Letters

How to Avoid the Cut

Your October cover feature "Making the Cut," concerning consulting firms' plans for staff reductions in the current economic downturn, missed a critical factor. As a "consultant's consultant" — I teach selling and closing skills to leading, as well as small- and medium-size, consulting firms — it's been my experience that the consultants with the best business development skills are most likely to survive downsizing.

The good news is that such skills can be learned; in fact, an ever-growing body of data about what works now in the sale of professional services of all kinds means that selling has moved from the realm of "we leave that to the rainmakers" to being done successfully by consultants at all levels of experience. As I travel all over the world, as well as across the United States, it becomes clearer to me all the time that as consultants, our job is to do the work, but our job is also to find work. Fail at either of these duties, and one is more vulnerable to the axe.

Lenann McGookey Gardner

President

Lenann McGookey Gardner Management Consulting, Inc.

Albuquerque, NM