guerilla marketing for pm

8/6/2019 Guerilla Marketing for PM

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According to an old saying, You cant get fired for hiring IBM.Well, those days are long gone.

Today, clients make the best choices, not the best-known choices. The name on your business cardmay get you in the door, but todays clients are seeking talent, not firm names.

The competition for new work is not between firms, but between people and their ideas. Yourmarketing must convey more than buzzwords; it must tell the full story of the talents and potential

benefits you can offer clients.

Guerrilla marketing extends beyond selling and completingprojectsit applies to everything you do.

Your firms name, its services, methods of delivering services, pricing plan, the location of

your office, and how you promote your practice are all part of guerrilla marketing. And there ismuch more, including the clients with whom you choose to work, how you answer the telephone,

even how you design your invoices and envelopes. The object of guerrilla marketing is to buildand maintain profitable relationships, not merely to get clients.

As a consultant, you face a vastly different challenge than those who

sell cereal or toothpaste. You are the product and, unlike a bottle of mouthwash, your services areexpensive, intangible, and sold before they are produced. Your success hinges on the relationships

you forge and the quality of your work. You must focus all your efforts on those

factors: Its your guerrilla mission.Everyone you deal withespecially your clientsmust beconvinced that you will always deliver what you have promised.

Traditional Marketing Guerrilla Marketing

Central to the business Is the business

Fuzzy message Focused messageConsultant-focused Insight-based

Invest money Build intellectual assets

Build brand identity Build client relationships

Enhance revenue Enhance profitCreate media perception Reveal reality

Tell and sell Listen and serve

One size fits all One size fits noneTake market share Create markets


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Clients and prospects have zero tolerance for marketing fluff,

but a deep thirst for ideas that can help them. Selling services isnot just about price, qualifications, or your firms long string of

success stories. First and foremost, it is about the insights and

ideas you bring to clients. If you cant provide great ideas, youmight as well stay home.

SIX PRINCIPLES OF GUERRILLA MARKETING

FOR CONSULTANTS

Principle 1: Insight-Based Marketing Wins

Your insights into an industry, a discipline, or a specific company should be the fuel for your

guerrilla marketing plan. Your qualifications may get you that first client meeting, but the ideasyou propose will be your strongest selling points.

Clients also ignore jargon-rich and content-free messages. Theyhave become desensitized to such messages and skeptical about

whether they reflect reality.

Consultants are often hesitant to disclose their best insights intheir marketing materials. However, insights are the guerrillas ultimate weapon. They cut through

the marketing morass. Frame your marketing to help clients resolve urgent, substantive issues.Give them original, insightful, and valuable ideas at every step of the marketing process.

Dont be afraid that you will give too much away before you are hired. Howard Aiken, co-inventorof one of the worlds first computers, advises, Dont worry about people stealing an idea. If its

original, youll have to ram it down their throats.


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Principle 2: Guerrilla Marketing Is Cohesive

and Coordinated

Guerrillas employ a wide assortment of marketing tactics to send cohesive messages to targeted

clients. They use their Web sites, newsletters or zines, speeches, research and survey reports,

presentation materials, proposals, endorsements, testimonials, references, andeven their letterhead and business cards. Unless your marketing

strategy is well integrated and all elements are coordinated with each

other and your overall plan, they wont get the job done.

Each of your marketing approaches must support, reinforce, and cross-promote the others. Your

goal is to imprint multiple, positive impressions on clients in your target markets.

The right mix of marketing tactics working in unison will create an overall market impactthat is more potent than the sum of its parts.

Reference your articles and Web site in your proposals and your research in direct mail andspeeches. Design your business card and Yellow Pages ad to promote special features of your

practice. If your firm specializes in improving warehouse workers productivity, highlight that

fact; or if strengthening employee attitudes is your forte, showcase it in all your market

communications.

Principle 3: Consulting Is a Contact Sport

Relationships are the lifeblood of a consulting practice. Most consultants spend considerable time

in contact with clients but fail to build

enduring client relationships. Forging long-term relationships cantake months or even years. Guerrillas invest in building those relationships as the core of their

marketing strategy.

GUERRILLA CONSULTING RELATIONSHIPS ARE BASED ON . . .

Mutual respect and trust

Deep knowledge of the clients business

Straight talk, honesty, and objective advice

Multiple interactions over time

Personal chemistry

Value for client and consultant

To meet client needs, rely on a cadre of trusted associates who

can fill in project gaps. Nonclient relationships with colleagues,suppliers, past clients, and even your competitors can provide a competitive advantage. Treat them

with the same care as clients . . . plus,

they may become clients or refer business to you.


