http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultantNewsletter adding value to consulting professionalsFri, 29 Jan 2010 02:40:46 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultant/1CkWz/h/The_Consultant_The.htm You can subscribe to this newsletter via the subscription box at the right at ConsultingPulse.com. All subscribers receive the 7 part series on Street Smart Consulting. Some blog highlights from the week 3 reasons why LION's are counterproductive to your networking Golden rules for consulting success The truly successful have a lo in common Doing one thing exceptionally well Consulting Cashflow When we start generating sufficient cashflow is a frightening prospect. But if we don't unlearn all the bad habits we have picked up from our careers, we run the risk of being in cash flow anxiety during our entire careers! Starting out as an employed consultant you immediately get the business model rammed into our heads. Time honored gems like Time = Money and If you aren't earning money you're costing money. A brief look back over my own consulting career reveals companies whose employee count rose and fall as rapidly as the tide does. As the workload increased they would hire more people for billable hours, and as it fell away they would cut away the overheads. regardless of how well this has worked for Accenture and others, there are far better ways for you to leverage your time. If you continue with this paradigm of time based billing throughout your career, then you can be guaranteed a life of hard work, always chasing the next engagement, and always trying to build and reduce your workforce at short notice. Doesn't sound like fun does it? Rule # 1 - Earn More Sounds easy, and actually it is. Earning more is all about increasing the revenues per working hour and there are many ways to do this. Get away from time based billing by charging based on what the work is worth, instead of for activities. This is a fundamental shift and one I initially learned from reading Alan Weiss. I have changed some of my approach however to work in the real world. (Or at least, the world that I inhabit, but is still an extremely valid approach) Start developing residual income streams. As we speak I have four consultants on retainers for companies throughout Asia. They are paid every month whether their time is required or not, and it allows people to contact them directly with issues they have. Another recurring revenue stream I work with includes coaching programs and other time-limited engagements. These have worked very well for me. Seminars, paid webinars and courses. I love training and I have been doing it for most of my life. As well as an enjoyable part of the game for me they are also fantastic ways to leverage time. Depending on the value and scarcity of what you are delivering your public courses can be charged at anywhere up to $2,000 for a two to three day course. Internal training also rises in terms of daily yields. In fact, anytime there is a knowledge transfer taking place their should be an equivalent increase in rates. What if you could charge, say, $250 per seat for a day long seminar. And you could attract 200 people? That's not a bad rate for a day it would appear...Training needs to be part of your cash flow strategy. Every time. Start reducing your cost base. Bootstrapping is now a formal word among business owners. And we wrote a Squidoo lens on lots of free or low cost software tools online for business infrastructure. But by far the greatest leverage tool here, the one that is a real game changer, is the ability each of us has to outsource repetitive, and even some technical work to off shore locations. There re many, many companies who will do this for you today. Most of whom will be cheaper than you could ever hope to do it yourself. The result? You can do far more work, for a far lower cost base than your competitors, and therefore generate far more profits with the same workforce as always. Rule # 2 - Work once A lot of what you say and do in your area has real value. The sort of value you can turn into a commercial product. So what are you waiting for? Today there are no end of publication and marketing alternatives for your writing career. These include self publishing via LuLu.com, self promotion via BookWhirl.com and a range of other avenues. Work hard now, market well, and receive royalties for years to come. Some work once: ideas include: - Writing books, audio books, eBooks and short booklets. - Creating courses for sale as a packaged unit. (Which are greater yields of course because they deliver greater value) - Kits are always a great way to leverage your time. Kits that contain workbooks, training courses, presentations and interviews as well as eBooks, audio programs and whatever else. A kit is a kill all approach to bundling products into a new saleable item with a lot more value. Mentoring Program After some weeks working on videos and eBooks for the mentoring program I have been able to break it into the categories that i think make most sense for consultants. These are: Trust Based Marketing - Generating a trust based asset that can be used to move the world. Consulting Cashflow 101 - Techniques and practical advice to turn on the revenue tap and increase your discretionary time. Frictionless Sales - Taking on sales as an enemy combatant who has to counter each and every objection is a recipe for consulting failure. Methods for making the sales process friction free and enjoyable. Getting stuff done - (Yes, I thought of that name myself) Not productivity. There is a lot of stuff out there on productivity. This section is about momentum. Building the momentum required to implement grea change to great companies. The First 250 - Tips, techniques, marketing programs and approaches to help consultants get from day one to $250k revenues within the first year. Tactics - Writing reports, quotes, book marketing and publishing workshops, managing relationships and all of the tactical skills a consultant should have to make them efficient and effective at the grunt work of consulting. I am extremely excited by this process and I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the value that this program is going to contain. For any inquiries please feel free to contact me on darylm@consultingpulse.com Very Sincerely, Daryl Mather www.consultingpulse.com Follow me on Twitter LinkedIn You can subscribe to this newsletter via the subscription box at the right at ConsultingPulse.com. All subscribers receive the 7 part series on Street Smart Consulting. Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:40:46 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultant/1u75f/h/The_Consultant_Newsletter_.htm You can subscribe to this newsletter via the subscription box at the right at ConsultingPulse.com. All subscribers receive the 7 part series on Street Smart Consulting. Write reports that close the deal Reports are a fantastic tool to capture attention, remind them of value, and close the deal on the next round of work. Yet most consultants are absolutely terrible at it... The vast number of reports I wade through and review every day are appallingly bad. Boring, pointless and hard to read. In fact I will often stop even trying to read them and skim for whatever important points are there. Imagine what a client must think! I have found that a well structured, concise and accurate report gets referred to by the client. Not only that but they I hope these tips are helpful to you. You might also want to run through the short MS Word Skills self-test I wrote last year. A good starting point for basic skills. Report Structure The Executive Summary comes first. Always, every time and without exception. Your report should be read by everyone from the head of the department to the technical staff. make it easy for them and avoid roadblocks. It should contain: The background and summary. A short statement on why the client wanted to do this (not what you did) and then a short statement on why the client should implement the findings. Key Findings. Tables, bullet points and short statements. No more than a couple of paragraphs. Do not list all the things you found, just those that are important and that you want to bring to the clients attention. Key Recommendations. Some short overall bullet points or a table stating the main areas that need to be addressed, changed, maintained or whatever. Key value considerations. Short statements on the value to be achieved by following through on the recommendations, and the timelines required. It is always good to insert a small table here on what the leading companies doing this have been able to achieve. it adds credence. The Executive Summary is no longer than two to three pages. With three pages being the absolute maximum! It should convey the value, seriousness and credibility of the remainder of the report without too much detail. The Detail Section is a long version of the previous section. But not too long... Apply the Wade Test. Once it feels like you are have to wade through too much data, too much detail and too much jargon, then it needs to be changed. Appendices are where you store all the stuff you have to wade through. Large data filled tables, images, evidence, process descriptions etcetera. Recommendations The most important bit. As a mater of fact, this is the reason you are writing the report and the reason why they asked for it in the first place. Make all recommendations brief, to the point and actionable! That's it, easy really, yet so many write this part as if it were a theology thesis. You may want to include additional information on the value, impact and omission consequences on each one. But thats only useful sometimes. Writing Tips The ability to be pithy is not a talent it is a choice. If you want to learn how to write short meaningful sentences then start a blog and join Twitter. Great ways to learn how to be more concise. Just tell them what they need to know. If they want to know what the time is do not tell them how to build a clock. Consultants tend to go overboard in their explanations, justifications and in setting context. Reduce the word count. Always read it back and reduce the number of unnecessary words. (Great for PowerPoint, blogs and Twitter also) Re-write until it grabs you. I often write a sentence. read it back, highlight it, and start again. There is always a better way to get your point across. Write in words you can read. You are not Einstein or your college professor. And fortunately, neither is your client. Write in language that is natural, like a conversation. Pay attention to tone and framing. use it according to the requirement. For example, if you are writing an audit report do not start out telling them that everything is garbage! No wild unsubstantiated statements. Use footnotes and endnotes to record references, data and supporting information. 10 anecdotes does not data make! Use the power of MS Word! Basic stuff. Use the templates in Word. Make sure all your document comes together automatically. No double spaces, no double returns, captions, proper headings, indices and cross referencing. All make for a far easier document to write, read and update. There is of course a lot more to it than this. But I hope these tips get you on the way to writing reports that are more readable, better received, and acted on! I am going to be posting some items on the blog in relation to framing and tone later in the week. Mentoring Program I have started to build the Ning Community I intend to use as the basis for the mentoring program I intend to start running from the end of 1Q this year. So far I have recorded a range of videos and audio downloads relating to the First 250. Tips, techniques and mindsets that you are going to need to take your consulting practice from nothing to your first $250k within 9-12 months. I also started work on some brief bootstrapping videos. I am convinced I can add value to your consulting practice. In fact, history has proven to me that I can help you to add significantly to your bottom line. The program will be designed and priced to make it easy to participate in - not to increase friction. I will continue to post updates here every newsletter. As always, please email me if you are interested in more specific detail. Free Prize Inside Amazingly it has taken me all this time to actually download and listen to Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. I'm a big fan and I like that he is such an entrepreneurial spirit. But this book did surprise me. it surprised me because it is not just about the power of the Purple Cow, but it is very sharply focused on techniques of implementing. This is an area of particular weakness for many consultants. Experts at getting the sale, developing the relationship and delivering the reports - but still many projects fail because of sub standard implementation. His ideas has are inspirational, practical, and - naturally - right out of left field. If you get some time in the next few weeks, while you are waiting or Linchpin, his next work, then take time to read free Prize Inside. it is a game changer. The LinkedIn Community Our Consulting Pulse LinkedIn network continues to grow. We are at 3,400 and we are growing at about 100 per week. We also have our own Twitter List now which you can subscribe to by going here. it is interesting to see how we deal with the public in real time on something like Twitter. Very Sincerely, Daryl Mather www.consultingpulse.com Follow me on Twitter LinkedIn You can subscribe to this newsletter via the subscription box at the right at ConsultingPulse.com. All subscribers receive the 7 part series on Street Smart Consulting. Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:44:41 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultant/1mr1P/h/The_Consultant_Newsletter_.htm You can subscribe to this newsletter via the subscription box at the right at ConsultingPulse.com. All subscribers receive the 7 part series on Street Smart Consulting. High conversion referrals Referrals from a peer are the diamond standard in trust based marketing, but they are not the only way to get a stream of work from referrals. When you are nearly finished a project or an engagement, try the following questions: 1) Do you know of others in the industry who would benefit from this type of work? 2) Would you be happy to give me their telephone and contact details so I can contact them? 3) Would you be able to call them to let them know I'm coming? Provided you have already delivered exemplary work this sets up the dynamic to continue the pipeline, and it is dramatically underused in the consulting industry. Getting referrals is the diamond standard in trust based marketing. Why? Because they are referrals from a peer. A trusted person who is staking their reputation on the line by putting their name behind yours. A second way to generate high conversion referrals is to set up a situation where your clients are speaking to others who have a similar need. Instead of trying to catch up at networking events, generate your own networking lunch. Invite decision level clients to a lunch. keep it containable, 6 - 7 is a lot. Organize for one or two of your past clients to speak on issues that you can support, and that they can honestly attest to, and make sure that there are opportunities for them all to speak freely on th eissue. Follow up with a telephone call within two days of the event, in order to discuss further some of the services you offer. (Because you were able to listen to them all talking, and your offering is now tailored to what they need) Referrals is an areas where we can get pretty innovative, yet we still just languish around with hope based referrals strategies. From the Blog A few of the highest traffic / most commented posts from the blog over the past two weeks. 6 problems with Social media marketing 2 years down the road we look at some of the hype and realities of marketing using social media. And identify some of the greatest problems with trying to market using these mediums. Could you disrupt the recruitment industry? A discussion on disruption. The start of two or three posts during the week on this issue. Why accepting all invites is the curse of LinkedIn I have changed the way I use LinkedIn totally. As a result my updates stream is now a source of scarce market intelligence. The First $250k - Tips for starting your consultancy A high traffic article on practical steps you can take to go from standing still to earning $250k within the first year. My year has started out pretty well, and I sincerely hope that this is going to be your most successful year also. Very Sincerely, Daryl Mather www.consultingpulse.com Follow me on Twitter LinkedIn You can subscribe to this newsletter via the subscription box at the right at ConsultingPulse.com. All subscribers receive the 7 part series on Street Smart Consulting. Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:34:05 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultant/P_pP/h/The_Consultant_Newsletter_.htm You can subscribe to this newsletter via the subscription box at the right at ConsultingPulse.com. All subscribers receive the 7 part series on Street Smart Consulting. Eliminating the friction from the sales process How can you increase conversion rates, reduce the number of calls, and get from meeting to invoice quicker? A twitter friend of mine, @TheTylerHayes has just finished his website and new business service. I loved the concept. Tyler is a Techie, meaning he spends most of his time trying to get unintelligent people like me to truly grasp the power of the PC and how they can use it better. It would be a terrible market. There is a lot of competition and not much understanding of the value that people like Tyler deliver. His solution? Eliminate the friction. If they have to find a service provider, pick up the telephone, ask for permission to spend money, raise an order, and then finally get you to come out and help them. Not only that but a lot of the calls would normally be from impatient PC illiterate types, (again - like me) who did not have the patience to do all of these steps and just want to get advice over the phone - NOW! (And they probably cannot work out why they should have to pay for this either) On his website Tyler has taken the approach of subscription services. A brilliant move. The friction now is Why Tyler and not his competitors? But that's it. Once he gets customers past that point then he can work them into one of his subscription plans and pow! No more friction. When they want his help - they call him. That's it. When the year is up, the are rebilled, maybe automatically, and he has worked the costs so that they are credit card level and a very good exchange for the value he is offering. I think this is an excellent example of how consultants, any consultants, can leverage their time and reduce the friction from the sales process. (Have a look at his packages) What could you do to eliminate friction? The less friction you have, the easier it is for people to buy. But friction can also be a reason to stop buying of course. Here are some practical tips you should be able to implement pretty rapidly. 1. Find out what their budget is and do not pitch higher than that. 2. Better yet, make sure you are talking to the person who can write a check for your services on the spot. 3. Make sure that your timeliness, customer service and communications are all beyond reproach. These are the very common reasons for breaks in contact. 4. Subscription models anywhere possible. (And they are possible almost anywhere) 5. If it can be broken down into easier digested chunks then do it. 6. Be contactable by telephone, email, web form and IM / Skype. And when they contact you - answer them. 7. If you can do anything at all like Amazon one-click purchasing then do so. Anything that reduces the amount of steps to be taken in order to buy from you is better. 8. Do not allow No to be an opion you present to them. Always give people a range of things that they can agree to, not something where they can cut your pitch out of the deal altogether. 9. And of course be risk-less. Your profile, track record, references, history and experience all need to be screaming credibility. I will pick this theme up again on the blog over the next couple of days. Please feel free to send me any feedback on areas that need to be explored more. Very Sincerely, Daryl Mather www.consultingpulse.com Follow me on Twitter LinkedIn A new Consultant Mentoring program By the end of the first quarter of 2010 I will be introducing a new mentoring program for those of you who are interested. In keeping with my own principles on friction the charges will be affordable. They will cost far less than the value of the program in any case... My past mentoring programs, my experience swith my own consulting teams, and my work with my clients over the past twenty years has convinced me that I can help you to: Improve your career prospects Increase your revenues Increase your B2B sales performance Increase the effectiveness of your B2B marketing And increase your enjoyment of your commitment to the consulting profession. Right now I am pre-loading a Ning network with eBooks, downloads, Videos, Tools, short courses and work kits. I hope to launch by the end of the first quarter as I said. If you are interested please send me an email to darylm@consultingpulse.com and I will be happy to discuss with you further. Thanks again, Daryl... You can subscribe to this newsletter via the subscription box at the right at ConsultingPulse.com. All subscribers receive the 7 part series on Street Smart Consulting. Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:23:22 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultant/1mNPE/h/The_Consultant_Newsletter_.htm 10 tactics for a successful new year You can subscribe to this newsletter via the subscription box at the right at ConsultingPulse.com. All subscribers receive the 7 part series on Street Smart Consulting. Are you worth investing in? What results do you expect of your investments? 15%? 20%? Do you apply those same measures to your own finances and business plans? I posted on this over Christmas but I think there is still something to be said on this theme. Would you invest in yourself? Instinctively we all say yes don't we? We all think that we are superb managers / entrepreneurs who can make miracles happen through sheer managerial sweat. But the question isn't would you bet on yourself. If you were looking at your business, finances and record for achieving strategic goals - would you commit funds to it? Here are some practical tactics I have used to better leverage my time, and to try to stick with the 20% per year increase in revenues, book value and cash flow. (The Big Three) 1) Develop sale able IP. At least 1 hour per week needs to be dedicated to developing sale-able IP. Something that can be leveraged to earn revenues without you present. This may be licensed training and other products, or book, audio books, SaaS programs or whatever. 2) Look at ways to leverage time. I have been delivering a personalized mentoring program now for several years. In the first year it was hard work, but by the third year it had increased my revenues by 30%. (And continues to do so today) 3) Where ever possible - de-couple the cost of what you are doing from the work you are doing. This is a variation on the Alan Weiss themes of charging for value. The secret is to charge based on what the work is worth, rather than for what the activities cost to do. A very powerful fee leverager and one that introduces real fairness into your commercial dealings. 4) Set a hurdle rate of (say) 15% for all capital you are spending. This is a good review for all spending, and for all costs currently involved with the business. Will the training you are doing help you increase earnings by what you are spending plus 15%? or is it just going to help you do what you are already doing - only better? Setting a goal and not achieving it is not the end of the world. Not setting one and achieving nothing spectacular is a crime! 5) Systematize many of your services. This is a brilliant concept and one that has made a 6 figure difference to my earnings each year. If you are just selling you as someone who is pretty good at what you do then you are selling yourself short and casting yourself into the price sensitive world of labor hire. 6) If you are an employee, and you are going for a new role, then be very aware of the value you bring with you. No matter how many deep breaths they take, or how much they whince when you talk about price, at the end of the day your value should speak for itself. Price is what they pay, and value is what they get in return. And it should be a clear 10 x return for them. Easy. 7) Unless you are trying to grow out your market share against large scale competitors, I would back off the display advertising a bit. Instead I would look at what is required to generate Trust Based Assets you can leverage again and again. 8) And of course, as always, make sure to continually leverage your network of professional contacts, trusted advisors, fans and mentors. You will continually be surprised with what your network is prepared to pay you if you take care of it. I am choosing to stop here as most people will be pretty busy trying to implement some of these and listing out more tactics is only going to confuse the issue I think. All the best with it, and please feel free to drop me an email on how you are going. Very Sincerely, Daryl Mather www.consultingpulse.com Follow me on Twitter LinkedIn Plans for the new year Let me first wish you all for the Christmas period, and I sincerely wish you well in all your personal and business endeavors in the new decade! This year we are aiming to grow the newsletter service to ten times its size in 2009. That is going to take some effort, require some incredible level of recommendations, and means I am going to have to add a load more value to the newsletters as well as to the blog I write. Some initial plans for the new year include: 1) Generating more auto-sender series on Trust Based Assets and Momentum 2) Publishing a unique content newsletter every two weeks at a minimum. (But never more than once a week) 3) I am working hard to finish the manuscript on Trust Based Marketing, called Bank On It. I want to have this done by the end of the second quarter and would welcome any comments you might have for the book. 4) Introduce some sub groups to the Consulting Pulse group on LinkedIn. This is going to take a bit of effort to manage and again I am interested in any input as to which themes would be worth while in the group. 5) (Maybe) I am considering playing around with Blog broadcasts where the newsletter is sent out automatically everytime the blog is updated. I am not sure if this is a good idea or not, and it has ben disasterous for me in the past. But I am keen to leverage as much as possible from modern online technologies so any advice would be welcomed. Again I wish you well for the next decade - and I hope I can help via this newsletter, the blog and whatever other mechanisms we deploy over the next twelve months. Thanks again, Daryl... You can subscribe to this newsletter via the subscription box at the right at ConsultingPulse.com. All subscribers receive the 7 part series on Street Smart Consulting. Sun, 27 Dec 2009 04:27:09 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultant/1vj0_/h/The_Consultant_Newsletter_.htm The Secret to Social media Success Content, Content, Content! Got that? Easy right? If you want people to read the newsletter, subscribe to the LinkedIn group, participate in your Tribe on Ning or follow you on Twitter then you must be worth following. You must bring them something interesting and of value, preferably some form of knowledge that is scarce. What social media success is not... Auto DM's on Twitter. Particularly those that try to sell me something as soon as I follow someone. It screams insincerity. Hi, thanks for the follow. I'm not interested in you but I am really interested in your money. Don't do auto DM's... it annoys people and they rarely read them. (And they all sound the same anyway) Self promotional comments on LinkedIn groups. Again, nobody reads them, and it just fills the group with clutter. Website tricks and bait and switch techniques. If they want your newsletter, and you have made it easy to subscribe - then they will subscribe. Don't send newsletters that are just electronic marketing brochures. Funnel sell pages. I am sure that these work, if they didn't there wouldn't be so darn many of them. But for my money, I never bother with them. Collecting endless followers on Twitter. Every single follow me technique I have seen or heard of is all about numbers and not about followers. 