Keeping the Ball Rolling With Prospects
Keeping the ball rolling with prospects requires a mix of empathy for their situation and a project management mindset.
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Consulting Business
Keeping Your Customers’ Trust
Earning and keeping your customers’ trust is essential to your success as a startup. Gerald Weinberg’s “Secrets of Consulting” offers “11 Laws of Trust” as a guideline for establishing and maintaining successful business relationships.
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Cold Calling Won’t Find Your First Business Customer
I meet teams trying to cold call for their first business customer and I just haven’t seen it work; the trust issues cripple them. Here is a relevant excerpt from Gabriel Weinberg’s interview with me for his traction book.
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Recognizing Chris Finnie as a Partner and Advisor
We focus on strategy and business development for software startups. We’ve been fortunate to develop strong relationships with firms who also serve startups but offer complementary services, as well as firms who focus on larger clients but whose expertise is also of benefit to startups. We work with a number of partners to create value
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DreamSimplicity Interview Transcript
Here is the transcript–edited for clarity and hyperlinked for context–for my recent interview with Floyd Tucker of DreamSimplicity Marketplace. The focus was on our startup stages model: formation, open for business, early customers, finding a niche, and scaling up.
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Beat The Clock
Global teams work 24 hours a day, 7 day a week to “beat the clock.” Here are some tips to increase their effectiveness.
Collecting Unpaid Bills
In 1995 I did some work for one of the early web startups in Palo Alto. They had delivered a number of database driven websites using a proprietary software technology that they had developed, and had sold the technology to several firms. But they had a problem collecting unpaid bills: they had not been paid
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Simple Client Satisfaction & Process Improvement Survey
Whether it’s a free phone call or a working session, a workshop, or a longer term engagement we normally send the following four question survey to all of the participants: Please help us improve our engagement and service delivery processes. Please take five minutes and answer the following four questions with one or two items
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Matt Perez on How Nearsoft Leverages Yammer
Matt Perez on How Nearsoft Leverages Yammer I met Matt Perez in 2003 just as I was starting SKMurphy. It was the tail end of nuclear winter in Silicon Valley and folks were trying to figure out what was next. We kept running into one another at various networking events and as we got to
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SKMurphy Featured In Case Study For Central Desktop
SKMurphy was interviewed and selected as one of a dozen case studies on Document Management Solutions for Consulting Groups by Central Desktop. Read about our innovative approach at “Document Management Solution helps SKMurphy Consulting Group Increase Productivity.” We make some strong claims in the case study: Increased productivity – approximately 5 to 10 times more
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Three Good Books for Consultants
Here are three good books for consultants that I routinely recommend: “Trusted Advisor”, “Secrets of Consulting”, and “Rainmaking.”
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A Too Common Conversation of Late
Layoffs continue to encourage old friends and co-workers to reconnect and many to consider–somewhat involuntarily–an entrepreneurial phase for their next career move. I spoke to three people today who had been laid off in the last month or so. Here is the summary of some key suggestions the three conversations: If you are considering joining
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Three Things I’ve Learned About Networking
Networking is good questions, listening, and helping others. Carry more than your own card. Connect folks who will benefit from talking.
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Marketing Consultants Forum at CNSV
I took part in a Marketing Consultants Forum at CNSV in 2009. My focus was on “Cultivating Communities to Get More Customers.”
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Plan For Customer Reference as Much as Payment
Worry about a good customer reference more than getting paid. A reference will lead to payment, but just because they pay does not mean they’re a reference. Plan for gaining customer references by starting with a request for feedback don the quality of your services and the business results you enabled.
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Scott Sambucci on “An Entrepreneur’s Lessons Learned”
I met Scott Sambucci when I spoke at TVC in July of 2007 in Menlo Park as a part of their “Entering the Entrepreneurial World” seminar. He was kind enough to blog about his takeaway from the talk in “Definition: Entrepreneurship” where he concluded that even though it was a noun it should be defined
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Using the Downturn to Launch Your Consulting Career
The last six weeks or so I have encountered a number of folks who have decided to use the downturn to launch their consulting career. Typically they have been encouraged in this by their former employer who has given them a large check a lot of free time. But some have chafed at cubicle life
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How To Measure Your Lead Generation Effectiveness
Many start-up founders believe that the sales process should be this straightforward: Get the phone to ring (or e-mail inbox or skype or web contact form) Tell your prospect about your offering Take the order Alas it is normally not this simple, especially if you are selling to businesses. We do encounter some startups that
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Entrepreneurial Focus: Right Layer, Right Problem, Right Time
Entrepreneurial focus means answering three related questions: what are we good at, how can we tell and how do we measure it, who wants it and how do they value it?
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Customer Development for a Consulting Practice in a Downturn
What follows are some real questions I have answered either face to face or in e-mail over the last 90 days in response to the current downturn in Silicon Valley. Customer Development for a Consultants in a Downturn Q: I just completed my first two years of consulting–which were spectacular–after 20+ years of full time
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