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Blogs > New2Midlo > Fun with a normal white guy...

You've Never Thought of That? Really?  

New2Midlo 54M
663 posts
4/7/2015 9:01 am
You've Never Thought of That? Really?

I'll keep this short for once and will preface by saying I endeavor to maintain my humility as best I can and only rub my intellect in someone's face when they need to be taken down a notch or two.

Anyway, I currently have my own consulting firm (sales and marketing in the electronics industry) and it's doing fairly well, which honestly surprises me a bit. For me, the biggest fear I have is meeting with a and coming to the conclusion that they're doing everything the way they should; that there's no value I can bring to them. This, of course, never stops traditional consulting firms as they have a seemingly inexhaustible supply of useless templates and meaningless recommendations that invariably include multiple references to levering synergies.

Back to the fear; this hasn't been an issue with most of my previous as they'd identified specific needs and wanted someone to address said need. However, I met with a new last week, who had retained me to essentially fix their sales and marketing strategy. They had a great product offering but their sales were stagnant; could I recommend how they could be better. Pretty nebulous stuff and as such, the fear kicked in.

However, by the time I left their facility, after two days of meetings, not only had the fear subsided but I felt like a sales and marketing god. After receiving some product training, I asked to review their current sales and marketing strategy. 'We don't have one.' Okay, so how do you choose your target customers? 'We don't; customers call us.' Alright, how about your advertising strategy and materials? 'Just the catalog you've got in your hand.'

From there, it became even more humorous as I asked about various things and saw they'd never considered most of them. It was amazing to see their thoughts about their business change and was quite rewarding on my side, knowing how I was impacting them just from a couple of days bantering back and forth. It was all positive as they truly wanted to know what they were missing. Plus, I told them at the beginning, we all leave our egos at the door.

If there's a point to this, I guess there are two. First, I should never be surprised by what plans successful businesses don't have. The other is that I'll never grow tired of the feeling of reward I get when making a positive impact on people.

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