Tag: career

Career Reform: Selling your Way Out of the Paper Bag

One of the things that all consultants have to accept is that selling is a part of the territory. Doesn’t matter if you are a solopreneur or an associate consultant in 10,000 person firm, selling is an everyday occurrence.

Sounds like a cliché, but it’s true. Everything a consultant does or says is part of their ongoing selling process. Skills and experience must constantly be sold to customers.

It’s hard to sell, if you stop and think about it. You have to convince people, strangers, that you or your firm have the skills to solve the problem that the customer has identified, and to demonstrate that you can identify and solve problems that the customer may not know they have.

How do you do it? There is no easy answer. My experience is that selling customers is often not about the products or services themselves, but about selling the value and the solutions that your experience brings to the equation on top of the products or services. Selling is about believing that what you can do for the customer is beyond what they could achieve themselves, but which will make them far more successful than they would be on their own.

Selling Consulting services requires self-confidence, and a willingness to leave your ego at the door. What the customer thinks they need, and what they position with you or the sales team that they have been working with, are often only their tactical, short-term needs. Customers often are unwilling to accept the solution they really need. Sometimes, the consultant has to accept starting with the partial solution sale to get the customer to accept the larger problem.

Leaving your ego at the door makes accepting the initial compromise easier to accept. Good consultants see the short-term, tactical project as the way in. But if that’s all that you are able to sell, then you may need to reflect on how you are positioning yourself.

Selling consulting is a process that is continuous, even with customers that you are already working with. Being a consultant means that you must always listen, observe, and sell. Reputation, relationships, and experience/skills only get you so far. Selling it, be it yourself or the solution the customer really needs, is what takes you the next step.

How do you sell consulting services? How do you sell yourself as a consultant?

Career Reform – From Analyst to Consultant

For many years my professional title has included the word “consultant”, and with it the gravitas that comes with being able to use that term. In the cold, hard light of my early-40s, in all honesty I have say that I was not a consultant for most of that time: I was an analyst.

Analyst versus consultant. What’s the difference?
In black and white terms, an analyst is a tactical consultant, with a specific set of skills and knowledge that can be used to solve a particular problem. And a consultant is…?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Inigo Montoya

Consultant is over-used and mis-used word. All the people I know who call themselves consultants are actually analysts, contractors, or skilled professionals who call themselves consultants for lack of a better term to describe what they do to pay the bills, and because putting Gun For Hire on a business card tends to attract the wrong clientele.

On the other end of the spectrum, consultant is more than a term to describe a person who works in a large consultancy or professional services firm (or as, Andrea Mulligan is working through in public, a professional service practice in a software or SaaS firm). A consultant comes to a customer with a set of skills that cannot be had just anywhere, be it in a programming language, GAAP restructuring, or, in my case, Web performance measurement and load testing.

A true consultant must be more than a skilled analysts who has chosen the freedom of working outside large companies, leaping from challenge to challenge. A consultant brings years of experience and a view of the larger world with them. In fact, many of the best consultants can’t do what their analysts do for them (or maybe the consultant’s skills are just too rusty) on a daily basis.

Analysts solve a specific problem. Consultants ensure that the problem never happens again.

Consultants put the problem that analysts solve into context.

For more than a decade, I have been an analyst, solving whatever thorny riddle is put in front of me using whatever tools and skills I could cobble together. Analysts don’t have a lifetime career ahead of them, as their skill-set falls out of favor or is replaced by younger, more talented analysts.

Consultants take what they have learned during their analyst/apprentice days and convert that into a strategic view. Not simply How do we solve this problem? but Is this the right problem to solve? or How did we get to the point where we needed to solve this problem?

And, most importantly, Is the solution we’re developing flexible enough to adapt to solve and prevent problems we can’t even foresee now?

It’s hard for someone like me who revels in solving the problems no one else can to let go and realize that the problem isn’t everything. To realize that there are people out there who can do what I do as well as or better than I can.

Letting go of one thing means that you have to have something else to grab onto. I do not relish Wily Coyote moments: looking down to see the fall that’s about to come.

