Today, I want to discuss the five stages of marketing your consultancy practice. 

From my experience with hundreds of consultancy firms and my own practice, I've identified five distinct ways consultancy firms market their services. These stages align with the historical ages of growth: Stone Age, Agricultural Age, Industrial Age, Information Age, and the Conceptual Age. 

Let's explore each of these in detail.

Most consultancy firms tend to work on promotion as their marketing strategy, judging by their websites and the way they present themselves and their firms both online and in networking meetings.  However, from what I see, promotion creates resistance and triggers questions that raise doubts about competence, trustworthiness and reliability.

On the other hand, the few consultants that use positioning as their marketing strategy, avoid triggering those same questions, especially when they are using authority positioning.

In this episode, I explain why authority positioning is a much better strategy than promotion, when it comes to attracting and acquiring more premium level clients who are ready to buy your services.

Learn more at https://businessflightpath.com

Schedule a free 60 minute strategy session at https://businessflightpath.com/ss

There is one critical question your marketing must answer, if you are going to be able to create relevant marketing messages that connect with your ideal clients.

I see a lot of marketing from consultancy firms that fails to answer this question.  The result is failure to attract the attention of ideal clients and an inability to attract regular new sales opportunities.

When you do answer this question, it makes the world of difference.  

You find potential clients seeking you out.  They come to you ready to buy.  They already see you as the market authority when they come.

How can the answer to one question make such a difference.

Find out in this week's Accepted Authority episode.

For more information go to https://businessflightpath.com

To book a 60 minute strategy session, go to https://businessflightpath.com/ss

Many consultants have a fear that if they give away any or much of their valuable intellectual property in their marketing process, the recipients will use that material to solve their own problems instead of coming to the consultant who provided the material to ask for their help.

The conundrum is that we know that if we give away some of our IP it will enhance our authority positioning and attract some potential clients to want to work with us.  However, if we give too much, we will suffer from people using that information without our help.

The question is: how much should we give away?

How much is too much?

How should we create the content that we provide our market in a way that it attracts them and motivates them to want our help instead of doing it themselves?

In this episode, I answer those questions and describe a successful format for providing educational content that elevates your authority and gets clients wanting to work with you, no matter what price you charge.

Learn more at https://businessflightpath or book a call with Greg at https://businessflightpath.com/ss

Most consultancy firms make a big mistake in their marketing that slows down their progress to new sales and acquiring new clients or may prevent them having an opportunity with some potential clients at all.

There is a predominant tool on most consulting firms' websites that asks for too much too soon.  That is typically the innocuous "Contact Us" form.  What comes with that form most often is the offer of a free initial consultation.  What is meant to be an easy and fast way for potential clients to move towards working for you is actually the biggest barrier.  That is the case because it violates natural human relationship building principles.

There is a faster way to sales that is achieved by actually slowing down the process.  However, it ends up being faster, because it mirrors natural human relationship principles.

In this week's episode, I explain how the fast way to sales ends up being slower than the seemingly slower approach I recommend, an how mirroring natural human relationship development principles in your marketing will get you clients faster.

Discover more at https://businessflightpath.com

Learn about Strategic Authority Marketing here: https://businessflightpath.com/sam

In many consulting firms, operational processes are more complex than they need to be.  Rather than offering a wide range of services to potential clients in order to achieve higher revenues, in my experience, operating with a focused specialization is what achieves greater simplicity in running the business, greater operating efficiencies, lower operational costs and greater profits.  The fact that it also created differentiation from competitors and attracts more qualified clients is an added bonus that should not be ignored.

In this episode, I detail why having a focused specialization should be the strategy employed by your consultancy firm and use a specific example of where I have applied this strategy with one of my clients and how it significantly increased their sales and profits, while reducing complexity in their business at the same time.

Go to https://businessflightpath.com for more details or book a strategy session with me at https://businessflightpath.com/ss

Many consultancy firms do a lot of activities in their marketing with the aim of attracting their target market.  But do these activities actually attract?

