Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Is there a way to make your consulting firm’s business development efforts easier, stable and more effective? Yeparoonie. There sure is.
Visibility-building undergirds your consulting firm’s endeavors to attract clients. And investing ongoing, consistent energy and time is required to reliably produce prospects and leads.
In contrast, haphazard, sporadic efforts yield disappointingresults.
Unfortunately, visibility-building activities are hard. They demand willpower, brain power and discipline, all of which are depletable.
That means in any short time period, your supply is limited.
For example, if you rely on possessing sufficient staminaand verve at the end of your busy consulting days to engage in outreach,chances are you’re not calling prospects very often.
You need a method for conducting visibility-buildingactivities that doesn’t depend on depletable resources.
Rituals
Rituals circumvent the need for energy, willpower and discipline to fuel visibility-building activity.
As a result, rituals make your consulting firm’s business development efforts regular, automatic and dependable—exactly what you need to attract more clients.
Intentions leave room for you to opt out of your beneficial action. (“Sigh, I’m just too tired to make phone calls. And besides, I need to run out for more Raisinets.”) Rituals, on the other hand, involve no choice.
Habits describe your usual behavior, but allow for exceptions.
In contrast, rituals are are Pavlovian, bell-rings-salivation-commences, non-negotiable behaviors designed to boost your consulting firm’s visibility-building.
How to Create Powerful, Visibility-Building Rituals
Rituals consist of two components: Triggers and Behaviors.
| Trigger | Behavior |
| After the prayer leader intones, “And we all say,” | the congregation responds, “Amen.” |
| Before dispatching his Hill Street police officers onto their beats, | Sgt. Esterhaus always cautioned, “Be careful out there.” |
| Every time my Dad sits at a restaurant table, | he assembles all flatware within reach into a balancing, kinetic table sculpture. |
To create visibility-building, prospect-attracting rituals for you and your firm, marry very specific Triggers to equally specific Behaviors.
Triggers can be times, dates, or situations.
Also, remember that rituals can incorporate rewards. Forinstance, publicly presenting your team’s gold star to the team member mostresponsible for a new client win.
After a bit of thought, I quickly identified 30 generic Triggers and Behaviors that could be developed into rituals. Some combinations are illustrated below.
10 Triggers that Set Off Growth Explosions at YourConsulting Firm
- At 8:00 a.m. on Wednesdays make at least 3 outreach calls,
- On the first Tuesday of each month, call a contact to say, “Thank you.”
- The Monday after daylight savings time, clean all “deadwood” from your CRM.
- Immediately after every phone call with a prospect, write a one-sentence prompt to help you with your next conversation.
- Last thing before you leave the office on Friday, write 3 accomplishments you’re proud of and three crucial, business-development activities you’ll bang out next week.
- After boarding a flight, hand write at least one note to a prospect.
- Each morning, before you look at email, write (i.e., create IP) for at least 10 minutes.
- Whenever you have dinner “on the road” for a client, search the news for mentions of the client.
- 10 minutes after you’ve been stood up for a meeting or phone call, reach out to two contacts you haven’t connected with in at least six months.
- I’ve left this spot open for you to contribute your idea.
What business-building rituals do you observe without fail in your consulting practice?
Text and images are © 2019 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.