Consulting Success Podcast The Mindset That Wins Work With Fortune 500 Companies with Mindy Millward
Today’s guest is Mindy Millward, a veteran consultant with over 20 years of experience from Navalent. You may remember my guest Ron Carucci, from episode 21, who recommended Mindy as an outstanding and insightful consultant, and he was right. I’m delighted to have her join me today. In this episode, we are discussing the importance of maintaining a long-term strategy and vision for your marketing and networking. We talk about how to find clients that are really ready to make lasting change, how to most effectively market your services, and whether it’s worth your time to compete with larger consultancy firms, particularly for the business of Fortune 500 companies. Mindy shares insights into how to correctly size your firm, the importance of getting connected with the decision makers of the company and how to spot the red flags that prove it’s time to walk away from a project. I think you’ll learn just as much from her insights and experiences as I did in this episode of The Consulting Success Podcast with Mindy Millward.
Marketing To The Ideal Client
As you are shaping and building up your consulting business, a majority of your time has to be spent on marketing. It is a widely accepted best practice idea to stay narrowly focused on both the company size and industry of your ideal client. This focus tends to narrow in the playing field and help you more easily locate companies that will benefit from your expertise.
At Navalent, however, the consultants aren’t worried about the size of client they take on or the industry they are in. From Fortune 500 companies down to small start-ups, their main focus has always been simply to connect with the leaders of the company that are willing to make actual change within their organization.
The common denominator of every ideal client at Navalent is the presence of a decision maker. Many companies tend to not have decision makers readily available. Even though they desperately need the services consultants can offer them, they don’t have the liberty to institute the changes recommended to them.
This can create a host of problems for consultants like you that are trying to make change happen. So rather than focusing on a particular size or industry of business, Mindy and her colleagues at Navalent maintain their focus on the complexities of problems within any company and their subsequent willingness and ability to solve those problems.
The question you may be asking yourself then is how can you effectively market to your ideal client? If the size of business or particular industry doesn’t have to matter as much as you once thought it did, marketing can become a complicated hurdle to overcome. Mindy shares several insights into effective marketing, starting with correcting your focus.
From pharmaceutical companies to financial firms, government agencies to educational institutions, any company that you focus on needs to have a desire for change. Starting with the hearts of the individual and working up to the entire organization as a whole, your work will only be effective if you are connecting with people and businesses that are ready to make a change.
Your Network Is Your Greatest Marketing Tool
Developing long-term relationships with collaborators or people that are connected to the CEO — and decision maker — of a company will be very beneficial. Any time that you make the effort to expand your network is time well invested in your consultancy. Companies will begin to come to you for help as they trust the relationship that you have formed with them. They will view your expertise as a beneficial business partner relationship rather than just as a consultant for hire. and as that trust in your work increases, clients will start to recommend you by word of mouth. Soon you will find yourself being passed from satisfied client to client with the requests for work coming directly to you.
In addition to the networking side of marketing your consultancy, there is great value in writing. Providing high-quality and authority-based content that is readily available to clients and easily shared through social media is one of the best ways that you can build trust with potential clients.
Both networking and writing work to create a long-term approach to marketing. These are not simple actions, but over time these efforts will be compounded to create greater opportunities for you to work with your ideal clients. Also, by identifying specific types of people that you want to work with, regardless of the company size, you will more easily be guided to your ideal clients.
Mindy shares one experience in which these efforts worked for her, even though it took four years to complete the sale. That may seem like too long of a time to wait for your efforts to bring in revenue, but the long-term approach to marketing through networking is always going to offer you the greatest returns on your efforts. She explains the situation that Navalent is currently facing as both consultants and their networks are aging out. It is not possible to sustain solely a network-to-relationships ratio without creating major gaps for yourself that are not sustainable over the long run.
Mindy explains why it is essential that you pursue both short-term and long-term opportunities in order to cover all aspects of your marketing. One easy way to do this is to ask yourself, “How am I adding value to this relationship or conversation?” regardless of whether it is paid work or not. Oftentimes a relationship may feel like it is not a good fit at first but can turn into something bigger as you’ve continued to add value to it.
