September, 2018

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Website or No Website? Answers and Help for Independent Consultants

Successful Independent Consulting

As a self-employed consultant do you really need a website? I’m asked this a lot, particularly if a consultant gets most business from referrals or they contract through agencies or boutique firms. Besides, it’s highly unlikely that a prospective client is going to stumble upon your website and decide to hire you. Surely creating a website is a waste of time and money, right?

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Why Playing with Your Food is Critical for Consultants

David A Fields

When you stood well under three feet tall, you chortled with unbridled glee at your father’s silly faces and merrily tried to ride the family dog. You’d also play with your food; catapulting carrot sticks and fashioning finger art with your mashed potatoes. What a hoot!

Fashion 286
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Becoming A 7 Figure Consultant Through Relationships With Barc Holmes: Podcast #52

Consulting Success

Maybe it’s time to reconsider your marketing approach, particularly in your path to becoming a 7-figure consultant. While some people invest a lot of time into creating content or figuring out how to do advertising or speaking or going to a lot of trade shows, Barc Holmes of Coral Mountain Consulting has found an approach that works well for him. He is a master of not only building and nurturing, but strengthening relationships.

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A Better Way to Visualize Hoshin Plans

Markovitz Consulting

The hoshin kanri X-matrix makes my head hurt. I mean, kudos to the person who invented it for creating something so incredibly compact and information-dense. But I’m not sure it’s the easiest way to convey the information in the hoshin plan. Small dots in three locations on a spreadsheet with text running in two directions isn’t a recipe for easy digestion. image via kanbanize.com.

Meeting 213
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PowerPoint Best Practices for Creating Stellar Presentations

Mastering data visualization in PowerPoint will help accelerate your career because it positions you as someone who can present data that drives business decisions forward. think-cell's PowerPoint Best Practices eBook was created specifically for professionals aiming to master the art and science of data-driven storytelling. What’s inside: Practical Insights: Uncover valuable tips for crafting engaging and persuasive presentations.

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7 Ways Your Website Can Transform Your Life

Consulting Matters

Congratulations! You have taken an important first step towards professional success. Having a world-class website that serves as the center of gravity for your marketing efforts is essential. I am certain that you are expecting a number of results in return for your investment. You want to attract and retain customers/clients. You want to establish yourself as a preeminent provider in your area of expertise.

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MECE

CaseInterview.com

What is MECE (Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive)? MECE (pronounced "me see") or Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive is a principle often used by management consulting firms such as McKinsey to describe a way of organizing information that is "Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive". MECE is a systematic problem-solving framework that helps to solve complex problems.

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Take off Your Happy Face! Why Consulting Clients Love Disagreeable Consultants

David A Fields

Your consulting clients walk into each engagement holding bouquets of helium balloons they want to release to the sky. (Metaphorically, unless your clients are clowns.) Each balloon is an assumption, preconception, hypothesis or dream that only requires your confirmation. Often you’ll grant their wish, agreeably snipping the strings of doubts that restrain your client’s balloons.

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4 Ways To Get Your First Consulting Client (Without Cold-Calling)

Consulting Success

Many consultants have trouble finding their first client. I want to offer you a few ideas to help you to go out and win your first consulting client. Here are 4 ways to get your first consulting client. Your challenge is getting to be visible so that your ideal clients know that you exist — so that they’re then able to hire you. 1. First-Degree Connections If you’re just getting started and you want to. 4 Ways To Get Your First Consulting Client (Without Cold-Calling) is a post

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Speaking the Language of Your Team

Markovitz Consulting

I started using Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata approach at a new client in NYC recently. The mechanics are young (18-25 years) old, and the education level is low. No one has been to college, and not all of them have even completed high school. Some of the obstacles I ran into were predictable to anyone who’s used kata before—people jumping to solutions rather than identifying real problems, focusing on symptoms rather than root causes, turning the discussion around obstacles into a (long and loud) g

Education 199
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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

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Digital Marketing Growth Strategies For Service Businesses

Henry DeVries

A service business needs to be agile with digital marketing if it wants to succeed today. Digital marketing growth expert Lisa Apolinski shares tips on how to grow a services business with digital services marketing.

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Individual Contributor vs. Team Member

Johanna Rothman

Many people draw distinctions between people who do management-kind of work and people who do “individual contributor” kind of work. I’ve been asking if they mean individual work or team member work. Sometimes, they do mean individual work. More often, they mean team member. Our culture shapes our language. (And, our language shapes our culture.

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Even Bad People Have Good Ideas

CaseInterview.com

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed a dramatic decline in the number of conversations that involve critical reasoning and independent thinking. I’m very concerned by this trend. One obvious place this has occurred is in American politics. I have friends across the full spectrum of political beliefs. I am shocked at how many debates devolve into arguments that involve barely any facts.

Trends 80
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The Source of Consulting Projects, in Order from Easiest to Most Difficult to Win

David A Fields

Projects could flow into your consulting firm from a slew of different directions: from current clients requesting follow-on engagements to out-of-the-blue inquiries generated by your dazzling, on-stage presence. Closing each of these opportunities requires different levels of effort, types of activities and kilograms of chocolate-covered almonds.

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Savings Consultants Are Needed in Today's Market More Than Ever

Savings Consultants are needed in today’s market more than ever. With an increase in expenses, businesses are looking for opportunities to save. Often unknown to businesses are savings in expense reduction, specialized tax savings, specialized savings including medical underpayments, health benefits cost reduction, zero cost processing, and more. Blue Coast Savings, with over 20 years in business, assists Savings Consultants in helping these companies move toward more profitable businesses.

