Consulting Practice Advice

A fascinating realization that changed my life: The common path isn't always the right path for your business. We've all heard the advice: "Follow the trends, do what works for others." But what if your key to success is creating your own unique strategy, even when it goes against 'best practices'? Here's why I like this: 1. Innovation instead of imitation: While competitors are busy copying each other, you can focus on being different. Standing out. This doesn't mean you need to reinvent the wheel. Just add your creative, authentic take on existing ideas. 2. Niche markets are absolute gold mines: Instead of competing in oversaturated markets, identify a niche that is wildly underserved. Create a unique solution to a specific problem and turn that into a lean, profitable offer. 3. Personal branding (with a twist): In a world full of carbon copies, be 100% original. Don't be a better version of someone else, be the best version of yourself. Share your story, not just what you think will sell. 4. Redefining success: Your business goals don't have to mirror everyone else's. Maybe success for you is about impact and work-life balance, rather than just profit. Good! Have you ever made a business decision that went against the grain but paid off? ~~~ If you found this helpful, consider resharing ♻️ and follow me Justin Welsh for more content like this.

📈 B2B sales seems to be regressing back to transactional approaches, which hinders progress. Sales organizations and reps should focus on improving overall sales effectiveness. However, this is not the case, and continuing on this path could lead to even more sales challenges for companies. 💼 🔑 A rule to consider: Non-technology companies should avoid adopting strategies and processes from tech companies, as these approaches tend to be transactional. Buyers and decision-makers reject such methods as they fail to create value and may alienate them from the sales experience. 🚫 💼 When it comes to technologies, all you really need is a CRM, a source of contact information, and a telephone. In the past, I grew revenue from 3M to 7.8M in just a year using nothing more than a stack of index cards and a telephone. I believe you can achieve similar success. 📊 🚫 Here's a list of strategies causing a regression towards increasingly transactional B2B sales: The Taylorism of Modern Sales: Slicing the sales role into thinner slices without a careful consideration of your strategy might not be the best approach. Let your strategy determine how you organize your sales force. 📈 The Cult of Efficiency: Automating communication, especially in cold outreach, isn't always effective. Sending mass emails to countless contacts might result in spam and disengagement. Focus on meaningful interactions. 📧 A Total Lack of Value Creation: Trying to rush the sales conversation to win a client can be self-oriented and reduce your chances of success. Create value for your contacts and stakeholders to differentiate yourself from competitors. 💡 Consultative Selling: Approach sales as a consultant, providing counsel, advice, and recommendations. Being more strategic will enhance your sales results. 📚 📈 The regression of B2B sales to a transactional approach can harm sales results, impact win rates, quota attainment, and cause burnout. Instead, optimize for sales effectiveness, not just efficiency, to outperform your competitors. Remember, success lies in being more effective, not merely efficient. 💪 📚 For more insights on elite sales strategies, creating value, and becoming truly consultative, check out "Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative." #B2BSales #SalesEffectiveness #ConsultativeSelling #SalesStrategies #BusinessGrowth 🚀

The organizations seeing the biggest wins with AI? They all started in the same place (and it’s not AI). After working with companies across industries, I've noticed a clear pattern in what separates successful AI initiatives from the rest. The companies that win with AI follow this path: 𝟭. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁. What exactly are we trying to solve? Why haven't we been able to solve it before? What's the real business impact? 𝟮. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁. Before jumping into AI, they ask: Are there other tried-and-true technologies that could actually solve this problem? Could standard SQL scripts work? What about robotic process automation? 𝟯. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗳𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗔𝗜’𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗱-𝗼𝗻. Here's what I'm seeing in enterprise: AI agents still need very clear and precise rules to make decisions on their own. They're not the autonomous problem-solvers we sometimes imagine. 𝟰. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴. If there are no other viable options after exploring existing tools and technologies that have already withstood the test of time, then, they explore AI. Don't use AI for the sake of AI. Start with the problem. Understand why traditional approaches haven't worked. Then choose the right tool for the job. This approach isn't about avoiding AI, it's about setting your AI initiatives up for real success. What's been your experience? How are you approaching AI strategy in your organization?

I have been on over 500 calls till now asking creators to try topmate.io and guess what, I have been ghosted countless times by them! "I will get back to you soon." is one of the most common responses when people are not interested in your services. As a professional, it is frustrating when your promising prospects fail to convert into clients, even after an engaging initial conversation. And it hurts even more when they ghost you without giving any reason. Here are four key factors to consider: 1⃣Misaligned sales and marketing: If your sales and marketing teams aren't in sync, your prospects may be receiving mixed messages. Ensure open communication and shared understanding of the ideal customer profile and lead qualification criteria. 2⃣Lack of customer understanding: Don't assume you know your prospects' needs. Take the time to truly listen and ask insightful questions to uncover their unique challenges and requirements. This will help you provide tailored solutions. 3⃣Credibility gap: If prospects don't trust your advice or believe you have their best interests in mind, they'll hesitate to commit. Focus on building rapport and demonstrating your expertise, not just closing the deal. 4⃣High-pressure sales tactics turn off prospects: Position yourself as a helpful guide, not a salesperson on a mission. By addressing these common pitfalls, you can create a more transparent, customer-centric sales process that builds trust and addresses your prospects' real needs. This will not only improve your conversion rates but also foster long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. After I started keeping the above things in mind, I have seen an exponential increase in the conversion rate. What else do you think puts off a prospect during the call? Your opinion is valuable!