5,000 followers, which I now have, means nothing if they don't know who you are. You are still just shouting into a crowded room hoping someone will here you and take an interest. If you want to be successful in Social Media... I ran a post in the LinkedIn group asking people if they wanted to put their Twitter account up there so we could form a Twitter pack. Of course there were one or two that just had to take the opportunity to put up their twitter ID, their blogs, their LinkedIn ID, their Facebook page, and a quick promo line about how they could make all of us millionaires. Of course they could do that.. their success is why they desperately spam everyone trying to crack the social marketing code. If you want to be successful with social networking and social media marketing then here are some easy followed rules... because you are probably going to have to put some time into it, so it should be enjoyable. 1) Be interesting. Sure, engage with others on Twitter, but ultimately if you aren't interesting then nobody is going to take time to watch you chit chat with everyone else. 2) Be unpredictable. No easy answers here. But being well read, looking at the other side of what everyone is rushing towards, and going for concepts that are not fully out there will help. Nobody wants to read yet another article on 360 degree performance reviews, nobody wants to read why SAP saves a fortune. But they might be interested in why SAP is yesterdays news... 3) Be authentic. Someone asked me why I always tweet about sales, consulting and marketing advice. Why don't I tweet more about myself and my life? Well, I do sometimes. But not too much. The thing is (sad or not) consulting, sales and marketing are pretty much the driving factors in my life right now. Also, if you talk about something. Make it clear that you have the right to talk about it. I am not going to tell you how to make a million with Twitter. Why? never done it.. so how would I know. The easy way to be authentic? Do what you love, then it oozes from you. Good luck... Very Sincerely, Daryl Mather www.consultingpulse.com Follow me on Twitter LinkedIn From the blog... Maximizing your LinkedIn Login. A collection of many of the high traffic LinkedIn posts that I have written since really using the medium to generate revenues for my company. Tips for Cold Call Success. The post that got me kicked out of two groups due to the raving debates from Sales professionals. (Still got no idea why that was) Using your LinkedIn Account to get around the Gatekeepers. You know these people right? The defenders of the status quo, the agents of No, and possibly the largest hurdle most companies need to overcome when they are trying to improve. Amazing how technology has enabled you to go around them. What has value today? A musing on how many things are quickly becoming value-less. production, factories, information... even ideas are devaluing at a rapid rate. Tricks of the Mind. A review of an audio book I listened to from British magician and mentalist Mr Derren Brown. The man is a genius and I have used his memory techniques to great effect already. Great skill for consultants by the way. Microsoft Word Skill Test. A post I rambled off when I was furious about the MS Word skills of some of my counterparts. Very frustrating. it has had the most traffic over thepast two weeks. (And it isn't that old) So I thought I would share it here. If you do visit the blog, please comment on the posts if you have something you want to share with everyone else. Feel free to use the re tweet button at the bottom of the posts, or the links to bookmark them. It isn't a conversation if only one person is talking. Working in the Cloud I run a team of consultants who work all over the country of Australia. For those of you who don't know...it's big. really big. And lots of empty space in the middle. For the past month or so we have been running with lots of cloud style applications. And so far I think all of them together have cost me less than a thousand dollars a year. Beats the life out of Web 1.0 expensive infrastructure and SAP style architecture that most companies still run with today. DimDim.com for webinars. I recently started to spend money on this program after many months of using it freely. Why? Seemed fair to me. There is no way I want them to go out of business. I love the program. File sharing and storage. I am using ElephantDrive and it seems really good. I wish I had done this before. Now I can distribute files to all my colleagues, or selectively, no matter where they are in the nation. Love it. Basecamp. Unless you have been living under a rock you will know that this is changing the way that projects are managed. Particularly the ability to give clients access to their specific project details. As all of this si really cheap, I am eyeing off a few more alternatives in the online world. I am already a big user and fan of Salesforce.com and I am looking for additional programs that fit with what I need to do. (already a big user of Google Docs of course) If you are still on the desktop and working with a group of people who could be all over the place... then you need to really have a look at the math here. (And the convenience to be frank) Changes on the Blog You will notice that I am now running Adsense ads from Google, as well as a few affiliate links. My goal is to have the blog up online as a stand alone media site covering consulting, marketing and sales of professional services. For this, it needs to generate an income. However, here are a few very important points. 1) I have no idea what Google Ads are going to run, but I hope they are at least relevant. (And often they come out against whatever it is I am writing about actually) 2) I only use affiliate links to products and gadgets that I use regularly, and that I would recommend. For example - it is dead easy for me to recommend Audible.com - I think I am one of their best customers. 3) Any sponsored post will reflect my true opinions of the product, service, website or company. I am not interested in writing negative posts - so if I can't write anything positive I won't accept it. Thanks again, Daryl... Popular Posts Turn your LinkedIn profile into a powerful Revenue Generating Tool Breaking the Twitter Code SEO is a fools Errand Unsubscribe Consulting resources The Consulting Pulse LinkedIn network Interviews with Extra-ordinary consultants Squidoo Lens - Bootstrapping Tools for Consultants Daryl Mather LinkedIn Profile Twitter Profile Skype: daryl.mather www.ConsultingPulse.comWed, 24 Jun 2009 08:15:59 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultant/20PqR/h/The_Consultant_Newsletter_.htm The Consultant Dear The name of the game! Consulting, more than most other managerial disciplines, is all about reuptation and relatiohsips. We often forget about that as we drill down into our methodologies. We spend so much time working on what we do and how we do it, that we often forget who we are doing it for. This brings us to a few vital points, and ones that are often easily forgotten. 