The Weekly Brief
Memos written for consultants Aug 2014 - June 2024.
Increasing your confidence
Here are two videos with a total of 10 minutes viewing time. Let’s start with The Gap and The Gain video. 🏋🏽♂️ I’ve found this simple concept incredibly useful for helping me build and maintain confidence in the progress I’m making toward my goals. When you start to
How is your pipeline?
Here are 4 tips to take it up a gear ... 1/ Find something worth saying to a client who is struggling right now. That means caring about their business problems and missed opportunities. Bring some fresh insights about what's important to their success. Make sure it's
How to improve your time investment?
This mini-mission comes from my performance coaching work with corporate executives. These clients wanted to improve and accelerate their performance. I didn't create the mini-mission and am not sure who did. If you are reading this and know who I should attribute to to please let me know.
The fear of stretch goals
Many consultants fear setting stretch goals. They worry they'll fail or overcommit. Here’s how you can do it and succeed. #1 Inspire yourself. Ambitious targets push you. They inspire greater effort and creativity. So, don't settle for easy wins. Set yourself up to achieve more
Stop asking dumb 'consultant questions' - Provide some leadership
Value creation with insight and a point-of-view “Winning sales” isn’t a useful mindset for client advisors. Offering insight, using your consulting skills, is a more congruent approach. My friend Stuart talks about educating people so they can buy. That’s the way I like to think about this too.
Applying Harry Potter 'reverse engineering' to your meetings.
I was listening to a Podcast earlier this week. An idea came up from one of the speakers. They explained how they reverse engineered the entire first Harry Potter movie. They went through it scene by scene and wrote down: • The setting • The dialogue • The “plot” action It took them
A single habit top consultants have that you can copy easily.
1 Habit Top Consultants Have That You Can Copy ... And Immediately Improve Sales Performance Most successful consultants share the same handful of things in common: They are experts in their field and recognised as such. They have, and offer, a different and useful perspective. They love working with other people
Why using consulting tools pre-sales is a winner.
It surprises me how few consultants apply everyday consulting tools in pre-sales situations. For example, a consultant could use Force Field Analysis to help clients decide. Here’s how: 1. Figure out what change the client wants to make, such as implementing a new system. 2. Find the drivers pushing
Sales performance … they make it sound so easy.
But it’s not … for example take some of the bog-standard sales advice you’ll hear: * Relationship first. * Lead with insight. * Leverage emotions. * Position as a peer. It’s in all the “how to sell consultancy” books. And it’s good stuff. But what happens when you’ve done all
Clients always have issues.
Clients always have issues, whether they're problems to solve or opportunities to capture. You may need to raise these issues with the client ... or they may bring them up themselves. The first step is to have an initial discussion about the issue. You'll want to lead