doing you a favor”.
- They don’t realize how important the process of establishing trust is. And so they undervalue that, and it trips them up later on.
- And they don’t know who to sell to next, because they’re out of friends.
Another thing that can happen is that an early customer may use a product in a certain way that’s different from what the team anticipated. And the team is in the grip of the vision, their thing is “hey you’re using my product wrong!”
When in fact, what they may have done is to point you to where the market really is.
FLOYD TUCKER: Sean, I want to thank you for your time today, but I do have one last question for you. You know, to me you don’t sound like a traditional marketer. How do you differentiate yourself?
SEAN MURPHY: So, the people that come to us, that are bootstrapping, are unhappy with current level of revenue.
We focus on revenue. Whether that means that we are doing sales process, we’re doing marketing, we’re doing business development, what we call customer development that covers all of those.
FLOYD TUCKER: So Sean, thanks so much for spending some time with us. To learn more information about Sean, and SKMurphy, visit SKMurphy.com and bootstrappersbreakfast.com.
June 20th, 2010
I picked up a used copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s “How the World Was One” which recounts the communications revolutions kicked off first by transatlantic cables starting in the 1860’s and by communications satellites in the 1960’s. Fiber optic technology has revitalized underwater cables (see a great recap by Neal Stephenson in Wired “Mother Earth, Mother Board.”)
Writing in 1991, he opens with a memory of attending a lecture by the historian Arnold Toynbee in 1947 “The Unification of the World,” at a time when much of the world was still recovering from World War 2. Clarke characterizes Toynbee’s thesis that developments in transportation and communication would seen create a single planetary society as unusually farsighted.
Thanks to transistor and the microchip, that dawn has certainly arrived–if one uses a somewhat generous definition of the word culture…Nevertheless, Toynbee is essentially correct. Except for a few dwindling tribes in equally dwindling forests, the human race has now become almost a single entity, divided by time zones rather than the natural frontiers of geography.
As more and more startups add global team members or even start out as global teams, the key challenges to communication and coordination have less to do with distance and much more to synchronization and managing across different time zones. It’s much easier to manage a team 3,000 miles apart spread from Vancouver to Costa Rica than Palo Alto to Boston for example. Much less a global team where any three members span at least five time zones.
Skype, or other low cost VoIP solutions enable easy voice communication. Wikis and source code control repositories allow for the teams works product to be easily revised–sometimes recovered–so that a current snapshot of “the truth” about a product is always available to team members. So applications are being layered onto the basic communications infrastructure to make global teams (and their complex work relationships) more effective.
The rule of thumb a decade ago was to co-locate a team to make it maximally effective. That’s probably still true, but collaboration technologies now make it possible to include a more diverse, and often more collectively creative, group of team members. We find ourselves with a global practice now. Most of our clients are still in Silicon Valley, but perhaps a third at one any one time are “out of region” many 3,9, or even 12.5 hours away.
I have two observations about long distance work relationships:
- Time zones matter more than miles: once people are not in the same room the offset in their circadian cycles is harder to manage than geographic distance.
- Anthony Jay suggested in “Corporation Man” that managers should embrace systems that augment memory but distrust and minimize the use of systems that replace communication. Because what matters in communication is not what’s said but what’s understood, synchronous communication enables you to quickly close the feedback loop to make sure that you understand what the other party meant and vice versa.
June 17th, 2010
Whether it’s a free phone call or a working session, a workshop, or a longer term engagement we normally send the following four question survey to all of the participants:
Please help us improve our engagement and service delivery processes.
Please take five minutes and answer the following four questions with one or two items that come to mind.
- What questions or suggestions that we offered were most useful?
- What were the least useful?
- What did we fail to do that you expected us to do?
- What else can we do to improve our practice.
We get a high response rate often learn things to do more of (and less of) to improve our practice. Feel free to adapt this to your own purposes.
For longer engagements we will often have a partner who had the little contact with the client (and who will therefore not be evaluated) call and ask these questions: it’s always easier to give bad news indirectly and a disinterested party is better able to probe for the good and areas needing improvement.
