I find it best to call soon after I believe the individual has received my letter. I start early in case the person is traveling. If you have targeted someone at the top of the organization, you may encounter a gatekeeper, someone whose main job is to protect the person. If a gatekeeper prevents you from reaching the person, you can say, “I believe she is expecting my call.” You might also ask, “Can you help me find a good time to call him?”When the gatekeeper specifies a time to call, keep that call time religiously. I have even had one gatekeeper prevent others from getting through when she knew that she had given a specific time to me. By the way, gatekeepers can often tell you whether the individual has received and read your letter. That’s an important piece of information to have before talking to him or her.
Gatekeepers usually take their jobs very seriously. You will never get through if you come across as arrogant and short. Be polite, ask for help, say please and thank you, use the person’s name.Manners work. By the way, try calling during off-peak hours—before 9:00 a.m. and after 4:00 p.m. Think about it. You are probably trying to reach people with lots of responsibility, which means that they most likely come in early and stay late. You may find that you get through directly more often. I also seem to have good results on Friday afternoons. You have the person on the phone. Now what? I use the person’s name first, identify myself, and ask if the person received my letter. If the person has read the letter, he or she usually takes control of the conversation from that point, commenting on the letter or asking how I knew all that I did about the organization. By the way, don’t forget to smile. Yes, I said smile. Your listener can hear you smile over the phone.
The mechanics of this letter are not unlike any other important letter you write. It should be neat, organized, and on your best stationery. Be certain you are sending the letter to the right person.What a waste to go through all that you have, only to learn later that you sent the letter to someone who retired last week! It could be worse. The person you have targeted may have been promoted from assistant director of sales to the director last year. Your attention to detail may be questioned if you used an older reference and missed that change. So check your facts out. Call the corporate receptionist and ask to speak to someone in the department where your letter is headed. Double-check the person’s title and spelling of the person’s name. Check the address. Before you send the letter have it proofed by two other people. Proof it for spelling and grammar, of course. You will also want to have it proofed for clarity and whether your message is coming across. Have you identified your area of expertise and how you could partner with the company? I try to have another consultant read my letters before they are sent.
Do not send brochures or business cards with this letter. If you are considering it, you have missed the entire point of this exercise. The letter should be a personal marketing tool that stands on its own. I usually send these letters in my regular stationery envelopes. Some consultants send them flat in a priority envelope. Yes, it costs a couple of dollars as opposed to a few cents, but it might be worth it to grab a potential client’s attention. One last thing. I usually affix stamps to these letters, as opposed to putting them through our postage meter.Metered mail always sends me the message of mass mailings.
It will be most effective when the body of your letter addresses three different but connected content areas. As you compose your letter, think in terms of these three questions:What’s important to them? What do they need that you can provide? And what can they expect next? The first paragraph should focus on the recipient’s company. It should discuss what is important to the company. It depends on what your research uncovered. You might focus on the company’s principles of doing business, service values, most recent challenge, corporate award or milestone, why the business was started, its growth rate, corporate goals, length of time in business, recent breakthrough, employee policies, or even something intriguing about their clients. Let your research guide your writing. As you are thinking about the most salient pieces of information, you should also be thinking ahead to the next section in your letter that alludes to why the company should hire you.
The next one or two paragraphs connect the recipient to the need for your consulting services and establish your qualifications. You must customize these paragraphs as well. Your research should have uncovered something that the company needs or something that is challenging to them. Once you hone in on this, you will state how you could help. For example, you might refer to your expertise and how it relates to the recipient’s need. You might mention your experience in the industry. You might mention a similar challenge you solved for another organization. When referring to past clients, select those who are related to the recipient by industry, location, or size. If that’s not possible, select a couple of your most impressive clients.Whatever you provide, be sure it clearly relates to the company’s needs. The final paragraph tells the person what to expect. You will want to maintain control of the process by saying, “I will call you within the week to schedule an appointment to . . .” Before you put that message in your letter, check your calendar to ensure that you can truly follow up as you promised.Make a note in your PDA or Day-Timer to make the call. By the way, you will want to try to keep your letter to one page.Most of the people I speak with do not have time to read much more than that. You can find additional examples of this type of letter in The Business of Consulting.
