How to Create a Consistent Pipeline of Consulting Clients [GUIDE]
If you are the owner or a senior member of a data consultancy, one of your biggest challenges is achieving a predictable flow of opportunities.
For many, creating this stable flow of leads and clients feels elusive.
One month the referrals and enquiries come flooding in, the next month you're staring down an empty pipeline.
When the opportunities are flowing, you can plan for growth, safe in the knowledge a percentage of deals will convert.
This need for 'opportunity stability' is a founding principle of why I launched myDataBrand.
I wanted to help other specialist data consulting firms implement the process I had perfected over twelve years to predictably attract a consistent flow of clients in my own data firm.
To help demonstrate the art of the possible, I recently spoke to two consultancy founders from the myDataBrand program who kindly shared their recent lead generation and sales conversion results.
By following what they had learned in the myDataBrand program, these firms have created a stable pipeline of leads that have converted to consistent sales.
What's impressive is they achieved this during Covid-19.
This guide will share the journey these consultancies have taken so you can learn more about the myDataBrand method and the daily habits required for success.
Part 1: Profile Positioning - Crafting a Precision-Engineered 'Ideal Customer Profile'
With the consultancies in question, our first step after reviewing their goals was to 'profile' their past projects.
This 'Project Profiling' activity serves several purposes.
Discovering the 'Unfair Advantage' of your Specialism
Firstly, project profiling helps define the unique value you bring to the market.
One of the clients had delivered a broad range of initiatives over their many years of experience, but through profiling, we narrowed down to a particular specialism within Data Governance.
Several years ago, merely stating 'we offer Data Governance services' would have been a strong enough positioning, but not anymore.
At the time of writing, we have 5x Data Governance consultancies in the myDataBrand program.
The increasing level of competition across many branches of data management demonstrates the benefit of positioning, specialisation and differentiation. Chances are, your firm also sits within an increasingly busy marketplace.
With this increased level of competition, I prefer to add positioning dimensions to the consultancy messaging and service portfolio to help differentiate your offering within the market.
I find it helps accelerate sales by a considerable factor.
It's why my personal LinkedIn tagline incorporates 'I help data consultancies' - it strengthens the resonance any passing data firm would have with my offering.
Inserting an industry vertical into my messaging also strengthens the resonance of my 'offer' by tapping into several 'unfair advantages' I have over other firms offering marketing and sales coaching.
For example, I own the Data Quality Pro and Data Migration Pro websites, as well as large email lists and active LinkedIn groups. This industry presence allows me to promote data consultancies/software vendors who are offering services within the scope of the 'Data Pro' customer base.
I was also a data consultant between 1993 and 2015, across all aspects of data quality, data governance, data management, BI/analytics, data modelling/architecture and data migration. I've owned a consultancy, hired staff, built teams and worked as a data management principal in large consultancies. I was also a software engineer and have created several commercial data quality and data management tools.
These are all examples of 'unfair advantages' I have over other sales and marketing coaches that I bring into my messaging.
The problem with so many consultancies I meet is that their unfair advantages are hidden, buried away in the history of their expertise and past projects.
When prospects stumble on your LinkedIn profile or website home page, you only have a few seconds for them to resonate with your messaging and services, so every 'attraction lever' you can pull will help convert 'lurkers' into prospects.
Project profiling brings out the 'secret sauce' that is innate within your firm.
Raising your Financial Thermostat
Another benefit of the Profile Positioning activity is that our clients re-connected with the incredible value they deliver.
When we carry out the Project Profiling exercise, we discover many clients have undersold their services, setting fees too low for the value they create.
With two other recent clients, we urged them to double their fees based on research within the data sector. On their next projects, they were able to achieve this with little client pushback.
They had effectively doubled their projected revenue overnight, all through coaching and a mindset shift to raise their 'financial thermometer' to the correct setting based on the unique value they both provided.
