Today, I want to discuss the five stages of marketing your consultancy practice. From my experience with hundreds of consultancy firms and my own practice, I've identified five distinct ways consultancy firms market their services. These stages align with the historical ages of growth: Stone Age, Agricultural Age, Industrial Age, Information Age, and the Conceptual Age. Let's explore each of these in detail.

Most consultancy firms tend to work on promotion as their marketing strategy, judging by their websites and the way they present themselves and their firms both online and in networking meetings. However, from what I see, promotion creates resistance and triggers questions that raise doubts about competence, trustworthiness and reliability. On the other hand, the few consultants that use positioning as their marketing strategy, avoid triggering those same questions, especially when the...

There is one critical question your marketing must answer, if you are going to be able to create relevant marketing messages that connect with your ideal clients. I see a lot of marketing from consultancy firms that fails to answer this question. The result is failure to attract the attention of ideal clients and an inability to attract regular new sales opportunities. When you do answer this question, it makes the world of difference. You find potential clients seeking you ou...

Many consultants have a fear that if they give away any or much of their valuable intellectual property in their marketing process, the recipients will use that material to solve their own problems instead of coming to the consultant who provided the material to ask for their help. The conundrum is that we know that if we give away some of our IP it will enhance our authority positioning and attract some potential clients to want to work with us. However, if we give too much, we will s...

Most consultancy firms make a big mistake in their marketing that slows down their progress to new sales and acquiring new clients or may prevent them having an opportunity with some potential clients at all. There is a predominant tool on most consulting firms' websites that asks for too much too soon. That is typically the innocuous "Contact Us" form. What comes with that form most often is the offer of a free initial consultation. What is meant to be an easy and fast way...

In many consulting firms, operational processes are more complex than they need to be. Rather than offering a wide range of services to potential clients in order to achieve higher revenues, in my experience, operating with a focused specialization is what achieves greater simplicity in running the business, greater operating efficiencies, lower operational costs and greater profits. The fact that it also created differentiation from competitors and attracts more qualified clients...

Many consultancy firms do a lot of activities in their marketing with the aim of attracting their target market. But do these activities actually attract? A lot of the activities I see consultancy firms engaging in don't get the results the owners of those firms are looking for. They don't attract. Instead of doing things to try to attract more clients, I believe more owners of consultancy firms should be focusing first on making their firm more attractive to the target ma...

One of the most common scenarios that consultancy firms experience is what I call the sales roller coaster. That is where the firm goes from being busy with client delivery work for a while, maybe a month or two, and then goes through a subsequent period of having not enough work and needing to find new clients or projects. The main reason this occurs is that when the firm is experiencing a shortage of work, the focus shifts to finding more work. However, the activities inv...

For most consultancy firms, client acquisition is not a systemtic process. Typically, we get clients through referrals and maybe networking, which ends up being a referral process too. Unless we have our marketing systems perfectly dialled in, we cannot expect our client acquisition to be consistent or predictable. When this is the case, we have no confidence in being able to grow our business, and perhaps even no confidence about when and how our next client will turn up....

I believe there is actually a lot of confusion about the importance of branding and what branding actually is for many owners of consultancy firms. In this episode, I reveal my take on what branding really is and how we can waste a lot of time and money when we get this wrong. In my experience, many consultants go about branding the wrong way, in a way that is ineffective and potentially harmful to the business. When you go about it the right way, you create connection by ...

Many consultants make the mistake of hurrying an potential client towards the sale, without realizing that this process violates the normal buying journey that all potential clients take. Our approach to selling is more like seeing the selling process as an event that happens around the sales meeting, instead of a journey that the client can take with you. It is your job as the consultant to provide the vehicle for the client to be able to take that journey with you. If you do no...

Many consultancy firms are great at satisfying demand for their services, but not so great at creating demand for their services. Most consultants start out in business for themselves and develop a team around them because they are good at what they do. They already demonstrate a level of authority in their field, especially when they can receive referrals that helps them grow the business. However, at some point, referrals cannot be relied upon to continue to scale a cons...

In this episode of The Accepted Authority Podcast, I discuss the difference between a consultancy practice and a consultancy business. I see most of the consultancy firms that I come across being run as a consultancy practice, which tend to end up being complex operations lacking consistency and predictability around the outcomes they are striving for. This is in contrast to the few that are run as a consultancy business, which tend to be systemized, scalable efficient operations with ...

As we come to the end of 2023, I'm hearing thought from many consultants about how glad they are the 2023 is nearly over, but that they are worried about how the challenging economic environment might affect them in the new year. What appears to be uppermost in their thoughts is how the external environment will impact them. What my concern is however, is how are they planning to improve what they have been doing in their businesses and in their marketing, so that they can control thei...

Many consultants display and obvious need for speed when it comes to selling their consulting services. However, this need for speed is counter productive to results. Your need for speed in selling your consultancy services undermines your authority, which ultimately undermines your sales effectiveness and your financial results. In this episode, I explain why many consultants display a need for speed, but also describe how to sidestep that need for speed to be able to establish, main...

Marketing your consulting services as a consultant or owner of a consulting firm is often a challenge to conduct effectively. By effectively, I mean that your investment in marketing actually delivers new clients rather than just getting exposure on social media or being seen by your market but not getting results. The marketing efforts I see from consultants often seems to lack the right strategy. I see lots of tactical marketing attempts that promote consultants and their servi...

Many owners of consultancy firms struggle to differentiate their consulting practice from their competitors and often have to compete against them to present proposals. Often in these situations, the cheapest quote wins. This is not a situation you want to be in. The challenge around lack of differentiation basically comes down a failure to do the deep thinking and the hard work to develop a winning competitive strategy. Without a winning competitive strategy, your firm is ...

What does it take as an owner of a consultancy practice to be regarded as the accepted authority in your field? Does it need someone to appoint you to that position? Of course that's not how it happens. Does it need us to claim that position? Well, yes and no. We can't just claim to be the authority and then go on doing what we've always done and just keep doing the same things as our competitors do. We have to be different and stand out so that our target market acknowledges that...

Many consultancy firms suffer from inconsistent workloads which are the result of inconsistent lead flow. Inconsistent lead flow comes about because of the manual labour involved in the way most consultants attend to the activities required to generate new leads. What if you could reduce the time and effort required to create lead flow? In this episode of the Accepted Authority podcast, I reveal the process I have developed that has enabled me and my clients to create consistent and p...

Selling consultancy services comes with a specific set of problems that relate to the levels of trust and belief that is established with your potential client. The typical lead that comes from a referral has led us into some habits in the sales meeting that don't help us with a marketing generated lead. Unless we have thought about the challenges in this scenario and have planned and developed a system to overcome these challenges, ideally before we ever turn up to sales meeting...