I heard Brad Sugars (founder of Action Coach) share a quote from a mentor of his at his recent speaking tour, which rang true with me. It was “You can’t out earn me until you out learn me”. Although I don’t use Action Coach, I do agree with this principle.

I started on a diet of one business book per week many years ago and have been enthusiastically consuming knowledge in this manner on and above my weekly dietary goals. One of the reasons I am keen to continuously absorb knowledge is to discover new ways to add value for our clients and more effective methods to implement in our processes.

Given a large part of what we do at The Sponge is B2B marketing, one of the books I found to be extremely interesting late last year was Professional Services Marketing Written by Mike Schultz and John Doerr .

In April the authors invited me to participate in an online training course they were starting that builds on what the book delivered. In keeping with my intention to uncover new and better practices I joined the program. It is a four month course delivered online which is drip fed one or two lessons per week. Just one month in I have found it to be surprising value and it is providing me with much, much more than I expected. I had intended to use the knowledge gleaned to help our clients, but quickly realised that The Sponge brand could benefit from the exercise too.

What does this mean for you?

If you are currently using our services you will notice new insights and advice that will make your marketing efforts more appealing and effective in gaining traction with your market. You will see the effects it has on The Sponge brand and may be asked to impart your wisdom at certain stages (like our recent Value Proposition Survey) to help reach the outcomes. You will see relevant and hopefully useful posts in this blog, and are invited to join in with questions and comments.

Finally, when the next course opens up (later this year), I highly recommend every professional service consultant or practitioner to sign up and do it. If you have any questions for me about it, drop me an email.