Sharing your Storybook of Success
Another benefit of profile positioning for these recent clients was the creation of a 'Value Vault' which provides a 'storybook' of all the client transformations they had delivered.
As an editor and data consultant, I pored over these past projects to identify compelling case stories and experiences we would later transform into engaging and inviting content.
By profiling your past, we shape your content strategy of the future.
The Result - Absolute Customer Clarity and Competitive Differentiation
Following this 'profile positioning' activity, our clients gained a clear understanding of the specific customer profiles they should be targeting for inbound and outbound sales development.
These profiles were not ambiguous or vague notions of an industry vertical or generalist role such as 'Leaders in FTSE500 blue-chips'.
Instead, both firms had a clear enough picture of their Ideal Client Profile (ICP) that we were able to quickly build a target connection list of 1,000 prospective clients on LinkedIn SalesNavigator.
(See the later connection strategy section for the relevance of this step).
What's more, we now understood why they were different and what made them 'special' when compared to the broader industry of competing data management consulting firms.
We consolidated all of this information into a 'brand positioning statement' and 'elevator pitch' that could articulate their value and differentiation, in seconds.
With their positioning statement and target customers defined, we quickly moved on to the task of 'Packaging' a compelling offer.
Part 2: Primary Offer Packaging - Creating your Solution Ladder of Trust
Consider the following consulting offerings:
OPTION 1: "We provide data profiling and data quality services to help you increase revenues and reduce costs".
OPTION 2: "We help you forecast, plan and de-risk your next data migration, with the use of our Pre-Migration Impact Assessment (PMIA) offering. Our PMIA service applies advanced data profiling, quality and discovery technology to deliver a pre-migration prototype and detailed data quality audit in less than two weeks. The result is the information you need to accurately plan the resources and strategy required for successful data migration as well as discover any severe roadblocks, months in advance".
The first offering was a generic service I launched with my earlier consulting business, 'Information Quality Solutions Limited', back in 2005.
I would eagerly attend conferences and meetups, thrusting my newly minted business cards into the hand of some poor, unsuspecting 'prospect'.
What followed became a familiar glance of the watch, followed by:
"I'm just going to grab some coffee before the next speaker, lovely to meet you".
I went through this charade of 'business development' for several months before I realised something was painfully wrong with my approach -business leaders would 'glaze over' whenever I talked about data quality.
It was time to make some changes, so I hired a sales coach who diagnosed my affliction in seconds:
"You're pushing on a closed door".
They pointed out it was like I had a 'data quality hammer' and was aimlessly wandering around, searching for a nail to hit.
Because no-one believed they required a 'nail to be hit' in their business, they closed the door firmly in my face.
Business leaders didn't wake up stressing about a 'data quality issue', so it seemed.
So I started to think about 'packaging' and how I could make my services easier to communicate.
The other problem of wandering around with a bag of data quality tools was that the random bits of work I did pick up were largely contract-based, diverse and not particularly well-paid.
One minute I would be cleansing data, the next I was an expert witness creating data quality dashboards in a large court case!
About this time, I noticed that the software I was reselling, Datanomic dn:Director was undergoing a brand overhaul back at head office.
They had pivoted from a generalist 'we do any data quality' messaging and had begun doubling down on PEP/Watchlist compliance.
The same product, but with a different brand name 'dn:Sentry' and a different message for a different problem, within a clearly defined industry vertical - banking and finance.
They stopped attending data conferences and switched to the finance conference circuit instead.
The results were dramatic - sales rocketed.
Suddenly, I realised being a generalist, even in a niche such as data quality, was working against me.
I started to create packaged offerings, and that's when the phone began to ring, and the enquiries came in.
When I backed up my strengthened positioning with a content strategy that would later bring a constant flow of businesses struggling with the issues I solved, there was no need to wander around conferences looking for someone to 'hit up' for a sales meeting.
Starting with a Primary Offer
In the case of our two recent clients, it was essential to build packaged offerings that 'fly under the procurement radar'.
