Our top tips for consultants from 2016

What lessons will you capitalize upon?
 
Our business serves two broad categories of clients: consultants and creatives (such as ad agencies or direct clients who require creative services). In case you didn’t notice, we alternate our blog posting by audience. It’s not always very clear-cut or apparent; for example, productivity boosters apply to both.
 
But for this article, we’d like to take a quick, bullet-pointed, hyperlinked look at some of the cool topics we’d covered for consultants in 2016.
 
Here’s a quick teaser; if you’d like to read any article in its entirety, simply click its link:

• New Year’s resolutions for building business. It posted back in January, but January’s right around the corner again. Want some quick ideas for making next year better than this year? Check it out.

• How to interview subject matter experts. How can you extract the maximum amount of actionable information in the minimum amount of time? This article contains lots of good tips from interviews of everyone from top chefs to retired Army generals.

• How to tell good busy from bad busy. If you are 1) jammed and 2) not rich, you should read this one. You’ll get a fresh look at prioritizing and some good tips and approaches you may not have considered before.

• How to solicit testimonials and write client success stories. It’s not much fun—or even very fruitful—to toot your own horn. Get others to toot it for you. But your timing and approach are critical; you won’t get a second chance to do this right.

• Five quick ways to boost your consulting practice. This one is such a quick and easy read that it’s certainly worth the look. If you get just one good idea from it, it’ll be worth your time.

• When should you sever a relationship? This is a subject most people prefer to avoid. But we tackled it, from three different angles: 1) cutting ties internally, 2) letting go of vendors, and 3) walking away from clients. If you’re on the fence, this article may tip you in the proper direction.

• How to be less “vendor,” and more “partner.” This is one of those subtle, the-difference-is-in-the-nuances subjects, yet the proper application of the pointers in this article can reap tremendous rewards. Check this one out only if you’re interested in taking your game to the next level.

• How to become a thought leader in your field. Not sure if this would stroke your ego or intimidate you, but we illustrated this one with a little photo of Albert Einstein. The point of this blog post is not how to become an expert—but rather how to promulgate your expertise to bring in more business. Big difference. As the subhead to this one teased: “Are you delivering more value than you’re communicating?”

• Formal vs. informal proposals: Which nets more? This one was meant to be especially provocative, and it was. We got lots of feedback on this one, both complimentary and critical. Do you agree with its conclusion?

• Exploiting the in-person/teleconference/email hierarchy. Are you controlling the message by controlling the medium? This may seem like a simple topic, but the solutions are anything but simplistic. And given that you use these modalities to connect to clients every day, every bit of knowledge should work to your advantage.

• Planning your holiday communications. If you’re just getting to this one now, concentrate on the “January/New Year’s” portion thereof. We won’t hold it against you.

 
Have feedback from any of these articles you’d like to share? Or do you have a topic you’d like us to cover next year? Contact us and let us know. We’d love to hear from you. 

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