Looking Out For Good And Bad Consulting Sales Leads

Legend has it that once upon a time there was a man with a rubber mallet at the end of the GM assembly line, whose job was to hammer misaligned car panels into their places.

Most cars would come off the assembly line with panels out of alignment relative to the panels next to them.

Most of the doors, hatchbacks, sunroofs, bonnets, boots and other bits and bobs didn’t close properly or didn’t close at all. If was the mallet man’s job to “align” panels by hammering them to level.

One day this man was taken to the Toyota plant in Japan. To his chagrin, shock and horror, he discovered that Toyota didn’t have a mallet man at the end of the assembly line.

Shocked out of his wits, he asked the Japanese managers how they could produce cars without the mallet man.

They told him that the misalignment was introduced earlier in the assembly process, so it could be eliminated only during the assembly process not after of it. Toyota focuses on preventing misalignments from happening. GM rather deals with the consequences of the misalignments.

In an oddball way, consulting practice development is fiendishly similar. Whatever problems you have with paying clients, the problem came up during lead generation because the lead generation process didn’t screen out the wrong prospects, so they degenerated to nightmare clients.

And this is what we discuss in this month’s marrow-chillingly mysterious episode of Commando Consulting, entitled, Looking Out For Good And Bad Sales Leads.

Enjoy!
Tom "Bald Dog"