Particularly for smaller firms, it isn't easy to land 6-figure deals for advisory or implementation work with no prior relationship.
Demonstrating trust and credibility is necessary before you try to sell the higher ticket initiatives, which is why we preferred to focus initially on building a Primary Offer, or what myDataBrand calls a 'Trojan Horse' offer, to get into the organisation with a 'Land and Expand' strategy.
Both clients have successfully achieved this during 2020.
They now sell sub-£20K packaged offerings initially, that are expanding well on their way towards the 6-figure range at several sites.
The added benefit of building these 'Trojan Horse' offers is that they bring in constant revenue that doesn't require a long lead time, definitely a bonus in the present climate.
But there's an additional benefit, profit vs time.
Going Global
For many consultancies, their profits are constrained by time because they're locked into a 'days for dollars' consulting model.
If you want more money, you have to give up more of your time.
With both of the firms in this case study, we worked on building scalable, global offerings, that are not constrained solely by time.
They've quickly broken out of a 1-2-1 operating model by delivering group programs, training and mentoring to organisations across the globe.
It has been a game-changer for these previously 'geographically constrained' consulting firms. They can now scale without having to work longer hours.
If they want to increase their revenue, they simply need to scale up the 'content marketing engine' we helped create that is documented later in the guide.
Gathering better data to create better data services
An added benefit is that with a much larger audience buying their services, both these firms can now gather data on the additional challenges their clients are struggling to solve.
Both of their packages encourage their clients to share their current situation, challenges and goals.
Armed with these insights, they can build a 'Solution Ladder' that offers even more value to clients, in the form of more expensive and longer-term packaged offerings.
Reflecting on a similar transition in my own consulting business, I was able to pivot from selling purely data consulting services, to reselling software and opening up a range of other revenue sources.
In one year, my software resale revenues began to surpass my consulting revenue, but with far less time investment required.
There is tremendous leverage to be gained once you create the right positioning and packaged offering within your chosen field of data.
I believe this is one of the key 'unfair advantages' that the myDataBrand program delivers over competing sales and marketing programs. As a data consultancy owner, I understand what it takes to build a compelling offer and promote it to a receptive audience.
What's more, for certain types of data business, myDataBrand has the media platforms (Data Quality Pro/Data Migration Pro) to get your proposition directly in front of a target audience, helping you to test and refine your offer at scale.
Part 3: Building the Platform
I speak to many data consultancies who have created a blog and a website, in the hope their content and services will eventually rank on Google and bring in qualified leads.
However, these firms soon realise this "If we build it, they will come" strategy does not result in a field of dreams.
If only life were that simple.
It can take months, in some cases years, for keywords to rank in the popular search engines, and that's if you've applied the latest SEO techniques and have learned the craft of writing outstanding copy.
(We cover content strategy/development later in the guide).
One of the clients featured in this case study had been creating articles on their blog for years, without generating any sales enquiries.
The problem?
Firstly, they had not done the earlier work of 'Profile Positioning' so didn't know who they were creating content for.
When you don't know who your audience is, and what pain-points they are wrestling with, your content strategy becomes a 'random topic generator'.
Your blog soon consists of seemingly disconnected data themes, delivered in a scattergun frequency.
Another problem is that you, or your team, create content based on your level of understanding of a problem and not that of your target audience.
One week your team principal writes an article titled:
'5 Reasons why Data Quality is Important for your Data Analytics Strategy'.
The next week, a more technical member of the team writes:
'5 Ways to Code Data Quality Rules in SQL'.
It's this constant shift in perspective that causes your blog to lose its 'stickiness' factor. Your ideal prospect may visit the blog, glance around, and soon realise it's not relevant to their specific role or pain-point, never to return.
A bigger problem for the clients in this case study, however, is that it was going to take far too long to start generating traffic to their blog. We needed a more direct route to market.
That's why the myDataBrand methodology places LinkedIn at the centre of your content strategy.