Q. Liz, what can I do to improve my company's culture? A. Here are nine ideas: 1. For jobs that can be performed from home, let employees decide when to work from home and when to commute. You hire adults. They can decide for themselves where to work. 2. Make work hours as flexible as possible. There is no reason for everyone to start at the same time and leave at the same time. This is a holdover from the factory era. 3. Get rid of performance reviews. Employees and managers hate them, HR hates administering them, they are a huge time suck and they rest on the anachronistic notion that "everybody needs formal feedback." The best feedback, as you know, is timely and specific - not an annual or quarterly overview. Pay people based on the market rate for their roles, give feedback when employees want or need it and ditch performance reviews. 4. Evolve past formal dress codes. Funeral homes and a very small number of other businesses can still reasonably require formal attire. Otherwise, it's a pointless expense and hassle. 5. Let employees transfer internally without requiring their manager's permission. Managers don't own their employees. Anyone could leave the company without their manager's say-so, so why make it easier to leave the company than to transfer internally? 6. Let employees keep the frequent flyer miles they earn with their own rear ends in airplane seats (and generally, by traveling for business on their own time). 7. Add a RIF policy to your handbook that says that employees who are terminated without cause will receive severance pay. Everyone deserves that. Remember that the US is the only industrialized country where working people don't have contracts. That lack of basic worker protections hurts employers as much as it hurts employees. When business owners wonder, "Where has employee loyalty gone?" the answer is, "It's off in an abyss somewhere right next to job security." Give employees the security your companies executives enjoy and working people in every other industrialized country take for granted, and you'll get more from them as well - but of course! 8. Make any sort of team-building event or personality assessment (MBTI, DiSC, etc.) optional and take care not to stigmatize people who don't want to participate. Team building events are unpleasant for lots of people for various reasons, and for some they are downright torture. Personality tests and assessments are not for everyone, either. Make the decision to participate or not each employee's choice. Never, ever use personality assessments in the hiring process. 9. It's easy and free to redesign your recruiting process to be faster and friendlier, and it'll help you with your recruiting and retention when you do. Get rid of terse autoresponder emails and the Mad Men era interview script. Reply promptly to the folks you want to hire and the ones you don't. This is an easy way to upgrade your culture. Here's to you and your team!

Massive but often overlooked reality check for fractional execs/consultants: Your greatest source of profitable “new” clients are nearly always current and past clients, colleagues, and those in their immediate circle. They know you, they know your work, it’s familiar. Yes, it’s important to be sharing knowledge / success / setbacks / hopes and dreams with the world on LinkedIn, and “shooting your shot” with some occasional cold outreach. But with extremely few options (like literally two), I can trace ten years of client “trees and roots” growth and probably 70% of revenue to my first major client retainer in 2015. Here’s 5 practical prioritization tips: 1) Focus on delivering amazing results for clients always, 2) Dedicate most of your biz dev efforts on your closest circle i.e. people and places that already know and trust you. Ask these people for referrals. 3) When doing cold or lukewarm outreach, focus on direct adjacent sector or similar work streams and be precise “In 9 months, I helped _____build an sustainable community engagement program that [insert very specific results]. 4) Share what you know and love on social and accept speaking invites to events and platforms. 5) Make referrals and get referrals. When something is outside of your wheelhouse, be diligent in connecting the potential client with someone who can knock it out of the park. I guarantee you both parties will remember when they’ll need your skillset. ———————————— And that’s it for now! Anything else folks want to add?

Stop surviving and start thriving. 15 years as a top-tier seller and leader have taught me 3 ways to move past surviving to thriving. I'm sharing them with you. Here's the Modern Sales Philosophy in 3 parts. No longer do we besiege our customers with a barrage of emails and calls until they surrender to a 'yes'. Our task today? Earning our buyer's time and consideration by becoming irresistible. 💫 Rule 1: Be Magnetic 💫 Put time and effort into becoming irresistible to your prospects. Join their conversations, show genuine curiosity in their needs, and be the helping hand they didn't know they needed. 🤲 Rule 2: Reciprocity is Queen 🤲 Shift the mindset from 'getting' to 'giving'. Give before you take. Question of the day - have I earned the right, through my generosity, valuable insights, and deposits, to make this ask? 🔄 Rule 3: Grow or Perish 🔄 Change is your new best friend. Promise yourself you'll keep improving, keep learning. Adapting isn't just important, it's obligatory. Our buyer's needs aren't set in stone, and neither should our approach be. Make the right impact. Transform from a salesperson to a trusted advisor. #BuyerCentricSales #EarnTheRight #B2BSales

