Defining Entry and How It Works

If you are a consultant, you must market your services if you are to receive contacts from prospective sponsors or clients. Recall that a sponsor is the person or group who will pay your bill, whereas a client is the person or group that stands to benefit from the consulting process. Sometimes a sponsor is both sponsor and client; sometimes the sponsor and client are distinctly different. For instance, if a CEO calls in a consultant to help with a reorganization, then the CEO is both sponsor (paying the bill) and client (recipient of help to make the reorganization). Alternatively, suppose a CEO calls in a consultant to help with executive coaching for one senior manager. In that second example, the CEO is the sponsor, but the executive to be coached is the client.

A very important question in OD consulting is “Who is the client?” That means “who is really being helped?” That is important because it is essential to know who is to be changed and how that person or group is to be involved in that change process.

During entry, OD consultants are often passive. They do not reach out to make cold calls to prospective customers in the same way that an (annoying) telemarketer might call to ask if you want to buy something.

Indeed, the big challenge in OD consulting is to get those client leads. (A lead means an individual or organization that wants help.)

According to Alan Weiss in Chapter 8, “Entry: Marketing and Positioning Organization Development” of your text, one way to succeed in the entry phase is to create a gravity well that sucks in prospective sponsors (Weiss, 2016). The goal is to do so many things that those who believe they need help on an issue are drawn to you and your consulting firm for that help.

Suppose you are an OD consultant who wishes to market outdoor team-building efforts, which is sometimes called adventure learning. To that end, there are many things you could do to send signals out to the world that you wish to do that kind of work. You could

• create a website that touts your skills and abilities;
• create a LinkedIn description of your skills and abilities;
• write a newsletter about your special approach to team building;
• approach local groups—such as church groups, synagogues, and community groups, such as Rotary, Kiwanis or Lion’s Club, and local groups of such organizations as the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the Association for Talent Development (ATD) or the OD Network—to volunteer to do talks about your approach to team building;
• approach groups that offer webinars (that is, seminars over the web) to offer to conduct webinars on team building;
• offer free samples of your efforts (that is, free sample outdoor team-building events);
• conduct talks at regional or national conferences of various groups on your approach to team building; and
• build relationships with other consultants who offer services that may be compatible with your business.

Carrying out these efforts are examples of the many things you could do to create a gravity well of the kind that Weiss is talking about in Chapter 8 of Practicing OD (Weiss, 2016).

If your efforts are successful, you should begin to generate leads. One important question to ask everyone who contacts you is “How did you hear about me?” The answer will provide useful information about which approaches to generating leads are most effective and thus worthy of more effort and investment.

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References

Weiss, A. (2016). Chapter 8: Entry: Marketing and positioning organization development: In W. J. Rothwell, J. Stavros, & R. L. Sullivan (Eds.). Practicing organization development: Leading transformation and change (4th ed., pp. 137–153). John Wiley and Sons, Inc.