Do you need to know everything? Of course not. But making an introduction and having a secret strategy can be advantageous. It's been proven that buyers who are constantly followed up with make more purchases than those who are not. According to the Annuitas Group, these “nurtured leads” make 47% higher purchases than unnurtured leads.
Tracking isn't just for phone calls and emails. It's essential to follow-up after meeting with a buyer. The Marketing Donut reports that 80% of sales require 5% follow-up to make the sale. If you send a proposal by email, your follow-up strategy should be different.
Instead of sending an email immediately after submitting your proposal, it's common to wait 3 to 5 business days before following up. Go back to your customer's conversation notes. What tangible products will they have once the project is completed? These will be your “results” and you want to include them in your proposal so that the client knows exactly what they are going to get from the project. We'll describe the deliveries in more detail in the next section.
Once the business consultant has developed a deep understanding of your company, he enters the evaluation phase, with the objective of identifying where a change is needed. This interaction can also help you test things out and determine if the consultant is right for your company's needs. This is the most common reason why companies do not use consulting services, and it is up to the consultant to use big data to demonstrate the previous ROI. Many consultants will be able to help you determine the scope and budget of your project as part of a free consultation.
A business consultant can help you conduct a competition analysis to obtain pertinent information on market saturation, new opportunities, and best practices in the industry. The idea that success in consulting depends solely on analytical experience and the ability to present convincing reports is losing ground, in part because there are now more people in organizations with the necessary analytical techniques than in the boom years of “strategic consulting”. Financial consultants can specialize even more, such as financial planning and advising your company on taxes, daily expenses and the best retirement plans. A number of common mistakes can prevent you from achieving success in your work with a business consultant.
It is also due to my experience supervising beginning consultants and to the many conversations and partnerships I have had with consultants and clients in the United States and abroad. Most companies analyze their net profits for the quarter before hiring the business consultant and then evaluate their net benefits in the next quarter or two after implementing the consultant's recommendations. It's essential to find a consultant who has experience in your industry or who has experience with the types of problems your company faces. Marketing consultants help companies identify their strengths as a brand and expand them to create brand awareness and exposure.
The increase in consensus, commitment, learning and future effectiveness are not intended as a substitute for the most common purposes of management consulting, but as desirable results of any truly effective consulting process. During the discovery phase, the business consultant will discover the details of your company's mission and current operations. On the other hand, a consultant who too quickly rejects this way of describing the problem will end a potentially useful consulting process before it begins. As managers understand the wider range of purposes that excellent consulting can help achieve, they will select consultants more intelligently and expect more value from them.
