From your own experience, describe an occasion of consulting in which you acted as an expert. Did you solve the problem?
When I lived in South America (Santiago, Chile), I founded a small marketing firm with a Chilean friend. Much of my work ended up being one-off consulting where I was hired to fix or help solve specific problems that startups were encountering in their growth journey; anyone familiar with the startup scene and the entrepreneurial process knows about these occasional “sticking points” that arise.
A successful example I can think of was in the consultation for an e-commerce site. They were having a lot of page bounces (i.e. people arriving to their site on various pages and just instantly leaving) and were wondering why. We evaluated their website design, which we realized was lacking a bit in ease of use and, aesthetically speaking, was not the prettiest. Of course, certain sites like Craigslist look terrible but work fine; that, however, is pretty unique to Craigslist’s ethos and sort of an outlier.
We realized that a major part of online commerce is trust; with online transactions lacking the tangibility aspect, people want to know that their transaction can be trusted and they are indeed getting what they pay for. In particular, this clients’ payment page looked very outdated and was poorly designed; it resulted in over half of their customers arriving to the page and just leaving, because entering credit card information in the fields available felt very “scammy” and illegitimate due to the site design choices. Re-designing that page, and others, allowed for customers to stay more time on the site, navigate it more effectively, and to complete their payments successfully.
Success.
