The Big Question
Questions I get from consultants. And my answers.
"Luk, I am struggling with combining my consulting work with doing the necessary sales and marketing activities to grow my consulting business. How should I go about such a combination?"
I get a variation of this question a lot. It’s one of the most discussed challenges in my conversations with consultants on the subject of revenue growth. That’s why today I’d like to provide you, my readers, with the answer that I provide to all of my clients struggling with this issue.
It comes down to changing your state of mind and re-framing your approach to growing your consulting business. After all, we can sit there, build a beautiful website, hang out on social media but if we don’t ‘sell’ nobody will come to us. Like it or not.
Sales and marketing in consulting is NOT about sales
Marketing in consulting is NOT about sales. Marketing isn’t about pushing a product or service or making on-and-off efforts that only truly manifest when you are desperate for work.
Instead, it’s all about growing your visibility and building trust in your expertise. You do this by sharing your knowledge in simple, jargon-free language and providing something of authentic value to the (specific) problem situation of your (specific) prospects/clients.
Consulting is a credence business
Your ability as a consultant to sell your services comes down to your ability to build trust in your expertise. This can’t be achieved by sleazy selling methods. Prospects need to find, like, and trust you before they buy.
Your revenue growth should come from the market's awareness and respect for the trust in your expertise, your social proof, and your reputation. It's strategically the only way to go about it in the long run. I've done it. You can do it. But it’s not an overnight job. It takes time.
This is how I see it: sales and marketing in consulting is a SIDE-EFFECT (yes!) of doing these other things extremely well...
● Sharing your expertise: creating the foundation of narrowly focused expertise, shared in various formats that serve a single goal – building up your visibility as a consultant and a distinct subject matter expert. Openly sharing your expertise sends a message that you are not afraid to reveal your expertise because you are that confident in your own skills and knowledge. It sends a powerful message that you have a lot more to offer because of how freely you share your knowledge.
● Defining your MVA: a laser-sharp identification of your (smallest possible) target audience (your Minimal Viable Audience - MVA) and openly sharing your expertise to your MVA.
● Addressing prototypical pain points: getting traction from your target audience by addressing the heart of their prototypical pain points. You will only stand out as a consultant in a crowded market when you help bring hidden problems and patterns to the surface, inspiring your audience to shift the way they think about their fundamental or underlying challenges. Your audience doesn’t want to hear what they already know about their problems.
● Picturing ‘The Promised Land’: the ability to succinctly explain your transformative offering that will allow your prospects to move from their pain-ridden state to “The Promised Land”. You will need to create a bold vision about the transformational potential of switching to a new, different approach. Your vision should be contagious. You translate your expertise into the confidence that you give your audience about the positive potential of a transformation. What you ‘sell’ is not what it is, but what it does (never forget this sentence!).
● Being consistent: consistency in the sharing-delivery of everything you learn, consistency in measuring the impact of your work and writing about it, consistency in communicating to your target audience, consistency in everything you do. Consistency is an extremely important component of trust-building in your expertise in general.
Consultancy IS marketing, it’s not separate from you as a consultant
As a consultant, you ARE the product. You ARE the marketer and the sales rep of your expertise, your approach, and your unique blend of experience and delivery. But it doesn’t matter how good you are. Nobody will come across your expertise if you can’t organically translate that into:
● Visible reputation: you are known for what you know, for your subject matter expertise in general.
● Subject matter know-how: you have deep vertical expertise, you have discovered all the patterns of the prototypical client problems. You combine this with broad contextual understanding. The T-shaped consultant, remember?
● Trusted advisor status: you get trusted for solving ‘their problem’, for bringing your clients from point A (problem status) to point B (problem solved status). The ‘Promised Land’ delivery.
● Influencing skills: you shift people’s thinking and ultimately you inspire behavioral changes (to get the problems solved).
Let me conclude with a great quote from Jonathan Stark: “If the people whose condition you can improve don’t know you exist, then you can’t help them.”
