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Don’t Just Win Projects. Create Them. Here’s How…

Over the past six articles I’ve shown you how to win more consulting projects by adopting enterprise-level techniques. We’ve covered five of the Six Pillars of Consulting Success: Know, Like, Trust, Need and Want. This article, focused on Value, is different. Rather than focusing on how to win more, I’m going to focus on how to create more opportunities with your current clients by exposing them to your value. Many, many more opportunities.

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Let’s say you’re a builder and you ply your trade in Connecticut. In fact, let’s say you’re the rare builder in Connecticut that calls a prospect back. You get a call from… oh, say… a Mr. Fields (just a coincidence, of course), who asks you to build his spiffy new castle. What’s your Total Customer Value Opportunity? (If this term is new to you, please quickly scan this article.)

Well, it looks like the TCVO is one house.

Plus the follow-on work in years to come: adding a sunroom, a pool, a dungeon; the typical stuff.

And, since you’ve soaked up this series of articles you’re thinking beyond the immediate buyer. The propinquity of Mr. Fields’ siblings, parents, friends and a small family of groundhogs warrant their inclusion in your calculation also. Now you figure your TCVO as 8 houses and 3 burrows. But there’s oh-so-much more.

The prior articles talked about how to interest Mr. Fields’ parents, siblings and friends in your house building capabilities. If you do this well, you’re satisfying the entire Fields community’s need for shelter, right? Wrong.

What about the new office building David wants to build? What about the restaurant his sister wants to open? Not to mention the new addition on the kids’ school, the local bowling alley renovations and the town’s plan to replace the post office with a full-scale replica of the Eiffel tower.

Those are all opportunities to expand the Fields community’s perception of your Value. Your TCVO just exploded.

eifel-tower

Whether you’re a builder delivering architectural marvels or a consultant delivering superlative advice, the number of potential, new projects at your existing clients is breathtaking. I guarantee you can heap Value on your clients in ways they (and probably you) haven’t thought of yet. All while staying inside your narrow niche. Clients just need to know everything you have to offer.

Below are seven techniques that can radically expand your opportunities to provide Value at your current clients:

Putting Your Value Front & Center – 7 Proven Techniques

Show off Your Portfolio

You have many consulting capabilities and your current client may not be aware of them all. You mention that you are optimizing yield for other clients; would he like to see the results? Of course he would.

Hold a Capabilities Workshop

You simultaneously strengthen relationships across the organization and expose capabilities that the client doesn’t know about. Your provocative presentation, “The Groundhog Workforce” will spark conversations with Facility Managers around the country who hadn’t even heard of you before the workshop.

Introduce New Ideas on New Subjects

If the client only thinks of you in terms of sales training, his perspective will broaden when you present compelling, insightful observations on how to improve call centers.

Set Up Selling Conversations

These can be related to a current project or totally separate. A pre-arranged selling conversation is similar to a capabilities presentation but has less presenting and more back-and forth discussion. Below, in a 30-second excerpt from one of my training videos, are three examples of how to set up a selling conversation.

Hold Vision Meetings

Vision meetings are the perfect opportunity to bring in other parts of the organization, talk about new capabilities and surface an entirely new, unmet needs. Did you know the organization is embarking on a Voice of Customer campaign? You will after the vision meeting, and you’ll have a role to play too.

Give Samples

When clients get a taste of the awesome services they’re not already purchasing from you, they’ll clamor for more. How can you sample some of your other offerings? A case study is not a sample, by the way. On the other hand, a one-day workshop where they experience the magic of your process might do the trick.

Provide Introductions

Not all the new value has to come from you! Think about experts from other related companies and unrelated industries. What about authors, academics or regulators? When you make the introduction, you are adding Value and expanding how your client perceives you.

With regular application, the seven techniques above will build a city full of consulting opportunities for you. Opportunities you’ll close using the practices outlined throughout this series. And with that many new gigs coming in, you can build a spiffy new castle of your own. (Good luck getting the builder to call back!)



This article is Part 7 of a seven-part series in which I show you how to win more follow-on and pull-through business by mastering the Six Pillars of Consulting Success at the “enterprise” level.

Part 6 – You’re Not Using This Technique. Too Bad… It Rocks Business Development

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