March 11th, 2010
I met Matt Perez in 2003 just as I was starting SKMurphy. It was the tail end of nuclear winter in Silicon Valley and folks were trying to figure out what was next. We kept running into one another at various networking events and as we got to know one another realized that we both had a passion for technology and innovation.
After I facilitated the Conversation Central roundtables on “Global Teams” at the 2009 Design Automation Conference I decided that a significant shift was underway where not only were teams in larger firms more often global but startups and small technology firms were going global much earlier in their life cycle than had been the case in the 1990’s. One of the enablers for this is a host of low cost collaboration tools. Some that are synchronous like Skype and real time dashboards, and others that are “quasi-synchronous” like wikis, distributed source code management and Yammer. These tools enable faster decision making because the team is able to maintain a “shared situational awareness.”
After a lunch with Matt in December where we had discussed this trend he agreed to share some of the ways that his firm, Nearsoft, was using Yammer and other collaboration tools to enable them to keep distributed teams providing development services and ongoing support in sync.
Q: Can talk you a little bit about what your firm does? I understand that your focused is on outsourced product development.
Nearsoft is a software product development firm with operations in Mexico. We work best as innovation partner to ISVs, SaaS companies and consumer-facing sites. These businesses understand that software is at the core of their business and they demand to work with people who are as dedicated and serious as they are about building great software.
We specifically avoid working with businesses that treat their software as a “backroom” operation or, worse, as a necessary evil.
Q: How do you work with clients?
We work in long-term relationships with our clients. We create teams around each client, with the right skills in the appropriate technologies. As the new team learns about the client’s business, they can contribute to all aspects of it, not just the raw coding.
Short-term, project-based engagements don’t work for us and I don’t believe they work for clients, either. It may work for doing something of the side, some throw-away code. But for the core product, you want to have a stable team of people that work well together.
We invest heavily in hiring the best and brightest and have created an environment that helps attract and retain that level of talent. A big part of that is because of the opportunity to work with leading-edge companies in the Valley as part of their core team. If we had people work on little projects here and there, we would not get the good ones; or, if we got them, they would not stick around for long.
Q: What collaboration tools do you use internally and with clients to support your methodology and your engagement model?
A: The first that comes to mind is Yammer, a Twitter-like system but for private use. Our folks are used to Twitter, so using Yammer was a natural. It works great for geographically distributed teams because it helps maintain a team presence.
In the situation where everybody in a team works out of the same office, team presence is a function of being physically in the office at the same time. Without consciously checking, you know when people are “there” and when they’re not. Yammer serves a similar function in that even if I am not reading each posting individually, I get a sense of people being “there” as the stream flows through.
It’s also a casual environment where people can jump in and out without much protocol. If I am looking for somebody, I can just ask “anybody seen Joe?” and one or more people will respond. Also, if people are joking around a particular event, you can also jump in and do the water cooler thing that’s part of social cohesion of effective groups.
Besides Yammer, we use Skype a lot. For example, a group of us keep a Skype “group chat” open all the time that we use a lot like Yammer. The reason we do it on Skype is that it’s easier to switch to voice conferencing when the text chats get too convoluted.
One of our client teams uses video all the time. They use both Skype and Adobe Connect.
Of course, we also use a number of tools to keep track of open issues, source code control, etc.
Q: What has been the impact of Yammer on your ability to deliver results?
Yammer and Skype and the rest of these real-time tools give us and our clients the benefit of being in touch constantly. Little problems and misunderstanding remain “little,” they don’t snowball into big, hairy messes. One person may say, “I am going to implement X using Y” and immediately another will jump in with “No, you shouldn’t use Y for reason Z.” They may go back and forth in the text stream, clarifying things. Then switch to voice or video. Misunderstanding is cleared before any major work is wasted building the wrong solution.
Without something as immediate as Yammer or IM tools, the question may sit in somebody’s email for a day before anybody looks at it. By then, the wrong solution may be finished only to be thrown away.
BTW, that is true for the folks working physically in the same office. In many ways, it is more convenient to casually ask a question or make a comment using one of the tools than in person. You can ask your question without “imposing” on the other people to drop what they’re doing to answer your question. The other people can choose when to respond. If they glance at it and see a “Google It” question, then they can just ignore it. If it looks important, then they can direct their attention to it at their convenience.
