The Profitable Consultant: Starting, Growing, and Selling Your Expertise

Appendix A

Putting It All to Work for You—A Review

Now that you understand the five steps of this process much better, let's see what it looks like when you put it all together as a more relevant scenario for you, the business consultant. Let's watch a play called “The Sale That Wasn't a Sale.”

Act 1

Scene 1—Inducing the client to come to you.

(You're sitting in your office when the phone rings. You answer it to speak with a gentleman who says he's the president of a local manufacturing firm, and he saw one of your articles on poor sales performers and would like to talk with you about that some more. You agree to meet him for coffee the next morning. You meet each other the following morning).

You: Hi, Mr. Smith, thanks for calling and making time to meet. You said you wanted to talk about something you read in one of my articles. Which one was that again—The Problem with Salespeople Who Suck?

The Client: Yes, Mr. Jones, that's right.

You: Call me Johnny, please. What exactly does your company do?

The Client: Sure, no problem. We're a local manufacturing company that makes injectors for locomotive diesel engines. We do about $25 million a year. I called because I was reading your article on what drives poor sales performance and I wanted to talk with you more because we've got some really horrible salespeople right now and they're killing us!

Act 1

Scene 2—Establishing the Power Source.

(Having decided this guy sounds legitimate and has a company you might be interested ...