SPIF! for Consultants

Win Bigger, More Profitable Engagements

Add Depth and Profit to Your Material
with Process Ideas and Techniques

I knew I wanted to be a consultant for many years before I succeeded in becoming one.

Little did I know how difficult it was going to be.

For me, the transition from being head of sales and marketing for an engineering company to succeeding as a sales trainer and field sales coach was the toughest.

Training and coaching field salespeople involved far more “soft skills” than I anticipated.

The engineering business required me to know my stuff, and have a thick skin. Sales training required me to anticipate and respond to other people’s perceptions far more rapidly. I twisted my guts for quite a while to get the hang of it. (I still have to work at it when I’m in those situations.)

Then there were the clients. In some companies the work was easy and the results were great. In other companies we met resistance at every turn.

We prepared for hours and hours to anticipate the audience’s reactions, drawing every ounce of creativity and experience we had to find a path that would work for them.

Fortunately, I worked for a company that did field sales coaching in addition to classroom training. I was amazed to learn how different those skill sets are.

Management consulting is about the client, not the content

Consulting work was new for me. Tough, mentally. Arduous, but healthy. It taught me incredibly important lessons about what it takes to succeed as a consultant. I saw how clients needed to be taught. How difficult it is for them to implement.

With all my years of experience, and a deep nerd/geek streak, I could see how process thinking was a key to some of the problems our clients were having.

Unfortunately, know-it-alls don’t make it in consulting.

You have to do everything on the client’s terms, according to their interests, from their perspective.

As I learned the ropes, I kept plinking away at how to help client companies think more logically. How to position things on their terms. I gradually learned how I could incorporate a few process tools and insights in our training engagements.

I taught the sales guys in our little training company to ask more process-savvy questions. That led to doing process mapping sessions alongside the training engagements. It led to customer value mapping projects where we customized our training content and delivered sales tools and case examples tailored to their industry and product lines.

These gave the sales guys in our firm a differentiator. They began winning more deals, and bigger deals. They were able to stay engaged with clients for a longer period of time. They made more money.

2002: Out On My Own

Ultimately, in 2002, I followed my gut and started a business focused exclusively on process consulting. My old employer continued to give me work for several years, and we still do projects together from time to time.

In the beginning, I started speaking at six sigma conferences. I developed the the only guidebooks around for designing, mapping, measuring, and improving sales processes. I followed the “Info-Guru” model: offer valuable content for free, and more valuable content for a fee to establish a relationship with people who can ultimately hire you for consulting services.

And, it worked.

Not as well as I had hoped, but it worked well enough to generate cash, and relationships, and to keep the business going. I knew they would be of interest to other consulting companies, not just corporate executives who were my real target.

As it turned out, more than 40% of the sales were to other consulting companies, and that was fine with me.

Why Sell My IP to Other Consulting Companies?

In the 1980s, I joined APICS, studied production and inventory control, and passed my certification exams because I had a job selling MRP systems. Ultimately, I became president of the St. Louis Chapter. It was great to meet people who learned the APICS course material and applied it in their small (or large) manufacturing companies, and achieved great results. Later on, I had a similar experience with the ASQ, where I earned a certification as a quality manager.

However, I also served on local boards of professional associations aimed at sales and marketing executives and CRM professionals, and these experiences were not as rewarding.

The reason?

IMHO, it is because there is no official body of knowledge about how to apply scientific principles to improve sales and marketing. And companies need this. Desperately, in fact.

The big problem in the market isn’t the need for sales process improvement. It is in the market’s almost total ignorance that it is possible, and that they NEED it.

I told Leslie, my wife, when I started out that if I was going to be an accountant, or a real estate agent, or anything else that people already understood, my success would be assured. After all, I’m smart, creative, honest, and personable, and I work like a mule.

However, I told her, “I’m going into a field no one understands yet. It is going to take years before very many people ‘get it.’ My biggest challenge is going to be articulating my value.”

Those things have turned out to be true, in spades. The big problem in the sales process improvement industry isn’t competition.

It is LACK of competition. The industry needs more people helping businesses learn how to uncover facts and data, separate signals from noise, learn how to articulate customer value and generally think in a more consistent way about how they go to market.

The Sales Performance Improvement Forum

That’s Why We Created SPIF!

