Consultant’s Pyramid, Part 4: Promote Yourself

(Part 4 in the Consultant’s Pyramid series—a short blog series on keeping the project pipeline full).

Plain and simple: people need to know you exist. As a consultant, you’re going to have a really tough go of it if your only visible presence is a web site that lists your services. What reason does anyone have to engage your services? You must create your own history, and write your own story, because nobody else is going to do that for you, at least not until you’re already famous—or up on felony charges.

When you do promote yourself, pick one adjective, then personify that adjective. It doesn’t have to be the same adjective every time. When I write a blog article that gives away useful information, in the back of my mind I’m thinking “be generous”. It’s OK to have a couple of lower-priority adjectives in the mix, but the important thing here is focus. If you try to play more than one role, your promotion will lose much of its potential impact. Do one thing (at a time), and do it well. Don’t make readers guess what your intention is; they’ll probably guess wrong.

Note well: This type of promotion is not selling. If your promotion consists of begging people to buy from you, odds are good you’ll be ignored completely. Promotion literally means “advancement”, which could be interpreted as the advancement of a cause, or a goal. Your goal is to advance your own personal brand. Promote yourself, not your products and services.

Some of you may be making faces at me for these remarks by now. “But Ryan,” you’re thinking, “how will this even remotely help me make a sale?” Most consultants sell in a business-to-business (B2B) world. That world rarely operates on a direct-sell model. After all, most corporate executives aren’t clipping coupons to get a free Catalyst switch with their next SAP installation. No, B2B sales are based on relationships and branding.

Promotion improves your personal brand, which increases your exposure, which greatly increases your ability to form new relationships, which dramatically improves the number of opportunities you will be privy to. Some of those opportunities will be an excellent match for your skill set, and you will already know some of the people involved. Selling all at once becomes a lot easier. In fact, odds are good that those opportunities will come looking for you.

Success Measure for Self Promotion: You can put in tangible terms exactly how you improved your own personal brand today.

In the next series post, we will again return to a one-on-one method of expanding your network. You may subscribe to my RSS feed here.