This deeply insightful guide to understanding what clients really want is “an indispensable resource for consultants” (Keith Ferrazzi, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Never Eat Alone). Independent consulting is a potentially lucrative enterprise—but the reality seldom matches the dream. Most solo consultants and boutique consulting firms are perpetually within six months of bankruptcy due to the sputtering unreliability of their new business engines. The problem, according to international consulting expert David A. Fields, is twofold: 1) lack of a consistent, proven plan, and 2) fundamental misunderstanding about what clients want in a consultant. Fields, who has helped hundreds of consultants and boutique firms worldwide build profitable, sustainable practices, replaces the typical consultant’s mindset of emphasizing expertise and differentiated processes with a focus on building relationships, engendering trust, and solving clients’ existing problems. In The Irresistible Consultant’s Guide to Winning Clients, Fields synthesizes his decades of experience into a step-by-step approach to winning more projects from more clients at higher fees. From nuts-and-bolts business advice and tactics to a deeply insightful breakdown of the human side of a very human profession, Fields, named one of Advertising Age magazine’s “Marketing Top 100,” delivers a comprehensive guidebook that is at once highly approachable and satisfyingly detailed. “If I could have just one book on client strategy, this book would be it.” —Marshall Goldsmith, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Triggers

Delivers the essential practical skills needed to consult and make sharp, well prepared interactions in a wide range of business situations This comprehensive handbook covers the fundamental skills and attitudes required by successful consultants from novice to practitioner level, irrespective of their specialist area. It untangles the key variables present in any consulting service and introduces practical ways to improve their effectiveness based upon the author's experience of helping consulting organisations to develop and excel in the marketplace. The book explores consulting ‘from the ground up' steering away from theory and focusing instead on practical application, providing a solid platform upon which to build further domain-specific competence. The Consultant's Handbook provides: An understanding of the key variables that can be addressed in order to improve one's own consulting performance A set of simple practices that can be implemented with immediate benefit to the reader Practical insight into day-to-day real life consulting interactions Confidence to implement the new ideas and approaches

The real-world guide to selling your services and bringing in business How Clients Buy is the much-needed guide to selling your services. If you're one of the millions of people whose skills are the 'product,' you know that you cannot be successful unless you bring in clients. The problem is, you're trained to do your job—not sell it. No matter how great you may be at your actual role, you likely feel a bit lost, hesitant, or 'behind' when it comes to courting clients, an unfamiliar territory where you're never quite sure of the line between under- and over-selling. This book comes to the rescue with real, practical advice for selling what you do. You'll have to unlearn everything you know about sales, but then you'll learn new skills that will help you make connections, develop rapport, create interest, earn trust, and turn prospects into clients. Business development is critical to your personal success, and your skills in this area will dictate the course of your career. This invaluable guide gives you a set of real-world best practices that can help you become the rainmaker you want to be. Get the word out and make productive connections Drop the fear of self-promotion and advertise your accomplishments Earn potential clients' trust to build a lasting relationship Scrap the sales pitch in favor of honesty, positivity, and value Working in the consulting and professional services fields comes with difficulties not encountered by those who sell tangible products. Services are often under-valued, and become among the first things to go when budgets get tight. It is now harder than ever to sell professional services, so your game must be on-point if you hope to out-compete the field. How Clients Buy shows you how to level up and start winning the client list of your dreams.

Learn the secrets of how recurring revenue is driven at expert firms like BCG, KPMG, EY, and more Never Say Sell: How the World's Best Consulting and Professional Services Firms Expand Client Relationships explains how to scale individual engagements into long-term business relationships. Cowritten by Tom McMakin, the coauthor of How Clients Buy and expert in account development, and colleague Jacob Parks, this book provides insights from key rainmakers at firms like Accenture, IBM, and more into how they drive growth from existing relationships. Never Say Sell is a business development guide for professional service providers like consultants, accountants, and lawyers, whether they are sole proprietors or members of account teams tasked with expanding key accounts. Doing good work with existing clients is not enough to have them come back to you again and again. You must do more. This book explores the techniques and methods that leading professional service providers use to add value, cross sell, and drive recurring revenue from existing engagements. Never Say Sell will help you turn one-and-done clients into some of your most exciting and lucrative relationships. It is a must-have for any professional who benefits from repeat business.

Management consultants of various kinds play an important role in the world of business, and within other types of organization. The Oxford Handbook on Management Consulting is a comprehensive overview of thinking and research on management consultancy with contributions from leading international scholars. The first section provides an account of the historical developments in management consulting research, and how current thinking has evolved from prior work. The second section focuses on disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, their diversities, areas of synergy, and parallel concerns. The following sections examine consulting as a knowledge business, consultants and management fashion, and the relationship between management consultants and their clients. The Handbook concludes with an assessment of areas of future research and debate. By bringing together a wide range of research and thinking on management consulting across different disciplines, sub-disciplines, and conceptual approaches, the Handbook provides a comprehensive understanding of both current thinking and future directions for research.

Written by more than twenty experts in management consulting, the Handbook of Management Consulting Services shares the technical knowledge, administrative skills, business acumen, and hands-on perspective needed to set up and run a cost-effective, client-oriented practice that's right for today's business environment. Provided here from the actual files of leading consultants are checklists, work plans, and practice aids.

A complete resource for assessing, auditing, analyzing, and evaluating any network environment With "Network Consultants Handbook, you will Learn from network audit and evaluation guidelines that aid in data gathering and analysis of network environments Work with tables and calculations that help provide near-real-time answers to internetworking issues and challenges Learn network diagramming tips that aid consultants and engineers in preparing consistent drawings for in-house documentation Discover how specific internetworking technologies fit into a design to create a networking solution for your customer Network consultants and engineers in today's industry continually face the challenge of assessing, auditing, and reviewing existing networks. Documenting, reviewing, and analyzing these changes in a customer's network is more challenging today than in the past, partly because of the explosive growth of converged applications and the Internet. Consultants and engineers often reinvent the wheel to gather and analyze relevant network information, particularly when examining a client's network while having little or no background information. "Network Consultants Handbook is a complete resource for assessing, auditing, analyzing, and evaluating any network environment. Intended for anyone who designs, manages, sells, administrates, or desires to understand various internetworking technologies, "Network Consultants Handbook demonstrates where and how to gather relevant information and how to analyze and document this information. Technology overviews peel away each layer of the network to provide a complete assessment. This book prepares you with form templates to completeduring a network audit, necessary device commands to aid in obtaining necessary information, and consistent forms to aid in documentation. Networks are like snowflakes: No two are alike. This is the challenge that network consultants, engineers, managers, designers, and anyone else involved with networks must face every day. Network Consultants Handbook provides the resources you need to evaluate and design networks, either as a desktop reference resource or in the field where the tables and calculations help provide near-real-time answers to internetworking issues and challenges. Companion Web Site The companion Web site for the book contains fully downloadable versions of the data gathering and analysis templates. These templates offer an easy-to-complete solution to gathering the data you need to complete your analysis of network environments. This book is part of the Cisco Press Networking Technologies Series, which offers networking professionals valuable information for constructing efficient networks, understanding new technologies, and building successful careers.