49 - Create Your Own Clients (Even When Their Not In The Market For Your Services)

06/08/23 • 24 min

Most consultants and consultancy firms tend to wait for their clients to come to them, either from referrals, or sometimes from inbound marketing. But in my experience, waiting for clients to come to you is too slow and does not give you enough control over the process of client acquisition for you to grow your business predictably or sustainably.
When you develop and systemize the process of creating your own clients, rather than waiting for them to come to you, you can grow your business much quicker and with less frustration. You can avoid the ups and downs that many consultants experience in their sales cycles and work flows, being busy one month but quiet the next, or not knowing where your next client of project is coming from.
Find out how you can create your own clients in this podcast episode.

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48 Any Client Is A Good Client - NOT!

Often in the early days of growing your consultancy firm, any client seems like a good client. We have financial pressures that need to be met and the only way to do that is to generate more revenue from new clients. So, it seems that any client we can engage will be a big help.
However, after a while, that choice to accept any client can prove to be a poor one. What we end up with is a mixed bag of clients, some of whom are great and a pleasure to work with, but there are a whole set of others who can be problematic. Our premium clients give us a great deal of joy to work with and contribute handsomely to our profits. Our not so good clients however, can be hard to work with, they don't meet their commitments on time, they can be demanding, disruptive and difficult.
But now that we have a significant amount of business coming from these challenging clients, can we afford to make a different choice to only work with premium clients? Often we can feel trapped by thinking that if we decided to stop working with these clients, we will lose a significant amount of income that will be hard to replace. Can we afford to do that? How do we replace those clients with better ones? How do we manage the workloads for our team if we reduce the current levels that the difficult clients create? Will we survive the loss of income that those clients provide currently?
I address these questions and others in the podcast. The answers may surprise you?

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50 - Brand Awareness V Buyer Awareness

There is a lot said about branding for your consultancy practice, so that buyers can be made aware that you exist when they need you. You want top-of-mind awareness so that when they have a need, they will come to you. And that’s a good thing.
Brand awareness is great when our clients have a need for what we do. We hope all the brand awareness activities we have engaged in will bring those clients to us.
But, one of the biggest mistakes I see owners of consultancy firms making is to focus all their marketing on brand awareness. What they should be doing instead is focusing on buyer awareness.
Brand awareness activities – focusing on what we do, the services we provide and the name recognition we try to achieve, mostly fall on deaf ears, because they have no relevance to our buyers, even though we know that most of them really need what we do.
Buyer awareness is about being the authority. As the authority, you influence the buyer’s journey to:
o Create buyer awareness
- Show you understand their situation
- Educate them about their problem and what happens if not attended to
- Show them your unique solution, based on your knowledge of what is best for them
- Highlight the outcome they will enjoy as a result.
o Build connection, trust, value and belief.

Slow down the sale – it’s about a relationship, not a transaction.
o Selling creates pressure which is responded to with resistance
o Relationship building creates trust and openness
Build a sales and marketing system that positions your firm as the authority for them, eliminates their resistance and has them trying to sell you on taking them on as a client.