Kendall Consulting Group - Marketing of Consulting Services Innovation Article
Marketing of Consulting Services
A difficult and often mysterious area for new or developing consultants is how to market their services. We even know senior consultants that tremble in their shoes over the thought that they might have to go and generate their own business. This article explores five major areas for marketing consulting services — or possibly any type of professional services. These are Use of Media, Professional Organizations, Multi-Client Programs, Networking, and Research. Each of these is discussed below.
What do we mean by marketing?
One of our colleagues referred to the marketing of consulting services as "making the phone ring" — others call it "rainmaking." When you receive such a call, a prospect has taken a positive step to seek you out regarding their business issues and problems. With a little work you can convert this initial contact into revenue-generating business — a consulting engagement.
Successful marketing of professional services also enables the consultant to make the initial contact and not be rejected. Thus, marketing efforts improve the receptivity of a prospect to a contact by a consultant.
Faith Popcorn in her book "The Popcorn Report" talked about "cocooning," a trend where individuals are building cocoons around themselves and are very selective about whom they admit and under what circumstances. One symptom of this is the rejection most of us give to telemarketers that call our homes in the evening. In such cases no groundwork for receptivity has been laid and we reject the call.
As consultants we need to find ways to breakthrough the cocoons that business managers build to screen the relevant and important from the irrelevant and bothersome. This article explores some consulting marketing practices.
What do you offer?
Our opening assumption for this paper is that you have something that is potentially relevant and important to a prospect. Some call this your value proposition. You can provide them something they need. They may not know about their need yet, but you can help them identify the need and satisfy it. What you have to offer needs to be put in your prospect’s vocabulary and currency, for instance, techniques to help them cut costs, improve revenues, generate new business, innovate, expand, deal with routine issues more efficiently, etc.
This paper will not explore the offerings of management consulting organizations. We do expect that each consulting group — whether an internal consultancy or a public consulting firm — will have researched their competitor’s offerings and chosen their own differentiating value proposition and their related product and service offerings. Consultants should have multiple vocabularies around what they do, so they can talk about it with people from various industries and functional organizations with various interests and skill sets.
Techniques for marketing
The leaders of one of the larger consulting firms we worked for several years ago strongly believed that the senior consultants should sell the jobs they worked on; a sales person could not sell their work for them. Nevertheless, we took a risk and hired a lead sales and marketing person at the officer level. We were all surprised when our new sales and marketing approaches pushed that consulting company into triple digit growth rates for a while, even though some of the methods used were unorthodox to us at the time.
Reviewing those marketing approaches and a number of others we have successfully tried yields efforts in five major areas. A sixth area was added as a catchall. The areas are:
• Media visibility
• Professional organizations
• Multi-client programs
• Networking
• Research
• Other
The remaining sections of this paper examine each of these six areas.
Media Visibility
One way many firms get known in their market place is to get their names in the press. Thus, members of the consulting organization publish articles about what they have done, plan to do, think about, etc. These articles are targeted at the audience of potential clients for the firm. They appear in the magazines, books, newspapers, web sites, radio shows, or television shows that their potential clients will see. They help the authors and their firm become known as experts or gurus in their field, and hence the people that needy clients should contact for assistance. Such articles show prospects that you know what you are talking about.
Once an article has been written, a number of things can be done with it.
• Consulting firm web site — immediately publish the article on the firm’s web site as state of the art thinking. Let your clients and prospects know about the article through other publicity or mailings. Encourage them to routinely come to your web site for intellectual leadership.
• Newsletter - Publish a (paper) newsletter and mail it to your clients, prospects and previous clients. This too helps raise awareness about your work and thinking. Use the article as a marketing brochure you routinely mail to prospects.
• Quotations - Get quoted in other learned publications or trade journals. For publications that only use their own authors, sending a copy of your newsletter lets those authors quote you as an authoritative source.
• Publications - Publish the article in a newspaper, trade journal or professional journal. Get published. Get your name out there. Submit your article for publication in the journal your potential clients will read. Again, raise your guru status.
• Books - Publish a book. Bundle a group of similar articles together and publish a book or compilation of articles. After you have written a series of well-received articles, group them together and publish a book. You can self-publish or submit the manuscript to one of many publishers looking for intellectually rich material to print. What happens after printing should be a key factor in which route you take. Will you distribute yourself, perhaps by mailing books to prospects and friends? Will the company promote the book? How?
• Radio/TV - Submit your article to radio and television outlets and get known as a guru in a certain area. Radio and TV stations often look to local talent to be guests on talk shows or to provide "sound bites" for a special coverage topic. Getting known as someone that can help them, puts you forward as a guru. Prepare your best public speaking persona!
