The Big Question
Questions I get from consultants. And my answers.
A Salesforce consultancy team contacted me for a high-level review of their market positioning. Here’s a summary of my review. Lots of learnings!
Early January 2021, I got a call from a medium-sized Salesforce consultancy to review their market positioning. A few pieces of information about them (with their permission):
● 2 Founding partners, founded in 2018, all of them with Salesforce consulting backgrounds.
● Expertise: Salesforce software implementation & adoption. Digital transformation.
● 12 consultants (on top of the partners).
The short story:
As with many new consultants, the founders believed that business would come to them once they had announced their intentions in 2018. It did initially.
A common characteristic of the new consulting professional: endless enthusiasm! Successful consultancy self-employment requires a belief in oneself, a strong desire to succeed, and enthusiasm for the idea, product, or service offering.
But their enthusiasm, they admit in hindsight, has resulted in difficulties to grow more consistently.
Their 3 key near-term objectives:
1. Increase size and scope of their projects (right now: too much, too small engagements)
2. Move to more consistent retainer billing for ongoing implementation & adoption support (with standardized/packaged subscription approach)
3. Grow more consistently (fewer ups and downs, causing team management difficulties)
Summary of my review: 4 main areas of improvement
1. Positioning too technical, not transformational, not client pain-resolving
As with most tech-based consultancies, their positioning is too technical, with too much jargon, focusing on the Salesforce software instead of on the transformational potential of a Salesforce implementation.
I know it’s very counterintuitive, but my advice is: DON’T SPEAK ABOUT TECHNOLOGY. Focus on business language in terms of outcomes: saving money, creating efficiencies, accelerating growth, or protecting against future business risks.
2. Audience clarity not strong enough (focus, focus, focus)
The target audience definition wasn’t clear enough to connect with ideal clients and create an organic pre-qualification process to drive efficiencies. An unclear audience definition will handicap all other business development components such as the value proposition, the content and the case studies, the expertise improvements, the team or client training, the account management, the implementation processes, pitching, pricing, and contracting, etc.
The consultancy had internal discussions on choices such as local vs. international, industry focus or not, enterprise and/or mid-sized company focus, improvement vs. new implementation, etc. These target audience discussions will never go away entirely. Still, such acute target client indecisiveness will always have a severe negative impact on generating new business in a focused and efficient way.
3. Value proposition developed in a backward way
As with 95% of consultancies, the value proposition got developed in a backward way. What do I mean by that? Backward proposition development is an inside-in positioning: ‘We are THE experts in Salesforce implementation’.
I also call this ‘the leaflet positioning’. And because almost everybody does the same thing, it doesn’t differentiate, it creates a commodity positioning. There are thousands of Salesforce consultants bragging about their expertise. It’s a worthless bag of wind, it doesn't build any trust. Don’t forget, consulting is a credence business (says Tom McMakin in his book ‘How Clients Buy’): clients need to trust us before they buy.
A good value proposition is an outside-in exercise. It starts from a specific audience with specific pains, specific gain expectations, specific objectives to achieve. The ultimate value proposition is a transformational, pain-resolution, distinctive service to the target audience. It uses impact-driven business language instead of the waste-less ‘we are the experts’ tagline.
(‘The Value Proposition’ book from Alex Osterwalder should be on every consultants’ desk)
4. Visibility not strong enough and not growing
At the start of an audit, the first thing I do is to drop the consultancy website in my Google Keyword tool Ubersuggest and study the number and quality of those keywords. Of course, it’s not (all) about Google, but I’ve discovered almost 100% correlation between visibility in a market and the keywords’ quality.
These Salesforce guys have been in business for 2,5 years now, and that should be visible already from their content (e.g., case studies) as a key driver for trust-building. Don’t forget: 90% of prospects check you out before meeting with you or before signing a contract, and you’d better have an abundance of trust-stuff that confirms how good you understand your target clients and how well you have solved problems with other clients in the same shoes.
On top, I always advise having at least one authoritative expert in the team with strong visibility in the market. That’s very often a difficult barrier in a consultancy with multiple partners: who is the team’s visible authority person?
I have explained this in my previous newsletter in the ‘Authority Grid’: authorities in consultancies have a unique role: grow visibility, build trust in expertise, inspire thinking shifts, picture the transformational potential, and ‘play’ the Trojan Horse (the prospect door-opener).
