Million Dollar Consulting® Performance


You should be hearing more and more of "We're tightening our belt," and "We've learned our lesson about expenses," and "We've frozen purchases." That's right, you should be hearing it.

That's because people get scared, and they try to manage the known (expense) instead of the less-than-known (revenue and profit). Your job is to help them be less scared. MUCH less scared.

Coolness under fire
Here are some highly appropriate responses to those objections above:

• I don't blame you, so are my other clients. Let me tell you what we're working on together to achieve greater economies while maximizing margins.
• That's what the last six prospects told me. Five became clients. The other is still struggling.
• Why do you think some businesses are thriving right now, even in your industry?
• Then you'll want to hear about how to be positioned to take advantage of the inevitable resurgence, which the best organizations are preparing for.
• I understand, but you can only tighten so much before you cut off the blood supply. Would you like to hear how to stay healthy and not fade away?
• Who is "we"? Are your employees making decisions at the front line which are saving you money AND gaining you customers?
• And how do you propose to maintain, let alone build, customer loyalty when your plan is to reduce customer services and response time?
• What if you primary competition launched an aggressive marketing campaign next week? Do you think you'd lose market share? I do.
• Your competition is probably thinking along similar lines and pulling back. Doesn't it make more sense to move into that vacuum?
• What is your priority for "suffering"? Is it your quality, your service, your market share, your margins? Or all of the above?
• This is a $14 trillion (or whatever) economy. Are you seriously saying that you think you're unable to find new customers and provide new products and services to existing customers? If so, let me turn your world upside down.
• You're really not talking about lowering your profile, you're talking about whether you survive or not. If you keep your head down long enough, you'll disappear from sight.
• If you're tightening your belt, it means your belt is already too lose or you have too much weight to begin with. Why not take a strategic look at your operation instead of a reactive one caused by external elements?
• Consider me a pair of suspenders.

Don't sell the conference table
This means, of course, that you must practice what you preach. (Newspapers, in terrible shape right now, are notorious hypocrites, because they don't do what they advise their advertisers to do: become aggressive in tough times.)

I remember a small consulting firm where one of the partners always wanted to sell the conference table for a few hundred dollars every time the business became slow. He wound up simply servicing accounts, a partner no more.

While everyone else is walking on egg shells, take huge strides. Invest more in your brand and your image. Contact every past client, prospect, recommender, and friend you can think of or find. People need confidence and direction right now, and the classic institutions that provided it, such as the financial industry and government, have lost all credibility. They are searching for people who can lead them through the uncertainty.

On an immediate, local, situational, and personal basis, help your clients work through the ambiguity of the times. There are classic approaches to individual and organizational development that are always effective when properly employed: leadership, team work, communication, involvement, responsiveness, and so on.

"Cutting back" is an arbitrary alternative when people have nothing more creative or compelling to offer. Don't take it as an edict, react to it as a challenge and opportunity. The question is: Why are they cutting back? It's almost always because they don't know what else to do.

Million Dollar Consulting® Performance is about helping them understand that they have more options than they believe. So do you.

© Alan Weiss 2009. All rights reserved.

Alan Weiss, Ph.D. is the author of 30 books appearing in 9 languages. He runs his famous Million Dollar Consulting® Colleges all over the world, and has consulted with over 500 organizations, such as the Federal Reserve, Mercedes-Benz, Hewlett-Packard, and J.P. Morgan Chase. He serves on a half-dozen boards, and is the only non-journalist to have ever received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Press Institute.. You can reach him at Alan@summitconsulting.com or his blog, http://www.contrarianconsulting.com.