So, at 42, I am stepping back to embrace a very new and different career question: What does it really mean to be a strong consultant?

It’s not easy to shift gears, and drop into the career lane that I had avoided for so long, feeling it a trap. I now know that to survive and flourish, I have to understand how the business works, how practice/company goals are set and met, how to effectively sell professional service (something I am awful at a lot of the time), and how to position professional services within the SaaS model.

It is a somewhat disheartening realization that the 10 years I spent fighting becoming a strong consultant now have to be made up in a very short amount of time, but the games everyone remembers are those that are won from behind in overtime.

Why Do I Do This? – Educate, Guide, and Solve

This is the year I turn 40. As a result, I am looking back upon my life, my career, and trying to determine what I do best. If I could make my life into an elevator pitch, what would it be?

I decided to take what I do right now and see how low I could take it. What does my career boil down to?

It came down to three simple words: Educate, Guide, and Solve.
Each of these describes a facet of my career that provides a profound sense of personal satisfaction. Each of these is unique in that they give me the chance to share what I know with others, while still gaining new experiences in the process.

These three things are simultaneously selfish and selfless. I believe that in order to have a successful, productive, and fulfilling career, these three things need to serve as the foundation of everything I do.

Educate

I work in a small community of Web performance analysts. I have spent years training myself to see the world through the eyes of a Web site and how it presents to the outside world. As I taught myself to see the world this way, I was asked to share what I knew with others.

At first I did this through technical support and a training course I helped develop. Then I moved into consulting. I began to blog and comment on Web performance.
I needed to share what I knew with others, because it is meaningless to hoard all of your knowledge. While I am paid well as a consultant, it is also important that as many people as possible learn from me; and that doesn’t always need to sold to the highest bidder.

Guide

While some may say that there is no difference between Guide and Educate, I see a profound chasm between the two.

We have all been educated at some point. We have sat through classes and lectures and labs that convey information to us, and have provided the foundation for what we know.

But we have also encountered people who have shown us how to step beyond the information. They place the information that they are giving us in a larger context, allow us to see problems as a component of the whole.

That is what I strive to do. Not only do I want to give people the functional tools they need to interpret the data, I want them to then take that data and see the patterns in the data. I work closely with colleagues and customers, helping them see the patterns, understand how they tie to the things I say everyday, and then be able to solve this type of problem on their own the next time.

A guide is only useful when the path is not known. Once I have showed someone the path, I can return to my place, in the knowledge that they are as experienced on the path as I am.

Solve

Once you have shown someone what the data can do, how to see the patterns, it is critical that they have an understand how to take that pattern and change it for the better. Seeing a pattern and understanding its cause are only the beginning.
I can share my experiences, share how others have solved problems similar to this one, help them fix the problem.

And then be able to show that the problem is solved. An unmeasured, yet resolved problem, is meaningless.

Summary

This is the skeletal description of what I want to achieve in my career. I could expand these topics for a lot longer, but the question I propose is: What three concepts can you boil your career down to?

Seth Godin Quote Week Continues

Seth, who I am quoting way too often this week, has three great posts on finding a job. [here and here and here]

I am one of these people. I have a degree in History. I work in high-tech. I can write code when I want to. I can limp around linux, Windows and pretty much and Unix-like environment. I know a fair amount about HTTP, TCP, SSL, Apache, databases, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, QA, Customer Service, Marketing, Sales and a few other things I can’t remember now.

Macs don’t scare me.

So, what does the work world do with a polymath generalist? Employers hate people like me, because we don’t fit a mold, a niche. I hate structured job roles. I want to achieve excellence, not mediocrity.

I got my last job by sending an e-mail to all of the executives at the company and saying ‘Look, you need me. You will not get better without me. Hire me now.’ Two months later I was leaving the Bay Area for Massachusetts, much to the chagrin of my former employer, to join a company that created a position for me.

I want to work for companies that do that. Companies that build themselves around key people, amazing talent, a desire for excellence.

The growth trend of more small companies appeals to me. Hey, even a company of one can be huge.

Thanks for the great read.

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