You should also make sure you are listed in industry lists of reputable consulting firms. One of these, published by the Harvard Business School Press, is probably one of the best and most frequently referred to in the industry, particularly by potential employees. Many prospective clients also turn to this publication for information about potential consultants, and we have received several inquiries about our consulting work as a result of the book. The following is a link to that book. [http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/prod_detail.asp?5815 ]
We mentioned getting a book published to reinforce your status as an expert or guru in your field. We have watched a number of books be ghost written for the leaders of consulting firms. The publisher then turned these books into non-fiction best sellers by aggressive marketing. In our opinion, consultants and consulting firms that have done this have outperformed the industry. Links to two books representative of this marketing approach follow.
Newspapers, radio and television stations are often looking for rich intellectual material to publish or put on the air on a routine basis. For a while, we had a weekly show on a local radio station. Preparing for the show helped to solidify our thinking on key topics, and copies of the audiotapes from some of the shows were sent to prospective clients. A colleague also routinely wrote a column for a biweekly industry trade journal that reached thousands of prospects for his consulting work. He rapidly became a favored guest speaker and had more consulting work than he could handle.
A final word about mailings — whether e-mail or regular mail. Whatever you send must be of the highest caliber, otherwise you risk becoming associated with the "spam" and "junk mail" type of consultants. Routine mailings often cost only pennies a page to prepare and deliver; but they often end in the trash. By contrast, years after a firm we worked at prepared an expensive and artistic book to promote the firm and mailed it to prospects and clients we are still surprised to see it on the coffee tables of CEOs and corporate officers that it was sent to. They kept it and put it on display because it was so well done. Be memorable!
Professional Organizations
There are mixed feelings about the value of professional organizations in generating business. One reason is that many other consultants also go to the same meetings or write for the same journals, so you just become one of a mass of people obviously looking for work.
A counter argument is that professional organizations are the place that you can earn your reputation as a guru in field, as well as increase your media exposure by public speaking and publications (see the first part of this article). Attending professional organization meetings will also help you do competitive research or even recruiting of staff that you may later find more valuable to the growth of your business.
There are two types of professional organizations that we focus on here: those dedicated to the consulting industry and those dealing with the "content" or "meat" of your consulting practice. The first can be helpful to beginners in the consulting industry and is good for pointing out techniques and approaches to consulting work. One example is the Institute for Management Consultants. [http://www.imcusa.org/ ] The second type of organization is more interesting to practicing consultants since some potential clients as well as thought-leaders from academia are likely to be involved. Two example of this type of organization are the Society for Information Management (SIM) [http://www.simnet.org/] and the American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS) [http://www.apics.org ].
Being a passive member of an organization will not do much to promote your value as a consultant nor help you make the kind of contacts that may lead to business. You need to be active! Serve on the program committee. Be a speaker or moderator for the annual conference. Help arrange for speakers. Publish articles in the organization journal or the related trade magazines.
Similar to a professional organization can be your affiliation with a local college or university. Most schools are looking for talented public speakers that are experts in a subject area to be guest speakers or even to teach a graduate or executive education class in a subject. Participating in this way helps build your reputation as a guru as well as exposes you to a new source of talent and leads. Most schools also sponsor their own symposia on key subjects that you could participate in as a resident guru. This author’s affiliation with several local colleges has led to several solid client relationships and a great deal of consulting work. At the same time, it has been rewarding and an opportunity to "give back" to society.
Multi-Client Programs
One of the most successful marketing techniques we have seen is to create a multi-client program. A group of like-minded clients subscribe to a research and/or educational program. The consulting firm gets to know these clients better, even visiting them to collect research information for the program. The clients get to meet a wider circle of like-minded individuals from industry and to hear state of the art business concepts (many from the consulting firm). Further, multi-client programs gives a consulting firm a place to keep clients close to them when they are between consulting jobs with a company.
The first multi-client program we had the opportunity to observe closely was in 1983 when Michael Hammer and Index Group (later CSC Index) signed up about 25 CIOs to understand the proliferation of personal computers into industry. The six month study allowed an in depth look at each company by Hammer and Index, and ultimately provided valuable insight to the subscribers as to how to better manage the deployment of PCs in their organization.
The PC study was so successful that the sponsors kept and expanded the program concept. Eventually over 100 companies participated in similar "research" studies at an annual cost of $50,000 per company. Index’s consulting work for these companies expanded dramatically. For their investment, the subscribing companies received the results of two major and two minor studies a year (often participating as "data providers" in some of the studies), attendance at two regional conferences each year (usually held at a top resort and accompanied by copious amounts of golf, tennis or other entertainment).