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Principle 4: High Tech Is for High Touch

Guerrilla clients expect every consultant to be technologicallyadvanced. Clients dont want yesterday, they want tomorrow; and technology is the gateway to

tomorrow. Tip the competitive scales

in your favor by integrating powerful, low-cost technology intoevery aspect of your practice, from gathering business intelligence

to marketing, billing, and revenue generation. Use technology to

manage and simplify your practice, strengthen client relationships,reduce reliance on high-priced specialists, and promote your practice, guerrilla style.

Principle 5: Focus on Profits, Not Fees

Principle 6: One Size Fits None

Tailor your marketing as if you were crafting a custom suit. Start

with the basicsa vision for the business, your value proposition,and the markets you will pursueand then shape the details.

Meet the precise needs of your clients and the market. Strike a

balance between building on your existing business and attracting

new clients. Adjust this balance as your practice matures.

Create a marketing plan. It will force you to examine each project in detail and confront the toughissueswho are your clients,

what do they need, and what can you do for them? As Harry Beckwith notes in What Clients Love,Planning teaches you and your colleagues about your business . . . writing a plan educates you ina way

that nothing else can.

Once you sift through your options and make critical marketing decisions, identify and

launch the guerrilla marketing weapons that will move your practicein the desired direction. After you get started, you can broaden your

plan or embellish it with analyses, charts, and appendixes.

Capitalize on your passion. Helping clients is the core of the

consulting business. Your passion for serving clients must drive

you to jump out of bed each morning and make you burn the midnight oil. Passion inspires

others and makes them want to support


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your efforts and sing your praises. Without passion for the profession and genuine

enthusiasm for solving client problems, the demands of the business will quickly overwhelm

your best-laid plans

for success.

SECRET 4: OFFER A GUARANTEE

Most consultants get convulsive at the thought of offering clients

any kind of guarantee. Consultants are notoriously conservative because they fear that

uncontrollable elements such as client executive

turnover, a clients surprise merger with another company, or even

bad weather might derail their best-laid plans for a project. The possibility of financial ruin

causes even the most confident consultants

to avoid guarantees.

The guerrilla understands this dynamic and uses it to competitive

advantage by offering an up-front guarantee of client satisfaction.

When all other things are equal, a guarantee will send consulting workyour way. A guarantee also motivates consultants and clients to nail

down objectives and responsibilities at the outset of a project so that

everyone understands what must occur for the client to be satisfied

and the consultant to be paid.

A guarantee should be a two-way street. If a consultant is willing

to waive fees or provide other considerations if the client is dissatisfied, the client should be

willing to increase the fee if the consultants

work exceeds expectations. For a guarantee to work optimally, both

client and consultant must have a stake in the game.

Consider this: Among the top criteria that clients use to choose

service providers is their guarantee to deliver as promised. In

consulting, there is an implied guarantee that certain results

will be attained. On many projects, clients hold back part of the

consultants fee until the project is completed successfully. So

in effect, clients create a guarantee that they will get what they

pay for.

A guarantee can put you at the top of the clients list for consulting projects and, in reality,

doesnt significantly increase your financial risk. And, as a bonus, you are entitled to ask for

additional fees if the results exceed expectations.

Clients no longer hire consultants solely because of a firms brand


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name, advertisements, or direct solicitations, such as cold calls and direct mail. Instead, they

turn to their networks of colleagues and the Internet. And they usually know quite a bit

about you before they

contact youparticularly about your qualifications to help them.

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Clients use initial discussions to see how well you listen andgrasp their situation, not to learn how big your practice is or how

many clients you have served in their industry. Exploratory client interactions are test-

drives. Dont waste your time trying to figure out

how to sell to clients, but be prepared to show how you can help

them. Since many clients think consultants are trying to sell to them

all the time, disarm and surprise them. Dont sell, but show them the

benefits you have to offer.

Clients gravitate to consultants who effectively demonstrate

their capabilities and show the value they can add to the

clients business. They ignore consultants who merely asserttheir qualifications with ambiguous marketing statements,

glossy brochures, or Web sites. The assertion-based approach

cannot compete with a value-based sales process.

SECRET 9: TOSS YOUR BROCHURES OUT

THE WINDOW

The question isdo your marketing materials (for example, your

brochures) communicate the power that your intellectual assets can

give clients? If not, you might as well toss them out the window.

