Marketing Your Consulting Services.pdf - epiheirimatikotita.gr

The year Babe Ruth hit the most home runs, he also struck out the most often.
Wayne Gretzky says you miss 100 percent of the shots you do not take. What are
these two athletes telling us? Perhaps that if you really want to succeed you need
to take a few more risks. Tom Peters states in his presentations that failure is a sign
that someone is doing something. He also says that companies ought to fail
faster—that is, take more risks. Some will fail, but get the failures out of the way,
learn something from them, and move on to success.
Your Challenge Identify five risky things you could do to enhance your marketing
plan. Need one for starters? The owners of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream challenged their
company to meet a goal. If the goal was reached, they promised to dance the hula on
Wall Street. The company achieved the goal and owners danced away. Now it’s your
turn to think of five risky things you could do. Try these words to get you started:
fire, mud, hot pink, jalapeño peppers. And remember James Bryant Conant’s quote:
“Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.”
3. Expand and Shrink
Again, a bonus of two related but different techniques. I am amazed at how often
I have used this technique in its simplest form with great results. This technique
suggests that you expand or shrink the problem, the marketing challenge, or the
situation to another size to determine what you might do differently.
Have you ever plucked a chicken? Few of us have, so let me explain the process.
First you plunge the beheaded chicken into scalding water to loosen the feathers.
Next you pluck the feathers out, but you are left with hair on the chicken’s skin.
The best way to remove the hair is to singe it. But the chicken is wet and wet anything
doesn’t burn. Okay, how would you dry the chicken hair if you were in a
hurry? Of course! A hair dryer. But that’s a small problem. You have a huge problem
if you are Frank Perdue with thousands of chickens to dry. If you expanded
on the hair dryer idea, what might you use? Well, Frank used the expand technique
and uses a jet engine to dry his birds.
I am presently working on new business cards to advertise my book, The Business
of Consulting. In the past I had a very simple white card with a picture of the
cover of the book, a quote from Peter Block, and my contact information. That’s
a very simple example of how you can use the “shrink” concept. I shrunk the cover
Marketing: Can It Be Fun? 227