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How To Productize Consulting Services with John Warrillow: Podcast #55

Consulting Success

To productize consulting services and build a sellable company, the ultimate challenge is to try to find something that you offer which is truly unique to what you do. It’s very likely that if you canvas your customers, there is one or two things that you do better than anybody else. The raw material is going to be customer insight. Bestselling author and founder of five companies John Warrillow says they spend a lot of.

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Tomorrow’s Industries are Looking for Effective Succession Management, Now!

Clarity Consultants

Crafting a dynamic organization where leaders can continue to advance, and employees are developed to step into their place is a must in today’s business world. Otherwise, you may find yourself struggling to secure the highly skilled, talented managers your business needs to achieve its goals. The post Tomorrow’s Industries are Looking for Effective Succession Management, Now!

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The New Rules For The Power Of Positive Thinking

Henry DeVries

“As a leader in your company, and every employee is a leader, it is your job to set the energetic tone of the workplace when you enter every morning,” says author Cathy Hawk.

Company 83
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Designing an Organization for a Product Approach, Part 1

Johanna Rothman

If you’re thinking about an agile transformation, you already know about feature teams. You might even call them/use them as product teams. You might wonder about organizing all the work as product work. See Your Current Organization. Many organizations use functions to organize people. The “Typical Product Development Organization” shows the kind of organization I see most often.

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TOOLS and METHODOLOGIES for developing DECISION SUPPORT PACKAGES

This White Paper targets opportunities for Management to develop proficiency in the Decision Framing and Analyses element of input to Decision, & Risk Analyses for Major Project Funding Decisions.

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The Most Strategic Decision of Your Life

CaseInterview.com

The most strategic decision of your life will be deciding which people you allow into your life and which you ask to leave it. It will be which family members to be close to (and which to not). It will be whom you choose as friends (and whom you choose to no longer be friends with). It will be whom you choose to be in your emotional support network (and whom you choose to exclude).

Energy 78
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The Effectiveness Quilt – A Surprising Way to Improve Your Consulting Firm

David A Fields

You’ve probably heard the expression, “Good is the enemy of great.” Yes, that saying arose to justify eliminating “chocolates” made with carob. (I’m pretty sure.) We’ve talked about this notion before, but in this article we’ll explore another aspect of building a more effective consulting firm by eliminating what you’re good at.

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5 Simple Steps to Win More Consulting Projects (Make Sales Easier)

Consulting Success

Here’s how to win more consulting sales. People often refer to it as “closing” more sales. I’m going to offer you some insights, some mindsets, and ways of thinking about this to help you actually win more business. The most effective consultants understand that it’s all about what’s going on in the buyer’s mind. 1. Forget About Closing The Sale (For Now) The key to closing more sales is don’t focus on the close.

Sales 176
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Behind The Scenes of the Chipotle E. Coli Crisis, with William Espey

Melissa Agnes

How Chipotle’s mindset and culture helped them manage their E. coli crisis, even though they were not technically crisis ready at the time. You can also listen to this episode on iTunes , Spotify , and Stitcher. William Espey, the man responsible for the voice of the brand that is Chipotle, joins the Invincible Brand Podcast to discuss the challenges Chipotle faced when managing the E. coli crisis in 2015, and the mindset and strategies they implemented to manage the many dynamics of this

Culture 73
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Why You Need to Use Case Studies in Sales and Marketing (and How to Start Now)

Case studies are proof of successful client relations and a verifiable product or service. They persuade buyers by highlighting your customers' experiences with your company and its solution. In sales, case studies are crucial pieces of content that can be tailored to prospects' pain points and used throughout the buyer's journey. In marketing, case studies are versatile assets for generating business, providing reusable elements for ad and social media content, website material, and marketing c

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The Four X Factors of Exceptional Leaders

Strategy+Business

All great leaders share four special factors that make them stand out, according to the authors, who identified these distinguishing traits after analyzing the performance of 2,500 senior executives over a decade. Leadership table stakes -- a strategic mind-set, delivering P&L performance, and boardroom presence -- are not enough. The good news is these four X factors can be developed and measured, allowing companies to identify corner office superstars.

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Top 10 Podcasts for Learning & Development Professionals 2018

Clarity Consultants

As listening to podcasts has become an increasingly favorite activity, competing with radio, the number of podcasts devoted to learning and development has grown. At Clarity Consultants, we’ve cut through the noise and identified 10 of the most informative and interesting podcasts for L&D professionals. Here is our selection, in no particular order.

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Product Orientation Requires Technical Excellence

Johanna Rothman

One of the big problems I see with a product orientation (as opposed to a project) is in preparing for ongoing work. You might not start the next project for this product after you complete this project. You might have to round-robin projects for various products because you don’t have enough people to do all the projects at the same time. However, if you want to develop a product orientation, you’ll need to consider the future.

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How to Win Any Argument

CaseInterview.com

The key to “winning” any argument is to recognize that some arguments not only can’t be won, but shouldn’t be “won.”. Arguments take place in one of two contexts: Unimportant Relationship. Important Relationship. (Notice how the two categories are MECE. I couldn’t help myself.). How you approach arguments in these situations can vary tremendously. From a purely logical standpoint, an argument can be analyzed and dissected, facts gathered, and conclusions presented.

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The Art of Remote Collaboration: How to Successfully Whiteboard with Remote Teams

Just because we're working with a distributed team doesn't mean we have to abandon time-tested tools and methods like whiteboarding. Digital look-alikes often cramp creativity and all but eliminate the humanity of shared interactions. Hardware solutions are also limiting and, of course, expensive and immobile. In an increasingly digital and remote-first world, it’s important for us to select tools and processes that allow us to mitigate if not eliminate the above problems.