4. Getting Consulting Clients Quickly

Consultants that depend upon the referrals they get in their first year usually fall into a Feast-or-Famine cycle. In a Feast-or-Famine cycle, consultants work long hours with clients and have no time for marketing. Then, when the client engagement ends, they face long stretches with no income as they work on stop-gap marketing. It’s a continuous cycle that drives consultants and their families crazy.

Getting out of this Feast-or-Famine cycle, and building steady growth is key to a successful consulting business.

In this stage, you learn about short term techniques to quickly fill your pipeline and convert prospects into clients.

These techniques fill the pipeline, but they take constant work, and you don’t want to be on this treadmill constantly. Once you have a couple of clients, start building the systems in Stage 5, Marketing Your Consulting Services.

The Feast-or-Famine Cycle

New consultants often start with referrals from friends, business acquaintances, and their previous employer. These referrals often fade after the first year, so new consultants find themselves facing months of no revenue.

Most consultants, even experienced consultants, have faced the Feast-or-Famine cycle. The Feast-or-Famine cycle swings you back and forth between high income and no income. The cycle alternates between all work and no marketing, and all marketing and no work. Of course, income follows the same cycle leaving most consultants yearning for stability and pushing them into accepting low paying work from low-quality clients.

You don’t have to go through this Feast-or-Famine cycle. By spending 10% to 30% of your time using the techniques describe for this stage, you can fill your prospect pipeline. Once you have two or three clients, begin building the marketing systems in Stage 8 to continuously fill your pipeline.

Start Networking Now

Before you start your consulting business, you should build your LinkedIn network with quality contacts. Contacts you connect with should be people you would want to work with or who work in the organizations you want to consult to.

To build your LinkedIn network connect with,

Matching Your Marketing to Your Experience

Before you run out into the street and start wildly marketing your consulting business, stop and think about how you like to work, how you like to connect with people, and how your prospects like their communication.

All those need to come together when you build your marketing plan. You want to,

The Marketing Matrix can help you identify your best way of filling your pipeline and nurturing leads into prospects. If you are just starting your consulting business choose marketing methods in the first column. If you have a running consulting business or are looking to the long term choose from the second or third columns.

Check the marketing that works best for your stage of consulting business maturity.
Click the image to open it in a full window.

Do Marketing You Love, So You Love to Do Marketing

If you read about the differences between high earning solo professionals and average earners you learned that high earners,

If you are going to work consistently on marketing, you want to do marketing that works and that you enjoy. That’s why you need to pick just two or three types of marketing that use work styles you enjoy.
For example,

Getting Consulting Clients Quickly

There are marketing and direct outreach techniques that quickly bring in clients. While these work I have found they take a lot of time and energy. That can be hard to keep up and they take away from your personal time.

The following section describes marketing methods that are known for quickly filling your prospect pipeline. What follows is an overview. For step-by-step action plans you need the detail in the Critical to Success courses and blogs.

While the following are some of the fastest methods for filling your prospect pipeline they require constant personal attention and hours of work. To build a marketing machine that works automatically make sure you read Stage 8, Automating your Marketing.

Client Referrals

Most new consultants begin their practice with a few referrals. However, these usually dry up within the first year.

If you have been an employee you should try to make a mutually beneficial referral arrangement with your past employer. In some cases, you can continue to support your old employer’s customers and clients for everyone’s benefit.

Some of the referral building tasks you need to do when starting are,

Network and Meetup Events

You CANNOT sit back and rest even if you have the benefit of starting with a full pipeline. If you have startup momentum from referrals, then use that momentum and the time it gives you to network and to start building your automated marketing machine. 

Here are a few tips on networking,

Direct Outreach with LinkedIn

Building your prospect list is significantly easier when you have a large number of quality LinkedIn 1st degree contacts. For example, at one point I had 1,000 1st degree connections. That created a network of over 3,000,000 (three million) 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections that I could search, connect with, and engage.

LinkedIn and especially LinkedIn Sales Navigator are like the Google of professional and business people. They are a goldmine of professional connections.