Index carried the concept ever further by adding other programs focused on particular types of executives or topics. Because of the orientation of the company, all of the topics had a strong element of technology deployment helping to bridge the gap between business and technology (Index’s mission). Programs were started that focused on the following managers or areas: IS managers, systems development, CIOs, CEOs, marketing and sales, finance, advanced technology. Subscribers paid between $25,000 and $75,000 annually to belong to each group. This enabled them to receive special research reports on their topic area as well as attend two or more conferences each year — also held at a top resort and accompanied by copious amounts of golf. Clients raved about the programs. At its peak, Index had over 500 subscriber companies.
Later Index applied the same concept within large client companies that it was working with. For instance, in the early 1990’s Index had many different reengineering jobs underway at AT&T. Index created an AT&T Roundtable where Index would periodically get the AT&T leaders of the various reengineering efforts to assemble and talk about their projects, issues and successes. Index hosted and moderated the Roundtables as well as involved other speakers from its consulting company to present some of the latest thinking in reengineering and even other consulting areas. Index’s work for AT&T expanded significantly during this time period. AT&T often cited the Roundtables as one example of how well a consulting firm (Index Group) added value to their company.
Networking
Personal networking is one of the largest sources of consulting revenues. Potential clients will call in people they are comfortable with and whom they trust when faced with need for outside assistance. Most consulting firms estimate that over 75% of their business comes from previous clients and friends. Thus, you will want to keep in touch with your friends, past work colleagues, past clients, current clients, and anyone else you can think of as a source for leads or ideas.
How you network or "schmooze" with your contacts is up to you. We believe it should not be forced, and should feel comfortable for both you and your friends and contacts. You should interact or engage in informal communication with others for mutual assistance or support, to exchange ideas or knowledge, and to build rapport. This can involve periodic telephone calls or visits, sending interesting articles or books, or any other action that demonstrates that you care and empathize with them.
We have found that intra-industry referrals represent a major source of new business for us. We have been invited by other consultants to join with them to assist in one of their client situations, or even to handle a piece of work uniquely within our areas of expertise. This involvement has been as simple as being an expert speaker for a client meeting or as complex as a major multi-year consulting engagement. Keeping in touch with friends in the consulting industry is one highly recommended way to both generate ideas and to find new business.
How do you meet the right kind of people to network with? One of our friends tells us he always flies first class and talks to his seat mates. He cites several large consulting engagements that trace back to this approach. Several major consulting companies, including McKinsey & Company, are well known for staying in touch with alumni from their organization as they move from consulting into industry and become major decision makers. The lesson for many of us is to stay in touch with colleagues even as they leave a move elsewhere. They may not be decision makers at first, but as their careers advance they will be. In general, try to meet as many people as you can and stay in touch with them. The best marketers we know are gregarious, outgoing and energetic people. This is often counter to the introvert many of us feel like when in the role as analytical problem solvers in our consulting work.
We have also had some special relationships with friends in other industries where we don’t compete but where we have agreed to jointly market each other’s service lines as though it is our own. The marketing term is "non-competing co-hosts." We both mutually introduce each other to prospects or clients to round out the type of services that we provide. One example is a decision support software vendor that would bring us along as their consulting arm. Several significant projects for us resulted from this approach and our willingness to partner with them. We have done this on a number of occasions, in some cases with companies many times our size.
A side note regarding networking includes mention of a contact data base. When we worked with Index Group, and again in our own company, we have paid careful attention to maintaining a data base of the contacts in our personal networks. While the contacts of many individual consultants can be pooled into a single data base, the individual contact is important and facilitated by the data base. What you include in and use the data base for is limited only by your own imagination. We have found this tool vital in helping us keep in contact with our friends, associates, clients and prospects.
Research
One technique that helps put you in contact with or keeps you in contact with prospective clients is doing research in your field of expertise. We mentioned above how Michael Hammer and Index Group parlayed research on the use of personal computers into a major (and money making) marketing machine. A number of other firms have successfully used this approach as well, including McKinsey, ADL, and Ernst and Young.
Index Group and Price Waterhouse Coopers are two firms that have used research to cement relations with prospects and clients and to build a guru reputation in the field. Both have used annual surveys of information systems executives and then published the results in top quality reports. The reports were given to their clients, but especially targeted at the media to encourage quotes and feature articles about the survey and its results — liberally referring to who did the survey. This "free" advertising informs the public as well as builds the guru image that is so important to consultants.
