Guest David A. Fields shares a gold mine of practical advice on outreach, positioning, building authority, trust building, and more.

Talking Points

How to maximize your impact as a consultant
How to "fish where the fish are"
How to identify ugent problems that your clients are dying to pay you to fix for them
How to win business even when you're up against giant competitors
How to build trust in a five minute conversation

Quotable Quotes

"It's about the finding the right people, right problem, right solution, right time."—DAF
"Winning business is easy when you're fishing where the fish are."—DAF
"If you don't hear back from clients, you're operating where there's a lack of urgency."—DAF
"If you're not winning as many clients as you'd like to, you have to make some changes."—DAF
"You have to make your practice about the client, not about you."—DAF
"Every time I have a conversation with someone who looks like my prospective clients, I learn something."—DAF
"If you're smart and your willing to pick up something new, the sky's the limit."—DAF
"Asking your client about hypotheticals will give you bad data. You have to ask them about the past."—DAF
"What you differentiate yourself on are reliability and credibility."—DAF
"Your whiz bang super unique process is likely to scare off clients."—DAF
"Fees are the trickiest part of consulting."—DAF
"There's more money to be had if you're solving a bigger problem for a bigger company."—DAF
"You don't have to work with big companies to win big business."—DAF
"You can build trust fairly quickly by living up to small promises."—DAF
"Targeting aspirations is a longer sale than targeting problems."—DAF

Related Links

Transcript

Jonathan S:

00:00 Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I am joined by David A. Fields. David is the co-founder of Ascendant Consulting, is a true consultants' consultant who works with selling boutique consulting firms worldwide, a best selling author, speaker, consultant and mentor. David also heads the Ascendant Consortium whose clients are who's who of the business world. David, welcome to the show.

David F:

00:22 Thank you so much, Jonathan. It is fabulous to be here.

Jonathan S:

00:25 It's really my pleasure. So for folks who maybe haven't come across you before, could you just give people a crash course and who you are and what you do?

David F:

00:33 Sure, and imagine that, there are people who are not aware of me. It happens every day. 95% of my business right now, Jonathan, is actually working with other consulting firms. So whether they are solo practitioners, or small boutiques up to, call it $25 million, I work with a few folks that are larger, but mostly 25 million and under, down to the folks that maybe have just started a practice and are just sort of cracking six figures. And so while I have corporate clients, most of my work now is with the consulting firms that are trying to win those corporate clients. And that's what I spend my days doing, is helping them accomplish that goal.

Jonathan S:

01:12 Excellent. So I've got your new book, it's called the Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients. Thank you very much for that. And in it, it's broken into six sections, six steps to unlimited clients and financial freedom. And there's a section that I'm particularly interested in, so I think it would be a great place to start, and that is this section on, I think it's maximizing your impact. Am I-

David F:

01:37 Sure.

Jonathan S:

01:38 Okay. Cool. So can you sort of give ... There's a bunch of sort of sub-sections here. Could you give us a kind of overview and then we'll drill into individual questions?

David F:

01:48 Sure. The one thing I would ... Let me preface this with, because this section, which on maximizing impact which is sort of step two, but it's important to understand that this comes before you start building visibility. A lot of consultants, a lot of freelancers want to get out there and just get known by everyone they can.

David F:

02:09 And before you run out and try to spread the word about yourself, you need to make sure that the word will be listened to, that you're not just out there talking, you're saying words that people want to hear. And that's impact, that's maximizing your impact. So that's where this fits in. It's very early in the process, making sure your message is going to resonate.

David F:

02:29 And basically, maximizing impact just comes down to a few pieces. You need to talk with the right people, about the right problem, offer the right solution in a way that's compellingly articulated at the right time. So right people, right problem, right solution and right time. Of those four, time is darn hard to figure out.

David F:

02:50 And so I tend to say you know what, put that one aside because if you talk to enough of the right people, about the right problem, and offer the right solution, then you don't need to worry about the timing. Some of them will be ready to move and want your services. So that's it. That's really the core of maximizing impact.

Jonathan S:

03:10 Excellent. So you have a great graph, it got six quadrants in it where you talk about the awareness of ... your sort of the clients' awareness, or the prospects' awareness of a problem-

David F:

03:25 Sure.

Jonathan S:

03:26 ... or opportunity, and their urgency around that. And this is a different way to describe something that I talked about here a lot. So I wonder if ... It is kind of visual, but I wonder if you can break it down.

David F:

03:40 Yeah, sure. I can describe it. As a matter of fact, all your listeners can sort of build it for themselves very quickly and easily if they want. This is useful, so it's interesting you pulled this out. This is one piece I didn't mention inside maximizing impact, which is this idea that I call fishing where the fish are, and business is so much easier if you're fishing where the fish are.

David F:

03:59 So here's how you figure out where the fish are. I would say regular consultants, they do two by two charts, but we're super sexy here, so we do a sextant chart. You're going to draw a horizontal line, and then instead of bisecting it with one line, you're going to trisect it with two vertical lines.

David F:

04:18 So now what you have is sort of six boxes, three on the top, three on the bottom. So that vertical axis is really is the client aware of the problem that you solve? So at the top, you might say yes, all those three boxes at the top are yes. And the three boxes at the bottom are no, they're not aware of the problem that you ... they have the problem.

David F:

04:38 They may have the problem, but they're not awa...

Can capital help solve climate change?