The Consulting Bible, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4The Journey: How to Market Your Value Rapidly and Profitably

Creating Gravity and Attraction

The Market Gravity^® Wheel is a representation of your options to attract people to you. The longer you're in business, the more you should be:

• Attracting people because of your repute and expertise.
• Gaining business through referral business from clients.
• Gaining business through repeat business from clients.

That combination should amount to about 85 percent of your annual business. If you accompany that with my belief that you need to jettison the bottom 15 percent of your business every couple of years, then you can see that you'll need to generate a modest amount of new business, but not that much.

There are three aspects to any sale: The immediate payment for the immediate project or advisory role; referral business; and expansion business. Most consultants settle for only the first, and very few manage to exploit all three.

Too many consultants are struggling well into their careers because they fail to implement this philosophy and strategy. They become immersed in the delivery of their work, don't market, and then face the feast‐or‐famine syndrome: Either they have work that they're being paid to deliver or they are desperately seeking such work.

This is the proverbial “roller coaster” syndrome. If you're not constantly attracting business, it's hard to climb the next hill and often you don't have the momentum to do it.

They are neither ant nor grasshopper. ...