One of the most important skills to have as a consultant is your ability to sell custom engagements.
While productizing your services is a path you may eventually take, if you don’t sell custom for a while first, there’s a good chance your productized services will miss their true potential.
Selling custom before productizing allows you to get clear on:
- Customer segments—who actually buys what from you?
- Problems—what are the real challenges you’re solving and how do prospects describe them?
- Goals—what are your prospects trying to accomplish and why?
- Features—what needs to be included to get results and what do people value most?
- Timelines—how long should your engagements be to get results?
- Value—how much value do you actually help generate for clients?
- Price—how much should you charge for your engagements?
- Objections—what common objections do I need to overcome?
- Questions—what questions do people ask when considering my services?
When you jump right to productizing, you inherently make a lot of assumptions about all of the above.
Your services may seem great “on paper” but they can easily miss the mark in several subtle or major ways.
When you miss the mark on any of the above, it will almost always cost you money. And that’s money you can never get back.
On Wednesday, January 25, I’m going to be doing a workshop on how to sell custom consulting services.
The workshop will cover things like:
- The counter-intuitive ways to get prospects to reach out to you
- How to uncover the real problem, the value of solving it, and the costs of inaction
- How to create compelling options that are profitable for everyone
- How to make a business case for your prices
- How to dramatically increase your proposal acceptance rates
- What to do when clients want to negotiate with you on price
- When to turn your custom services into productized services
- My experience with what clients value most in a proposal (and what they don’t)
- Bonus: The proposal template I use today to successfully sell my consulting services
If you join live, there will be a Q&A session at the end.
Interested in participating?
The price for this workshop is $79 and includes a full recording within 48 hours after the event.
(Note: Mindshare members get this workshop and past workshops free.)
Hope to see you there!
—k