William Mooney Associates

This presentation helps participants learn why listening is so critical in selling consulting services and how to listen to understand the client’s needs, both stated and unstated. For consultants, a good way to achieve a competitive advantage is to have a better understanding of the client’s real needs than the competition. Participants will be asked to contribute their own experiences in gaining a competitive edge by listening to clients and using questions to uncover valuable information about consulting opportunities. Bill Mooney, consultant to consultants, will share specific tactics and strategies identified from his research that will make consultants better listeners and more effective in selling their services. These include:

The target audience for this presentation is consultants, coaches, and trainers who want to gain a competitive edge in attracting clients through honing their questioning and listening skills.

This presentation helps the participants learn from case studies, cited resources, and audience experience how to develop winning consulting proposals in different typical situations. Topics include the rationale and cautions for proposals; informal proposals; questions to ask before doing the proposal; a recommended overall organization; how to use functional flow diagrams to prepare and present the proposal; a proven phase-oriented, narrative format for constructing the proposal; and the value of including value options. Four other approaches – by John hall, Alan Weiss, Tom Sant, and Henry Holtz – to developing and presenting proposals will also be identified along with resources where they can be studied. The outline of topics is, as follows:

The target audience is consultants, coaches, and trainers who: want to learn how to develop several kinds of proposals or who want to significantly improve their proposal writing and increase the persuasiveness and acceptance of their proposals because they are concise, understandable, persuasive and provide options as well as client and value oriented and clearly let the client know what they will receive in the way of deliverables as well as the assumptions made for the project.

This presentation encourages the participants to review their fee setting and disclosure strategies and tactics and based on the experience of many other successful consultants adjust their fee-setting and disclosure to become more competitive in attracting business and more profitable in managing their business. The outline of topics is, as follows:

The target audience is consultants, coaches, trainers and other professional service providers who desire to develop fee-setting and disclosing strategies that will attract more and better clients as well as increase their revenue and profitability.

Research has revealed that consultants obtain more business with less effort from former clients and colleagues followed by third party referrals from other professional service and industry contacts than from other strategies. Other research also indicates that clients tend to hire consultants who have experience solving problems like their dilemmas for people like themselves and from those who know their industry. Based on this information a model will be shown that combines using your network of former clients, colleagues, along with other professional service providers and industry members to increase your ability to become a client magnet. This will enable you to build a better pipeline and attract and keep more and better clients. Attendees will participate in the program by completing a short assessment instrument on how they work their network as well as provide examples of the strategies and tactics being discussed.

After this session, the participants will be able to:

The target audience for this presentation is consultants, coaches, trainers and other professional service personnel that desire to improve their ability to attract and retain more and better clients by employing a more effective and efficient set of strategies and tactics for working and adding to their network of contacts.

This presentation helps participants discover new and creative strategies that successful consultants use to uncover new “macro”, or niche-wide, and “micro”, or individual organization, consulting opportunities. Tactics used to convert such opportunities into engagements are also introduced. Consulting opportunities are high probability situations for doing something new to you to help an old client, or something old to you to help a new client, or something new to you to help a new client. Questions answered include: My consulting business is not doing as well as I want it to, how can I identify new opportunities for consulting business? Once I have identified a new consulting opportunity, how can I take advantage of it to generate a profit? How can I grow my consulting business? The strategies and tactics introduced will be illustrated by examples featuring successful consultants including attendees at the presentation.

The participants will learn:

The target audience for this presentation is consultants, coaches, trainers, and other professional service personnel who desire to be more creative in identifying consulting opportunities and developing strategies and tactics to develop these opportunities into consulting engagements, thereby, growing their consulting business.