5 Ways Small Consultancies Can Boost Their Sales

Key Takeaways

1. Demonstrate Expertise Early: Establish trust and demonstrate value in initial client interactions by sharing expertise freely.
2. Explore Project Value: Discuss the project’s value in both qualitative and financial terms to justify your fees, regardless of pricing model.
3. Seek Feedback on Wins and Losses: Obtain feedback whether you win or lose a project to continuously improve your sales process.
4. Diversify Services: Offer a variety of services including signature, entry, fall-back, and follow-on services to reduce sales costs and expand work with existing clients.
5. Improve Proposals: Regularly review and enhance your proposals with external feedback to stay competitive in the market.
6. Build Strategic Partnerships: Align with other consultancies for mutual business development opportunities.
7. Engage Previous Clients: Reconnect with past clients and failed bids for potential repeat business, referrals, or testimonials.

I’m going to talk you through a few areas, five in total, where the average small consultancy sales process can be improved. These should lead to an improvement in your pipeline and your conversion rates.

The evidence comes from working with my own clients who are small consultancies that want to grow and study their sales process but also interviewing around 200 smaller medium-sized consultancy owners over the last 15 years.

Let me talk you through a standard sale process.

The Consulting Sales Process

Let’s start with the lead who is a client or potential client who has shown an interest in your products or services. The next step will typically be some form of meeting or telephone call where you will typically do three things: demonstrate your expertise, define the challenge and opportunity , and finally qualify the client.

Once they have been qualified, you should spend time exploring the value of the project. You do this even if you’re not doing value-based pricing because you want to show that your fees are an insignificant percentage of the value that you will be achieving for the client.

If you are doing value-based pricing, then this is the point where you would insert metrics that would measure whether the project is successful or not.

The next step is submitting the proposal with the pricing for the project. If you are unsuccessful, then there’s typically a feedback loop where you will follow up with the client or potential client to find out why you were unsuccessful.

If you were successful, you then get on and do the work and then ideally, a new project will come from this, or you might even get a referral from it.

This is a fairly standard sales process. It obviously depends on the client, the project and the type of consultancy you are, but this would take as standard in terms of where things can typically be improved.

5 Ways to Improve the Sales of Your Consultancy

Let me give you five pointers on how you can improve your sales:

1. Demonstrating Your Expertise

Demonstrating your expertise as early on as possible in your contact with the client helps build trust and show that you will be giving value for money. Many small consultancies are worried they are giving away the crown jewels.

I would say in today’s age, information isn’t a scarce commodity but expertise is, so if you can share and advise as much as possible even in the first meeting, then you’re going to be building trust and potentially putting your prices up as well.

2. Exploring Value

This involves having the conversation with the client about the value of the project not only in qualitative terms but also in terms of finances and business goals.

This conversation can lend itself to value-based pricing but even if you’re doing fixed pricing or time and materials, then getting the client to have a good view of the value that you’ll be delivering the firm is a great way to justify your fees.

3. Getting Feedback on Failure or Success

Many consultancies seek to get feedback when they fail to win a project, but many also assume that because they won the project, they were perfect. When you win a big, you should ask ‘what did the competitors do better than us in the bidding process’? 

4. Offering and Communicating the Right Services

In addition to your ‘signature service’ (the one which you’re best known for), you should also have an ‘entry’ service (an exploration or discovery project which costs much less), a fall-back service (what you offer when the client isn’t up for your signature service), and one or more follow-on services.

The cost of sales is a massive expense in consultancies and can be reduced significantly if you expand what you can do with existing clients. An important addendum here is that many consultancies assume that clients are mind-readers – most clients don’t know what their consultancies offer other than the work their currently doing!

5. Improve Your Proposals

A lot of consultancies rarely look at other firms’ proposals. They think that what they’ve been doing for the last 10 years in terms of proposals is sufficient.

However, I would really urge you to get a third party, preferably someone who has seen a lot of proposals to give you some advice – it’s one of the quickest ways in which I can offer value to my own clients, which is to look at the proposals that have been unsuccessful, and just give them some pointers and how they can be improved.

The market has gotten a lot more competitive over the last 10 years and everyone has started to lift their game, not just in terms of the delivery, but also in terms of the sales process.

2 Bonus Tips

6. Build Partnerships

By aligning with consultancies that offer services upstream (services typically implemented prior to yours), downstream (after yours), or adjacent (at the same time), you may be able to offer business development opportunities between the two firms.

Alternatively, look for those people, platforms or companies which offer advice on how to select, or do strategy concerning, your type of consultancy. Incentivising others to pass business your way is a no-brainer, but it needs to be done properly: give them an exact idea what you’re looking for and pass them an agreement or contract so they remember you next time they’re having a relevant conversation.

7. Engage Previous Clients

When’s the last time you went through your black-book of previous clients and even failed bids? Repeat business is the easiest and cheapest method of business development. Even when this is not possible, referrals, or at least testimonials should be sought out.

Consultants often forget that they occupy a very small, and quickly diminished percentage of the client’s mind. Revisiting them will ensure that this doesn’t disappear, and may even result in new business.  

Obviously, all of this will be supported by some systematic CRM system or professional service automation system that will allow you to record your pipeline and interactions with the clients throughout the journey.

There’s lots more information at https://joeomahoney.com that is all available free of charge.