For a business consultant that targets small to mid-sized businesses, your personal brand is driven by the accumulation of voices and footprints you have left behind. Your brand should feature specific personal characteristics as a discrete professional, but also include your expertise and disciplines within the human resource arena that support performance improvement, operational control, or improved work-life balance.
Once you have established your brand it is an easy transition to summarize your performance history, and then translate your expertise into a tangible value that can be documented and verbalized to your marketplace, leveraging your visibility?
The question is, how do you cultivate an audience of perspective clients and lead them to a tipping point where they want to engage in a candid discussion regarding your services, and you can leverage your brand? We recommend offering them something of value for free that drives the conversation deeper and focuses on their challenges and opportunities.
A free offering is a safe zone for both you and your prospective client, enabling conversations of significance that contribute to your personal brand and image as a unique and valuable resource.
Which of the following would you include in the “free” category of services that could naturally leads to a client consultation engagement?
· Attend a management meeting
· Research a competitor
· Gather feedback from key customers
· Tour a prospective client’s operation, or…
What if you offered a free employee engagement assessment as part of your market development strategy that identifies challenges and opportunities within the organization? Could you see how this might transition into a significant conversation and ultimately a consulting engagement?
Once your audience of business owners acknowledge opportunities to improve performance, control, or work-life balance, it creates a natural transition to discuss your blueprint of initiatives or solutions.
To leverage your personal brand, Visiam offers an employee engagement assessment that you can configure and apply to a prospective client on our cloud-based platform. Our hope is that through this experience you will see other opportunities to deliver your service as a tangible product, enabling you to remain virtually integrated within your client’s operation.
Technology streamlines and automates processes to drive out costs. The key is, that with the help of technology, your services become tangible and easily replicated. For more information, please visit us on LinkedIn.