I had Nick Glimsdahl on the Negotiate Anything Podcast and we were talking about skepticism in the world of business and sales. The conclusion we came to was that since many of us feel like we are constantly being marketed to, we shut down much faster when we sense this happening. This is a frequent occurrence for those in the sales industry. Potential clients start to feel like the only reason you are being friendly is so that you can sell them something. So how do we overcome this skepticism? By breaking predictable patterns. So, here’s an example: Let’s say in a typical sales interaction, you would begin by offering some free advice or asking them about some problem they are having. There’s a high likelihood that many of the people you speak with will assume that you are only offering to help them as a tactic to eventually persuade them to purchase something. This only increases their skepticism and blocks their willingness to listen to what you have to say. In this case, the predictable behavior would be doing just that. Simply asking questions with the goal of turning the conversation towards a sales pitch. So here is something you can do instead. Be genuinely generous, not strategically generous. Create goodwill in the relationship by helping people without expecting something in return. Then, follow your genuine curiosity with authentic advice. One thing Nick likes to say in situations like this is: “Regardless of which company you decide to go with, [Product X]  would be a good decision because of….” It’s the consultative sales process that helps you to be seen as a trusted advisor. Once they realize that you are offering advice without the expectation of anything in return, it makes them more likely to trust you. Ironically, this increases your odds of securing them as a client, in the moment or at some point in the future. #Negotiation #Sales #Business

Early in my career, I needed to tell a senior executive that his behavior was harming morale. I 𝐀𝐆𝐎𝐍𝐈𝐙𝐄𝐃 over how to have this tough talk without endangering my job. There was no easy way around it. This was going to be 𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐃. Ultimately, we sat down together in a neutral setting. I focused on my desire to see the team thrive. The executive, while surprised, appreciated my honesty. We had an open dialogue, and things improved. It was a growth moment for both of us. 𝐒𝐔𝐂𝐂𝐄𝐒𝐒! 𝘏𝘖𝘞'𝘋 𝘐 𝘋𝘖 𝘐𝘛? Here are three things that have always worked best for me: 1. 𝐁𝐞 𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐮𝐞, not the person. Make it about solving problems, not attacking character. 2. Listen first, then speak. 𝐒𝐞𝐞𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝 before asking to be understood. 3. 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝. Align on shared goals and good intentions to prevent discord. Courageous conversations require emotional intelligence, empathy, and care. With the right mindset and approach, you can express yourself effectively while minimizing defensiveness in others. 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕'𝒔 𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒂𝒈𝒆𝒐𝒖𝒔 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒔𝒖𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒇𝒖𝒍? Share one tip below for constructively having necessary but tough talks. I look forward to learning from your experiences!

A friend of mine (Debra Levin) shared an article with me this morning that made me sad & mad. The New York Times, wrote about life coach training, but everything in the article could have applied just as well to someone who hires a coach. There are lots of studies that show that coaching & mentoring can be very effective at every level. We also know that anyone can grab the label coach. Various organizations are working to create standards so that customers get a reliable, repeatable experience. The International Coaching Federation, the EMCC Global & the Institute of Coaching just to name three that I am affiliated with are cultivating a framework of learning, ethics, consistency & more. Schools such as Wellcoaches, Positive Acorn and others are providing rigorous programs to develop coaching skills in coaches, mentors, leaders - anyone who values deep listening, powerful questions & the capacity to coax out of others their most creative ideas & actions. But not every coach or trainer has the benefit of this level of education & accreditation. So how can you find out whether your coach/coach trainer is the real deal? 1. Check who they were trained by & research that organization. How many coaches do they have? What is their mission? Who are they accredited by? 2. How many clients/students do they work with? Even the most accomplished & extraverted coaches find there is a limit to the number of people they can coach. This is because, while coaches may seem to be doing not very much they are in fact multitasking in a way that few people can. (See below). 3. Ask what the coach's approach is. It is common for a coach to suggest a package - either a number of sessions or a duration such as 3 months. Rome was not built in a day. But our medium term goal is to "launch" you. We are aiming for the day when the client says "I was going to call you, but then I thought what would Ruth ask me now?" Our goal should not be to keep the client forever. We are looking to empower clients not ensnare them. 4. Ask what their continuing education looks like. The best coaches know that they continue to grow & develop as does the science behind coaching. No plan means no growth. You want a coach or coach trainer who is growing their own skills every day. The price tag on effective coaching can be daunting, but the best coaches will not lock you into endless or accelerating payments. Get clear what the options are if you are not getting what you signed up for. For example, if you cancel a coaching agreement with me in the first month you get at least a 90% refund. Not sure about your coach yet? Do they offer group programs? These are usually more affordable, you get the benefit of others in the group with you & you get to see what the coach is like. In the comments I will share an option to come for a FREE laser coaching session. Curious to know what my super colleagues would add.... #coaching #Consumerprotection Coaching Ethics Forum