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Review of After the Launch - Good Advice for New Consultants

By crooky | March 28, 2008

I have committed to writing about the ins and outs of running a consulting business on Fridays but recently, I stumbled across a great blog run by Shama Hyder of Dallas, Texas. Shama has a similar background to mine but has chosen to go the “business coach” route rather than the research and analysis route (probably a good choice because I suspect that business coaches get paid more than I do).

Shama Rama Ding Dong

One article in particular caught my eye - The Number#1 Marketing Mistake
 - in which she outlines all the mistake most newbies make when they hit the networking circuit:

Business relationships are a lot like personal relationships. You can’t rush into anything. If you go too fast, you will scare the other person away. Most people think that business is done this way:

Meet–>Sell–>Re-Sell

Instead, she suggests that one should:

Meet–>Connect–>Build Trust–>Share an Experience—>Sell.

This is a better articulation than I was capable of in my recent posting about Increasing the Depth of Your Client Relationships.

Essentially, what Shama and I are both driving at is the face that you cannot do business with someone with whom you don not have some form of relationship. I spend a lot of time calling around to see how my existing clients are doing and, more importantly, to see how people I want to work with are doing. It’s hardly work because I love my clients and the people in my network so it’s always a pleasure to chat.

Learn from the SFU Alumni Association (an organization whose board I sit on) - they recently heard in their Alumni survey that some grads were a bit miffed at the fact that they only heard from SFU when they wanted something - a donation, a request to try out an affinity program, etc… I can tell you that this is something we’re actively working on remedying but the message is clear - the SFU Alumni Association wasn’t spending enough time listening to the needs of the people it represents.

We’re trying to deepen that relationship now but it’s an uphill battle because in many respects, we haven’t laid the groundwork. I’m not trying to criticize the SFU Alumni Association because I believe that they’ve done a great job to date but the realities of our social-media saturated world is that people expect more.

The real challenge for my business and everyone else is how to make these touchpoints genuine. I’ve seen far too many attempts at corporate blogs for big, huge monolithic organizations that are cold, impersonal, have no voice and don’t allow comments. That just doesn’t cut it these days.

I’m going to be a regular reader of Shama’s work and I encourage you to check out her blog as well.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology

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Topics: Business of Consulting |

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