4 ms·

The article misses the thing that most people will have problems with - generating leads, getting a proposition agreed and selling that to the wider organisatio

The article misses the thing that most people will have problems with - generating leads, getting a proposition agreed and selling that to the wider organisation and budget holder. That’s the hardest part of running a professional services business by a factor of 10. The second hardest part, almost as hard as the first, is attracting and recruiting good and reliable talent who won’t mess up your customer engagements. Negotiating prices as per this article is right at the end of a very long process. If you get there you are almost home dry on the deal.

rad_gruchalski 4y ago
This. This is a full time job. Trying to get leads via LinkedIn? Twitter? Ain’t going to work - preaching to the choir. One needs to reach outside of their network. This is all about meeting people in real world and talking to them. Events, conferences, paid introductions. Alternatively, one does contracting sourced through headhunters but that’s not really consulting. It’s all about talking to people, building rapport, establishing trust. Often talks lead nowhere for months or years. Talk to people about their problems, suggest solutions, show your value, but don’t share how. Next point, without people on standby, some engagements are unreachable because the client will not engage if: a) you have no perm employees, b) you are too small, as in, what if you go under 6 months down the line or some bigger client paying more comes around. It can be rewarding but it’s a tough market to be in. Competition is huge and there’s always someone with prices lower than yours but positioned better than you at a given point in time.
- As_You_Wish 4y ago
  >This is all about meeting people in real world and talking to them. Events, conferences, paid introductions. Right. I've always told people to do 2 things to always have a job and lots of job offers all the time: 1) public speaking at events and conferences. 2) public writing. I know a guy, did SQL stuff, and if there was a group of 2 people that got together for a local users group, he'd travel 200 miles to give a presentation in front of them. He'd been doing it for years, as in decades. The guy got 4 - 5 job offers every day. He had his computer there and showed me the offers coming into his email. And of course, if you do a lot of writing for any kind of journal or blog, and get published, that's also going to explode your contacts. . When you publicly speak or write, it establishes you as an industry leader, even if there are people more technically knowledgeable than you are.
- abrichr 4y ago
  > ...show your value, but don’t share how. Can you please elaborate on this point? Are you saying that if you create an open source solution, people won't pay you to implement or support it for their use case?
  - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    I like this question. The contrary. IMO, this is one of the best ways to go about it. However, the solution should not give away your secret sauce. Look at examples, two come to my mind: Ory and Yugabyte. Their solutions are mostly open source and both are examples or healthy businesses operating on an open source foundation. But not all bits are open source. Not all knowledge gathered by the org is shared for free. In both cases, the value is open source, the how isn't. The premise is: "this is what can be done, you, the client, can do it roughly like this and this". There's a lot of space to fill between individual "this". That space is your secret sauce, the "how". For the "how", the client needs to engage. The client must have a way to learn the "how" but it's important that the client knows the price of the "how" and is contractually obliged to keep the "how" knowledge internal.
- bruce511 4y ago
  Becoming an "authority" can help as well. Having a public, professional, persona can help with credibility. I started off doing training, which progressed to a book, which progressed to more training, which progressed to a free weekly webinar where I answer questions. In my tiny niche, prospective clients "know my name". If I'm asked to supply credentials it's easy to do, and there's usually someone on their team who's heard of me. It helps skip over the "can he do the work" part of the negotiation. Customers are happier to do projects, and pay more, if they are confident the project will actually succeed. Typically its not their own money they are depending, but project failures hurt their upstream reputation.
tepitoperrito 4y ago
Hmmm, I cofounded the company I'm at now specifically because companies trying to grow in my industry are tired of chasing "qualified leads". So what we do is the work of getting to a request for bid or quote with target customers and forward those off to our clients. A lot of "engineering types" including myself can be semi blind to the value of the MBA types. Or even just sales in general. However, I think the content in the article addresses all that. They mention to: - frame a value proposition as value creation by solving a problem for your customer - set appropriate pricing, charge your worth - and to network professionaly If you're an individual running a FLOSS consultancy thats great advice to get going with sales, marketing, and B2B credibility. YMMV but for someone starting out they might not be able to afford a digital sales team or a large enterprise contract with an agency to drive growth.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  So your company acts as if they are part of "my" company and does the boring slog of "do you want a new CRM" until they find someone with that need and connect to a CRM provider?
  - tepitoperrito 4y ago
    Yup, we start by generating leads in house (based on your on boarding discussion we help with targeting as well). Then build / execute custom email and call prospecting campaigns on your behalf. All the way up to delivering your internal sales team an opportunity. If you're in B2B find us at Quantum-Quote.com : )
- q-big 4y ago
  > A lot of "engineering types" including myself can be semi blind to the value of the MBA types. Or even just sales in general. I don't think these engineering types are (semi-)blind to this. It is rather my opinion that this kind of sales pitches hardly works on engineers, and sales pitches from engineers do not work for MBA types. For example, a quite successful business consultant (who nevertheless knows a lot programming) told me between you and me that selling anything to me is insanely harder than selling to C-level executives because I nearly always find the weak points in his sales presentations and ask critical questions. On the other hand, I somehow "do not speak the language of the 'MBA types'". The most likely reason for that is that deep inside I consider completely different properties of a product to be important than most managers.

