AUTUMN 2013
FMI
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IGF JOURNAL
5
“The Consultant with
Pink
Hair”
Cal Harrison
Many
FMI Journal
readers work regularly
with professional advisors – accountants,
engineers or management consultants,
for example. Many others are themselves
professional advisors to governments - and
still others will probably be one day.
One of the hurdles in the transition to
the private sector advisory sector is the
issue of marketing your services. It’s fine
helping out your old employers for a while
but those who rely on this typically don’t
last long in their new profession and are
sometimes destined for a shock.
Being a professional advisor – perhaps
a management consultant - is a highly
specialised and competitive business and
selling your professional expertise is one of
the most difficult and demanding parts of it.
So how do you set about it? Largely by
“differentiating” your services to define
your unique functional expertise, and then
by selling the expertise.
Marketing folks understand the value
of differentiation in selling. It’s what
makes a business different from the
competition in the eyes of the buyer. So
effective differentiators are among the
most important tools in a firm’s business
development armoury - and among the first
things a new firm should be thinking about.
What do we have that our competitors
don’t – and can’t easily replicate?
One of the most respected “marketing
advisors to professional advisors” is Cal
Harrison, CMC of Winnipeg. It’s not
often you come across a fictional tale about
a pair of management consultants - or
management consulting for that matter
– as chock full of valuable selling lessons
as this book is. Harrison has successfully
woven much of his selling advice into
a short and entertaining story - and it
succeeds well. Individual consultants
and firms wondering about how best to
differentiate their practices to consistently
acquire good, premium-paying clients will
find this book interesting and valuable.
Concerned about the time you spend
responding to government RFPs (“Rarely
Functional Processes” according to
Harrison)? About the value of attending
networking events? About what, and
how, your buyers actually buy? About
which points of differentiation are really
important to your buyers? (Clue – fewer
than you might think!) Read this book and
you won’t be.
Are things like price, “our people”,
professional
qualifications,
customer
service, number of awards received, third
party endorsements or size of the firm
really valuable to buyers? Harrison tells
you which are, which aren’t, and why. He
also defines the criteria that a firm should
use to choose its points of differentiation.
One of the characters in the story says
“I don’t want a consultant, I want some
good advice”. And that might give you a
second clue.
If you have attended one of Harrison’s
business development seminars you
probably know what your most effective
differentiators are, and why. If you haven’t,
pick up this book and find out.
Chris Jones
, MBA, FCMC is a Certified Management Consultant and an
Associate Faculty member at Royal Roads University in Victoria British
Columbia. He is a business writer, teacher, innovator, management consultant
and a life-long learner with a particular interest in online business tools to
make Canadian business, governments and non-profits more successful. He
is also winner of the 2010 Alan G. Ross Award for Writing Excellence awarded
annually by the fm
*
igf Journal. Readers interested in knowing more should
contact him at
.
Publisher: RockBench Publishing Corp.;
1st edition (August 3, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1605440140
ISBN-13: 978-1605440149
