Do you follow up course attendees for consulting work?

Running training courses can be a great way to make sure your site always has new content and show that your company is active publicly. As well as being good for branding, it can also be a great source of lead generation for consulting work.

In order to capitalise on this, you should have a developer in any training course who is there to help out and get to know the attendees, whose job it will be to meet up with some of the attendees a couple of weeks after the course to catch up for a coffee and a chat. This could be the speaker or another personable developer if required. It’s important that this is not just a sales person, as it needs to be someone who can give further advice on the training topic at a later date if needed.

Keep these meetings fairly informal, with the agenda basically consisting of:

• How did you find the course?
• Is there any way we could improve it?
• What are you doing with what you learned?
• Is there anything else you’d like to know?
• Does your company have a need for any consulting work?

The last question is key as it could lead to substantially more work, but you should make sure the person you’re meeting with gets some good value out of the meeting itself, so this does not just seem like a sales exercise.

It's also a good idea to mention that this will happen at the end of the course so that the call doesn't come out of the blue. The speaker could say something like:

Read how this rule is also useful for presenters on Do you do a Retro Coffee after presentations?