Consulting firms operate in a highly competitive environment and the role of management teams is to set a course and positioning that will promote the growth of the firm. Beyond this strategy, it is necessary to exploit the right marketing and sales channels, which are constantly evolving, in order to support the growth of the company. Here are 3 main steps necessary to accelerate your consulting firm:
1. Expand marketing
Writing and deploying a marketing strategy adapted to your business is becoming more important every day. The way in which potential clients report their difficulties and the commercial approach usually put in place by consulting firms is indeed increasingly diverging.
Historically, the marketing approach of consulting firms consisted mainly of increasing the visibility of the firm with sponsorship, participating in events to look for potential clients and exchanging business cards by regularly reminding the contacts created. However, today's buyers of services, and particularly consulting, are doing much more research online on their issues than before, and are not contacting consulting firms until much later in their thinking process.
Hive, a research company on the professional services sector, showed in a study that the majority of clients of consulting firms 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 will have earned this reputation and will be invited to speak in public, which will allow you to consolidate your position.
2. Create an effective lead generation engineOutbound : Deploy outbound and inbound marketing channels, and measure the performance of each:
Regular email contacts : You will proactively and regularly get in touch with your contacts. Any opportunity is good for them to keep your company in mind. An event related to their sector, an innovation that may interest them or an event in which they could participate, any opportunity to engage in an exchange with them is good to take.
Writing a white paper : You can also write a white paper or e-book on the topics your firm is particularly familiar with. It is a really effective tool to engage a new contact and give credibility to your skills compared to your competitors. A white paper requires spending time on research and writing, but it's a very worthwhile investment, as it gives you the content you need to justify reaching out to more prospects: providing value through the content you put out has a lot more effect than a business card exchange. Finally, the white paper can be distributed for 1 to 3 years depending on the subject, so you will easily amortize it.
Inbound : bring prospects naturally to you
Content Creation : a very powerful channel, but be careful, not with just any content! It is imperative to produce quality content, with information that brings maximum value to your prospects, otherwise it will eventually bring traffic to your site, but will have no effect on your sales. Some associates are reluctant to share content because they see their knowledge as a competitive advantage that should be kept secret. Don't be afraid to share your knowledge, as important as it is, making it available in an article will only boost your credibility and interest, and will be just a sample of how much you can contribute. The blog article will not allow the client to solve his problem alone thanks to your content, but he will know that your company is an expert in this field.
Add this content to a section of your business site, to allow the reader to then read 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 will quickly increase the number of visits to your site and you will always give yourself a better chance of being contacted.
Retaining visitors : Don't let visitors leave your site, or finish reading your content without creating the next engagement. It's not necessarily to push them to contact you, but for example to subscribe to your newsletter. By subscribing, they will provide you with information that will allow you to integrate them into your CRM and better track them. A simple content visitor becomes a follow-up contact, who will regularly receive information that is useful to him. You can be sure that when a need arises, it is you that he will think of first.
3. Organize the team
As in any other company, turnover can only grow with the right level of focus on commercial activity. Of course, the partners are at the origin of most of the commercial results, but having at least one sales manager allows you to better focus your efforts, to test new markets, and not to limit yourself to the network of partners.
Creating this position of manager also makes it possible to bring the rigor necessary for commercial success: cleaning contact databases, updating them, segmenting contacts and qualifying them (differentiating them between prospects or simple contacts), determining when is the right time to go and "reach" these contacts, preparing proposals, etc. There is no shortage of work, and without rigorous follow-up of opportunities, some will be wasted, contacts will be relaunched too late, and growth will not be as fast as expected.
Finally, you need to make sure that all that marketing and sales work is profitable. It is therefore necessary to have a solution that allows you to track the time spent by your employees on each project, whether it is internal or commercial activity on well-defined opportunities. Measuring the performance of your business activities is as important as setting them up.
These business approaches have proven to work, and marketing continues to evolve rapidly with new channels constantly opening up and technology that further optimizes your marketing. We'll share them with you in future posts, and feel free to let us know what you'd like more details about!