One associate of ours at Frontier Works Consulting has used online surveys so that prospects can get a "free" diagnosis of their current situation in some area. With enough participants, comparison data becomes available to those that participate. Later, the door is open for our colleagues to contact a participant and discuss the survey results further with them, possibly opening the door to a consulting engagement.
We have watched several of our friends also conduct targeted research on a particular company and its approach to using technology. Initially done without contacting company staff, and then with some internally assistance, the research gradually established our friends as smart about the industry and that company. Shortly thereafter, they became consultants to the company.
Another direction research can take is to look for consulting work directly through your research. The Commerce Business Daily and online counterparts such as bidmain.com and other B2B directories often list solicitations for consulting proposals from a wide variety of consulting firms. General Electric is one company that also does this online, even registering and pre-qualifying suppliers (consultants) so that subsidiary companies can immediately solicit work with such firms.
Give Aways and Other Ideas
The last marketing area focuses on giving away some of your time and possibly making a travel investment. We have used this approach is three areas:
• Assessments
• Consulting
• Education (training)
Offering up a "free" assessment is one way to stimulate interest in you and the approach you would take to resolving problems or issues within a company. You volunteer to visit the company for a few hours or a day, carry out an initial assessment, and present the results to the company’s management. In the process, if appropriate, you recommend a subsequent course of action. Part of that action would involve you working with the company to do the recommended work. If travel is expensive, this can be a significant investment; however, we have found that the more we invest, the more likely we are to get follow-on work from such a venture.
We have also given a free day of consulting away as well, sometimes making the offer but unaware of what direction a prospect will take the idea of a free day. We had one manager that used our free day to come and get individual coaching and validation for how he was running his company. Another manager brought us in to run a product development creativity session for her staff. Yet another manager used us to help launch a reengineering project in his department. Prospective clients can be much more creative about how they might want to use your free time that you can be. Just offer them a "free day" and see what happens.
The last area we have had success with involves offering a free day of education for a management team. For us this has been an opportunity to talk about what we do and how we do it, targeting it specifically to the prospect's situation. For the company we are visiting, it is an opportunity to get smarter about some aspect of management that they may know they are weak in. The inevitable result is a smarter constituency that then turns to you for consulting help when they pursue the area with more diligence.
Some Closing Words
Many books and articles have been written about sales but we find few on marketing approaches within the consulting or services industry. While the lines are often blurred between the two approaches, learnings in one area do cross over and are valuable in professional services marketing and sales. The biggest lesson of all is "listen to the customer" and determine what you say or do in marketing from what you hear.
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Kendall Consulting Group has helped a wide variety of companies with strategy formulation, execution, and implementation tactics. The company often helps clients bridge the gap between business and technology, creating innovative and workable solutions in the process. KCG has also helped many companies start and run internal consulting groups or professional services groups. Please contact us if you would like to talk further about your business needs.
Kendall Consulting Group
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Innovations
Innovations is KCG's publication focused on organizational and technological change. Each issue of Innovations presents one or two case studies on a key topic as well as an approach or methodology relating to the situation. A recent issue is published here. Other articles can be found at our site by visiting the links at the bottom of the page.
Links to other articles at KCG's website
Innovations Articles
• Measures
of Success for Internal Consulting Orgs (NEW!)
•
Consultative Selling
(New)
• Trends
in Consulting
• Commentary on Trends in Consulting
• Marketing
of Consulting Services
• Skills and Competencies of Successful
Consultants
• Consulting Skills Development Experience
• Effective
Uses of I.T. Staff as Internal Consultants
• Strategy Implementation
• Visit
to an Operational Excellent Company
• Organizational Due Diligence (Mergers and
Acquisitions)
• Principle Driven Operations
• Change Management
• Education's Role in Change Management
• Communications and Change Management
• Value Disciplines
• Role of IS Strategy in Making Market Leaders
• Strategic Planning and Change Mobilization
• Project Management
• Grow Your Own Consultants
Archive Articles (below)
• Designing
Executive Information Systems
• Executive Information Systems: An
Overview of Development
• Implications of Transition From an
Industrial Era to One of Information
• Critical Success Factors Techniques
can Apply to Team Management, Too
• Decision Scenarios Ensure Information
System Meets Business Needs
• Critical Success Factors : Helping
IS Managers Pinpoint Information Needs
• Combining Quality and Reengineering
for Operational Superiority
• Steering IS Committees Straight
• Internal Consultants and a
Consultative Approach
• EIS Plays Critical Role in Reengineering
• Rapid
Software Selection
Kendall Consulting Group is an international general management consulting firm specializing in strategy execution, change management, and executive education. We invite you to contact us for how we might help you and your company grow and prosper.
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