OUTSOURCING TO CONSULTANTS
Not getting quality
from consultants?
This may be why…
Right off the top, if it’s not a life-or-death surgical, ocean oil leak, or rocket science need to fill, stop with the panic attacks about finding a consultant with industry-specific experience.
What you need is to find a consultant who can get the job done. Period.
- Give me a guy, for example, who sells railroad cars full of French fries and I’ll teach him what I need him to know about representing my fine linens products (or my precision computer parts, or my insurance policies). And he’ll do better at it than a fine linens (or microchip) manufacturing (or insurance) expert.
- As another example, show me someone who maintains an efficient warehouse operation, and I’ll show her how to manage a shipping schedule better than the head of any trucking company.
Why? Because sales and organizational skills are lot harder, more time-consuming, and more expensive to teach than the ins and outs of your business.
Learning how you manufacture and package and sell your products and services is easy. Learning how to think and act like a sales or traffic management pro is not easy because it’s often an issue of attitude.
When you’re outsourcing projects and looking for consultants who can get the job done, don’t be making yourself crazy trying to find someone who has extensive experience in your industry or profession.
Look instead for someone who has extensive experience in her or his consulting specialty. A good solid marketing person or writer or web designer or trainer or coach, for instance, doesn’t need to have ANY expertise in your specific business or professional practice in order to help you produce a significant difference in sales, sales leads, CRM, or staff development.
The same principles and dynamics that work for selling hot dogs also work for selling precision parts, accounting and legal services, heart transplant specialists, or (aaah, entrepreneurship!) “Silly Bands.”
The art and insight of writing an effective news release, advertising campaign, or website, doesn’t change in the slightest.
The target markets change; the media selections change; the technical details change. But benefits are still what need to be emphasized.
All products and services are purchased because an emotional buying motive is triggered — not because a laundry list of rational features has been presented. Skilled marketing consultants know how to plan and create and activate emotional buying motive triggers that get results.
Your job is to teach them your business, be a sounding board for their recommendations, and help bring about action.
You can follow the advice of headhunters and placement services and counselors and job trainers all you want, and puppy-dog behind every leader in your industry or profession, but I’ll put my money on you finding the best outsource consulting service teams and individuals based on your own instincts and your own judge of character and chemistry. It got you here. It works.
Trust yourself.
The minute you’re able to find people who can fill the role(s) you have in mind, who have a track-record of success in many diverse fields, don’t hesitate to engage her/him/them simply because you think your candy company is so unique that only someone who is a candy business expert can appreciate you and your business enough to do justice to it. A sweet idea, but unrealistic.
Informed fresh perspectives don’t
come from clones or ostriches.
www.TheWriterWorks.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US
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