As my term as president of Women in Consulting comes to an end this week, I find myself reflecting on all the incredible experiences I’ve had throughout the last two years.

We celebrated our 10th anniversary in 2008 with not only a gala event, but a new look & feel for our website and a new blog. In 2009, we expanded our social media presence to include LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

We expanded the reach of our organization, with strong and vibrant satellite groups in San Francisco, the East Bay and North Bay/Marin, as well as the South Bay and Peninsula.

We created a mentoring program and offered workshops to help consultants grow profitable businesses.

We expanded our Leaders Network to provide a venue for seasoned consultants to meet and exchange thoughts and ideas with their peers.

We expanded our profile in the community–partnering with a wide variety of organizations and associations, including the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association, the Association for Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP), FountainBlue, Astia, IMC NorCal, NorCAL BMA, and others.

We provided benefits to our community from groups like People OntheGo, SD Forum, Cubes & Crayons, Vertical Response, MarketingProfs, Egnite, WeMeUs, Zoomerang, and PR Newswire. And we continued our partnership with Million Dollar Consultant Alan Weiss and the Society for the Advancement of Consulting.

We held silent auctions to benefit Girls for a Change and collected donations for the Georgia Travis Center in San Jose.

Not only did we offer a top-notch set of outstanding speakers for monthly programs, but we launched teleseminar and webinar programs as well.

We continued to offer outstanding value to members and affiliates through our renowned mail list and other resources.

In fact, through the worst recession in nearly a century, we grew our community to be nearly 500 strong–with our ranks of full members swelling by nearly 40% this year.

And we did all this as an entirely volunteer run organization, with over 100 consultants taking on pro bono consulting roles for WIC.

Why, in a time when many organizations are struggling or even closing their doors, is WIC thriving? Because in addition to everything I’ve already mentioned, one of the most important things WIC provides is a strong, collaborative community–a place where consultants can come to learn as well as to socialize, to build their businesses as well as to connect with colleagues, to share experiences and develop referrals, to grow as individuals as well as part of a bigger whole.

For all of these reasons I feel extremely lucky to have had the privilege of guiding this organization over the last two years. And I feel extremely confident in turning over the reigns to the extremely capable and passionate Avery Horzewski to take WIC to the next level.

Thank you to all of you who are a part of WIC. WIC is community and I am grateful for the opportunity to work with each and every one of you. Here’s to more wonderful WIC happenings in 2010 and beyond!

I ran across this newsletter article (Proposal or Contract? February 2005) on the Win Without Pitching site a few weeks back. I remembered then that someone had told me to check out WWP a while back. In the constant overflow of information running across my radar, I had forgotten to do so. I encourage you all to not make that same mistake and to check out not only this article, but the entire Web site. WWP is oriented towards designers and ad agencies, but the principles advised in the founder’s (Blair Ennis) philosophy are highly applicable to quite a few consultancies. You can sign up for his newsletters, follow him on Twitter (@blairenns) or sign up for his RSS feed. Many a juicy morsel of consulting genius.

The very word ‘proposal’ raises the blood pressure of many a consultant or sales executive. Even if your firm is smart enough to have created a proposal template (and even smarter if you’ve got an online version that your client can fill out, instead of you!), it’s rare that a template will cover all bases of a project. This is particularly true when there are quantifiable deliverables expected at completion of a project such as a strategic marketing plan, a web site or printed brochures.

In my own growth process as a business owner, I have spent countless hours putting together detailed proposals for clients who probably had no intention of hiring my firm. I even suspect that in a few cases, my proposal was used to drive down the prices of other firms. I’ve learned to streamline our process quite a bit since I first started. I make sure clients know that our pricing information is confidential information. I’ve gotten better (and braver) about qualifying clients on the phone to make sure they’re not tire kickers or uninformed enough to think that $1000 for a corporate identity package is a reasonable fee, etc. I’ve also modified my proposal form that I use to get initial budget feedback from/to clients. Even with that, I still found myself spending several hours putting together numbers when I actually had no real idea whether the client perceived enough value in our services to commit. And in recent years, I began to have a sneaking suspicion that there was probably a still better way, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

And then I found the WWP article. Eureka! It takes a little bit of guts, but not that much. And it is pure genius. I highly encourage you all to read the actual article (not that long and includes a simple outline for what a proposal should contain), but I’ll summarize it here:

1/ Typical proposal situation: great meeting, enthusiastic client who requests a proposal.

2/ You promptly spend significant time putting it together and email it over.

3/ The client is never heard from again. Your emails and phone calls are ignored.

4/ You are left scratching your head as to what happened and what you did wrong.