You’ve researched your twenty top candidates. Now how do you reach them? You could just make a phone call and speak to someone. That’s called cold calling and usually isn’t much fun. Articles about selling suggest that you must make one hundred phone calls to find ten people who will speak to you. Of these ten, two will agree to meet with you, and one will purchase your service or product. Since consulting is an expensive service, I’d bet that the odds are even greater. That doesn’t sound like fun to me. There is a way to warm up your sales calls. And that’s why you have worked so hard at your research.
Once you have gathered all your information, you will compose a letter to each client. Each letter will be customized for each organization. A sample prospecting letter is included in this chapter (Exhibit 7.4). Be sure to read them to understand the flow of the content and to get a sense of the climate they are meant to establish. It may sound like a lot of work, but once you are in the rhythm the letters will flow off your pen (or out of your computer). If it still sounds like a huge amount of work, remember the one hundred cold calls to schedule two meetings. Besides, even if you do decide to go the cold call route, you will need to conduct some research before your meeting to have maximum success. The person you meet with will expect that you know something about the company. You will be able to rely on the folders you have created.
By the way, at this point you may not have all twenty of the candidates you started with. You may have dropped some because you found out they had filed for Chapter 11 or that they were in some other turmoil that was not conducive to the kind of consulting services you offer. On the other hand, perhaps restructuring organizations is your specialty and that is exactly the kind of work you desire. You may have dropped some organizations because you could not find enough information about them. I would not toss their company profiles just yet for lack of information. Place them in a pending file and try again during round two. I only toss ideas once I am absolutely certain that I will not want to research in the future. You also may have added organizations.As you read interesting articles or conduct searches on the web, other names will pop up that interest you.You may as well at least Prospecting in All the Right Places: How
start profiles for them. I encourage you to focus on fewer than twenty companies—especially this first round. Trying to keep track of more than twenty can become confusing and frustrating—which is why you have the profiles to summarize the information.
Therefore, continue to sift through the list of names, continuing to maintain fewer than twenty. In addition, if you begin to collect many magazine, newspaper, or web articles that you want to keep, begin a file for each company. I find these files handy later when I have an appointment to speak with someone or when I write a proposal for a project for the company. One last thing about your research—don’t keep everything. Prioritize what you believe you may use and toss the rest.
If you are looking for a local company, check the local business magazines, journals and periodicals, local business newsletters, local newspaper, the city directory, manufacturer and business directories, and any other resources available. Each of these has an index that makes it easy to research a list of clients in a couple of hours. Several specific sources you may wish to ask for by name include:
• The Advertising Red Book—provides a considerable amount of information, including key executive names, company size, subsidiaries, and nature of the business.
• Thomas Register—indexed by industry, provides detailed information about each company to categorize companies within an industry.
• The Over the Counter 1000—published by Monitor Publishing, a directory of the people who manage the one thousand younger growth companies in the United States. Check other directories published by Monitor.
If you have not conducted this kind of research in the past, expect to be pleasantly surprised at the wealth of knowledge housed in your library. If you can’t find what you are looking for, ask your friendly local librarians. They are sure to assist. In Other Places There is no shortage of data sources. You could contact the trade or professional associations that serve a particular industry.Most associations will provide a membership list either free or for a small fee. The amount of information will vary, but if you have targeted a specific industry, this is a good reference tool. Gather information whenever you attend a trade show or a conference. Speak with your best clients and ask them directly for referrals or ask about the kind of publications they read.
If you have a specific city in mind, be sure to check the business development department and the city’s Chamber of Commerce. You could gather lists of companies as well as specific information about the companies you have targeted. Both probably have newsletters and you should ask to be added to their mailing lists. If you anticipate having lots of work in a particular city, you may even want to join their Chamber of Commerce. Remember your personal network. Do you know anyone who works in the company? Do you know anyone who knows someone who works in the company? Anyone who is a customer or vendor of the company? Any of these individuals may be able to give you some inside information that is not available in print.
Electronically Begin by spending half a day in front of your computer. Check out the organization’s website. Capture all the information that might be pertinent to services you could offer the organization. You are trying to gather enough information for two reasons: First, to learn as much as you can about the organization, and, second, to have enough information to compose a unique, personalized letter that will grab the reader’s attention. Synthesize the information you uncover on the company profile. In addition, you will want to copy articles about the organization that you find. You can often pull quotes or statistics from articles to personalize the letters.
