There’s one word that can make business owners shiver and rush out of a room, unlikely excuses falling off their tongues as they scale walls and cross oceans to get out unscathed. That word is CONSULTANT.

Consultants have bad rap and it’s no wonder. Many consultants will hijack hours of your time, only to deliver a wire-bound, clear covered POTS report and disappear.

POTS refers to ‘plan on top shelf’ because that’s where most organizations put them, pulling them out periodically when they’re needed as paperweights, draft insulators or booster chairs for small children. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

From Consultant to Coach

The idea of simply submitting a strategy to a client with no implementation or follow up is like throwing a ball over the fence and hoping somebody will catch it. It’s a short sighted way to operate for both you and your client.

Once the strategy is written, it’s time for consultants to turn into coaches and help their clients to:
• Arrange the resources
• Implement the plan
• Make it work over the long term

Your client’s strategy should include implementation to begin with, but your involvement goes beyond that. A true consultant should be invested in the success of the plan. And that investment can be expressed a few ways:
1. Performance pricing: Growth Path works with a number of clients on performance-based fees. The more they make, the more we make. Performance pricing not only reduces your client’s risk, it’s also the ultimate expression of confidence in your ability to help your client reach their objectives.
2. Ongoing reviews: One of the ways we add additional value to our clients is providing them with ongoing consultation for as long as they need it – long after the last invoice. A monthly or bi-monthly in-person review allows you to track progress and obstacles, and modify plans to realistic objectives. This leaves us managing the relationship rather than a transaction, bodes well for the life of the strategy, and increases the likelihood of repeat and referral business big time.
3. Complimentary training to various levels in the company and be on call to them whenever they have questions. Anything you can do to make it easier for your client to implement their strategy will be highly-appreciated by your client. The idea of ‘nesting’ within an organization (building relationships throughout the organization) will strengthen your overall relationship with your client and introduce you to additional business development opportunities.

Demonstrating your commitment to your clients’ success by performance pricing, ongoing status reviews and training may seem like a lot of time, but the chance of those clients eventually retaining you doubles. It takes just a few conversions for you to see the logic of being a better consultant. That’s the bottom line – better than the top shelf.

Ready For Canada's Anti-Spam Law?      
What you need to know - now.

Canada’s sweeping new anti-spam law, CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation), comes into effect this fall and companies that don’t comply could face BIG penalties.

We’re talking million dollar per day penalties for soloprenuers and 10 million for big companies.

If this is the first you’ve heard of it, don’t panic. The new law not only makes sense, but it has the potential to strengthen your online marketing activities and help you see better returns.

If you’ve ever sent an e-mail newsletter or e-blast, print this article out and tape it to your wall – this is info you need to be acting on now!

CASL SNAPSHOT

This new legislation currently applies only to Canada but the world is watching. Canada is considered a pilot country and it’s expected that the new law will expand across North America and Europe.  

The framework is surprisingly simple:

CASL applies to email, instant messengers (including BBM), text messages & social media

• Anyone marketing within Canada or to Canadian recipients must comply
• CASL differentiates between implicit and explicit consent. Your goal is to gainexplicit consent by having your audience opt in for receipt. If they sign up for your online newsletter, that’s considered explicit consent.
• If someone gives you their card at an event, or asks for a quote, that’s considered implicit consent and you may online market to them for SIX MONTHS
• Anyone who is your current client is considered to have granted implicit consent and you may market to them for TWO YEARS
• You have a THREE YEAR grace period to receive explicit consent from your existing list (but any new names are not included and must comply with CASL)
• There’s no minimum number of e-mails or texts to be caught by rules – a single errant newsletter is enough to ground your entire online marketing program

THE IMPACT

There’s a lot of debate about the impact of CASL. Some feel it will spell the end of online marketing, but at Growth Path, we think it will usher in a new era of strategic, targeted online communications. We’ve outlined four main areas where we’ll feel the impact the most:

1. Database Maintenance

Under CASL, you have to track exactly when a recipient entered your database and exactly when they should be deleted.  Both implicit and explicit consent, and multiple timeframes for qualified marketing won’t make things easy if you manage your own database. But there is some good news:  many e-mail marketing systems and companies already comply with the new law.

2. Quality over Quantity

Growth Path’s philosophy is that 100 of the RIGHT subscribers will bring better returns than 1000 subscribers who don’t care. Most organizations will end up with smaller distribution lists over time. We think this is good because those left over are those whowant to hear your message! Your subscribers may be fewer, but they’ll l be more likely to buy from you. Getting to know them will help you strengthen you create better products for your target market and help strengthen your customer relationships.

3. The Rise of Social Media

We’ve seen social media rise in dominance these past three years but CASL crowns it king. Social media is already opt-in so you can market all you want on Twitter or Facebook and never have to worry, Provided your content rocks, they’ll also be more likely to subscribe (provide explicit consent) to your newsletter.

E-mail is already considered obsolete to the under 20 crowd, so we expect to see companies focus less on e-mail and more on social media marketing.

4. Content – A New Standard

CASL will bolster those marketers using killer content that recipients appreciate and will weaken those that use sub-par content that recipients hate. This is great news for both recipients and content creators.

For once, recipients that unsubscribe from a list because of irrelevant content (or any other reason) have somewhere to turn if they continue to receive emails. Marketers that have for years tried to convince clients that producing relevant, informative content is the only way to get heard won’t have to shout as loud. The case for content is won.

NEXT STEPS

Over the summer, Growth Path met with every one of our online marketing clients to make sure they understood the new law and to ensure compliance.

If you have an existing online marketing program, we encourage you to take a good look at your systems or have a good talk with your marketing company and make sure that, when CASL comes into effect this fall, your program is 100% compliant.