LinkedIn: The Vital Cog in your Consulting Sales Generation Engine
The way to think of your sales generation approach is a system of interconnected processes, all working together - just like an engine.
Because one of the consultancies in this case study had been mostly focusing on writing blogs to their website, they had neglected the promotional aspect of content marketing.
You need traffic before you can convert clients
Their website wasn't generating anything like the volume of traffic required to develop a sales pipeline.
With the other consultancy, we had a different problem - they were a startup, with no website and zero industry presence.
They had intended to start a website and blog to attract clients, which is an admirable, albeit longer-term goal.
With the myDataBrand system, we initially focused on the individual profiles of the company founders, as this would be the main focus of the outbound messaging campaign to follow.
Because we had worked hard on their positioning and differentiation, their personal LinkedIn profiles (and later, company profiles) no longer looked like a résumé. Instead, they became a finely crafted, high-converting, sales page that aligned the problems of their ideal customer, to their distinctive solution offering.
Once you start creating content, your LinkedIn profile will become an essential source of lead generation, so it is one of the first elements of the 'Platform-Building' exercise that we help to get right.
For example, between January and March this year, I generated 45 sales calls from my LinkedIn profile.
During that time, my website was offline while I migrated between hosts.
My entire sales pipeline was created by driving qualified traffic to my personal profile on LinkedIn.
Do you see how powerful the myDataBrand approach is when you connect these different 'engine elements' of a sales strategy into one system?
Does your profile look like a résumé? Then book a discovery call to discuss how we can transform your profile into a sales magnet, using the myDataBrand system.
Website Syndication
With one of the consultancies being a startup, in addition to their LinkedIn presence, we helped them get their website platform in place.
We worked with them to create a complete website solution, in just a few days, that combined:
Blog
Sales landing pages
Shopping Cart/Product sales
Straightforward content creation
Webinar/event scheduler
An integrated call booking system
Effective analytics and metrics
Integrated forms and surveys for collecting leads
Email newsletter and autoresponder sequence
In effect, we helped them deliver a 'consulting business in a box'.
They were ready for the main aim of the myDataBrand process - attracting clients.
Part 4: Publishing Great Content to Attract Great Clients
With the myDataBrand system, you (or someone on your team) must have deep expertise in a topic that your Ideal Client Profile wishes to address.
To put it bluntly, 'you can't wing it'.
So many firms outsource content creation (aka publishing) to external agencies who know far less than your intended audience - that approach is flawed.
There are smarter ways to solve the problem of:
"We don't have the time to write articles - who can we call that's cheap enough to do it for us?"
Many firms take shortcuts with the quality of their content.
If you scan your LinkedIn feed, you'll see a lot of the low-value content which becomes a bain of existence for your Ideal Client Profile (ICP), for example, those CxO influencers you are desperate to court.
The typical CxO desperately wants to consume insights and answers, but what they get is a mass 'recycling' of shallow ideas and unsubstantiated claims that fail to impress at every scroll of their LinkedIn feed.
If it's not high-level 'fluff' clogging up their feed, what they get is fine-grained 'tips and tricks' that don't resonate with the complicated and thorny issues they're trying to address.
Little wonder why data firms reach out to us complaining that they keep attracting "techie tyre-kickers" to their webinars!
So, assuming you know your data craft, and that knowledge will resonate with your target audience - where do you start with creating content that grabs the attention of your ICP?
Start with the Pain of the ICP
With both of the clients featured in this case study, we locked in on the pain and frustration of their Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs).
Whilst the firms in question had different target clients, with very different problems, they all faced similar challenges.
What frameworks will work for our type of organisational makeup?
What initial steps do we take to launch our data initiative?
What should a program or project roadmap look liked?
How do we set up a team and tech platform?
How do we sustain buy-in and adoption?
Fortunately, we already knew the 'pain and frustration' of each client ICP because of the work carried out during the 'Profile Positioning' phase.
