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Lead Generation for Consultants (and non-Consultants)
By crooky | June 4, 2008
As some of you may know, I am a junior partner in another consulting firm called Rocket Builders in Vancouver. It’s a good relationship in many respects but in addition to doing good work with this group, I am learning a lot about how to run a business. One of the key foundations in any business (consulting businesses included) is the ability to generate leads (and subsequently sales). This is something that few companies do effectively, myself included. I rely far too heavily on word of mouth marketing and my own burgeoning reputation in the Metro Vancouver area.
A good friend of mine - Aaron Goldwater from Jurat Canada - and I were discussing lead generation this afternoon and we are both on the same page. We know we need to do lead generation but we’re both so damned busy running our respective businesses that we just don’t have the time to be on the phone all the time doing lead generation.
Arguably, that’s not what the founder/CEO/Principal should be doing with their time. So how should small companies and self-employed consultants do lead generation and ensure that their sales pipeline is full?
1. Identify Your Target Market
It’s easy to say “I’m going to market my services to group X”. That doesn’t mean you’ve identified your target market. It means that you have a vague concept of who might buy your services. To effectively target a market, you need names. You need the names and phone numbers and e-mail addresses of people that you know you have a chance of convincing to buy your product or service. That’s a target market.
You need to know what companies and what kinds of people within those companies you should be talking to in order to close a sale. You need to understand why they are in your target market - not just “I think I can sell to these guys”. What is the compelling reason why they should buy? I could try to sell my consulting services to my next door neighbour but I have no idea what he would use my services for.
A target market for consultants is specific organizations/companies, specific functional roles/individuals within that company (and I don’t mean “the decision makers” - you need to understand who the decision makers are. Hint: It’s rarely the CEO) and most of all, you need to understand intuitively why those decision makers need your product or service - what is the market pain that you’re addressing? Not everyone is going to have the same reason to buy, which brings us to the next point:
2. Identify Your Market Segments
There are quite possibly 2-3 types of businesses and/or individuals that could buy your services. In my case, I sell to large public organizations like Universities, government agencies and government regulated industries. I also sell to small, startup businesses. These are two very distinct markets that are buying very different services from me.
The large, quasi-public and public organizations out there are buying my program review, public policy, market intelligence and research services. Small startup companies are buying my market intelligence services almost exclusively. These are my market segments. I don’t push the market intelligence aspect of my business as heavily to the large public organizations as heavily as I do to the small startup companies.
I also pitch a slightly different value proposition to each of these segments. The type of person that I pitch to is very different between these sectors. With large, public organizations, I never pitch to the CEO/Director level. I deal almost exclusively with middle management. With small startups, you’re almost always dealing with the CEO or founders. These are important distinctions.
3. Develop a Lead Nurturing/Generation Strategy
I’m assuming here that you’ve already thought through your marketing materials - that’s a whole other topic. Once you’ve successfully identified your target market (in detail) and your segments, you need to develop a strategy to nurture contacts in a database into leads and then into hot leads before converting them into sales.
Some people use Google AdWords campaigns to do this. I find this to be a weak solution for consultants. I belong to a group called Vancouver Consultants that does this for me. It has brought me all of two leads in the year since I joined - neither of which turned out to be a hot lead.
I think for consultants - you need to go on the offensive. Once you find a target market, buy a list and start hitting them with your messaging. A recent client of mine - Antarctica Digital - has a great platform to streamline and automate a good chunk of the lead nurturing process. What they advocate doing is crafting some e-mails that address the perceived market pain, sending out say… four e-mails in a 2-3 month period and use personalized URLs (pURLs) to track contacts that come to your website and click around through your offerings.
This is a brilliant strategy because, for example, if you have case studies up of other projects that you have done, you can tell which ones specific leads are interested in and call them with a tailored pitch. If they’re not interested, you can put them back on your mailing list until they give some indication that they’re interested.