1. The vast majority of sales for consultants will happen as a consequence of the relationships you hold, and therefore... 2. Web traffic is nearly useless to you. These two principles should make you at least reconsider your time investment in social media, and your strategy. Economic decision makers do not search Google to get a hold of trusted consultants. They take advice from their peers and trusted generals. Your social media strategy needs to focus on this as a core element. making connections not just collecting contacts. If you are in the B2B game, then use a B2B medium. (LinkedIn) If you are moving towards the B2C game, then use a B2C medium such as Twitter. But for most of us, it is the ability to create and sustain commercial relationships that count. Relationships built on trust. Thats the name of our game... not how many but who !! Very Sincerely, Daryl Mather www.consultingpulse.com Follow me on Twitter LinkedIn Recent Themes The recent themes section is going to become a staple part of this newsletter fro those who prefer not to subscribe to the RSS feed or email updates. Not all - just those that made an impact. SAP finally gets it - but is it too late? (More on this below) The Explosion in Social Media Experts - A very dangerous trend that is wasting the time, the money and the reputation of otherwise talented consultants. Be careful !! Who is looking over your shoulder? - Another note on the danger of accepting all invites. THis is an insidious habit, I have dropped most LIONS and TOPLINKED from my connections list. Should you work for free? Clients want it all the time, and we tend to thionk it's okay, but when should you really work for nothing? Just for fun - A look back through some of the web sites that we frequent regularly. How they have changed tells us a lot about how we are chaning also. The quest for remarkable - In a complex world - simple is remarkable. While you are resisting today... ...someone else is working very hard to create tomorrow. We slave away trying to hold back threats to what we do, to our livelyhood - when we should be ambracing them and taking them further than others can imagine. SAP tried very hard to ignore SaaS. Then, in concert with Oracle, to play it down and belittle the whole industry. Then the crisis came, revenues started to fall away while Salesforce.com got even stronger. The print media...well we all know that story now. And then there's tradeshows... another dying artform that will not transform itself into what it fears. What is it that you are worried about? What is on the horizon that nobody sees yet? Become that before somebody else does... Noble time-wasters It is easy to waste a lot of time on marketing and sales related activities. All activity and no action unfortunately. Here are some absolute winners from my own recent experiences. 1) Trying to boost your LinkedIn cred by spending hours answering questions that are posted. Forget it. Do it out of love, or enthusiasm - but don't do it to win work. It won't happen. 2) Chasing followers on Twitter. If they aren't following you because you are you, then it is a waste of time. A smaller room, but you are still just yelling into it hoping somebody will hear you. 3) Re-negotiating that many times negotiated contract in the hope of retaining the client. Forget it - she doesn't appreciate your value and there are others who will do. 4) Sending emails on a cold call. With the exception of LinkedIn cold calls, there is absolutely no reason why you should not pick up the phone and jumpright into it. Far better results... In closing... Thanks again for your patience. I am back on board with the newsletter now and I will be sending it out as regularly as previously. (Apparently moving your family across the world is harder than it looks - who knew!) Any comments you have on the format, style, content or whatever please send them through to me at this email. For those of you who are in the LinkedIn group I hope you will continue to contribute there, and I hope you will be able to recommend our group, the blog and this newsletter to your colleagues with pride. Thanks again, Daryl... Popular Posts Turn your LinkedIn profile into a powerful Revenue Generating Tool Breaking the Twitter Code SEO is a fools Errand Unsubscribe Consulting resources The Consulting Pulse LinkedIn network Interviews with Extra-ordinary consultants Squidoo Lens - Bootstrapping Tools for Consultants Daryl Mather LinkedIn Profile Twitter Profile Skype: daryl.mather www.ConsultingPulse.comThu, 11 Jun 2009 08:58:16 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultant/1VGeR/h/The_Consultant_Newsletter_.htm The Consultant Dear Trust, Social media and trafffic! Good to be talking with you again, I have been neglecting this newsletter of late as my own career needed some attention. For those who don't know I work as the BD manager for a large multinational in AUstralia, focused on Engioneering. These are tough times for us right now. Anyway... the last few weeks on the blog have been extreemly exciting ones. Here are a few of the themes we have touched on. Social media has again been at the heart of our thinking. Particularly LinkedIn and Twitter. (I don't use Facebook anymore) Over the past 6 months my own record on LinkedIn is now at around 7 figures, the keys to this success are obvious and I recorded them here. (Read More on LinkedIn) Basically LinkedIn is a 24/7 tradeshow that everybody came to. People tend to forget that and use it like they use Facebook or MySpace. (Read about common LinkedIn errors) Twitter, however, is an entirely different beast. I tried a few experiments with Twitter and actually increased my followers by 2,000 within about ten days. Full descriptions of how I did that are here. (More on Twitter Followers) But, it highlighted something that I didn't click to previously. It's not how many but who!! Even for Twitter. You can check out more about breaking the Twitter Code and why some people have more success than others here. Above all the Twitter experiment highlighted another old myth from the marketing game. The belief that traffic is great, and more traffic is even better. (read more about traffic scams) Over the next few weeks I am going to be looking a lot more at issues related to entrpreneurism, sales and execution in particular. I am also conducting a few experiments to take this blog to the next level, I will be sure to keep you informed of course. I think there will be a lot of very useful findings for all consultants. Very Sincerely, Daryl Mather www.consultingpulse.com Follow me on Twitter LinkedIn Get BIG Quick (Building on a recent post on the blog) Being BIG is severely underrated. We all like to read Seth Godin, and his brilliant book on Small is the new Big tends to brush over some of the advantages of being BIG. If you are a consultant in the global scene today, then your number one prioprity needs to be how to get very big, very quickly. Big doesn't mean numerous, it means BIG. Seth Godin and Alan Weiss are essentially one man operations and they are both pretty big. You can read some advice on how to get big on the blog here, but the resons why you should consider it are below. 