France seems to be quite a hotbed of social learning…

I know exactly where you’re coming from. I’ve spent years trying to define what I do in ways that potential clients will understand. As Clark says, we’re selling complex solutions that will be different for everyone.

If at all possible, I would suggest that you try to “productise” at least some parts of what you’re offering. That’s advice that I’m still trying to work through myself.

As an example, looking at the Enterprise Collaborative site – even though I’m totally bought in to the concepts behind your thinking, I’m still not sure what it is you and Frédéric are selling?

Cheers,

Mark

The feast v. famine world can be hard to live with. I had a famine last year and am now in feast mode, but all my clients are looking to spend on the small side (5 – 10K) for strategy/advisory work, not necessarily big scale implementation. Maybe you are noticing this, too? Also, everyone here wants “social media”, so I have to admit, I kind of just go with that – call it whatever you want.

Definitely agree with Virginia on the admin side – you have to also be accountant, receptionist, IT support, and all the other things you mentioned with the sales stuff.

My blog is not for marketing – its more for sharing within the learning community – although my prospective clients do read it, I think it is only for style-matching. I tend to market more through LinkedIn, and my local HR association, and asking for referrals.

I would wholeheartedly agree with Cathy Moore (but, who wouldn’t really). You need to know what problems you are solving, articulate those pain points, and even better if you can attach a cost to them. Remember clients only really want something that will save them money or make them money.

The other thing that I’ve done, who knows if it is right or wrong, but I still introduce myself as a specialist in “training”, with a focus on web 2.0 with my clients. It’s their comfort zone (and their bosses, more importantly), so we start there and then together we talk about how web functionality could enhance their ability to train people. We go on the journey together. I’ve found that in our field we use terms and jargon that is hard for people to understand, so I try to make it easy for them, and connect it to their business (“this can help you launch your product in 4 weeks rather than 20 weeks, let’s calculate what that would save you in training costs and get your salesforce selling quickly – what do you think an additional 16 weeks of productive selling time might also in terms of top-line revenue?”).

PS – I live in the middle of nowhere (west) on an island off the BC coast, so also don’t just pop in for coffee, but I do service the Vancouver market and make trips there once a month – I line up a string of coffee/lunch/drink meetings and check in – I’m not sure that getting to Toronto or Montreal or some other centre where many of your clients might be is as easy for you as getting to Vancouver is for me, but as much as I love the online world, nothing beats face-to-face for relationship building. That is the essence of what we do.

For whatever it’s worth – I hope you have found this helpful (and not pedantic). Even if the specific points aren’t new to you, at least know that somewhere on the other side of our big country there is someone else who is experiencing the same thing!

Holly

One thing you did not include is the organization that it takes to be a consultant. The fact is that often you have long periods of time when you don’t have a job and then you will get 4 or 5 prospects at once. You need to be able to handle the down times and the busy times. To do this you need to be very organized, have time to do business developement while you might be finishing up a project (i.e. taking an hour a day for business development for example), have templates in place that describe your services and you can use for job bids, and have billing, contracting, and AP/AR services set up.

My question Harold, is where do you see your client base located? Just in your town or province, in NE Canada? In the NE US? In other parts of Canada? It seems to me from reading your blog that you do a good job of networking and making contacts both face to face locally and at international conferences. I am assuming that you follow up those contacts. However, you might want to expand to conferences and events where potential clients are (i.e. if you work predominately in one industry, go to their professional conferences; take part in Human Resources conferences, whether they are concerned with elearning, training, or communication or not). This will serve two purposes, networking to get your services known. But also it would serve for you to see what problems potential clients might have, which you could then use as a basis for what Cathy recommended in beefing up your web advertizing.

My 2c on the books: Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith. Seriously good for consultants on service marketing. I think I’ve bought this book a dozen times now for gifts. Seems almost patronisingly basic but every page has something meaty (if you can stand having McDonalds being touted as the ultimate in service marketing…)