There is only thing you did wrong: you wrote up the proposal.

Here’s where WWP’s genius part comes in: don’t write up proposals. Get a verbal commitment from the client before you spend any time doing that. Without the verbal commitment, your proposal is a complete waste of time. And as I mentioned above, could be used for nothing more than to drive competitor prices down.

My own tip that I’ll add in here is that you get extra brownie points for getting the verbal commitment from whoever has the authority to sign checks or authorize someone to do so. A verbal commitment from a Director of Marketing can be a very different thing than one from a CEO.

Oh, and if they tell you they’ve got to have something in writing to show their boss? Don’t give them that opportunity either. Suggest an in-person presentation with both your client and his boss. Ask for the commitment at the end. If you get it, start typing. If not, tell them you’ll be happy to send over your contract (not proposal!) once they’ve made up their mind.

The above requires that you have your act together. You’ve got to know your business well enough to ask the right questions and get the information you need to put together your verbal presentation. But this, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is not at all a bad thing.

“Expert agencies write contracts that get signed, order-taker agencies write proposals that sit on shelves. Let your competition write the proposals.”

In this particularly difficult economy, we all need to get better at getting to the right customers and closing them faster. Let your competitors spin their wheels on proposals. By the time they’ve submitted one, you’ll have already spoken to several clients and your chances of landing one (or a few of them) are much higher.

A logo is an important tool for a consultant because it gives your business an identity and a face of its’ own. This gives you four major benefits:

1.   Makes your business look established, stable and successful. People want to do business with businesses that have experience, who will be there for them in the future (and in some consulting areas, this translates to just being around and available to complete the project!), and who are good at what they do. Investing in creating a logo can show your prospects that you fill these qualifications.

2. Makes your business look bigger and more official. This is the difference between positioning yourself as a freelancer and a consultant. Without a logo, you’re just a person, working by themselves, in a spare bedroom in your house. With a logo, you suddenly become a business –- and you’ll carry the increased credibility that brings with it. This credibility will help to assure your potential clients that you can handle their project.

3.   Gives you an image to place on your marketing materials. Having an image on your marketing materials instead of just text will make your materials look more visually interesting. More visual interest makes it more likely that your materials will be picked up, read and retained by potential clients. This isn’t to say you should stop at the logo when adding graphics to your materials, but it’s an excellent start.

4.   Contributes to your marketing’s consistency. Starting all of your marketing pieces with your logo will help you to create a consistent set of marketing pieces. Making sure your marketing pieces are consistent will help your clients to recognize each of your pieces as yours. And, as they receive or see more of your marketing, they will see your marketing message repeated again and again. This repetition will help them to remember you when they have a need for your consulting services.

This is the second part of my recap of the EBWIBR Social Media Luncheon that I attended on Friday, April 3rd. I learned quite a bit in the two presentations given by Nancy Friedman of WordWorking and Kelly Parkinson of Copylicious. It was obvious both presenters had far more to say about Twitter and LinkedIn than we had time for, and I look forward to hearing these women speak in the future about Social Media. In the meantime, here’s a recap of Kelly’s presentation which focused on using one of LinkedIn’s powerful networking tools: InMails.

If you’re like me, you’ve set up your LinkedIn profile and you’ve got a nice set of contacts. Perhaps you’ve sent out recommendation requests and got those set up as well. Maybe you’ve joined a few LI groups. And then you let your account sit there. What a lot of people either don’t realize or aren’t taking advantage of is that LinkedIn can be a great social media tool as well.

Let’s talk results first: when Kelly tried InMail (initially as sort of an ‘experiment’, and not expecting huge results), she had a 41% response rate and 6 new clients. If that doesn’t make you sit up and take notice in this economy, I don’t know what will. I should note that I would like to know how many InMails Kelly sent because while that’s a great response, InMails do cost money. (And Kelly if you read this, please comment if you can.) But as the saying goes, sometimes you’ve got to spend a little money to make a little money.

What is InMail? InMails are a proprietary LinkedIn networking tool. It is a paid service and may seem pricey at first: $10 a pop. However, there’s an enticing aspect to this and for some, a significant upside: no cold calling. Now, if you’ve been in business for a while, you probably don’t do a lot of cold calling, or only as your last resort. But if you are new to the game (as Kelly was at the time), or in a, ahem, down economy, you might find it necessary to pick up that telephone. Before you break out in a cold sweat and do that however, consider InMails. Quick, easy, non-invasive and here’s a bonus: if they’re not opened, you get a 100% refund on the InMail and you can use it to send to someone else. You only pay for what actually gets opened. For me, that softens the blow of the $10 price tag a bit.