rad_gruchalski 4y ago

This. This is a full time job. Trying to get leads via LinkedIn? Twitter? Ain’t going to work - preaching to the choir. One needs to reach outside of their network. This is all about meeting people in real world and talking to them. Events, conferences, paid introductions. Alternatively, one does contracting sourced through headhunters but that’s not really consulting. It’s all about talking to people, building rapport, establishing trust. Often talks lead nowhere for months or years. Talk to people about their problems, suggest solutions, show your value, but don’t share how. Next point, without people on standby, some engagements are unreachable because the client will not engage if: a) you have no perm employees, b) you are too small, as in, what if you go under 6 months down the line or some bigger client paying more comes around. It can be rewarding but it’s a tough market to be in. Competition is huge and there’s always someone with prices lower than yours but positioned better than you at a given point in time.

As_You_Wish 4y ago
>This is all about meeting people in real world and talking to them. Events, conferences, paid introductions. Right. I've always told people to do 2 things to always have a job and lots of job offers all the time: 1) public speaking at events and conferences. 2) public writing. I know a guy, did SQL stuff, and if there was a group of 2 people that got together for a local users group, he'd travel 200 miles to give a presentation in front of them. He'd been doing it for years, as in decades. The guy got 4 - 5 job offers every day. He had his computer there and showed me the offers coming into his email. And of course, if you do a lot of writing for any kind of journal or blog, and get published, that's also going to explode your contacts. . When you publicly speak or write, it establishes you as an industry leader, even if there are people more technically knowledgeable than you are.
abrichr 4y ago
> ...show your value, but don’t share how. Can you please elaborate on this point? Are you saying that if you create an open source solution, people won't pay you to implement or support it for their use case?
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  I like this question. The contrary. IMO, this is one of the best ways to go about it. However, the solution should not give away your secret sauce. Look at examples, two come to my mind: Ory and Yugabyte. Their solutions are mostly open source and both are examples or healthy businesses operating on an open source foundation. But not all bits are open source. Not all knowledge gathered by the org is shared for free. In both cases, the value is open source, the how isn't. The premise is: "this is what can be done, you, the client, can do it roughly like this and this". There's a lot of space to fill between individual "this". That space is your secret sauce, the "how". For the "how", the client needs to engage. The client must have a way to learn the "how" but it's important that the client knows the price of the "how" and is contractually obliged to keep the "how" knowledge internal.
bruce511 4y ago
Becoming an "authority" can help as well. Having a public, professional, persona can help with credibility. I started off doing training, which progressed to a book, which progressed to more training, which progressed to a free weekly webinar where I answer questions. In my tiny niche, prospective clients "know my name". If I'm asked to supply credentials it's easy to do, and there's usually someone on their team who's heard of me. It helps skip over the "can he do the work" part of the negotiation. Customers are happier to do projects, and pay more, if they are confident the project will actually succeed. Typically its not their own money they are depending, but project failures hurt their upstream reputation.

tepitoperrito 4y ago

Hmmm, I cofounded the company I'm at now specifically because companies trying to grow in my industry are tired of chasing "qualified leads". So what we do is the work of getting to a request for bid or quote with target customers and forward those off to our clients. A lot of "engineering types" including myself can be semi blind to the value of the MBA types. Or even just sales in general. However, I think the content in the article addresses all that. They mention to: - frame a value proposition as value creation by solving a problem for your customer - set appropriate pricing, charge your worth - and to network professionaly If you're an individual running a FLOSS consultancy thats great advice to get going with sales, marketing, and B2B credibility. YMMV but for someone starting out they might not be able to afford a digital sales team or a large enterprise contract with an agency to drive growth.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago
So your company acts as if they are part of "my" company and does the boring slog of "do you want a new CRM" until they find someone with that need and connect to a CRM provider?
- tepitoperrito 4y ago
  Yup, we start by generating leads in house (based on your on boarding discussion we help with targeting as well). Then build / execute custom email and call prospecting campaigns on your behalf. All the way up to delivering your internal sales team an opportunity. If you're in B2B find us at Quantum-Quote.com : )
q-big 4y ago
> A lot of "engineering types" including myself can be semi blind to the value of the MBA types. Or even just sales in general. I don't think these engineering types are (semi-)blind to this. It is rather my opinion that this kind of sales pitches hardly works on engineers, and sales pitches from engineers do not work for MBA types. For example, a quite successful business consultant (who nevertheless knows a lot programming) told me between you and me that selling anything to me is insanely harder than selling to C-level executives because I nearly always find the weak points in his sales presentations and ask critical questions. On the other hand, I somehow "do not speak the language of the 'MBA types'". The most likely reason for that is that deep inside I consider completely different properties of a product to be important than most managers.