A lot of the activities I see consultancy firms engaging in don't get the results the owners of those firms are looking for.  They don't attract. 

Instead of doing things to try to attract more clients, I believe more owners of consultancy firms should be focusing first on making their firm more attractive to the target market.  Many firms are not attractive, therefore whatever activities they try to attract their target market will fail.  

What does it take to be attractive to your target market?

In this episode, I reveal the three essential elements of making your consultancy firm so attractive to your target market that you will have prospects lining up at your (virtual) door hoping you will take them on as clients.

More information at https://businessflightpath.com

One of the most common scenarios that consultancy firms experience is what I call the sales roller coaster.  That is where the firm goes from being busy with client delivery work for a while, maybe a month or two, and then goes through a subsequent period of having not enough work and needing to find new clients or projects.  The main reason this occurs is that when the firm is experiencing a shortage of work, the focus shifts to finding more work.  

However, the activities involved in finding new clients or projects are labour intensive and typically not the favourite type of work that consultants enjoy.  It does get results though, which means that when the need arises, these activities, typically networking oriented, are the fall back strategy that consultants use.  But when they succeed in generating new work, the focus shifts to getting the work done and happily, the networking activities are dropped in favour of doing the client delivery work that is either more enjoyable or more likely to generate more income in the short term.

This common approach is what keeps growth for the firm limited and commonly, even though over the months, sales results are up and down like a roller coaster ride, the annual results somehow tend to be about the same as the last few years.  Growth hits a plateau that seems the limit to how high the firm can go.

The only way to break through this plateau and avoid the sales roller coaster syndrome is to develop a consistent marketing outreach system that operates continuously in the background without requiring the time and involvement of the consultants who are focused on client delivery work.  If you only ever operate with a short term focus and continue to create the roller coaster ride by continually shifting focus to marketing or delivery when the need arises, nothing will change.  

In this podcast episode, I reveal how to change the roller coaster scenario and avoid the ups and downs in work loads and short term revenue, by building a system that provides consistency and predictability in client acquisition and provides the platform for growth beyond the revenue plateau you may be experiencing.

Learn more at https://businessflightpath.com

For most consultancy firms, client acquisition is not a systemtic process.  Typically, we get clients through referrals and maybe networking, which ends up being a referral process too.  

Unless we have our marketing systems perfectly dialled in, we cannot expect our client acquisition to be consistent or predictable.  When this is the case, we have no confidence in being able to grow our business, and perhaps even no confidence about when and how our next client will turn up.

There are three steps to systematic client acquisition.  The first and last of these are probably reasonably well understood, even if not well executed a lot of the time.

The first is what I call connection.  We first have to make a connection with our likely prospects, whether that is through advertising or other organic methods.  We have to get on their radar and we have to have some sort of interaction where we get their name and, or at least, their email address and any other information that helps us know who they are.  

The third step is quite obvious. I call it conversion.  That's when we convert the prospect into becoming a paying client.  

Both these steps should be systemized.

The middle step however, is not well understood.  However it is the critical step in the process that creates the bridge between connection and conversion.  Even if you think you might know what this step is, it's my bet that you don't understand it in the way I explain it in this podcast episode.  Most people get this step wrong, which makes it ineffective and leads to a lot of hard work with little to show for it.

Check out the podcast episode to find out what it is and how to get it right.

More information at https://businessflightpath.com

I believe there is actually a lot of confusion about the importance of branding and what branding actually is for many owners of consultancy firms.  In this episode, I reveal my take on what branding really is and how we can waste a lot of time and money when we get this wrong.  

In my experience, many consultants go about branding the wrong way, in a way that is ineffective and potentially harmful to the business.  When you go about it the right way, you create connection by being more relevant to your target market.  When you use an authority positioning strategy to create your brand, your target market creates your brand for you, which creates much more demand for your services than when you try to do it yourself.

Learn more at https://businessflightpath.com