6 Erroneous Practice Development Gospels Many Boutique Consultancies Follow

Have you heard of Adelbert F. Waldron?

With 109 confirmed kills, he has been one of the best sniper in American sniper history.

But what made him famous was not so much the number of kills but his incredible accuracy.

In the documentary “Inside the Crosshairs: Snipers in Vietnam”, Col. Michael Lee Lanning describes Waldron’s amazing ability for accuracy.

“One afternoon he was riding along the Mekong River on a Tango boat when an enemy sniper on shore pecked away at the boat. While everyone else on board strained to find the antagonist, who was firing from the shoreline over 900 meters away, Sergeant Waldron took up his sniper rifle and picked off the Vietcong out of the top of a coconut tree with one shot (this from a moving platform). Such was the capability of our best sniper."

Nuff Said.

Practice development in your firms is pretty similar in many ways.

Your competitors are pecking away at your target market, hoping to seduce them from your client roster into theirs.

Now you have two options.

Either you join them in the pecking party or you bring sniper-calibre accuracy into your practice development process.

Remember, the cream of the crop of any target market is only about 2-5% of the whole target market. And to entice that segment, you have to do something different from what your competitors do.

These are great clients who are easy to work with, pay premium fees and pay on and have the potential to create great results using your services. They are good for your brand and reputation.

But their number is too small for random and aimless pecking.

You have to acquire these clients one by one, using off mainstream practice development methodologies.

This is how this kind of client acquisition is similar to sniping.

Every action to acquire a new client is meticulously planned and executed with surgical precision.

Yet, what do we see so many consulting boutiques do?

Shooting from the hip like a psychopath gunslinger. That is, mass prospecting. It’s as futile as trying to avoid hypothermia by being engaged in a heated argument, but fairly cheap.

And we continue this heated argument, hoping to avoid hypothermia, in this month's terrifyingly torturous episode of Commando Consulting, entitled, 6 Erroneous Practice Development Gospels Many Boutique Consultancies Follow.

Enjoy!