1. Clients leave their door ajar when you are big 2. Broad and deep beats narrow and limited 3. Annual predictability trumps monthly uncertainty 4. Passive income beats effort related income 5. Work comes to you... 6. You have resources to do stuff. (Capital, human and time) Being small is great. You are flexible, versatile and able to respond to changes int he marketplace. But being BIG changes absolutely everything. Community RoundUp THis newsletter is going to start being published more frequently. I have been working on content for the series and that should be sorted out by next week I think. The LinkedIn forum continues to grow with many new subscribers commenting that it was the hard line on spammers that actually bought them to the group in the first place. Happy about that of course. I hope you will feel that this newsletter, our group on LinkedIn and the blog at ConsultingPulse.com are worthwhile recommending to others. I continue to look for ways to add value to this group, and we may unveil a Ning community soon. (Possibly) Let me know any positive or negative feedback on this newsletter. Good luck, and I wish you all the best in your consulting endeavors. Daryl... My Links Google's decaying revenue growth The rise of online advertising Twitter's growth dwarfed by YouTube Unsubscribe Consulting resources The Consulting Pulse LinkedIn network Interviews with Extra-ordinary consultants Squidoo Lens - Bootstrapping Tools for Consultants Daryl Mather LinkedIn Profile Twitter Profile Skype: daryl.mather www.ConsultingPulse.comSun, 07 Jun 2009 15:10:22 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultant/1vVwJ/h/The_Consultant_Newsletter_.htm The Consultant Dear Welcome to Consulting Pulse! Happy Easter! This is our regular Thurdsday newsletter. I hope it is filled with useful information and resources for you. First let me apologize to one and all for the debacle of the last couple of weeks. The blog broadcast idea was a bad one and it ended up sending out all sorts fo garbage to our readers. I can't apologize enough. When you signed up for this newsletter you did so because of certain expectations - the last couple of weeks did not live up to those expectations. It will not happen again! Lastly - the blog has not had comments enabled for a few weeks now. I have no idea what happened, and I am not smart enough to fix it. So I installed IntenseDebate comment platform. And I love it! It allows for direct discussion between commenters, you can follow a particular discussion, and you can display your profile and logo / avatar / photo if you like. We are a big step closer to making this a truly interactive community. Feel free to get involved. Rank the posts, comment, discuss, Digg, whatever. I look forward to seeing you there. Very Sincerely, Daryl Mather www.consultingpulse.com Follow me on Twitter Theme(s) of the week The last week has been really focussed on social media and the consultant. I have been thinking a lot about how social marketing can supplement the walk about marketing traditionally associated with selling professional services. As a result we published some posts I thought were really good. (Well good fun anyway) 5 tips on eMarketing using Twitter - Looks at some of the easily adopted techniques and tools out there to help you in getting the most out of your Twitter account. Why are people so stupid on LinkedIn - This post was really very popular. Moreso than I thought it would be. It focuses on some of the very easy mistakes that people make when they start using a professional networking tool like LinkedIn. (Interesting comments) Using LinkedIn to generate revenue was another really popular post, drawing somewhere near 3,000 views on the first day of publication. Surprising. A look at some of the common sense rules of LinkedIn, and how you can very easily leverage it to turn it into revenues. During the week there were a range of posts on other subjects. Particularly Twitter. We looked at a way that marketing companies could tap into the Twitter phenomena to keep relevant in the do it yourself marketing culture of today, we also visited some of the sillier ideas on Twitter - like the Re-Follow Rule. Lastly we ran the number on trust and the decline of print advertising. (With surprising results) All in all it was a fun week. Let me know by email if there is anything you think it would be interesting to post on. Community RoundUp We made the discussion forum to be a safe haven for consultants. A place where they could seek advice and council, or provide advice and council to others. And a place where we can share a lot of our experiences. (As we are all in this together pretty much) So far it has gone very well. The discussion board is lively, we are nearing 3,000 members now. And we only rarely have to kick out people who think it is their private spam group. I am pretty happy about that. Attention recruiters - please continue to post jobs on the LinkedIn groups space - lots of good candidates in teh group now. Lastly you will have noticed that our news feed is vastly different to everyone elses. I have scoured the internet for good news feeds that will provide us with timely, relevant and useful information in consulting and related fields. I listed the feeds on the Blog here. And of course, our Squidoo lens, our first, hit #17 (!!!) in Business. A great start to our time on Squidoo. (Check it out) Let me know any positive or negative feedback on this newsletter. Good luck, and I wish you all the best in your consulting endeavors. Daryl... My Links Google's decaying revenue growth The rise of online advertising Twitter's growth dwarfed by YouTube Unsubscribe Consulting resources The Consulting Pulse LinkedIn network Interviews with Extra-ordinary consultants Squidoo Lens - Bootstrapping Tools for Consultants Daryl Mather LinkedIn Profile Twitter Profile Skype: daryl.mather www.ConsultingPulse.com Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:46:10 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/the_consultant/1EMwl/h/The_Consultant_.htm Unsubscribe to this newsletter Thoughts on consulting, sales and marketing, technology, the media industry, and current affairs. The Network | The Blog | Author | Twitter Welcome to the newsletter Dear , I am experimenting with a combination of techniques for the newsletter. On one hand I want to try to get posts from the blog out to you as I think they will add some value to our readership. But I also wanted to try to keep it pretty personal. So for the next few weeks I am going to experiment with a half and half approach. The first bit will be focused on some unique (not on the blog) perspectives I have formed recently - and the second half will be focused on publishing posts from the blog. Please let me know if this new format is working or if we need to rethink the whole idea. It