It’s not enough to be good in your mind. You need to look good in the mind of new business prospects. This is often a challenge for recently launched B2B sales training and consulting firms as well as some veteran firms. After all it is hard to look good without a positive track record in the business!
Before you’ll ever have a chance to be effective inside a client organization, you need to be effective out in the cloud. Your practice must have a presence online, and your presence must ooze credibility.
Almost every inquiry into the authenticity of a consulting or training firm and every probe for validation starts with a Google search.
Here are some of the things people will look for before they start working with you:
- They’ll search your category, your company name, and/or your name.
- They’ll look at your website and click around to find out what you are saying about your consulting organization’s capabilities and track record, what others say about you, what you’ve published, and what you’ve published lately.
- They’ll see who your clients are and take special note of companies they consider on a par with themselves.
- They’ll also look beyond your site: Who links to you? Who has commented on you, good or bad?
- They’ll search your category (“B2B sales consultant,” “B2B sales training,” “sales training resources,” etc.) to see who else is out there—and the most impressive Web presence they find among your competitors may become the benchmark by which they go back and review your site again.
What they find will boost you or break you. Word-of-mouth still makes a difference, but at least half of word-of-mouth is now digital, too. Your website is an investment you must make, a part of establishing the credibility you need—especially if you are a recent entry to the crowded field of sales consultants or trainers.
Read more resources for consultants: Account List Management
Here are a couple of things you should do to establish credibility online:
- Become a thought leader on LinkedIn and Twitter by starting and participating in discussions—discuss recent trends and observations from the field not just your latest blog post or recently published ebook.
- By the way, a rule of thumb related to blogging is to publish at least three times a week to have an impact on search. Also, you should ePublish with a couple reasons in mind:
There is no getting around it: If you’re nobody on the web, you’re nobody these days. You are what you publish, and you need to publish regularly to have an impact on the web.
Download The 5 Hurdles Every Successful Sales Consulting & Training Firm Must Clear, a free ebook to learn more tips on how to establish credibility as well as clearing these other hurdles that face B2B sales consultants and trainers:
- The Content Hurdle
- The Transfer Hurdle
- The Priority Hurdle
- The Innovation Hurdle
Find out how many you have already cleared and which ones remain? Failure to clear them can keep your business from growing... or worse!