If you didn’t do the Client Profile exercise in Stage 2, go back and do it. You have to use a consistent system with LinkedIn to test which profiles are best. Searching with different client profiles and not testing which profile gives you the best prospects is a waste of time.

If you do not have a large personal LinkedIn network, practice using the free LinkedIn and then when you are ready, get a month-by-month subscription to LinkedIn Navigator. Use it long enough to build an initial prospect list.

Create the best LinkedIn connection requests by connecting with some form of personal relationship or an exchange of value. Connecting and building rapport by creating a high-value exchange on LinkedIn is critical. We do a lot of work on this in the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course.

DO NOT SELL on LinkedIn! You hate spam emails and phone calls and so does everyone else. Spam LinkedIn messages are just as annoying.

LinkedIn activity can be slow. Many people only go on LinkedIn once or twice per month so you may not see responses for a week or more.

Don’t be discouraged by a 10% to 20% connection acceptance rate. Once you have a great LinkedIn profile, published LinkedIn content, and have built a brand from speaking or writing, your acceptance rate should be over 50%.

Here's a proven process for connecting on LinkedIn,

The Google Advanced Search box.

The LinkedIn Navigator Advanced Search box.

Workshops, Lunch-and-Learns, and Webinars

Workshops and lunch-and-learn sessions are an excellent way to build your prospect list. They give you the chance to demonstrate your consulting ability, engage with attendees, and build rapport and build a mailing list by offering additional post-workshop material.

Again, this is where you must know the key pains and problems of your Client Profile. You want a workshop with a title and pin-point solution that your audience can’t ignore.

In all three of these, you must create offers so that prospects want to reengage with you one-on-one afterward. That will build your email list and personal connections. 

Workshops
If you have an idea for a good one to three hour-long workshop, approach the organizers of an industry event and ask if you can do a pre- or post-event workshop. You will need to give the organizers a white paper, testimonials, sample worksheets and an outline. If you have a video of you speaking, put it on YouTube and send them the link. Always have an irresistible offer for attendees so they will connect with you afterward.

A good way to engage with a small group in a workshop or Lunch-and-Learn is to end the workshop or Lunch-and-Learn with a brainstorming session on how the learnings can be applied when they return to work. This is a great time for you to learn about client needs and pain.

Webinars
Webinars can be almost as good as real-world workshops. But, they take more work to build rapport. The key here is to engage the audience in the chat and have workbook exercises. If you just talk you will lose your audience.

Webinars work well done in participation with companies or associations. 

I’ve used many different webinar platforms, but I prefer Zoom for its quality, low-cost, and ease-of-use.

Lunch-and-Learns
Lunch-and-Learns are a little different than workshops. Lunch-and-Learns were a staple in building my first computer training and consulting business.

Lunch-and-Learns work best for skills-based training where the sponsoring company brings in lunch and you bring in the workshop material. Besides computer skills, these also work well for management and leadership scenarios and training.

Speaking

Speaking, when done with the right structure and offers, is an excellent way to capture leads and prospects.

One significant advantage to selecting the right niche market and knowing their pains and gains is that most high-value niches have professional meetings or conferences. These meetings and conferences are a perfect place for you to present, build your brand, and gather leads.

When you present to a meeting or conference, you have two objectives.

 First, you want to be recognized as a captivating expert who helps your audience learn and advance. This will also get you rebooked for more speaking.

Second, you want to capture leads to build your consulting business. Capturing leads as a speaker takes a few extra tricks that are in the Starting and Building a Thriving Consulting Business course. 

Even a speech that garners standing ovations can leave you with no leads. To get leads you must structure your speech with prompts that build desire, have a Call to Action, and drive attendees to contact you. We go through this speech protocol in the course. 

One consultant who took the How to Start a Consulting Business course is highly qualified. She has a Ph.D. in her niche and is a successful speaker. Although a good speaker, she rarely got leads.

She turned that around when she started using the speaking protocol that drives an audience to become leads. In her next speech, she got seven leads. Three of those turned into clients.