Improving sales processes is one of the most challenging — and rewarding — kinds of work in the business world. My team at Sales Performance Consultants, Inc., has been pursuing this discipline one way or another for nearly 20 years, struggling to find information, examples, and solutions to challenging business problems.

We believe education on the scientific principles of managing and improving sales and marketing ought to be as readily available as it is in other professional societies, such as the American Society for Quality (ASQ) or the American Society for Operations Management (APICS).

I’m ready now, Michael (more after the jump):

What is SPIF! ?

SPIF! is a professional educational community devoted to evidence-based approaches to improving B2B revenue results. It is our way of sharing our discoveries and methods with other business professionals, and of learning from their experiences and discoveries as well.

When “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way” was published in 2006, it cemented my status as uber-geek of sales and marketing. Within six months, we were engaged in a consulting engagement much larger than anything we had ever done before.

A string of additional large engagements followed, giving my team and me a unique perspective on how process thinking affects corporate environments, and the reactions of key individuals, such as the senior executive, the sales VP, and the first-line sales managers.

Along the way, we’ve discovered some surprising things: expensive lessons, hidden opportunities, mine fields to avoid. I looked high and low for gurus and coaches who understood the world of B2B sales and marketing, management consulting, and process improvement. I spent a lot of money with several of them, only to be frustrated in the end because they really had no idea how to help me, or were more interested in talking me out of my money than digging in and helping me make it work.

I wish I had found someone who understood my challenges, someone who had been through it before. Instead I had to make it on my own.

Now, my team and I are in a position to do that for you.

What You Get When You Become a Professional Member of SPIF!

Professional membership in the consulting division of SPIF! gives you access to protected areas of our website containing:

• Foundational instruction (currently six hours and growing) on topics like:
  How to design/map a sales process
  How to develop effective sales qualification criteria
  How to map customer value and design more effective selling tools
  How to conduct a sales kaizen event
  How to ensure your customers can find your business through your website and search engines
• Webinar archives that broaden your knowledge of sales and marketing best practices and your business process acumen
  For example:
  How to help salespeople gain access to big new accounts
  - with Jill Konrath, author of “Selling to Big Companies”
  How to design and implement a lead generation campaign
  - with Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch, and author of “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale”
  How to incorporate effective negotiation into your sales process
  - with Brian Dietmeyer, Managing Director of Think, Inc., and author of a”B2B Streetfighting”
  How to design and implement a nurturing campaign that gets prospects to buy
  - with Jim Cecil, founder of the Nurture Marketing Institute
• Access to upcoming webinars and courses about improving sales and marketing results by leveraging process ideas and rigor to get results faster, avoid mistakes, and get organizations to change faster. See upcoming events for more information.
• SPIF! Print newsletter, containing new, thought-leading articles and how-to-do-it information on improving your sales process. See the cover of a recent issue.
• Special pricing on important guidebooks and information products that will help you succeed
• Archives of presentations, templates, examples, newsletters, swap-files, and other valuable materials

You’ll be able to listen to unique, one-of-a-kind conversations about dealing with prospects and customers, salespeople, company presidents, and other consultants. You’ll be able to ask your questions about everything from sales and marketing techniques to statistical principles, and get answers from savvy, experienced practitioners. For example, have you ever struggled with consulting challenges such as:

• How to get sales managers to be interested in process ideas
• How to get senior executives to realize the value of a process approach
• How to position the value of your consulting engagement
• How to price your consulting services
• How to transition from training (or CRM, or other consulting) to management consulting
• When to stay away from process, yet still make progress with the client

These are tough, challenging questions, and my team, and other consulting members of SPIF!, are uniquely suited to help you grapple with them.

What other consulting members have said:

The structure around the process and thinking behind it with the examples were excellent.

Dan, Consultant, PA

The seminar was very good at stitching the pieces of a process design project together. The “roles” slide was especially effective. Also Bob’s suggestion about keeping it simple, down to 3 main areas with 3-5 elements each. Also the idea of incorporating what is known in the organization (i.e. for the “best prospector” to see his/her thumbprint on the design). Could say more, but overall very good. Thanks.

David Crankshaw
Geonexus, CA

Your webinars have helped me understand how to design my interactions with client sales teams, and the details around things like nurturing programs, lead generation, internet marketing, are great. Plus, you are a good facilitator, Michael.

Bill Zeeb, Senior Partner
Infinitas, France

Becoming a Member of SPIF! is easy. You can chose your level of interest.