If the organization is publicly traded, you should be able to obtain its annual report. Continue to add information to the company profile. You probably will not find all that you need from the website. Therefore, you will continue your research at other sites. First, conduct a general search on the Internet. This may uncover a wide variety of information—some useful, some not. Continue searching through it looking for what you need. Prospecting in All the As you are looking for information about companies you have targeted, you may come across other companies that you did not think of earlier. I highly recommend that you start a company profile for each of them as well. Remember, this is round one of a continuous process. Even if you do not continue to gather information about every company this time, having new candidates will give you a jump-start on round two. At the Library You will probably not find all the information you need on the web. You may be able to find additional information at your libraries. Yes, that is plural. Your public library is a good start. You should also check out Department of Commerce libraries and university business libraries.
Make fifty copies of the company profile shown in Exhibit 7.3. You will want one copy for each organization you have targeted. You will also want extras to capture information about other interesting companies you discover during your research. The company profile will keep you organized during your research. It will help you focus on finding all the pieces of information you need to write a prospecting letter to potential clients. You will capture logistics such as the telephone number, address, and website; corporate information about locations and management; and other background about products and services, history, finances, and philosophy. It also allows a place for you to note relationships to your consulting services so that you can begin to build bridges between yourself and the potential new client. Organizing your research on the profile will make it a breeze to write your prospecting letter. Complete whatever information you know about the companies you have targeted. If you know their website address or some of the key players, begin to fill in the blanks. What if you start and for some reason determine that you need to select another industry? Perhaps you had not selected one and once you started researching you decided it would be easier to have an industry focus. Perhaps your research is revealing that you selected an industry that is not as strong as you thought it was.
How can you select another industry? These questions should help you make decisions about one industry over another:
• Is the industry growing or shrinking?
• How strong financially are individual companies in this industry?
• Can you reach this industry in a cost-effective way?
• How does geographic location affect your work with this industry?
• Will this industry embrace your services?
• Do you have a competitive advantage within this industry?
• How strong is your competition in this industry?
• Do you have referrals to this industry?
• Do you have the experience and reputation necessary to work within this industry?
List organizations that are potential clients for you. Perhaps you do not have specific organizations identified. You may have an industry or a geographical area targeted. This is where you may need to complete some investigation. You most likely have some experience in the targeted area or you would not have chosen to market to the “Norfolk,Virginia, area” or to the “fast food industry.” Start by identifying twenty or thirty organizations you wish to target. You will begin with that many because some may drop out along the way. You may have difficulty locating information about them or, in some cases, you may change your mind about wanting to work with them based on information your learn. Starting with twenty or more gives you some flexibility. If you cannot identify thirty organizations, check Exhibit 7.2 for ideas of whom to ask. If you are identifying companies in your area, your banker, insurance provider, accountant, and attorney are all good places to start. As you continue to compile your list, remember to ask others in your network for suggestions. Ask people in your professional organizations as well. Even if they are competitors, you may receive suggestions that you may not have otherwise considered. Others you could ask include your mentors or those you have mentored, college contacts, members of organizations to which you belong, current or former clients, anyone you have referred, former coworkers, and other family or friends. If you are identifying organizations in a specific industry, you can check out trade or professional directories that you will find online or in your library.
How will you decide whom to call? You may have already decided to contact specific organizations that meet your criteria and with whom you would like to do business. List those organizations. Remember what I said in the last chapter about going after large organizations. This is not the time to be shy, timid, or modest. Go for it. Are you thinking that Microsoft is too large? Perhaps Harvard is too prestigious? Or General Motors is too impenetrable? Don’t let size, prestige, or reputation scare you. The people who manage organizations need good consulting, no matter what the size. You will invest the same amount of time marketing to large organizations as small. However, the payoff may be much greater. As I stated in the last chapter, larger organizations have larger consulting budgets, they generally have a greater need, they are more likely to hire for repeat work, and they are often willing to take a risk with new consultants. Don’t be intimidated by the size. To whom do you want to provide consulting services? If you hope that your image is respected by larger organizations, this may be a great opportunity to test it.
It’s unlikely that you will be able to easily identify a large number of clients and even more unlikely that you will have adequate knowledge about them. How do you do this? Let’s examine a five-step prospecting process, which is shown in Exhibit 7.1 and described below. Set aside one full day each month for researching potential new clients. Make a date with yourself on your calendar, just as if you were working with a client. Accept no phone calls; and if you are at the library, do not call in for messages. You will find it easier to stay focused and will be surprised at how much you accomplish.