Q: What, if anything would you do differently?
When I started the company I tried several models before settling on the way we operate today. It would have been nice if somehow I could have gone through that part of it a bit more quickly.
We’ve had a couple of startup clients that didn’t make through the crisis in 2009. I thought they were dynamite businesses and wished they could have been able to stay in business. We helped all we could but in the end they didn’t make it.
Q: What else have you learned from working internally and with customers in this fashion?
The most salient thing for me is that cultural alignment is key. Effective communications include a ton of stuff that’s never said; it literally goes without saying. There’s a lot of “y’know what I mean?” in there and it would be too costly, emotionally and in time, to explain every little subtlety that goes on in a conversation. Likewise, it can very expensive when people miss out any of those subtleties. To deal with this you need to make sure that everybody in the team is aligned with the goals of the business and that they “know” what it takes to get there.
One example I can think of is when a developer is asked when he can get something “done.” If we both don’t have the same understanding of what “done” means, then we are going to end up in hot water.
Q: Thanks for your time
For some outstanding examples of how to blend humor into an explanation of a complex service I would encourage you to take a look at two of Nearsoft’s videos:
I really appreciate Matt’s willingness to talk about some of the practical challenges in working in a geographically distributed organization. If you would like to talk about lessons learned from your startup or innovative business practices that you would be willing to talk candidly about, please contact me and we can explore an interview that would be of interest to bootstrapping entrepreneurs.
January 4th, 2010
SKMurphy was interviewed and selected as one of a dozen case studies on Document Management Solutions for Consulting Groups by Central Desktop. Read about our innovative approach at “Document Management Solution helps SKMurphy Consulting Group Increase Productivity.”
We make some strong claims in the case study:
- Increased productivity – approximately 5 to 10 times more productive
- Significantly sped up decision making time on projects
- Eliminated version control issues for faster review cycles
The baseline is E-Mailing documents and phone tag. We rely on the edit lock that Central Desktop show to prevent you from editing the same file at the same time as someone else (this happens more than you might think as you get close to a deadline) and find that setting update notification for two hours encourages other members of the team to contribute.
We use Central Desktop to work with all of our clients and have found that it allows us to respond with drafts much more quickly and to achieve a working consensus in a few hours to a day or two. We use it to rapidly prototype the content for key E-Mails, presentation outlines, datasheets, backgrounders, and other content or documents that are used in the sales or customer engagement process by our clients. Each of our clients has their own password protected workspace, as well as any attendee at a workshop who wants one. We also use them for projects with our partners.
We think this approach offers them the following benefits:
- The workspaces are searchable and both the wiki pages and attached files are under version control so they good visibility and control over our joint work product, whether it is in planning stages, in process, or had been delivered.
- Meetings and conference calls are more productive. We use the same wiki page can be used the agenda, notes in process during the meeting, and for minutes and action items afterward. There is one place to look for anything about a meeting and it can have hyperlinks to other content that was discussed. This is an order of magnitude more productive than reconciling a stream of E-Mails for agenda and minutes.
- The workspace is the first place to look and it’s more easily organized than anyone’s inbox. It’s not uncommon for us to run a Skype text chat session for conference calls and append that to the meeting page as well. This is a lightweight approach to making meetings more productive and because things get documented immediately you have more of a complete archive as you add folks to the team or want to look back in two or three months to see what was decided.
- We normally include the cost of Central Desktop in our engagement fees but have turned over the workspace to clients at the end of an assignment. One client we worked with in 2006 through 2008 had more than 550 pages and attached files in the workspace.
We have been working in wikis since we started in 2003. We chose Central Desktop in 2006 and phased other wiki platforms out except where a customer is already using one. We have more than a hundred distinct workspaces (some are archived) that have been used with clients, workshop attendees, partner projects, and internal projects.
We are happy to have a phone conversation if you are interested in trying to incorporate them into your business: Sean has given a number of talks on them as well if you would like a briefing or presentation for your group or event. We do not resell Central Desktop and we were not compensated by them for the case study: we agreed to talk about it because we have been satisfied customers for more than three years.
Related blog posts on wikis:
October 6th, 2009
I continue to run into folks who find themselves encouraged to launching a consulting career by their former employer and what is proving to be a very deep recession. Here are three books I recommend to them to help get some perspective on the career they now find themselves in.
