How to Identify Clients in Need of Your Niche Consulting Service Quickly (or Within 2 Meetings)
This is the top, top, top skillset for any consultant on the side.
One thing is true for all consultants on the side, especially when you are running a 1-Man consulting practice.
You have no time. Therefore, you have no time to waste.
If we have only 4 hours per day to work on our consulting side-hustle, we want to make sure that 100% of those 4 hours are billable. Either that or we are out securing new contracts.
And it takes 5 follow-ups, on average, to secure a consulting contract. And that takes too long in my opinion.
My goal is 1 or 2.
If You Want to Secure a New Consulting Engagement Fast — Get Your Clients to Talk.
There are 2 principles I adhere to when running my 1-Man consulting practice.
Principle # 1: Prepare only questions when meeting clients for the first time.
Principle # 2: Sell answers only during consulting engagements.
Consultants love to interact with others. We love to talk. We want to share what we know, our ideas, and our thoughts with the person in front of us.
That is why we want to be consultants on the side in the first place!
And there are times when we need to talk less. The intent is simple. We want the client in front of us to talk. The more they talk, the easier it is for us to size up the deal opportunity.
Start with generic questions. This is my list.
“What makes you contact me?”
“What do you want to achieve from a 3-month consulting engagement?”
“Do you have any immediate, complex problems that must be resolved?”
Notice that these questions are open-ended, and they are easy questions with no straightforward answers. Your job is to ferret out what they have in mind as fast as possible.
And structure the ideal consulting engagement at the back of your mind while they talk.
“Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.”
This is how you can do it.
Have a Framework When Conversing With Your Clients. Let Them Know the Value of Hiring You NO MATTER What Their Requirements Are.
I call this the A.C.T. framework. It stands for accelerate, collaborate, and transform.
I namedrop these 3 keywords during the 1st 2 client meetings a lot. It helps me figure out their purpose of hiring me within 60 minutes.
When their purpose of engagement becomes clear as the sky, I drill into the details. You want to dig deeper once you hit the jackpot.
This is what I do.
Consulting Topic # 1 — When It is About Acceleration
Think fast results. Think producing more within the same unit of time.
There are 2 anchors to this topic, time and work completion. Combining these 2 anchors produces different potential outcomes clients want to pursue.
This is my list.
- Efficiency — Doing the same thing faster.
- Effectiveness — Knowing exactly what to do as various issues and incidents occur.
Having ferret out the client’s considerations and anchoring the discussion to improving efficiency or effectiveness, you can prepare a consulting engagement draft at the back of your head by the end of the 1st meeting.
The consulting opportunities here include introducing new problem-solving methods, processes, and tools. It may include visual management practices and system-thinking workshops.
Framework and anchors give clarity. You will be ready to present the commercials, duration of consulting engagement, and preferred modes of working by the 2nd meeting.
Consulting Topic # 2 — When It is About Collaboration
This is not about navigating office politics or teaching people how to ignore the obvious. Instead, consulting opportunities come in the form of mutual understanding.
Standard examples include personality tests, interpretation, and how different personas can work together without killing each other. For me, I work to create cross-domain function clarity.
Misunderstandings occur when we speak a different domain language. We need to understand how our colleagues think about work issues if we want to collaborate without fiction.
My collaboration workshops comprise the following.
- Understanding the language of finance professionals: Topline, Bottomline, Cashflow, Variance Analysis.
- Understanding the language of operations professionals: Scheduling, critical path, inventory turnover.
- Understanding the language of technology professionals: Data governance, straight-through processing, cloud computer, software-as-a-service.
These collaboration-centric workshops have the highest positive impact on small and medium businesses because every employee wears multiple hats.
They must decode how vendors, partners, clients, and internal customers think like an open book. And fast.
Consulting Topic # 3 — When It is About Transformation
This topic is the easiest to anchor once you pick up the tell-tale signs.
Transformation-based consulting engagements may include new software deployment and adopting new industry practices (such as Agile). It can mean building an Enterprise of the Future (based on industry trends such as Industry 4.0.).
I love transformation-based consulting engagements. Here’s why.
- I can share my understanding of industry trends without additional preparation. The materials can be recycled for use.
- I have practitioner experience in software and process-based transformation.
- I can relate to their problems and inhibitions.
Your knowledge becomes valuable when you have what clients seek for them to get to the next stage.
In Conclusion
As a consultant on the side, you have no time. Of course, you also have no time to waste.
We need to be efficient in identifying clients’ needs. Not only that. We must also respond to our clients with a clear proposal of service engagement when they are done talking.
And to so, we need to be clear about our framework of consulting delivery. I use the accelerate, collaborate, and transform (A.C.T.) framework because they represent the pillars of work in my 1-Man consulting practice.
You should have one too. And if you do not, feel free to steal mine!
As a content contributor, I write my observations from daily life and my business exposure. Because our life experience is the bedrock of our unique perspectives.
