demonstrating expertise on the radio

We all know that we need to market ourselves and we all know it can be costly and time consuming. For the "average" consultant due to financial limitations most of it is DIY. Which methods then are most effective?

Malcolm Tullett found a way to get his name and company profile in front of millions yesterday when he was asked to step in via a colleague after the Fire Service spokesman pulled out on the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2. He was asked to offer expert opinion on one of the shows topics. Malcolm's expertise is in Fire Safety and he was responding to a particular question about the public helping at a fire. Here's the advice he offered.

It may be that on radio shows all over the country expert views are needed on a wide range of topics from health and safety to construction so it is probably wise to have an ear to the ground (or airwaves) and be prepared to call in and offer a sensible comment or as in all effective marketing build a relationship with the producers so that when they are in need of an expert in your particular field they call you.

Have you used a different but effective medium and more importantly are you prepared to share with others?

A bird in the hand?

Interesting to read that the eco-warriors trying their best to disrupt the G20 summit this week plan to keep one step ahead of the police by using the social networking site, Twitter. Not just for the kids, 'tweeting' is becoming an increasingly popular method of communication in some areas of the business community espcially journalism and PR (NB. tweeting, according to people in the know allows 'informal collaboration and quick information sharing') - we've been evaluating Twitter for a few weeks and 'tweeting' occasionally but have yet to be convinced about it's application within our business - does anyone else use Twitter and have you found it useful? (or if like me up until a few weeks ago, you've got absolutely no idea what it is visit www.tweeternet.com for a quick one page guide!)

Scam email aimed at freelancers

Just started receiving a new slant on the 'traditional' scam email - it claims to be from a freelance researcher work at some international research institute. All written nice and professionally, so sad that this person's employers insist on paying in the wrong currency and if you could just do them a favour and move the money through your bank account all will be fine!

I'm sure you'll all have seen through this, but it just shows how scam artists are getting more sophisticated and hard to spot - not a single spelling mistake or dodgy use of English in the whole email.

profile summary

Consultants using Skillfair often ask for tips and this is one of the most FAQ's we have - how do I write my profile summary, how long should it be and how much detail can I include.

The most important thing to recognise is clients are interested in what you can do for them and generally if they can't work that out from the first line or two they won't bother reading any further.

Equally, while a short profile can be a good thing being as brief as 'management consultant' or 'web designer' probably isn't going to get you the new contacts you're looking for.

You should put as much effort into writing your profile asyou would into the home page of your website, for some ideas click here

posting projects

Working in customer service for Skillfair I read dozens of project posts but often the description isn't terribly clear, so it's hard to fathom exactly what the client is looking for.

While this might present a challenge to the consultants, the main victim of the vaguely worded project is the client themselves, who not only risks receiving dozens of irrelevant replies, but might even go so far as to accept an offer from a consultant who has a false notion of what is required.

So I've written a brief guide to how to write a project advert to get the best results, click here to take a look and let me know if I've missed anything.

Local Consultants map

It was really good to have David Cottrell and Rob Watling send details of the Skillfair Local Consultants map to their regional newspapers. David's in Wiltshire and Rob's in Nottingham. We haven't heard yet if the story got any coverage but we do thank them both for their interest in both the map and Skillfair and hope they get some useful publicity as a result.

2 heads can be better than one

I was interested to hear about Skillfair member Rob Watling's experience of looking for someone to join their bid team. I often hear people say "I would have gone for that project but I think I'm too small/haven't got 3 years accounts/we're missing one small area of expertise' etc." so why not give co-bidding a whirl?

Rob needed someone with specific skills to bid with him on a piece of work - he advertised his requirements on Skillfair and in his words "We had 6 replies, 3 of them good enough to keep the details on file, and one of these good enough to include on this bid. So thanks. We wouldn't have been bidding otherwise."

Has anyone else had any experience of this?

Average consultant fee rates increase by 7.5%

I've just finished analysing and writing up the results of our 5th Anuual survey of consultancy fee rates. Slightly to my surprise the results show that rates are up 7.5% on this time last year.

Given that I've heard from consultants that there are newly self-employed people on the market willing to work for ridiculously low rates (£200 for 'management consultancy is surely silly!) has made me wonder what this really means.

A key factor that emerged in the survey is that most of our consultants do most of their work directly for clients - cutting out agencies and other intermediaries - and I think this may explain why the rates they're reporting are holding up so well. What does anyone else think?

Full survey results are here

A different use for Tender Alerts

Speaking to David Seacombe today about Skillfair and the way he uses the web site brought up some interesting comments. He said "We are finding Skillfair a really useful service but not in the way that most people will probably think of using it. The daily alerts are great, but most of them are for work that is already well defined. Aston Beck is a specialist management consultancy – we tend to get involved earlier in the process – when the client is not yet sure what the challenge is, yet alone the solution.

What we do is use these tender alerts to give us a "reason to call" possible partners and maintain a dialogue with prospective clients. Most people involved in business development of any sort will agree that this is a most valuable asset; if you don't have a good reason to call a client or prospect then it is unlikely that the relationship will be maintained."

It's certainly much easier to call a client or prospect if you have an interesting tidbit of information for them - or better still can ask for their advice about something as almost everyone loves to be able to give an opinion!

Does anybody win tenders

There are lots of public tenders available and because they're public a lot of companies bid for them. Skillfair members often want to know if small consultancies or individuals ever actually win them.

The short answer is "Yes, they do!"  - but being successful in a formal tender process requires careful thought and some hard work. Those people who regularly win tenders tell us that the most important thing is to only bid for those tenders where you are really well suited to the project. Putting in lots of bids when your company is only just suitable or where the requirements are too vague means you'll be competing with lots of others and won't be able to make your bid stand out from the crowds.

Seeing the wood for the trees

When you're entering information a website to publicise your business, sometimes it's easy to miss the obvious. Quite by chance this week one of our members called up about a tender and happened to mention that they run a translation service. As we have a client looking for a Japanese speaking recruitment consultant Angela asked if they knew anyone suitable.

It then turned out that although the members skill profile included Translation and Interpreting they hadn't actually entered skills for all the languages they cover - so hadn't received an alert about that particular project.

I think the moral is you should always ask a 3rd party to give your website and other web profiles the once over as they are likely to spot things that you're too close to the business to see!