Marketing Your Consulting Services.pdf - epiheirimatikotita.gr

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PROSPECTING IS A TRANSITION
Prospecting is the transition between developing your market plan and selling your
services. It’s a transition for a couple of reasons.
First, it is the transition between marketing and selling. When you read marketing
books you will find prospecting covered; when you read books about selling
you will find prospecting covered. Some authors do not differentiate between
marketing and selling and, quite honestly (remember that stack of eighty-seven
books I mentioned in the preface?), I’m not so sure I can either. I do know that you
need a marketing plan and you need to sell. Where the two divide is less important
to me than what you need to do to move from one to the other (Remember, I
promised practical), and that’s where prospecting comes in.
Second, I consider prospecting a transition because it is this process that at times
leads to changes in your marketing plan. You have a plan now. Once you begin to
implement the promotional and personal marketing tools, you may find that you
need to tweak the marketing plan. Perhaps you targeted small local businesses, but
once you started prospecting you found that they had less to invest than you expected.
Perhaps you targeted state government agencies and found that their
process was too slow. Perhaps you targeted an industry that is now going through
a difficult financial time. You will want to adjust your marketing plan on paper,
but it is the prospecting process that helped you discover the issue. The change to
your marketing plan will be implemented in future prospecting actions.
This chapter will focus on a prospecting process for targeting, identifying,
and locating specific clients: the right clients, in the right industry, for the right
consultant—you.
Take the Chill Out of Cold Calls
I’ve made very few cold calls as a consultant. I prefer to make warm calls. Making
warm calls takes more preparation time. Cold calls take more execution time. In
the end, I think that it takes the same amount of time to land a client. I enjoy the
warm call process more.
What’s the greatest fear about making cold calls? Rejection. And what can positively
be guaranteed about making cold calls? Rejection. So create a positive cold
call attitude. So what if someone says “no”? Hangs up? Or is rude? Don’t let it
bother you. You must refocus your attitude. You were not rejected; your services
were rejected. The person did not need your services at this time. When you run
Marketing Your Consulting Services