Each of their past projects had been profiled using 20+ questions that helped us explore every challenge the typical ICP faces, from different angles, such as strategic, operational and tactical.
When it came to the content 'ideation discovery' phase, there were already plenty of ideas that we knew would resonate.
With one of our clients, we leveraged the ICP community of Data Quality Pro to apply additional research tactics that uncovered even more in-depth topics that we knew would resonate with the target market.
From these two sources of insight, we identified a series of key topic areas and 'pillar content' that, once published, immediately started to build engagement and traffic.
What's more, the traffic surpassed anything they were receiving to their website.
Coaching for Confidence in the Publishing Process
Having created a globally recognised 'data brand' in the past, I'm all too aware of the impact this has on the individuals in your firm who are responsible for creating content.
It can be depressing when you put out content that fails to move the needle and generate engagement, let alone leads.
But this is all part of the process.
You won't be an overnight success. It takes time and persistence.
With both clients, I had to provide regular coaching and support to explain that this is a natural step on the ladder to building a fully operational sales generation system.
It sucks at first; then it gets better.
As our clients started to publish more content, their enquiries, and later sales, grew in tandem with their content output.
It takes time, but if you've followed Steps 1-3 correctly, the results will come.
What Content Formats Work Best on LinkedIn?
As I mentioned, with the clients featured in this case study, we focused on LinkedIn for content publishing, as it's the fastest path to sales generation that we've found so far (particularly for months 1-12 of your content marketing strategy).
We also syndicated articles to the website, but the core focus remained on LinkedIn and a bunch of additional strategies I cover later in this guide.
Due to this obsession with LinkedIn, I'm often asked the following phrase:
"What's the winning content formula for generating sales on LinkedIn?"
The answer?
Firstly, consistency trumps content format. Our most successful clients are posting consistently every week, typically multiple times a week.
It's a simple formula - the more content you create that addresses the pains and aspirations of your ideal client, the 'luckier' you will be in attracting the right clients.
So, in a sense, the content 'format' is far less critical than its consistency. The best format is pointless if your content is weak and inconsistent.
But you came to this guide for insights, high-level platitudes, so let's talk tactics for a moment.
In both these clients, we applied slightly different approaches.
For the first client, they had a lot of information we could repurpose from past projects, so we focused mostly on an article publishing strategy, backed up by shorter posts that drove traffic to the articles. The articles were published on LinkedIn and syndicated to the website blog.
Consistently publishing each week was key to their success, along with the depth of their content. Many readers said the content was the best they had seen online, and this was a significant factor in driving sales growth. The content produced was 'on the money' in terms of the pain-points their ideal clients needed to address.
With our other client, we focused more on LinkedIn status feed posts that combined images and short stories, providing a narrative around the many misconceptions within their industry. When these shorter posts were combined with more in-depth, 'how-to' content, their audience and engagement steadily grew.
Today, we're continually testing what content and formats are the most effective as LinkedIn expands its dominance as the most leading business networking and publishing platform.
We see excellent results with LinkedIn newsletters, 'Carousel PDF' posts and now LinkedIn stories and live feeds are with us. Testing the right content format to attract your specific audience is vital, and at myDataBrand, we're constantly gathering data on what works.
Finally, a significant shift with both of these clients occurred when we introduced compelling promotions for their 'Trojan Horse' offers into the LinkedIn content marketing mix.
When I speak to consultants and consulting firms who struggle to generate sales on LinkedIn, there is often an imbalance with their content strategy. They're producing too few promotions, or their content output is almost entirely promotional.
LinkedIn works when you're creating the right combination of promotional/educational content.
With that insight, let's explore how we set up the promotional activity with both of these clients.
Part 5: Promoting the Primary Offer - Connecting an Ideal Client to your Compelling Solution
As I mentioned, sales started to step up a gear for these clients once we introduced compelling 'offers' into the content output, particularly on LinkedIn.
