Marketing Your Consulting Services.pdf - epiheirimatikotita.gr

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Market Research and Market Plans
What is marketing? Must it really be research-based? Should consultants have marketing
plans? Marketing is everything you do to find or keep a client. Most successful
consultants know more about marketing than they believe they do. That’s
because if you keep all the jargon out of marketing it can be an intuitive process.
To be the most successful, marketing is generally based on some research, even
if that research is unsophisticated and subjective. For example, you as a consultant
decide to contact one client over another, or to write one proposal over another,
and you make those decisions based on the “research” you have done. Do
you have some inside scoop about one client? Perhaps you spoke to the director of
human resources and you know they are looking for some sales training, your specialty.
Is the other client notoriously late with payments to other consultants? The
answers to these questions will lead you to the next step.
You will most likely plan some marketing strategies to use with the first company.
Perhaps you will write a personal letter to the vice president of sales that
shows you are familiar with the company and outline your credentials and what
you do. You may follow up with a telephone call that leads to a sales call. You plan
carefully what you will say during the sales call: What questions you will ask, what
information you will share, and how you will position yourself to ensure that you
are hired for the job. Congratulations! You have just completed your market research
and market planning for one client.
Now how did you choose to respond to one proposal over another? Again, you
conducted some minimal amount of research. Perhaps you called a colleague to
learn more about one of the organizations. Perhaps you looked the organization
up on the Internet. Once you read the Request for Proposals, you learned which
one would utilize your skills more. Again, this is the research. Your marketing plan
will be to write the best proposal they’ve ever seen, showing how you will solve the
organization’s problem, add value to their mission, and do it all for a reasonable
price and within their time frame.
Guarantee Your Business Success
Want to guarantee the success of your business? You can essentially predict success
if you do two things: (1) Research and answer the following questions correctly
and (2) plan and implement the effort to accomplish the actions suggested by the
questions.
Marketing Your Consulting Services