🔴 Consulting kickstart -6- Growing a customer community
The notion of customer community might be overused and debased, but when understood is certainly the core of a strong and resilient consulting business. As always, we'll see some practical approaches to get you started and grow such a network.
Last weeks recap
Last week was all about the 10-20-30 pitch framework and how to apply it to your online Homebase or in just a minute during an informal meeting. By now, even if not everything is perfect, you should have a clearer understanding of your positioning, early-stage feedback, contacts, and a communication toolbox on the ready.
Let's now set up things to get our first real customers!
Investing in focused visibility
Getting in sales mode now means reaching out to potential customers and trying to say "Hey, this is what I do; please hire me," only in a smarter (more efficient) way. The truth is, any form of cold calling (getting in touch with a prospect who doesn't know you and maybe doesn't need you) is anything but efficient. And if it kind of works when selling commodities like insurance or solar panels over the phone with a 0.03% win ratio, the higher your expertise is, the less it's going to work for you.
And yet, most of what we can learn about selling services comes from two approaches: selling commodity skills to unknown customers (see above) or pitching your skills to a known customer, who is asking different providers to compete for a mission on the cheap (which is even worse). Both of these situations are exactly what we've been trying to avoid since the beginning of this work we're doing together.
As consultants with differentiated expertise, we need to approach the market differently. The golden zone we want to be in is having a potential customer who knows us asking for advice on working with us because she gets our value. This incidentally means a totally different approach from cold calling, where we aim for much fewer contacts in exchange for an 80% success rate in getting a mission.
How to get there? Glad you asked.