By this point, we were leveraging webinars and other 'attention-grabbing' tactics (see later section on Prospecting), but the biggest transformation always comes when clients begin to promote their 'Trojan Horse' offer.
Putting out a specific 'proposition' to a particular problem, forced our client's audiences to make a decision:
"Do we carry on struggling and confused, or do we take action?".
The sales that followed vindicated the strategy of mixing promotional and educational content via the personal feed. In short, it works.
As I mentioned, many data consultancies get this wrong, for several reasons.
Firstly, they promote their services via their company LinkedIn profile (which few people typically see) instead of their personal profile. It's okay to promote via your company profile, but you'll get more traction through promoting on your personal feed*.
*Caveat: If your company profile has many thousands of followers, you can get good results with promoting off the company feed. However, most boutique data consultants don't have anything like that following.
Secondly, because most firms don't implement the right level of target client profiling and proposition design, their offers look like this:
"If you need help with data quality, check out our data quality services".
Ok, I accept that's an extreme example, but my point is if your offer is too broad, your target audience (assuming you have one) simply won't resonate and take action.
Compare the following advertisements:
1: "We sell cars."
2: "We sell electric family-sized cars that give you the safety you need, but with the comfort and charging power to satisfy the longest of road trips."
Do you see how the first ad is generic, and the second ad is specific? The second ad forces the reader to make a decision: "Is this for me? Does this solution address my pain-point?".
Don't be a generic 'car dealership for data', become a specialist because that way your promotions will cut through the noise of the generalist competition.
Your promotions can't be vague because they need to answer the many questions your target audience will have, such as:
Which type of buyer is this solution ideally suited to?
Who is it not suited to?
What challenges does it address?
Who has used it before?
What results do others get?
What deliverables do I get?
How is the proposition delivered?
Who is providing the solution?
Why is the supplier qualified to help?
What is required of my team and me?
How long will it take to get results?
What are the costs (hidden and obvious)?
These are just a sample of questions, but my point is you can't expect a buyer to pick up the phone and call you. They're busy, give them the information they need and make it easy for them to access the information they need.
Don't lock your offer away in documents that require email registrations and hoops for your prospects to jump through.
In both of the client examples in this case study, we spent time reviewing the 'sales copy' of the landing pages and crafting LinkedIn promotional posts that were soon driving sales.
For one of the clients, we designed one of the sales pages using a popular 'Landing Page Design Tool'. These apps are excellent for building attractive sales pages quickly and can be later optimised based on conversion performance.
The lesson here is simple. Don't go to the trouble of creating great content, and then skip the need for constant, high-quality promotion.
Be patient. Test your promotions to see what messaging resonates.
You can't expect to post a few articles and have the phone ringing off the hook within a few days. It takes time to generate clients on sites like LinkedIn.
But what if you could accelerate the process?
It turns out you can, and what's more, your entire LinkedIn content marketing strategy will fail if you don't apply the following tactic.
Part 6: Prospecting - Perfecting the Art of Ethical Outreach
With the clients featured in this guide, and our other clients, we combine educational and promotional publishing with a weekly LinkedIn outreach campaign.
What is the myDataBrand Approach to LinkedIn Outreach?
By examining the Ideal Client Profiles discovered earlier in the myDataBrand process, we first start with 'copycat' lists of target leads via LinkedIn SalesNavigator.
These 'ICP Lists', help our clients identify who they should be connected with on LinkedIn if they are to get their services sold.
It's surprising how many data firms we see where the founders only have a few hundred LinkedIn connections but are actively promoting content.
The sad reality is, without a large volume of connections, very few people within your target audience will ever see your LinkedIn posts, live streams, videos, newsletters and articles.
We typically recommend sending anywhere between 30-50 LinkedIn connections per day, as a reasonable target to aim for, particularly in the first few months and especially if your network is already small (< 1500 connections).
If you send too many connection requests, LinkedIn may warn you to 'slow it down' or even suspend your account.
