How can you find clients?
Referrals (Ray identified two main kinds of referrals)
- Intentional Referrals: People where there is a relationship of some kind. (student, acquaintance, etc.)
- Strategic Contacts: People who are in the marketplace (executive, service to market-accounting, legal, etc.)
How to Cultivate Strategic Contacts:
- Create a list of all potential strategic contacts.
- Prioritize the most strategic (what kind of reach do they have? Who do they know?)
- Meet with them.
- Find out what is happening in their world.
- Bring them up to date with what is happening in your business
- Who do they know that need the kind of services and skills that you provide?
Each relationship develops its own rhythm. Some it’s good to meet with four times a year, others twice a year, some once a year.
REMEMBER!
It’s a relationship! Always share information with strategic contacts that they might find helpful (a business lead, a book or article on a topic they are interested in, etc.).
How many strategic contacts should a consultant have?
12 (meet with at least one strategic contact each month)
How often should I try and meet with strategic contacts?
- Try to make a marketing connection once a month.
- Always talk to a different person every month.
How do you prioritize the strategic contacts?
- Who has the greatest impact?
- To what extent are they respected and do others seek their advice?
Trust is vital for referral relationships.
It will help close the client deal.
Good questions to use when meeting with a strategic contact:
- What are you learning?
- How can I support you?
- Who do you know that might need the kind of services that I can provide?
Authentic relationships are the heart of any consultant relationship.
Trust is built on common values.
What are the values that you hold in common? This is an important question to keep in mind when meeting potential clients.
You don’t laugh much when you aren’t trusting. Conversations tend to be more serious and more matter of fact.
Ease of laughter is a good indicator of trust.
Questions Ray asks himself to try and identify shared values:
- Does the client or potential client really want to make a long-lasting impact? Do they want to make a difference?
- Do people matter? No one person is enough in leadership. It takes a group of people committed to change to create long-lasting change. The leader must be committed to people and relationships.
Click the links below to listen to a past episode about both types of leadership:
Strategic Business Growth through Referral Marketing:
- What kind of business/industry do I want to develop?
- Who within my network knows something about that industry or client?
TOPIC: Use a framework to assess the health of an organization.
Clients often don’t want to change as much as they thought they did when they engage and organizational consultant. One tool that consultants can use to help clients overcome their resistance to change is an organizational health framework.
Resistance to change.
What is the source of the resistance?
- There is a natural resistance to change that happens. Change creates disequilibrium and we naturally don’t like to be out of balance.
Another explanation in organizational context
- Organizational dysfunction: The organization isn’t able to change because of the problems that are at the heart of how the organization function.
Organizations operate by the same principles that humans do in their development.
Suggested Reading:
The Living Company by Ari De Geus
De Geus studied companies that lasted over 100 years. He found that organizations that lasted over 100 years viewed themselves as a living organism, which embraced change.
Where organizations are effective, they are healthy.
When organizations are not effective, there is dysfunction somewhere.
Reframing Organizations by Lee Bolman & Terrence Deal
Frames outlined in Reframing Organizations
- Structure (how an organization is organized)
- People (human Resource)
- Organizational Politics (decision making)
- Symbolic (meaning symbols, stories, rituals, activities, logos, etc.)
- Process (how things are done)
- Soul (mission, purpose, values, vision=essences of organization)
Each frame can be functional or dysfunctional. It’s the role of a consultant to help the organization identify where health and dysfunction is in these frames.
Built to Last Jim Collins and Jerry Porras.
Organizational Health must look at each one of these frames. Status of health will have a direct impact on the success (or lack there off) of any consulting work.
What does a consultant need to pay attention to?
Intuitive Questions that a consultant would ask about an organization:
- Are they clear about their identity?
- Are there issues about how they are doing things?
Organizational Decision Making (Clue to Organizational Health)
- To what extent is the way the organization makes a decision (or anyone in the organizational health framework) congruent with organizational values?
- Most organization decision making is personality centered rather than organizational centered which results in no accountability.
- Most organizations practice the golden rule: who has the most gold, rules.
Organizational Framework is an important tool for consultants to help create better results.
The guiding question for consultants:
- What is the status of their health (however you define that)?
- If I engaged with them, to what extent can I help them to increase their health, rather than enabling their disfunction.
Intuition Questions:
- What do I know?
- What am I going to do about it?
The most dangerous thing for a consultant is to be in denial about the health of the organization.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Reframing Organizations by Lee Bolman & Terrence Deal
Built to Last Jim Collins and Jerry Porras