Also, keep in mind that you won’t be blasting to hundreds of people at a time. One of the myths about using LinkedIn that Kelly pointed out is that being a ‘power user’ is not necessarily the best way to go about it. Are you really going to have any meaningful contact or interchange with 8000 connections? Chances are more likely that if you cultivate a smaller but highly relevant set of contacts and selectively add to them when doing InMails, you’re chances of making contacts that actually go somewhere are much higher.

How do I use InMails? If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, you’ll need to get that first. And honestly, if you’re just getting started on LI, you’ll probably want to explore the basic features before you jump into InMails. But in the event you’re ready to jump in, or have been on LI for a while now, sending InMails is not rocket science. Basically you would want to do a keyword search on LinkedIn to find the people you’d like to contact. In Kelly’s case, she use ‘marketing manager cleantech’ as this was where she wanted to focus her work. Hint: as in any marketing outreach program, targeted InMails will probably get you a much higher response rate. Use the very user-friendly LinkedIn UI to set up the emails, compose your message and hit ‘Send.’ Easy as that.

What should I say in my InMail? Keep it short and suggest a brief initial contact: ‘Let’s talk for 15 minutes on x/x/2009, etc.’ Nobody likes to be sold heavily on the phone, or even in person, right? Bless your email outreaches with the same brevity and you’re more likely to get a response.

Another great tip from Kelly: as you’re going to send your InMails (and I think this works for almost any outreach marketing you do) remember that you are the expert and they need you. Approach this kind of outreach with the attitude of ‘why, of course you want to hear from me, because I can really help you.’ This takes the pressure off of ‘making that sale’ and comes from a more honest, non-aggressive and, I believe, successful position than what we sometimes are taught as ‘good’ sales techniques.

I haven’t tried InMails yet, but I intend to do so in the future. I’ll report back here with what success I have, if any, and I hope to hear from any of you out there on The Internets who have also tried InMails and what your experience has been.

In future posts, I’ll be exploring other networking features of LinkedIn and how to really work your profile. For now, I’ll be focusing on Twitter though as I’ve only begun to scratch the surface there.

As an independent consultant, I know that marketing and selling is a big part of my life and livelihood, but they haven’t been naturals for me. That’s why I like to watch and learn from the pros.

This is a true story about a guy I know. I’ll call him “Ray” because he’s like a ray of sunshine in every way. We all can take a page or two from the book he endorses and lives. (At the end of this blog I’ll tell you the title — you may be surprised.)

Ray is one of the best examples I know of a successful business person. He’s a top-selling pharmaceutical rep for one of the world’s largest pharma companies. What’s more, he’s a top seller even though he doesn’t have a particularly good territory. While other reps get Manhattan or Los Angeles, Ray has to travel long distances around a large, sparsely-settled Midwestern state to serve his physician clients. Yet two years in a row, Ray was the top oncology sales rep for his corporation. If you know anything about how sales goals are set, you know it’s tough to be # 1 in the first year – but nearly impossible the second because the bar is raised significantly.

I couldn’t resist asking Ray how he managed it. A generous person, he willingly shared three things.

#1: Ray knows his company’s products, his competitor’s products, the industry, and the field of medicine in general. Learning has to be ongoing because the flow of new discoveries and new drugs is constant. This alone, however, isn’t the answer.

#2: Ray is a true consultant. That means real problem-solving even when it may mean losing some immediate business. He partners with his physician clients to help them figure out the best solutions for individual cancer patients. He will even recommend a competitor’s drug if he thinks it’s more suitable in a particular case. Clients see him as collaborator rather than salesperson, and trust is built. But this isn’t the only answer, either.

#3: Here’s the secret sauce. Ray truly cares about people. He understands that clients don’t buy products and services as much as they buy an experience – from people they can relate to. In answer to my question about his selling skills, Ray said (and I quote): “I don’t try to make sales; I try to make friends.” For him, that means relating to clients on a personal level first. It isn’t fake; he truly appreciates and respects others. He went on to tell me that his daily guide is Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” It has been a best-selling business book since 1936. Some of the examples are dated, but the information and techniques are still “right on.” Ray told me that he re-reads it annually. I had a copy on my bookshelf, so I read it again – and there was Ray on every page. As one who is privileged to know this outstanding human being, I can assure you he doesn’t just turn the pages, he turns the advice into action.

By the way, Ray is a 30-something guy with a loving family and hundreds of adoring friends and associates. He’s an all-around success because he practices the same solid people principles in private as he does in business.

It’s not hard to find a copy of “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” The investment is small, and the payoff can be gigantic. Just ask Ray.