Consultant, to improve and grow your business, don’t just focus on your technical skills. Learn these marketing & sales skills π
π₯ CUSTOMER RESEARCH: This is shoved to the back burner because we’re all so busy. But knowing how to extract insights from the market to fuel your positioning, offering and messaging. Your audience’s key problems, needs and desires keep shifting. If you’re not on top of them, you’re on the road to irrelevance.
π₯ CREATING COMPELLING OFFERINGS: Clarity about who you are to whom makes it easier to create solutions that fit market problems. Creating offers and solutions is a timeless process and can be learned. Once you know how to do it, you’ll have a skill that serves you well for a long time.
π₯ BUILDING A RIVETING NARRATIVE: Communicate your value in a way that resonates with your audience and makes them sit up and take notice of you. You don’t need to be a Hollywood scriptwriter but you need a basic understanding of how a business story is developed and presented to the market.
π₯ REFERRAL GENERATION: Referrals and word of mouth can produce strong leads. For this, you need to have a strong system to seek out introductions to potential clients and partners. A word of caution here: referrals are great, but don’t depend on them (see below).
π₯ PERSUASIVE WRITING: You write so much during the course of a day: emails, reports, presentations, workshop notes, speeches, etc. You aren’t expected to be Edgar Allen Poe – you can use tools like ChatGPT, Wordtune, etc. to help you write. However, you need to have clarity of thought before you put them down on paper. Clear thoughts lead to clear words.
π₯ GET COMFORTABLE USING VIDEO: This gets the most pushback whenever I talk about it. But consulting is a high-touch business. Clients want to see and hear you and get a sense of your personality before they hire you. You can get by without doing video but you’ll likely fall behind the ones using it extensively.
π₯ BUILD A COMMUNITY: Build a community of potential clients and give them valuable insights so they keep coming back and pay attention. When they’re ready to join you as a paying client, they’ll let you know. The stronger your community, the stronger your business.
π₯ DISCOVERY: Almost every consulting business owner I’ve met says, “Once I get a meeting with a buyer, I close the sale pretty easily”. While this may be true, you may be leaving money on the table if you don’t follow a discovery process. Great discovery can not only help you convert prospects into paying clients, it can also increase the value of the deal and help you land clients faster.
Did I miss any key growth skills for consultants? Drop them in the comments.
Also, if you’re looking to learn these skills, that’s exactly what we do at ππΌπ»πππΉππΆπ»π΄ ππΏπΌπππ΅ ππΌππΏ. Check the community for more details.
β
Ready to add $100k-$500k revenue to your consulting business in 12 months or less without burning out? Schedule a call and let me show you how.
Image credit: openai Dall-e
