Cracking the Code: How To Achieve Consistency and Predictability In Consultancy Services Client Acquisition

Acquiring new clients is something that all consulting firms need to do, but various surveys indicate that more than 80% of consultancy firms struggle to attract premium clients predictably and consistently.

A recent BenchPress Survey found that the most common tactics that consulting firms had turned to when wanting to develop new business was using LinkedIn, written content marketing and email marketing.? The bad news is that for most, these tactics failed to produce the leads they wanted. The lack of new clients results in firms’ growth stagnating and many hitting a barrier that they cannot go beyond.

So, what is the difference between a stagnant firm and a high-growth one?

The successful firms have cracked the code on client acquisition.

In each of my three consultancy firms, that I was eventually able to grow and sell, I definitely experienced this challenge until I “cracked the code.”

Client acquisition for me was typically reliant on one source, like most other consultancy firms, which was hoping to get referrals.

And luckily, because we did a good job, they came reasonably frequently.

But there was never the ability to scale what we were doing by relying on referrals alone. We had no control over growth by waiting for referrals.

So, I had to come up with another way of growing my business effectively.

Being a consultant who loves problem solving, I applied my own analytical thinking to the consulting services client acquisition challenge.

The result didn’t appear overnight.? But over time I ended up with a completely new way of looking at marketing for consulting firms.? Through my search, I discovered that marketing consultancy services successfully is so different from other marketing in other industries.

In consulting, you are selling a service, a strategy, or a solution. Most marketing companies are generalists across various product based industries but lack the specialized knowledge required around selling professional services.

That’s why it is so important to pick a marketing partner (or have marketing execution & strategy carried out by a firm) that knows consulting’s unique challenges.

I found that the process around selling to referrals almost exacerbates the challenge for us, because we get used to getting a phone call or an introduction to a potential client, having a brief conversation and saying, well, let's come and have a chat. And so, we enter the sales conversation very quickly. When I look at the approach to client acquisition of most consultancy firms, it appears that almost any marketing that we do tries to get us quickly in front of someone to have a sales conversation.? While that’s entirely logical, it’s also totally counterproductive.

We found that instead of rushing towards a sales meeting, we had to take a few steps back and start to build a relationship with a potential client before they were ready for the sales conversation. We learnt that it was better to offer potential clients valuable information about how to solve their problem and educate them about the solution, before inviting them to a sales meeting.? And what I discovered through that process, was that I was demonstrating my authority, my expertise, my abilities in solving the particular problems my clients had, before they were even thinking about buying our services.

It was about building a step-by-step system to create a ?relationship where they could start to know us, like us, trust us, before they bought from us. So, systemizing that process over that learning period was really what enabled me then to scale my business and effectively get it to a point where we had clients coming reasonably consistently and predictably.

And that’s the aim with all of this: consistent and predictable client acquisition.

If done with a clear focus on the target market, you can attract regular high-quality opportunities.

That’s the authority positioning strategy that successful consultancy firms adopt so well.

If consistency in client acquisition is a challenge for you, you need to start building a system that can attract clients to you. And when you have that system of attracting clients and using authority positioning where you're deliberately setting yourself up to be seen as the accepted authority, they start to come to you already pre-sold.

That’s what authority positioning can achieve: the power dynamic shifts.

If you can become the authority who talks about solving their particular problem – and if that content and educational process is specifically designed to lead people from their initial problem awareness to the solution, you've become the authority in their eyes because you are the one teaching them.? Then they automatically come to you for help.