Another essential step is to market yourself in such a way that people can easily find you. Podcasts, blog posts, social media, and speaking engagements are all interactions that give people a chance to get familiar with your name and the work that you do. Look for ways to expand the value that you provide and the opportunities will more readily come to you. And once you are in a system, don’t limit yourself to being just the coaching people — position yourself as the organizational design or strategy expert as well. These steps will help secure more work for you in the future.
Should You Compete With Larger Firms?
If you are a smaller sized firm and have ever felt unsure about whether a larger company would take you seriously when competing with larger firms, Mindy has some checkpoints and words of advice that you need to listen to.
First, it’s critical that you be realistic about the capacity of work you are able to take on. You are not entirely limited by your firm’s size; you can lean on associated resources and networks to help you successfully accomplish a larger scope of work when needed. Don’t shy away from selling huge pieces of work — instead, you can rely on your network to help you get the bigger jobs done.
Second, don’t waste your time trying to compete in ways that you know you’re not going to win. Mindy shares an experience she recently had in which she turned down an RFP but was still able to position her firm in a place of authority despite competing against much larger consulting firms.
Third, find the qualities of your firm that are unique to you and play them to the client. You don’t have to waste your time — or theirs — trying to be something that you’re not. Be honest about what you have to offer. If clients are looking for something entirely different from what you have to offer them, they will just be disappointed by your efforts. Don’t waste your time or theirs!
You will always find greater success as a consultant when you focus on what you have to offer and don’t worry about the rest. If there are a good fit and the potential for adding real value to your clients, you have to help the client see that. Regardless of what other sized firms may be going after the work, your confidence will prove that you are the right choice for the job.
How to Connect With The Ultimate Decision Maker
There is nothing more frustrating as a consultant than discovering that the work you have been hired to do will never make a lasting impact on a company. If you aren’t connected with the people in a company that actually have the power to affect change, you are wasting your time as their consultant. Mindy shares some of the best practices that have worked for her and her partners at Navalent to make sure that they are working with the people that have the decision making power necessary to effect change.
You’ll want to hear some of the strategies she uses to effectively connect with the decision makers. From asking the right questions to conducting diagnostic interviews with clients before getting paid, Mindy has several examples that prove that her methods work. She highlights some of the red flags that keep her from pitching work to a company that isn’t really ready to make changes and outlines the characteristics of the client employees that will work as a consultant’s champions to get them in touch with the decision makers of the organization.
Finding The Right Size Firm
Now that you’ve learned how to reach your ideal clients, you have to grow your firm to just the right size to get the work done. The ideal company size is different for everyone, but as a firm that serves Fortune 500 companies, Navalent has grown to seven full-time consultants. Mindy shares the reasoning behind their current size as well as steps they have had to take to get the right fit consultants on their team. Not surprisingly, when you’re looking for partners, you will find that the best consultants for your firm will come from your network. As Mindy says, “know them before you need them.” It’s essential that you know the skills and capacity of other consultants before you sell the work that you need them to do. By doing this, you’re securing for yourself the capacity to conquer any size of a project that comes your way.
Long-term thinking has the potential to pay off in so many ways in your consultancy firm, from developing your network to securing your ideal clients. As a successful consultant who has seen the benefits of long-term thinking in her work, Mindy Millward is full of great advice for anyone that is looking for the next step to securing work with a startup business or a Fortune 500 company. You’ll definitely want to hear her insights and learn from her experiences in this episode of the Consulting Success Podcast with Mindy Millward.
Key Takeaways:
[:17] Introducing Navalent partner and consulting expert Mindy Millward.
[4:40] Targeting your ideal client, regardless of company size.
[10:16] How to generate revenue while embracing long-term marketing opportunities.
[14:10] Competing with larger firms means doing these three things.
[20:05] The mindset required to secure the work with Fortune 500 companies.
[24:02] Connecting with the ultimate decision maker within an organization.
[31:06] Enlarging your firm’s capacity and finding the best consultants.
[37:10] Connecting with Mindy Millward.
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