When you send too few requests, your network growth will obviously take far longer, which can inhibit sales growth.
Insight: When we examined lead generation activity on myDataBrand, we found that 95% of all sales came from 1st-degree connections. This is why we continually focus on improving the connection strategy of the myDatabrand process; LinkedIn connections are a significant lever for sales growth.
The Dark Side of LinkedIn Outreach
With the myDataBrand method, there is no concept of 'pitching' following a connection.
I'm confident this is why some data firms refuse to join the myDataBrand program; many consultancy founders and marketers demand a shortcut to lead generation.
The reason we don't recommend 'connecting and pitching' is that you will quickly burn through your target audience when you resort to 'peddling your wares' before you've established trust and resonance with your content and expertise.
Speaking to a Chief Data Officer recently, they confided that their Linkedin inbox was overwhelmed with spam from data solutions vendors selling software and services, up to 5x per day.
But what about the results from 'connecting and pitching' - does it work?
I spoke to one data services firm recently who had hired a B2B outreach agency to connect with thousands of CxOs over twelve months using the personal account of the consultancy founder.
After each connection made, the agency would quickly send a standard sales pitch.
After exhausting the annual marketing budget, the consultancy received nine sales calls, 3x proposals and zero orders for their efforts.
The typical consulting firms we work with have a great deal of respect for their target audience and therefore refrain from adopting a 'connect and pitch' mentality in the outreach process.
Many of our clients were once employed as senior data and business leaders, so they recognise the importance of ethical outreach and developing relationships that last.
So, how did the clients in this case study, weave content outreach into their sales system?
How we Integrate Expert Content into a LinkedIn Outreach Messaging Campaign
A key difference with the myDataBrand approach is that we're trying to establish career-long clients.
If you rush in with a clumsy sales pitch before you've established whether you're even a good fit to solve their problem, you'll likely offend your contacts and drive them away.
Working with the clients in this case study, we adopted a sequence where they would send valuable information to their connections at set intervals, but with no sales pitch.
It was essential to carry out the customer profiling activity at the start of the myDataBrand process so we could spot 'pain-point' patterns that were common to each of the ICPs. This earlier analysis had helped to create the right content detailed earlier in the guide. Armed with this content, we were able to identify which of the existing content assets could be shared via the Outreach Campaign.
Whenever a connection would respond, our clients would engage, not to sell, but to serve.
When a contact engaged with the content, often to indicate that they resonated with the material, or recognised the 'pain-points' that the content touched on, I would encourage our clients to respond with open-ended questions, that in turn, helped their connections open up and discuss their challenges.
The key with this approach is to be 'naturally curious' instead of 'hunting for the sale'.
One of the problems I often see is that some consultants are keen to try and solve the problem by demonstrating their expertise - don't be too eager, there's plenty of time to showcase your ability.
Don't forget that if it was easy enough to solve their problem with a few lines of text, chances are they would have fixed it already.
Instead, build rapport by coaching the contact through what we call in myDataBrand - The Gated Socratic Method.
This technique involves initially asking open-ended questions such as:
-- Why do you say that?
-- Can you elaborate?
-- Tell me more about that last point?
-- Can you give me an example?
From there, we teach clients to follow a series of scripts that 'walk' their prospects through a series of predefined steps that eventually lead to a discovery call, where further 'gates' are navigated, with more scripted questions.
The key to effective prospecting is to remember you have a limited number of hours in the week. You need to be focused on engaging with contacts who are your ideal client, so you're not just giving away free advice.
That's why the 'Gated Socratic Method' that we've devised in myDataBrand works so well, you never take a prospect through the next 'gate' in the sales process if they don't meet specific criteria.
The beauty of the Prospecting phase is that you're not waiting to build an audience from your publishing efforts. Ethical prospecting allows you to start making connections and relationships with your Ideal Client Profiles immediately. A percentage of those relationships will inevitably turn into sales discovery calls.