is your community after all. Bootstrapping for Consultants Over the past week I have been exploring Squidoo as a place where I can develop lenses that are vey focused on a specific subject. I am working ona few but the first one is called Bootstrapping for Consultants. It is a starters page of links, programs and software that is either very low cost of free. I use most of them, and plan to try to use the rest of them. You can see it here: http://www.squidoo.com/Online-Apps If it is useful and of value please fel free to forward it to colleagues and others who you think might get some use out of it. The new job market Over the past few months I have tried to run a no charge job board for consultants, and another one for engineers. We had a heap of traffic, the right audience, and the right connection with advertisers and recruiters. But it all fell through... why? People dont check job boards any more. For years we have been hearing that 80% of people get their work through their network. With the newly connected world the ability to do this (on both sides of the job) have increased outasight. Instead of Monster.com or Seek.com.au, people are now posting on LinkedIn. Or in the LinkedIn groups, or even through Facebook. (Which I have zero expertise on) Twitter has also become a great hunting ground for the recently transitioning employee. People will look for work where it is easiest to do so, and people will post roles where people are looking. Convenience wins again. As we all move from real world networks to extended, global village type networking over the internet - this sort of thing is only just beginning. In fact I am sure that 99% of us have absolutely no real idea how far this is going to go and where it is going to take us... phenomenal right? Trust Based Marketing I am considering writing a new series on trust Based Marketing given some of the recent success that I have had in this area. Would this be of interest? it would be a three part series. Sent out to coordinate with the end of Street Smart Consulting, and I hope it will contain some thoughts and concepts that should be able to add immediate value to your consulting efforts. Let me know by email if this sounds like a good idea. I have no desire to send you stuff that you don't want. The Theme of the Week For some reason I have been thinking a lot about social media this week and how consultants can use the various platforms for marketing, sales and networking. We posted a number of short posts on this, one of which, on LinkedIn, received a lot of traffic and interest. It is amazing how, once people take relationships online they seem to think that the standard courtesies no longer apply. Picture yourself meeting somebody for the first time in a room filled with professionals of your industry... Hi have a gift.....In response to your introduction, or I would like to connect with you...from someone you have just now seen fo rthe first time in your life. Or imagine if somebody just cut across all other conversations you were having at that time and started to tell you about something he/she thought you would be interested in... All common sense isn't it? Standard courtesy still works. The relative anonymity of he internet is not an excuse for bad behavior, and doesn't make bad behavior more likely to achieve good results. Enjoy the blog posts below ! Daryl Mather The Exploding Middle Space 2009-04-02 19:15:00-04 Of all industries that have been wiped out by the Internet the greatest casualty has to be the old style go betweens. The most obvious example of this is travel agents. The internet democratized travel, making it possible for everyone to look for, book and compare prices from a range of providers. Another example is brokerage houses. Stock brokers finding themselves immediately displaced by E*Trade, CommSec and other online trading and information portals. Again the result was one of democratization. Allowing everyone to make their own decisions as they now had access to the data and means of taking action. The newspaper, say, used to be the go between for small-medium businesses and their buying public, today e see this happening in industry after industry. Newspapers used to be the go between for the public and in depth news. Today news is a commodity and you can pull down 12 different opinions of the same event within hours of it occurring. They also used to be the go between for classified advertising and job postings. The first of these is just one of the many casualties of the Google-ization of the Internet and the advent of search based advertising. But the go between doesn't cease to exist...to the contrary - instead of their being one or two stalwart guardians of the communication channel - there is an explosion of providers. This is basic economics. The economy is finite, not an infinite mound of cash to draw from. As one industry grows it draws on capital that other industries are losing to do so. Newspapers held Job postings very tightly. Until Monster.com and Seek.com.au took it off them. New go betweens, lower costs and more accessible. We are now seeing job boards, even the large ones, starting to fail also. The natural place for job hunting has always been through your personal network. And with the advent of networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, looking for talented professionals has also changed dramatically. Instead of trawling through Monster.com, advertisers can now post jobs in one of 50 different groups on LinkedIn. All catering to their specific niche market and all containing professionals who are self motivated enough to be managing their career proactively via a platform like LinkedIn. LuLu.com and CreateSpace.com (Amazon company) are replacing the old go betweens in the book publishing equation, inLinks and pay-per-post advertisers are starting to shatter the paradigm that search is the only way to advertise online, and Google Maps is fast replacing local search champions such as the Yellow Pages. How can you replace the middlemen and go betweens in your game? (Either as a business stream for you, or as a way of more effectively reaching your market) Conference organizers? Direct mail and telemarketers? Download sites? Recruitment agencies? PR Agents? ...the list is endless. read more... Featured Books Sales and Marketing Extra-ordinary Consulting In the latter stages of last year I reached out to some of my consulting heroes and asked them if they would be interviewed on the Blog. An amazing number of them agreed! The Extra-ordinary Consulting series remains one of the most read parts of our network. Masters like Seth Godin, Alan Weiss, Ford Harding, Kevin Hogan and others make it a must read for every consultant! Help me write a book I have recently restarted work on my book about Trust Based Marketing. There are two chapters online, and two chapters about to go up online in the next 7 days. I hope you will drop by and let me know what you think. Contact Us Email LinkedIn Twitter Mobile: +61429910729 Skype: daryl.mather Copyright © 2008 Consulting Pulse. All Rights Reserved. Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:51:51 -0400