LIFT PhD Offers a New Service to Disrupt Traditional Consulting

The Internet revolution continues to shape and redefine how products and services are located and purchased. Even areas like high-value professional services are being transformed by more efficient and effective matching of buyers and providers.

LIFT PhD

In keeping with this trend, LIFT PhD (www.LIFTPhD.com) has just launched a new service to match corporate decision-makers with the world-class expertise of business school professors. Any size company can request consulting or executive education help for a specific business challenge and can gain access to prequalified professors from the LIFT PhD network.

Initially, LIFT PhD will focus on marketing, but then expand to other business functions. Within marketing, a company can connect with professors who have expertise in nineteen different topic areas, including innovation, product management, pricing, promotions, sales management, segmentation, and social media. According to Rob Schade, co-founder of LIFT PhD, “Perhaps the most impressive thing about working with professors is the new perspective they bring. They bring frameworks and analyses that lead to better decisions.”

“Every company has dozens of focused challenges at any given time that can benefit from the specialized expertise a professor brings,” says Lance Bettencourt, co-founder of LIFT PhD. “More often than not, traditional consulting is too expensive and too time-consuming for these challenges so companies choose to do the best they can with internal resources. Sometimes that’s good enough. But, often, it’s not.”

Photo: Clayton Christensen

According to Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, traditional consulting is ripe for this type of disruption because it often tries to sell more “help” than is actually needed by a company. This is because traditional consulting is highly focused on the deployment and utilization of their people, and that is often at odds with the best interests of the client. LIFT helps companies tailor the amount and type of expertise they receive for any particular challenge.

The LIFT PhD network includes marketing professors from many of the premier universities in the United States, including Cornell, Yale, UCLA, USC, Michigan, Indiana, Alabama, and more. The professors have been personally selected by the LIFT PhD team based on a combination of their cutting edge domain knowledge, advanced research capabilities, interpersonal skills, and past consulting experience.

“I truly believe that professors are an underutilized knowledge asset,” says Lance Bettencourt. “To this point, it has been too cumbersome and time-consuming to find a professor who has the skill and motivation to help with a specific company challenge. I am amazed by the talent and experience among LIFT professors and I am confident that everyone from CMOs and VPs of Marketing, Sales, and Strategy to product and brand managers will be as well.”

Related link
Read More About the LIFT PhD Network (PDF)

Source: PR.com (press release) and LiftPhD Channel (YouTube)