I have a related blog post from October of last year on “Customer Development for a Consulting Practice in a Downturn” and another one from July of 2007 on “Networking in Silicon Valley” that is still accurate.
April 21st, 2009
Layoffs continue to encourage old friends and co-workers to reconnect and many to consider–somewhat involuntarily–an entrepreneurial phase for their next career move. I spoke to three people today who had been laid off in the last month or so. Here is the summary of some key suggestions the three conversations:
- If you are considering joining or forming a startup, check out a Bootstrappers Breakfast that’s convenient. We are up to four a month in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Milpitas.
- Probably the best South Bay group for professionals seeking employment is the eight year old CSIX, they meet every Tuesday in Cupertino and every Thursday in Saratoga.
- If you are considering a career in consulting consider joining/attending
- If you are feeling inventive check out the Inventor’s Alliance and TechShop.
- We see a decidedly mixed economic environment with some clients prospering and others not so much. It’s definitely not as bad as the dotcom meltdown for technical folks in Silicon Valley but it’s not good and it doesn’t look like it will turn around this year.
- There is a lot of opportunity, especially if you are able to take advantage of some technical and business innovations whose full effects are yet to be felt:
- Skype, and VoIP in general make global conversations, both personal and teleconferences much less expensive.
- Cloud computing, in particular Amazon’s EC2, make launching a new web business cheap and easy to scale.
- Wikis and real-time document collaboration services are fundamentally altering consulting service delivery.
- More generally, software-enabled services that blend human expertise with automation are creating a number of new kinds of businesses.
I am always happy to hear from old friends and former co-workers and happy to try and connect you with other folks or firms where there may be some synergies.
February 18th, 2009
- Good questions sell.
- Listening sells.
- Networking is helping other people: carry more than your own card and connect folks who will benefit from talking to each other.
Ford Harding’s Rainmaking (now with 2nd Edition, see not below) has been a source of inspiration and insight for me, his focus is professional service firms but a lot of it is also applicable to any complex sale that involves orchestration and ongoing service and support. He has a good blog as well.
Related blog posts
- “Customer Development for a Consulting Practice in a Downturn” from October 2008 where I also suggested that
“One good book on consulting is Gerald Weinberg’s “Secrets of Consulting” (he also blogs at http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/ ). He advises that in a week you spend two days doing work, two days marketing yourself, and one day getting better at what you do. If you are working on a product to complement your consulting you might modify that to three days doing work, 1 day marketing yourself, and one day developing your product. As work slacks off divide your time between additional marketing efforts and working on your product.”
- Networking and Referrals from August 2008 offers definitions for both
- Networking is the act of putting yourself in an environment to meet and interact with others.
- Referrals happen when someone introduces you to a third party who might benefit from what you have to offer.
- “Networking in Silicon Valley” from July of 2007 where I observed:
“One of the secrets to navigating Silicon Valley, is that it’s actually a very small place with many connections: some that can take a while to discover are nonetheless quite potent. That being said the single most important thing to avoid is wasting people’s time. Time is more scarce than capital, technology, or knowledge.”
- “Continuing Education in Entrepreneurship” from October 2006 suggests networking offers “knowledge that isn’t written down” (and not to be found in Mr. Google’s basement):
“I had this epiphany that I had spent the last dozen years or so, since I started attending Software Entrepreneur Forum (now SDForum) and Churchill Club meetings, in this ad hoc program in continuing entrepreneurial education. Books are valuable, and not enough entrepreneurs do enough reading, but there is also a category of knowledge that hasn’t been written down yet. And you can gain wisdom from listening to someone who has played the game–even if it’s just their mistakes–that you would otherwise have to gain from your mistakes experience.”
Malcolm Gladwell offers a perspective on networking in “Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg” about the true nature of excellent networkers.
“…people like Lois aren’t bound by the same categories and partitions that defeat the rest of us. This is what the power of the people who know everyone comes down to in the end. It is not — as much as we would like to believe otherwise — something rich and complex, some potent mixture of ambition and energy and smarts and vision and insecurity. It’s much simpler than that. It’s the same lesson they teach in Sunday school. Lois knows lots of people because she likes lots of people. And all those people Lois knows and likes invariably like her, too, because there is nothing more irresistible to a human being than to be unqualifiedly liked by another.”