For guerrillas, the boilerplate approach to brochures, Web sites,

and service descriptions is dead. Instead, guerrillas tap into the

repository of the firms intellectual assets to produce highly tailored

materials that are responsive to the unique needs of each client and

provide the basis for a substantive dialogue on the relevant issues.

If you lose a client, it may produce an immediate financial impact. If you lose a great

consultant, you lose a lot more than money.

You lose a portion of your ability to sell and deliver projects, you lose

your investment in training, and you lose the client relationships

that the consultant built. And dont forget the high cost of recruiting

and breaking in a new consultant.

SECRET 11: CLIENT LOYALTY IS AN OXYMORON

Regardless of the strength of the relationship, clients look for increasingly great work by

incumbent consultants. In effect, your own

flawless delivery raises the bar for your next proposal. The guerrilla


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pulls out all the stops when proposing new work to an existing client

by using every scrap of intelligence and every relationship in the

clients organization to blow away the competition.

As an incumbent, any proposal you submit for new work must

prove that the depth of your previous experience increases your

value to the client. Otherwise, you can easily lose any competitiveadvantage.

Guerrillas understand that we are in an era of 24/7 marketing.

Clients will not take notice of your practice unless you continuously

promote it. Your business will eventually stall if you think, Well

focus on marketing after we finish this project.

Marketing must be a daily activity with the same high priority as

performing your work for clients. There is no on/off switch in a guerrillas marketingprogram.

Your marketing plan is more important than your business plan; it

can mean the difference between building a successful practice and

finding yourself in the unemployment line.

Consider the following ten marketing goals:

1. The specific clients you hope to attract

2. Ideal projects youd like to complete

3. The steps you should take to become a better consultant

4. Your charitable contribution or pro bono goals, such as volunteering to serve on a

committee for a community service organization

5. Your industry contribution goals, such as writing a topical

article for an industry newsletter, speaking at industry conferences, or helping to organize a

seminar in your field

6. The number of new relationships you want to forge

7. Improvement of your market visibility by developing a new

publicity campaign, updating your Web presence, or undertaking a survey or poll on a topic

of interest to your clients

8. Your financial goals, such as revenue, profit, and growth

9. Your life/balance goals, such as scheduling nonnegotiable

vacations, setting a monthly limit on client service hours, or

starting a new hobby

10. New service areas youd like to develop, which might mean

expanding the scope of a service you currently offer, adding

capabilities to your practice by hiring new people, or building new services

GUERRILLA TIP:YOU CANT DO IT ALL

You cant be an expert at everything, so dont try to be all things


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to all clients. Focus on doing a few things and do them exceptionally well.

NINE DIFFERENTIATORS THAT DO WORK

Distinguish yourself by focusing on how you will provide benefits

and insight for clients. Zero in on clients needs and give them solutions, not slogans:

1. Category authority. Nothing trumps the power of undisputed

competence. The market embraces experts far more quickly

and rewards them with higher fees than jack-of-all-trades consultants. Most people dont call

a general contractor to fix a

plumbing leakthey call a specialist, a plumber. Similarly, aclient who wants to develop a plan for employee retention is

more apt to look for help from a consultant with relevant expertise than from a generalist

consultant.

2. Simplicity. Some consultants get so enamored with the elegance of their solutions that they

fail to make sure that

clients understand the offering and feel good about buying it.

If you are proposing a complex service, show it to the client

in small pieces, instead of in one overwhelming chunk. Support each part of your proposal

with white papers, in-person

meetings, and case studies. Recognize that it may take clients

time to comprehend the brilliance of your ideas. Be patient,

expect multiple interactions, and educate clients at their

speed, not yours.

3. A real guarantee. As suggested earlier, offer your clients a tangible guarantee such as that

turnover will decrease by 10 percent or that production capacity will increase by 7 percent.

A

few words of caution: If you offer a guarantee, make it simple

and easy for all parties to understand. A guarantee that looks

like a piece of congressional legislation loses its punch.

4. Giving something away. In the early stages of relationships,

clients continually size up their experience with you. Move

relationships forward and demonstrate the power of your

practice by offering a complementary seminar, a telephone

briefing, or a research report that could benefit the client.

A wine industry consultant periodically holds an open

house for wine company executives, where they discuss pressing issues. The consultant does

not charge for this service, andWHAT ARE YOUR STRENGTHS?

discover the areas where you can stand out in the crowd, you must

identify your strengths. What are you really good at helping clients


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achieve? What can you help them increase, reduce, improve, or create? Maybe you can help

clients create new products or services, improve the quality of the information they use to

make decisions, or

reduce employee turnover.