The lynchpin of this plan is that you need to invest in a good quality list of your target market. For this kind of thing, I suggest looking to Jigsaw or another list provider.
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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.
Topics: Business of Consulting |
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June 5th, 2008 at 7:53 am
The only way you are going to sell some one on your consulting service is to phone them with a good reason to see you (e.g. save them money, make them money. The pitch has to be tailored to their needs which means lots of research before you make the call. It is time consuming and will get you in the door only 10% of the time even if it is done right.
The best approach is by industry (using carefully selected lists from sources like D&B, Scott’s, etc.) What you learn from being rejected by one prospect in that industry you can use to sell the next person in the industry.
It is hard work. It is why sales people are hired and make good incomes. You can lessen the pain of rejection a bit by doing a pre-phone call mailing (snail mail not e-mail) to introduce yourself. The e-mail is too easy to ignore. Most will not remember receiving the mailing.
June 6th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
After generating leads, it’s also a good idea to acquire a system that immediately and systematically pushes the leads to the best qualified salespeople. A system that also allows the salespeople to immediately and frequently respond to leads and turn them into prospects. Again, this simple but overlooked approach can boost your results anywhere from 20 to 200%.
June 7th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Ian,
I am going to have to disagree with you. You’re advocating essentially the same thing that I am but you’re operating under the assumption that snail mail is better than e-mail which, in my opinion, is false. Unsolicited snail mail is just as easy, if not easier to ignore as e-mail. When I worked for a large government agency, I got a lot of snail mail spam and unless it was an internal document or a personal letter, I didn’t read any of it.
Additionally, we had a vigilant office manager who made sure we didn’t get bothered by unsolicited snail mail.
What I’m advocating in this post is that consultants avoid the hard work of cold-calling, which they can ill afford to undertake. You’re suggesting that consultants phone up prospects with some kind of elevator pitch. It’s just not feasible for most consultants nor is it smart.
It’s old-fashioned push marketing with doesn’t work in the consulting world. People find consultants primarily through pull marketing - they want to be able to get on Google and find your firm based on your expertise or your portfolio OR they want to learn about you through word of mouth.
That’s why I’m suggesting a nurture campaign. Educate en masse. You’ll get just as many bites as you would with some kind of massive spam-calling campaign but with a fraction of the time and expense.
You still need to do networking (face to face) but that’s much different than calling people up with a pitch for services they don’t necessarily need.
June 7th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Ps. Thanks for the link Darin. Your product is essentially what Antarctica Digital does but without the multiple touchpoint integration.
June 9th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Gentlemen,
In my experience snail mail and email are simply tools to prolong the inevitability of making a cold call. Don’t waste your time, just get to making your calls!
In my last business, which was a computer and network support and services business with twelve employees, I employed a full time telemarketer who employed a very systematic method of cold calling, qualifying, and closing (closing here means setting up meetings for my director of business development - meetings with pre-qualified prospects). My biz dev guy then went out and met the pre-qualified prospects, I wasn’t paying him what ended up being more than $100,000 annually (in 1997 dollars) to cold call, I was paying him to close on business. I provided an inside sales rep who supported the biz dev person in proposal preparation and the techies in project implementation.
After putting this system in place it took about three months before I saw any results, but let me tell you that when I did see results I saw real results.
Just one model that worked and a bit of food for thought.
Cheers,
June 10th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
I would love to get you and my friend who says people who cold call for lead gen are like “functional drunks” in a room and lock the doors.
June 11th, 2008 at 9:03 am
I enjoyed your comments about targeting your market. It really isn’t sufficient to have an idea of who, or what kind of person, you want to market to. Your comments about targeting specific individuals within specific organizations is dead on. You really have to understand your leads to help them progress.
June 14th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Yes, that would be fun. But I should clarify that people who are not talented telemarketers (read me) with a scientific approach to their calling can waste a lot of time on this exercise. It is as much an art as a science - neither of which are skils of mine ;-)