Update February 19: Ford Harding E-mailed me a reminder to link to his second addition of Rainmaking, called “Rainmaking Attracting New Clients No Matter What Your Field” which has 40% new material in preference to his older addition of “Rainmaking.”
November 13th, 2008
JL Gray left a short but thought provoking comment on yesterday’s post “Negotiate the Level of Reference in Parallel with Price and Others Terms and Conditions.”
Asking for references is something I’ve never felt especially comfortable with (gasp – what if they say no!) but can be crucial in getting your foot in the door with a new client. You’ve done a good job categorizing the types of references and describing how one might go about including the possibility of a reference in an initial contract. It seems like most of the above would work for product companies, but would be more difficult for service companies. Any thoughts on that?
Thanks Sean, JL
I wouldn’t start by asking for a reference, I would ask for feedback on the quality of your services and the business results that you enabled. If it’s positive you then have the basis for asking for a reference. If it’s negative then you have a chance to remedy and ask after they are satisfied.
We do most of our work with early stage software firms. They often have to wrap their technology in a thick protective blanket of services to protect their customers from jagged cuts by the rough edges of tomorrow. So to their early customers a young software firm can look as much like a consulting company as a technology company.
One of the key concerns that early customers have about a new company’s offering is not whether it works–they know “nothing new ever works” from Secrets of Consulting
The first line of defense is accepting that the new system will fail, possibly in several ways. When I find myself thinking, “I must have this change because I can’t afford failures,” then I’m in big trouble. If I can’t afford some failures, a new system won’t help. And neither will an old one.
Nothing new ever works, but there’s always hope that this time will be different.
What’s harder for them to assess is the level of commitment to persevere through the normal challenges of new technology introduction so that they don’t get a dent in their career. One of the ways that they make that assessment is your past performance and the best way to substantiate that is through customer references and testimonials.
I think that the suggestions I made yesterday would be appropriate for consulting to a large firm or a public firm. It’s very reasonable to address up front how you can talk about the engagement and ask them up front for an honest quote, endorsement, testimonial, or joint technical paper as an outcome. Certainly asking for a LinkedIn endorsement after a long engagement is very reasonable.
One other thing to consider is to have another member of your firm do a periodic ‘quality check’ on how the engagement is progressing, certainly at key milestones or deliverables. One reason to use someone else is that sometimes a customer may be more candid with a third party than they will with you directly (it’s also more credible when another member of your firm has a discussion about what is going well and less well as it implies a corporate commitment to customer satisfaction even if there are aspect of your performance that they are not happy with).
We will also do these “customer view” exercises when we are helping a new client build or verify a positioning. We not only interview customers but as many “near misses” or prospects that proceeded some way forward in the sales process and then dropped out as we can. We have uncovered examples of “reference customers” who were unhappy (and shouldn’t have been used as a reference until their issues had been addressed) as well as novel uses for a product, different perspectives on how to talk about a product and what the true benefits were.
I wrote about some aspects of this about a year ago in “Best Feedback From Early Customers is a Story” and built on Peter Cohan’s formulation of four categories of customer success story (with the applicability to consulting engagements in parentheses).
- Vision: what were their reasons when they gave you the purchase order (or statement of work).
- Initial Implementation (perhaps first or second milestone in a consulting engagement) what are the initial benefits and problems they observed.
- Consumed: what actually got used (what is the impact of your work on the overall project as it progresses)
- Evolved: how did they ultimately use the solution (when they look back in a final project after action or they start the planning or kickoff for the next project, how do they plan to use your services).
When you consider the introduction of a new methodology or a new project that is early in your support of a new technology, the reference that a customer can give you is often what will tip the balance for future work: both with that same customer and with other prospects with similar challenges.
An internal project plan that addresses not only how to manage the delivery of quality consulting services but their substantiation by your customer is therefore an important component of your long term business success.
The current economic downturn will only exacerbate technology firms’ risk aversion. This will increase the need for references to complement your credentials and technical competence as demonstrated by technical papers and professional presentations.
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