When you shop for anything, check with the business owners and ask, “How’s business going?” They will be happy to share their thoughts. Roadmapping involves interviewing and understanding a client to identify their needs and craft a solution for them. Take care of and protect your clients to develop successful and reliable results.
My guest today is Lionel Martin, a software and DevOps engineer who helps technology startups improve how they build using the Cloud. As a freelancer, he experienced the income and project roller coaster, which was very stressful. Lately, he has been doing high-value consulting. Lionel shares tips he has implemented that may benefit your company. Tactics he uses that are game changers to make a good impression on clients and get them to pay him more include being more descriptive rather than prescriptive and not having a portfolio.
Today’s topics include:
- Organizing your business and personal life: Schedule, time, and bandwidth
- Making mindset changes by setting up hands-on consulting and roadmapping to be able to implement strategic or tactical changes
- 4 Phases of Engagement: Diagnosis (identify problems), Prescription (recommended solution), Implementation, and Reapplication
- Expressing empathy during diagnosis and prescription to understand why client is willing to spend money on you; walk in their shoes before going directly to your comfort zone
- Having hesitations and being confident enough to talk with any client in any industry and deliver value
- Having curiosity, willingness to help, and asking questions – talk business with people
- Getting qualified leads and clients involves content marketing and focusing on strategic conversations for productizing (3 months for productizing to packaging)
- Building trust and positively changing your relationship with clients through roadmapping; others deliver biased advice geared toward their services
- Waterfall vs. Agile Development: Where do you need to get to, where are you now, why is now bad, why is there better, and how can you help them get there? Assess risks
- Hear It Before They See It: Investing time to talk to client, offering proposal, and getting them to buy an option