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Cold Calling for New Consulting Clients

By crooky | January 11, 2008

The trend these days is for clients to indentify vendors through a combination of web research and personal referrals - as much as 80% of vendors are selected in this manner. This has a couple of important implications - you want to be easy to find, have a good network and when you’re found, you want to have information that qualifies your leads for you. That said, there’s only so much that a good network and having a snappy website with a great, regularly updated blog can do (*cough cough). At some point, you’re going to have to bite the bullet and do some good, old fashioned cold calling. I’ve hit that point in my business cycle and I want to talk you through what I’m going to try so that I can report back on the results later.

Last night, I sat down and did some hard thinking about what value my business provides to my clients. What I came up with is this:

I am too experienced to fall into the junior consultant role. There are plenty of people straight out of (or still in) university that are willing to work for $20-$30/hour that can help other consultants with their big projects. The problem with junior consultants is that you have to train them. You have to hold their hand at every step of the project. I’m also not a senior consultant with 15+ years of consulting under my belt. I fall into that awkward, middling niche where I’m not cheap but a senior consultant can give me discreet chunks of a project, let me run with them with the confidence that I can deliver on that piece of the project on time and with minimal supervision.

Rocket Builders brought me on board for that exact reason as did David Roughley from Strategic Technology Consulting. That got me thinking - instead of responding to 50 million RFPs that I invariably come in 2nd, 3rd or 4th on, I should be offering up my services as a sub-contractor directly to the best senior consultants in town. So, that’s my plan. Next week, I’m going to come up with a compelling brochure outlining what I can do, then I’m going to troll LinkedIn for leads. Once I identify what looks like a good lead (probably management consultants), I’m going to call them up and try to talk them into letting me take them out for coffee and send them my brochure. There are hundreds of senior consultants in town and I only need a little business from half a dozen or so for 2008 to be a very good year.

I’ll update on how this approach is working next Friday. Wish me luck!

Ps. I just noticed all the alliteration in the title. That wasn’t intentional. I’m just that good.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Business of Consulting |

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