Ford Harding on Rules of Thumb for Networking
Networking is good questions, listening, and helping others. Some rules of thumb for networking from Ford Harding’s Rainmaking (pages 44-59).
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Consulting Business
Refine and Curate Your Thoughts as FAQs, Articles, and Talks
Refine and curate your thoughts by reworking the first draft of your answers in an email or in response to a question from a customer or an audience member at a talk.
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Len Sklar: Be Clear About Payment Terms And Consequences
Len Sklar, author “The Check is NOT in the Mail” has spoken several times at Bootstrapper Breakfasts. Here is a recent talk he gave where he stresses the importance of putting payment terms and the consequences on non-payment in writing, communicating them in advance, and ensuring that they are understood. It all seems so obvious
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Getting Unstuck From Perfectionism
Innovation is never able to “get it right the first time.” Getting unstuck when your perfectionism paralyzes you requires you to be willing to share bad versions and ugly drafts.
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Five Reasons Companies Hire Consultants
Understanding the reasons companies hire consultants can provide clues on what to look for and how to find more business.
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Keeping the Ball Rolling With Prospects
Keeping the ball rolling with prospects requires a mix of empathy for their situation and a project management mindset.
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Keeping Your Customers’ Trust
Earning and keeping your customers’ trust is essential to your success as a startup. Gerald Weinberg’s “Secrets of Consulting” offers “11 Laws of Trust” as a guideline for establishing and maintaining successful business relationships.
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Cold Calling Won’t Find Your First Business Customer
I meet teams trying to cold call for their first business customer and I just haven’t seen it work; the trust issues cripple them. Here is a relevant excerpt from Gabriel Weinberg’s interview with me for his traction book.
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Recognizing Chris Finnie as a Partner and Advisor
We have worked with Chris Finnie on several projects and would recommend her if you need help with branding, messaging, and positioning.
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DreamSimplicity Interview Transcript
Here is the transcript–edited for clarity and hyperlinked for context–for my recent interview with Floyd Tucker of DreamSimplicity Marketplace. The focus was on our startup stages model: formation, open for business, early customers, finding a niche, and scaling up.
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Beat The Clock
Global teams work 24 hours a day, 7 day a week to “beat the clock.” Here are some tips to increase their effectiveness.
Collecting Unpaid Bills
In 1995 I did some work for one of the early web startups in Palo Alto. They had delivered a number of database driven websites using a proprietary software technology that they had developed, and had sold the technology to several firms. But they had a problem collecting unpaid bills: they had not been paid
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Simple Client Satisfaction & Process Improvement Survey
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
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Matt Perez on How Nearsoft Leverages Yammer
An interview with Matt Perez on how Nearsoft leverages Yammer and other collaboration tools to enable them to keep distributed teams providing development services and ongoing support in sync.
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Early Proposals: Avoiding Consulting for Free
Avoiding consulting for free is possible if you use using every conversation to explore client’s needs. Don’t solve a hard problem before an agreement on payment.
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SKMurphy Featured In Case Study For Central Desktop
We were featured in a case study for Central Desktop. Compared to emailing Word files we felt Central Desktop made us at least 5 times more productive, especially in making reaching consensus on a project approaching a deadline.
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Three Good Books for Consultants
Here are three good books for consultants that I routinely recommend: “Trusted Advisor”, “Secrets of Consulting”, and “Rainmaking.”
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A Too Common Conversation of Late
Layoffs are triggering a too common conversation: “what do to do now? How do I navigate the Great Recession?”
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Three Things I’ve Learned About Networking
Networking is good questions, listening, and helping others. Carry more than your own card. Connect folks who will benefit from talking.
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Marketing Consultants Forum at CNSV
I took part in a Marketing Consultants Forum at CNSV in 2009. My focus was on “Cultivating Communities to Get More Customers.”
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