The benefit of the myDataBrand approach is that you're creating both Inbound and Outbound sales generation channels.
If you've followed the process outlined in Steps 1-5, Inbound traffic from your blog posts, webinars and LinkedIn activity will convert into a steady flow of enquiries.
But if you back this up with Step 6 - Outbound Prospecting, then you're doubling your chances of creating a stable flow of client opportunities.
What's more, as the clients covered in this case study began to increase their LinkedIn connection count, they increased the reach and visibility of their content posts and articles, further improving their inbound lead generation rate.
There is no downside to ethical outreach.
But of course, it all counts for nothing, unless you successfully convert prospects into clients.
So let's explore how our clients achieved this in the final step of the myDataBrand process.
Part 7: Pull-Selling - Helping Your Clients Come to the Right Conclusion
There is no need for persuasive sales tactics at this stage, not in the conventional sense.
When you use traditional methods of sales generation, such as cold-calling or cold-pitching via LinkedIn messages, the prospects you attract need a great deal more education and persuasion to cross the line and become a customer.
You'll find conventional sales tactics often require far longer lead times and a lot more sales calls, not to mention endless requests for testimonials and referrals.
With the approach we taught our clients in this case study, they found that their clients came ready to buy their 'Trojan Horse' offers with little fuss.
But why was this?
It's simple; our clients had already sold the prospect on their approach and developed the required level of trust, all through their content.
The Key to Sales: Trust and Clarity
To create any client, they have to first know you, like you, trust you and, when the timing is right, understand that what you have to offer meets their exact needs.
When you cold-pitch an unwary prospect, you are in effect 'pushing' your product on them. You're trying to get the target prospect to trust you enough to book a call. This lack of trust is why you need to pitch thousands of prospects to get a few sales meetings booked.
The benefit of building trust through your content and outreach means that when a prospect does reach out, they're already 80% of the way through the sales process.
What's more, because you're also promoting details of your approach in the form of articles, videos, PDFs, webinars and posts, your prospects will have complete clarity around how your solution will address their problems.
Speaking to our clients in this case study, they shared that their prospects had been consuming their content for weeks, sometimes months. Consistent publishing and outreach had convinced the prospects that there was only one solution for moving forward, and that was to hire each of the consulting clients featured in this case study.
Their prospects knew them, liked them, trusted them, and when the time was right, hired them.
Applying the Gated Socratic Method to Sales
As we discussed in the Prospecting phase, some prospects may still need help in understanding how your approach will solve their problem.
We remove this indecision by extending the open-ended questions discussed earlier, and leading prospects through a 'gated' discussion on a sales discovery call.
Once again, your intention is not to sell on these calls, but to help prospects understand their situation through a new perspective.
That's why we teach our clients to ask Socratic, probing, questions to help prospects understand the real impact and urgency of their situation.
You help to unpack the internal consensus and explore whether that is serving or holding them back.
You share stories (narrated from the earlier 'Vault Vault' exercise) that help your prospects visualise an aspirational state based on your past experiences and client successes.
Finally, you neatly articulate all the pains and goals of your prospect to show empathy, and then you explain how, step-by-step, your solution helps them reach their desired state.
The key to this approach is to focus on coaching instead of selling. As I said earlier, there is no real persuasion to be done.
Most of the sale is made in the discovery part of the process, helping your prospect to gain a clearer understanding of their present situation.
From there, it's merely a case of identifying how your solution closes the gap between the state they're in and the state they wish to reach.
Remember you have an advantage over your competitors in that the prospect must have already resonated with your content; otherwise, they would not have reached out to you in the first place!
Taking the Next Step Towards Client Generation Stability
If you want to learn more about the myDataBrand method, and how it can help your data consultancy to finally create a stable flow of clients using the steps outlined in this guide, then book a Breakthrough Call today.
We'll discuss your current situation and explore how the myDataBrand method will help you create a simple, scalable process for attracting the clients your expertise deserves: