 |
Opening New Markets: Paying Close Attention to the Company You Keep When old markets “mature,” and the demand for existing products begins to shrivel, a company is best advised to expand its product lines, pushing into new market segments. Any company that intends to stay in business for long must always look for new customers and new markets. Therefore, clinical psychologists currently in independent practice have a great deal to gain by looking “outside the healthcare box” for their new markets. My own practice had been predominately healthcare-centered until the early 1990s, when I began seeking additional means of doing more insurance free business. Rather than looking, as many have, for ways to find new customers for specialized healthcare services, or looking for other ways to fund my existing healthcare services, I explored possibilities for using my psychological expertise within new market segments. This brought me to expanding the part-time corporate consulting that had been one part of my independent practice since the early 1980s. As a result, I have now come to see that clinical psychologists are eminently qualified to bring much-needed people skills expertise into the workplace through consultation. For example, Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence, after an analysis of corporate star performers, concludes: “[O]n average, close to 90% of their success in leadership was attributable to emotional intelligence”(Goleman, p. 34). Clinical psychologists do work related to these psychological skill areas everyday. However, merely taking clinical models and attempting to transfer them into workplace settings is not the best way to expand a practice into corporations. What follows below are three of the main ingredients I have found for successfully making a transition into doing consultative work with companies. 1. Paradigm Shifts Several conceptual shifts are important prerequisites for those wanting to do corporate consulting. Most clinical psychologists are locked into seeing their customers as patients having individual psychopathology, which can be modified using clinical skills and services delivered in 50-minute increments. In clinical work, the primary relationship to be managed is the doctor-patient relationship. Corporate work involves shifting out of an individual and into an organizational framework. Multiple relationships in different strata and zones inside the company must be formed and managed simultaneously. Organizational behavior goes beyond individual psychology, so that factors related to group dynamics, hierarchical power, organizational structure, economics, governmental imperatives, and broader societal values and changes – to name just a few – must be taken into account in conducting effective consultative interventions on company issues. The foundational relationship with any company is the sales relationship. Forming such a relationship is totally foreign to most private practitioners because, essentially, when their customers show up in the waiting room, the “sale” of the clinical service has already been made. Not so in corporate consulting because companies do not suddenly appear, waiting to receive services. There are no opportunities to deliver consultative services until after sales are first concluded. No sales relationships, no services. Diversifying into corporate consulting involves seeing those services as a new business distinctly different from clinical work. Therefore, another necessary conceptual shift is becoming entrepreneurial. All businesses aim at satisfying certain needs of potential users, and entrepreneurs create new businesses that fulfill customer needs. This likewise applies in transitioning out of healthcare services. Practitioners wanting a business that is insurance free must first create businesses with products that customers will purchase without relying on insurance. Shifting to an entrepreneurial framework therefore means creating a new enterprise featuring non-clinical services. Doing corporate consultation involves identifying new and different customers (whole companies, not patients) who have different needs (business results, not emotional problems) and positioning the new enterprise outside the healthcare marketplace. What makes the kind of business consultation that psychologists do different than what other consultants do is incorporating their psychological expertise into solutions for pressing business problems. Clinical clients have some preliminary ideas about their own needs, which most often are personal sufferings of some kind, and they will seek out therapists based on professional expertise related to their kind of suffering. Companies generally do not go about purchasing consultation the same way. As a result, another conceptual shift centers on understanding the need for active marketing and sales, prior to delivery of consultation. Services to companies are based on the consultant identifying their problems, creating consultative solutions, and then, in sales situations, convincing the prospective user about the benefits of purchasing the product. In creating and marketing the services, the consultant must necessarily aim at achieving business results, which is yet another conceptual shift. Clinical psychologists can readily get preoccupied with methodology, whereas companies are more directly concerned about bottom-line results. If your consultative service, for example, is executive assessment and selection, be aware that companies are less interested in knowing exactly what your instruments and assessment procedures are. They are more interested in knowing what results your services will bring to the company, such as lowering their recruitment and retraining costs, increasing their frequency of good hires, increasing employee retention, and staying within EEOC and ADA guidelines. II. Marketing Studies But before designing these non-clinical services, first study and understand the needs of your intended corporate marketplace. This is important both in designing effective services to solve critical problems and also later in making sales of these services to prospects. During selling situations, the benefits of using a service must be described to prospects, in order to show how the company will be better off AFTER its use, than it was before. Remember; no sales, no services. There are many effective ways to go about studying corporate market needs. Perhaps the most useful way is to form networks of relationships with people in different work roles inside companies. This allows talking to them regularly about their business issues. Another way to get to know about business problems is by regularly reading popular business literature. Browse the business books section at the larger bookstores. Read the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune, and related periodicals. Keep up on company and industry news by tuning in to radio and television shows, such as Lou Dobbs. Joining clubs and organizations that have a large array of business people as members will regularly put you at lunch tables with company insiders. Examples of such organizations are Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions Club – others, as well. Arming yourself with a list of business-oriented questions you can put to people you meet at these functions will soon create a database of impressions, opinions, and information you can use in designing services. Consider regularly asking a version of such questions as: “What’s the biggest challenge your company is now facing?” or “What is your company doing about . . . (name a specific hot topic)?” Becoming a member of the local Chamber of Commerce not only will get you invited to its programs and functions, but also gets you inside the information loop to hear Chamber opinions and learn about resources for further study. By going about it this way, the entrepreneur starts with understanding the market and works backward towards creating the service. This means that market information will always be used in designing consultative solutions for needs that already exist in the business market. The last thing a new enterprise needs is an excellent, high quality service with too few users. III. Designing Your Consultative Services One of the best ways I have found to start selling consultative services is to create a small menu of focused services that are based on my own areas of psychological expertise. I call these “starter services,” in that selling these services to a company provides you with a means of beginning a longer-term relationship with that company. A starter service will usually showcase one specific areas of your psychological expertise. It has high impact and visibility, can be completed in a relatively brief period of time, and is not prohibitive in cost. Selling and delivering that service to a company gives you the opportunity to demonstrate how you go about your work, as well as the value of your expertise to the company. Once completed, the service gives you credibility and positions the possible sale of future services. This allows you to continue to pay attention to companies you want to keep as your clientele. One such starter service on my menu is a consultation bundle focused on “Preventing Workplace Violence.” In the early 1990s, the U.S. government charged companies with establishing and maintaining a safe workplace. In response, CEO’s frequently delegated the responsibility for compliance with this OSHA directive to human resource managers. Most human resource directors were not equipped, either by background experience, knowledge, or skills, with the means for effectively responding. A business need thereby existed, for which psychological expertise provided a solution. I created a consultative service package consisting first of assessing the companies’ existing violence prevention activities and recommending changes to bring them into compliance with the OSHA mandate. I worked cooperatively with the local police departments, arranging for them to come into plants and do physical security checks and recommend changes. The police also reviewed the companies’ policy and procedure manuals to recommend changes. The third component of this service was staff education and training. I designed seminars to be given to company employees about workplace violence, centering on recognizing and responding to critical incidents involving anger escalation. Follow-up managerial and supervisory coaching sessions were conducted, in order to handle actual situations emerging on the plant floor. What followed next was consultation to refer selected employees to company EAP services for assessment of violence potential and recommendations for follow-up and/or to deal with domestic violence situations that had been uncovered. The final component was making provision for trauma response, in the event violence was not or could not be totally prevented, such as services for employees traumatized by robberies at, for example, banks or convenience stores. Training company employees to be internal debriefing team members, or else establishing links with existing community CISD (critical incident stress debriefing) teams put into place the final piece of my “Preventing Workplace Violence” consultation package. Conclusion Psychologists tired of fighting the managed care wars can profit from looking beyond healthcare into new markets that can benefit from insurance free services. Diversifying into doing corporate consulting provides one such avenue for entrepreneurial-oriented practitioners to bring psychological expertise into business settings. This comes at a time when companies need to have optimal performance from their people so as to maintain competitive advantage. In order to take advantage of this opportunity for entering a new market, psychologists must reinvent their professional practices, so as to gain better market position for attracting prospective corporate users. References Goleman, Daniel. (1998) Working with Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books. Louis A. Perrott, Ph.D. is a past president of the Virginia Psychological Association and current Treasurer of the Virginia Academy of Clinical Psychologists. He has diversified his clinical practice by expanding into corporate consulting and is the co-founder of Peak Performance Consultation. Dr. Perrott is the author of Reinventing Your Practice as a Business Psychologist, published in April 1999 by Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers. He may be reached at: 3635 Manassas Drive, Suite A, Roanoke, Virginia 24018, telephone (540)-989-8896, FAX (540)-989-8893, E-mail address: loupero@roanoke.infi.net |
||
| Louis A. Perrot, Ph.D. | |||
| Return to Top |