(for consultants and ‘non-sales’ professionals)
This report begins to help you understand how your consultants are thinking, the business development advantages and problems this may cause and some ideas of how to efficiently help them grow as revenue-generating consultants
How many opportunities are your consultants missing?
No doubt you hire and develop good consultants. But how many opportunities do they miss each month to secure more business with more clients, more frequently? What if they were fully equipped, switched on, supported and driven to continuously grow both yours and your clients’ businesses?
— Your first two assessments are free. Get in touch here if you would like access. —
How likely are you consultants to grow your business in the coming months?
Unfortunately, no one has designed x-ray specs and a crystal ball to get insights on your consultant’s BD mindset, capabilities, costly blind spots, and potential to grow your business in the near future. But you might have just found the next best thing.
If you value supporting your people to grow and develop strategically, then you might like to consider this low cost but highly valuable starting point. (And your first two are free…)
What will make most impact on your consultants’ BD performance?
The challenge to helping people learn and grow, especially in the area of business development (where soft skills meet hard results), is that one size does not fit all. You’re going to get more misses than hits with a generic training programme or with well intentioned but mis-aligned advice that tells consultants how to sell your way. And worse, the wrong type of support could demotivate, shutting down desired behaviours even further.
Many consultants who did not sign up to get involved with selling are hyper-sensitive to any efforts that may appear to encourage them to do so. If they feel they’re being pushed in any way, they’ll push back. So a surgical approach is important.
We all start in different places, with different strengths, weaknesses, fears, experiences, beliefs, and costly blind spots. Not to mention we’re all part of an emotionally-reactive system internally (and an even more complex system when you bring clients into it).
For BD to be effective, each individual must build a plan of attack or an approach (that is proven to work) around their strengths. A refined approach of what they were inclined to do anyway, but that aligns them better with their clients to provide more value. They must be supported to find what works for them, your business and your clients. But also, our blind spots and ‘weakest links’ set the height at which we will go. So these must be identified, understood, and either sidestepped, made irrelevant, mitigated, or developed.
So how do you know the right thing to do?
— Your first two assessments are free. Get in touch here if you would like access. —
What this report begins to help you do (it requires follow up conversations) is get a more realistic idea of how your consultants are thinking, the advantages and consequences this may cause (in the context of BD) and some ideas of how to best help them grow as revenue-generating consultants.
15 minutes to look under the bonnet
The online self-assessment takes 15 minutes for individuals to complete a series of questions (works well on mobile too) and on completion, they receive an emailed PDF report. Optionally, their manager or team leader can also receive a copy for discussion with each individual. A follow up telephone debrief is recommended for each individual to explain the findings, help the consultant interpret correctly, and help them prepare next steps.
What’s in the report?
The report will help you answer questions such as:
- What’s most likely stopping my consultants from developing business?
- How driven are they to learn to improve at this?
- How do they rank against the most important BD capabilities of a top perfomer?
- Where is their level of skill vs will to improve at BD?
- What would an efficient, targeted learning plan look like for each individual?
- Who could make significant impact now if they engaged more in BD activity?
- Who might make a significant improvement with minimal targeted support?
- Who might need more thorough ongoing support?
- What top BD challenges do they believe are limiting them?
A strong development discussion document
Perhaps most importantly the report together with the optional 1:1 telephone debrief opens new important conversations that explore what you could do right now to make the most impact on their capabilities, on your business and on your clients’ businesses.
How to purchase the report
The report is affordable and available to buy for teams and we strongly recommend that it forms a part of a coaching, learning or training programme.
If you would like a free trial for up to two people please get in touch.
