SPA Conference session: Consulting without Secrets | |||
| One-line description: | Share your puzzles and successes on marketing & sales of services | ||
| Session format: | Workshop (150 mins) [read about the different session types] | ||
| Abstract: | Selling your services, is a popular topic for hallway conversations at many software development conferences. How do you sell courses? How do you sell coaching? From what sources do you get your programming projects? (How) do you decide which leads to put energy in? What marketing do you invest time and/or money in? We want to bring the conversation from the hallway into a proper session, so we can all learn from each other. Marketing and Selling your services is not always easy. You are passionate about your product, and there must be customers out there who are as passionate as you. How do you find them? One of our colleagues said recently: "most of us can't market our way out of a paper bag...". Sometimes a colleague brings you in, sometimes a former client calls you, maybe your website sells something. Problems consultants can encounter: selling niche services customers have not heard about yet (e.g. agile coaching, model driven architecture, that new framework...), living in a remote area, being too experienced or all-round, lacking the right kind of connections, ... Example topics: - Different mental models of 'selling' and 'marketing' - are they separate activities or are sales and marketing basically a form of consulting? - Where does your sales process end and the billing cycle begin? - Who, if anyone, do you partner with? (we have had some interesting partnering experiences over the years) - Do you have a favourite sales process or source of inspiration? (e.g. solution selling, flawless consulting, secrets of consulting) - How do your marketing and sales efforts contribute to successful projects and happy customers? - Do you work for your network or does your network work for you? Come to this session to share experiences and stories. Tell us your tips and strategies, and we will tell you ours, also the ones that do not seem to work. | ||
| Audience background: | project coaches, consultants, trainers, freelance developers (external and internal) | ||
| Benefits of participating: | learn more about how to market and sell your services as a coach/consultant/trainer/freelance developer, whether you're external or internal | ||
| Materials provided: | We will provide post-its, index cards and other workshop materials. Background reading: - Gerald M. Weinberg, Secrets of Consulting - Peter Block, Flawless Consulting - Michael T. Bosworth, Solution Selling | ||
| Process: | At the start of the workshop, we collect all issues participants have. Each participant gets a turn to present one issue, we do multiple rounds depending on the number of issues people come up with. After collecting issues, we will explore and elaborate the issues in groups. Depending on the group size and the number of issues, we either prioritize (with voting) and plan the issues or we create an agenda wall where participants choose a slot to work on their topic. if we have more than 7 participants, we will work in subgroups on the issues. For each issue, we'll create a short report (flipchart or A3). We'll conclude with short plenary presentations about the results. | ||
| Detailed timetable: | 00:00 - 00:10 introduction 00:10 - 00:40 brainstorm & collect topics (depends on size and creativity of group) 00:40 - 01:25 discussion slot 1 (half our discussion, from 25 minutes onwards to make a write up) 01:25 - 02:10 discussion slot 2 (half our discussion, from 25 minutes onwards we encourage to make a write up) 02:10 - 02:30 one minute presentations (plenary) of topics and closing | ||
| Outputs: | Collection of issues. Short report for each topic that was discussed in depth, possibly flip charts to hang in common room. | ||
| History: | Has not been run before | ||
| Presenters | |||
| 1. Marc Evers Piecemeal Growth |
2. Willem van den Ende Living Software B.V. |
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