How to accelerate the growth of your consulting firm
Consulting firms operate in a highly competitive environment, and the role of management teams is to set a course and position the firm for growth. Beyond this strategy, it is necessary to exploit the right marketing and sales channels, which are constantly evolving, to support the company's growth. Here are 3 key steps to accelerating your consultancy:
1. Develop marketing
Writing and deploying a marketing strategy tailored to your business is becoming increasingly important. The way in which potential customers report their difficulties and the sales approach usually implemented by consulting firms are indeed diverging more and more.
Historically, the marketing approach of consulting firms consisted essentially of increasing the firm's visibility through sponsorship, taking part in events to seek out potential customers and exchanging business cards by regularly following up contacts made. However, today's buyers of services, and particularly of consulting, do far more online research on their issues than they used to, and only contact consulting firms much later in their thinking process.
Hive, a research company specializing in the professional services sector, showed in a study that the majority of consulting firm customers do their research online, by reading blog articles, publications or listening to experts talk about their problems.
This is where consulting firms can assert themselves as experts in their fields, highlight their positioning and increase their reputation. Be the expert that prospective customers find on Google, publish articles and analyses, educate the market on the issues you master. After a few months, you'll have earned that reputation and will be invited to speak in public, consolidating your position.
2. Create an effective lead generation engineOutbound : Deploy outbound and inbound marketing channels, and measure the performance of each :
Regular e-mail contacts You will proactively and regularly get in touch with your contacts. Every opportunity is a good one to keep your company top of mind. An event linked to their sector, an innovation that might interest them or an event they could attend - any opportunity to engage in an exchange with them is a good one to take.
White paper You can also write a white paper or e-book on subjects in which your company has particular expertise. This is a really effective tool for engaging a new contact and giving credibility to your skills compared with your competitors. A white paper requires time spent on research and writing, but it's a very worthwhile investment, as it gives you the content you need to justify contacting more prospects: bringing value through the content you distribute has far more effect than an exchange of business cards. Last but not least, a white paper can be distributed for 1 to 3 years, depending on the subject, so you'll easily recoup your investment.
Inbound : bring prospects to you naturally
Content creation Marketing: a very powerful channel, but not with just any content! It's imperative to produce quality content, with information that brings maximum value to your prospects, otherwise it may bring traffic to your site, but will have no effect on your sales. Some associates are reluctant to share content, because they consider their knowledge to be a competitive advantage that must be kept secret. Don't be afraid to share your knowledge - as important as it is, making it available in an article will only enhance your credibility and interest, and will only represent a sample of all you can contribute. The blog post won't enable the customer to solve their problem on their own thanks to your content, but they will know that your firm is an expert in the field.
Add this content to a section of your commercial site, so that the reader can then read about your value proposition, see your customers... Little by little, your content will bring traffic to your site and your visibility will increase. By optimizing your SEO, you'll quickly multiply the number of visits to your site and give yourself an even greater chance of being contacted.
Keeping visitors coming back Don't let visitors leave your site, or finish reading your content, without creating a next engagement. This doesn't necessarily mean getting them to contact you, but rather, for example, subscribing to your newsletter. By subscribing, they'll provide you with information that will enable you to integrate them into your CRM and track them more effectively. A simple content visitor becomes a tracked contact, who will regularly receive useful information. You can be sure that when a need arises, they'll think of you first.
3. Organize the team
As in any other company, sales can only grow with the right level of concentration on commercial activity. Of course, the associates are responsible for most of the sales results, but having at least one sales manager means that efforts can be better focused, new markets can be tested, and the company is not limited to the associates' network.
Creating the position of sales manager also brings with it the rigor necessary for commercial success: cleaning up contact databases, updating them, segmenting and qualifying contacts (differentiating between prospects and simple contacts), determining the right time to go out and "touch" these contacts, preparing proposals... There's no shortage of work to be done, and without rigorous follow-up of opportunities, some will be wasted, contacts will be followed up too late, and growth will not be as rapid as expected.
Finally, you need to make sure that all this maketing and sales work is profitable. That's why you need a solution that enables you to track the time spent by your staff on each project, whether internal or commercial activity on well-defined opportunities. Measuring the performance of your sales activities is just as important as implementing them.
These sales approaches have proved their worth, and marketing continues to evolve rapidly, with new channels constantly opening up and technology optimizing your marketing. We'll tell you all about it in future posts, and don't hesitate to let us know what you'd like to know more about!