When thinking about these questions, you might find it useful to

look at the list of possible drivers of consulting value in Chapter 17see Table 17.1). Reflecting on your strengths will help you differentiate yourself from the

competition. It will also help you clarify the

specific clients you want to target in your marketing.

WHAT ARE YOUR STRENGTHS?

discover the areas where you can stand out in the crowd, you must

identify your strengths. What are you really good at helping clients

achieve? What can you help them increase, reduce, improve, or create? Maybe you can help

clients create new products or services, improve the quality of the information they use to

make decisions, orreduce employee turnover.

When thinking about these questions, you might find it useful to

look at the list of possible drivers of consulting value in Chapter 17

see Table 17.1). Reflecting on your strengths will help you differentiate yourself from the

competition. It will also help you clarify the

specific clients you want to target in your marketing.

HITTING YOUR TARGETS

Carefully choose the market(s) you wish to serve and those you will

ignore. Then relentlessly pursue the market(s) you select. Some consultants try to be all

things to all clients and end up squandering

their marketing resources because they lack market focus. The guerrilla aims, not at a mass

market, but at targeted markets that use consulting services.

It is easy to target too broadly. Some consultants serve the small

business market, but find it impossible to provide compelling offerings to so broad a group of

clients. If you target small businesses, narrow the field to a few segments and build your

presence with those segments.

Guerrillas build their plans around seven sentences:

1. Sentence one explains the purpose of your marketing.

2. Sentence two explains how you achieve that purpose by describing the substantive benefits

you provide to clients.

3. Sentence three describes your target market(s).

4. Sentence four describes your niche.

5. Sentence five outlines the marketing weapons you will use.

6. Sentence six reveals the identity of your business.

7. Sentence seven provides your marketing budget.


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The following three sample marketing plans illustrate how to incorporate these seven points

in your plan.

Sample Marketing Plan 1: Spinnaker Consulting

The purpose of Spinnaker Consultings marketing program is to make

Spinnaker the leader in selling high-profit services to the worlds

major boat manufacturers and boating suppliers. This will be accomplished by positioningSpinnaker as the industry expert in helping

clients accelerate manufacturing operations, improve sales processes,

and boost product profitability.

Our target market is the chief operating officers, sales executives,

and manufacturing executives of the 50 largest boat manufacturers

and their suppliers. The firms niche is to provide practical, actionoriented advice that

guarantees clients will achieve improvement in

profitability that exceeds Spinnakers professional fee.

We plan to use the following marketing tools:

A Web site that promotes Spinnaker and provides resources

for our clients

Go FOR SAMPLE MARKETING PLAN ON PAGE 43


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YOU MAKE THE CALL

Everyone knows that the telephone figures prominently in many aspects of marketing. But it

is worth a slight detour to talk about the

most effective uses of this tool.Placing cold callsunsolicited telephone calls to unknown people to try to drum up business

is uncomfortable for most of us. Consultants dont like to make cold calls, the person on

the receiving end

doesnt want to get them, and the response rate is low.

Yet some professionals swear by the technique. One tax accountant reports a good response

rate for cold calls made to businesses

close to tax time. You may find cold calls effective in limited situations. If you have sent a

direct mailing to clients you dont know

about an upcoming seminar, you might follow up with a call to find

out if the recipient plans to attend. For the most part, though, cold

calls are a waste of time.By contrast, warm calls based on referrals or to follow up on

contacts made at conferences, speeches, or other events are an easy,

effective, and low-cost way to keep your firms name fresh in

prospects minds. Also, you should regularly call those in your professional network and in

your firms client base to follow up on articles you have sent, discuss your most recent

report, or invite them to

events.

To avoid bugging clients and contacts, call infrequently, but have

consistent plan to keep in touch. Rehearse calls in advance and

keep them short and to the point. Keep a log of your calls and document the issues you

discuss. Dont try to sell on the telephone; use

your calls to stay on the radar of clients, prospects, and colleagues.

WHY YOU NEED A GREAT WEB SITE

When a potential client can access the archives of the Smithsonian

Institute, the Library of Congress, and the complete works of

Leonardo Da Vinci using a mouse and a browser, they are unlikely to

be satisfied if their review of a consultants Web site turns up nothing

but marketing babble. Potential clients expect consultants sites to

look and feel professional, with insightful content that helps them

understand whether you and your firm can help them.

guerilla marketing for pm

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