Business Development Consulting Case Studies

Below are a list of several case studies from actual clients. These will give you an idea of Kelle's approach to Business Development Consulting with her clients.

 

Personal Growth Workshop Company Seeks Expansion

This company came to us with the problem that they were looking to expand their marketing, keep their current clients engaged longer thereby bringing them back for more continuing workshops, and they wanted to broaden the diversity in both the age and race of attendees. They also wanted to be able to start paying their volunteer production staff which meant bringing in more profits.

THE PLAN

We instituted a multi-pronged approach to their marketing plan.

Awareness Raising

First, we created a purely promotional event that their current clients could get involved in. Their workshops are based on bringing more love into the world, so we utilized the “FREE HUGS” campaign that was so popular on YouTube. Current workshoppers came out and offered free hugs to people on the street. If asked, they shared the special “Free Hugs” cards that were created for the event. We then took pictures of the event and made our own YouTube video which is still serving as an awareness-raising tool on the web.

Reunions

Then we set about creating “reunion” events for existing clients. These one-day events brought people in who had completed all of the weekend events or who didn’t have the time or money for a weekend event. They are hosted at a volunteer’s home, so they cost very little to put on and the additional funds are being used to funnel money back into the promotion machine and to pay some money to the production staff.

More Intros

Because the initial workshop program is only offered twice a year, we increased the number of “Introduction” events. This also encouraged existing workshoppers to bring their friends out year-round and helped capture more people coming in cold with something they could do immediately.

Meetup Groups

To expand the awareness of the events, we encouraged workshoppers and volunteers to join Meetup.com events of a similar nature to bring in additional people into the program. We also encouraged organizers to set up a Meetup event of their own based around their subjectmatter.

Increase Diversity

We had sit-down meetings with the few workshoppers who came from the existing target demographics we were seeking to determine how they heard about the workshops and what drove them to come. We also spoke with them about their social activities to identify where this target market works and plays, then we developed a strategy to reach each of those markets.

Corporate Sponsorship

We discussed the fact that there are many corporations that would really like to get in front of their demographic and that this could be accomplished in very unobtrusive ways. We discussed allowing food and drink companies to offer free samples to participants. This would both bring in extra income from the sponsorship dollars and reduce the food costs at each event. We also discussed adding advertising to the newsletters and back end web pages.

Promotional Items

The group was already selling T-Shirts, but we discussed expanding the product lines to include coffee mugs and other items. This would accomplish two goals at once, added promotion (primary) and additional income (secondary).

Testimonials

We also discussed adding video, audio, and written testimonials to the website to encourage more web conversions.

THE RESULTS (so far)

We did three FREE HUGS events in three different months in the summer. It was both a lot of fun for participants and served to promote the group to hundreds of people on the street. The video has been viewed over 1,000 times on YouTube and will be able to be viewed many more times when the group finally puts it on their website. Once it is there, then we will encourage all of the workshoppers to put the video on their personal blogs as well to help it go viral.

Reunions are running on a regular basis and are filling up nicely with existing workshoppers. They are getting a good reputation in the community of attendees and it is keeping people more engaged and they are bringing in additional income for the production team.

The Introductions are being run more often, but we need to do more to bring people into the events. We‘re currently working on a plan to teach workshoppers how to refer people to the intros.

The remainder of the items are still on the “to do” list. We’ll update this case study as they get implemented.

 

 

Patent Writer Needs More Money

The patent writer needed more income into his business to fund both his business and personal life. He was working really hard and had a lot of clients, but was not making ends meet.

THE ISSUES

I went over his income and expenses with him and then asked him about what he did day-to-day.

He Needed Help

I discovered he was spending a ton of time copying, filing, and researching. These were all tasks which were easily outsourced. He hadn’t hired an assistant before because his business was variable and he couldn’t keep someone busy full-time and he didn’t want the payroll burden. Plus his office wasn’t big enough to accommodate another person.

Hire A Virtual Assistant

I connected him with a local virtual assistant who could work on an as-needed basis doing items both in and out of the office.

Financial Analysis

We then did an analysis of the extra time he would have to work on paying business with the new assistant, compared that to his hourly rate and determined that he would in fact, just barely make ends meet with the new plan. But that wasn’t good enough. He had already gotten rid of unnecessary expenses and it was just too tight. So I asked him how much his competition was charging.

Raise His Rates

It turns out that his competition was charging significantly more than he was, so I encouraged him to raise his rates. He was already maxed out on his time, and would be again as soon as he got the extra time he was freeing up by delegating to the new assistant. This meant that there was sufficient demand to justify the increase and even with a substantial increase, he was less expensive than his competitors.

THE RESULTS

Between these two simple tasks, we took him out of the financial hole he was in and put him on the path to future success.

THE NEXT STEP

The next step is to bring on an associate or two to do some of the actual patent work for him.

 

 

The Internet Product Sales Company

The owner of this company had been in business for a little over two years. She had build the initial website herself and created a product line that sold well when people found it, but didn’t get enough traffic to keep sales high.

 

THE PLAN

Increase Traffic

The first order of business was to increase traffic to the website. We took a three-pronged approach.

• Articles/Blog – We had the owner of the company begin writing articles for the major business magazines in her niche. We also had her start a blog which had links back to her website.
• Podcasts/Teleseminars – We got the owner to create a podcast which she later also used to beef up some of her product offerings (see below). We also had her offer free teleseminars for herself and other vendors in the industry which helped drive traffic from other sites.
• Interviews With Others – We got her a PR person who got her interviewed in other trade magazines, on audio interviews for trade publications, and put up press pages and speaker information on the website.

Develop No-Cost or Pay-Per-Sale Cross Promotions

We put her together with several different companies to do cross promotion campaigns.

• For one she created a free giveaway which the other company paid to produce (she gave her time for free) and she got her company’s name and web address advertised for free to all the people on their mailing list (more than 100,000 people per year).
• She partnered with another trainer to do a coaching program together and that gave her access to the 8,000 names on the other trainer’s mailing list.
• She offered free use of the excerpts from her book and articles she had written to vendors who needed back end content for their websites.

Pay-Per-Sales

• We connected her with a large marketing company in her niche who charged only a percentage of sales made.
• We set up an affiliate marketing program to allow others to promote her products and services and make a commission on them. Then we created a plan to bring in affiliates.

Increase Conversions

• Between us and the marketing company, we re-wrote all of her online marketing materials and, once the money started coming in from these new ventures, we encouraged her to create an integrated brand image for her website and her products. This served to increase her credibility on the web.
• We added in free audio and newsletter sign-up incentives to increase newsletter conversion.
• We developed custom landing pages for particular promotions to increase sales conversions
• We helped her to beef up some of her products by including some of the interviews, podcasts, and articles she had done in the past to make the perceived value of the products greater.
• We had her switch hosting companies (to reduce the large amount of time her site had been down due to outages) and shopping carts. The new shopping cart had more cross-sales opportunities and a greater ability to be integrated with her brand image. It also significantly reduced her time to add a new product and immediately got indexed on Google and other search engines.

THE RESULTS

All of the items listed above were implemented in 2007 except the marketing plan for the affiliate program. That is due to be launched in 2008.

Her website visits increased 62.96% from 2006 to 2007 for the same 6 month period. (Stats weren’t available prior to May 2006). Sales for 2007 were more than triple 2006’s numbers. She has received speaking engagement requests from around the country as well. Her numbers are on track to take a large leap again in 2008.

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508-243-6257

 

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