Marketing Your Consulting Services.pdf - epiheirimatikotita.gr

consulting? Whether you work alone or with other consultants, the service resides
within the people who are delivering it. Your services are inseparable from you.
Another way to look at placement is where you complete the services. Do you
do all, some, or none of your work at the client’s place of business? This may affect
price in the market mix. For example, if you are an executive coach you may
charge one price for the time you spend in your office compiling data, designing
questionnaires, and putting materials together. You may charge a much higher price
when you work one-to-one with the executives.
Promotion Typically when marketing products, the term promotion refers to
things like coupons that push sales or persuade buyers to ask for a brand. We can
broaden the definition of promotion of services. For example, in consulting it includes
all the marketing methods available for you to use in marketing your consulting
services. What mix of personal sales, publicity, advertising, direct mail, and
telemarketing should you use?
CONSULTANTS AND MARKETING
Consultants in my workshop, So You Want to Be a Consultant, made the following
statements. How would you respond to these consultants?
• “Marketing takes too long and it doesn’t work for consultants anyway!”
• “I am not a salesman and I would never have become a consultant if I knew I
had to market and sell!”
• “Marketing? It’s a mystery to me. Isn’t that what big companies like Coca-Cola
do; they have entire departments and they conduct research, do taste tests, and
study the buyers’ habits to know what kind of ads to buy and how to sell more
Coke.”
• “I’ve been in business for nine months and have already spent thousands of dollars
on my brochure. I don’t see a payoff.”
• “I don’t do any marketing. It’s too expensive and takes too much time. Besides,
my clients wouldn’t like it if I became a pushy salesperson.”
If any of these consultants are successful, they have done some kind of market
analysis, goal setting, market planning, and customer sales. They just may not call
Marketing: What’s It All About? 5