This article provides a roadmap to help new consulting firm marketers build a high performing marketing and new business engine.
Maybe you’ve just been promoted to the Director of Marketing role in your firm, maybe you’ve been marketing professional services firms for some time and just accepted a new post in a consulting firm, or maybe you’re a seasoned B2B marketer who’s fairly new to the consulting industry. Regardless of what brought you to this moment, you may find yourself stuck with the same question, “Now what?” This article lays out a sequence of six things I believe any new marketing leader in a mid-sized consulting firm should be thinking about.
#1. IDEAL CLIENT
Effective marketing starts with knowing exactly who you’re marketing to. So before you do anything else, get a consensus on your ideal client. Maybe they’re similar to clients with whom you’ve had success in the past. Or maybe there’s a different type of client that holds potential.
To define your ideal client, ask these fundamental questions:
- What do our best client relationships look and feel like?
- What do those organizations look like in size, industry, location, status, and performance?
- Who generally sponsors us into the organization in the first place?
- What is their role, function, experience, and perspective on the world?
- What are their most pressing issues?
Pinpointing your ideal client is critical to your marketing strategy for two reasons.
- Your firm exists to solve clients’ problems. But if you don’t have clarity on who your clients are, you can’t fully understand their problems nor build a better way to solve them. Everything that follows – from solution design, to marketing, to client service, client experience, and client loyalty – suffers.
- As a consulting firm, you’re not just marketing to an organization. You’re also marketing to individual key decision makers within that organization and everyone in their orbit, too. For your marketing efforts to work, you need to consider how to incorporate all these decision-makers into your approach.
#2. Positioning
For any marketer to be successful, they need to start with clarity on the types of clients they hope to attract. While most consulting firms already have brand and business strategy figured out long before they endeavor to hire a non-consultant to lead the marketing post, there are occasional exceptions. So it’s important we start at the beginning:
- What markets are we in and why have we chosen to compete in them?
- What expertise do we have and where is it most relevant?
- What proof do we have that our expertise is both relevant and valuable? Examples include marketable case studies and outcomes, fact-based research, and any other “in market” application of our recommended remedy.
If the principals of the firm can’t offer you clear and concise answers to most of these questions, you may have a positioning problem on your hands.
HERE ARE A FEW OTHER RESOURCES YOU MAY FIND USEFUL:
#3. Differentiation
What differentiates one consulting firm from the next in the eyes of a potential client? While positioning is quite often the root of differentiation, it’s still just one aspect of what distinguishes one firm from the next. Even for the most specific business problem, clients generally have at least a handful of viable alternatives to solve it.
Differentiation is about strategically aligning critical aspects of the firm’s business against its positioning such that it creates something unique and valuable to the firm’s ideal clients. The culmination of this is often grounded in a distinct point of view or POV—essentially its core belief about the best way to go about solving its clients’ problems or addressing their opportunities.
That said, we can’t invest in everything. Generally, a firm has to make decisions about where to invest resources (and where not to) in order to fulfill its point of view and build something tangibly different and uniquely valuable to its ideal clientele.
Usually it’s some combination of these things that works:
- Process and methodology — Maybe your firm has developed a unique process or methodology that has proven to produce tangible results against a specific set or type of business problems. The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), originally coined in Gino Wickman’s book, Traction, now used by thousands of consultants and more than 170,000 companies around the world to create alignment and traction around corporate vision, is a good example of this.
- Proprietary systems, data and techniques — Or, perhaps your firm has built proprietary data or systems you use in your work. David C. Baker has built his business advisory services including his Total Business Reset assessment around his comprehensive and proprietary benchmarking database of more than 12,000 data points. Recombinators is another example of a management consulting firm that differentiates itself based on its Challenge Tree database, which includes more than 10,000 winning business cases amassed across functions and industries.
- Hiring and training practices — Often, the way a firm hires and trains its people is a critical aspect of what makes it unique. For years, much of Accenture’s success was built around the intense learning and teambuilding activities that occurred during the first few months of employment for new consultants at its St. Charles education facility. This bootcamp-like experience was the backbone of the firm’s client engagement process. It was the place that smart people with little technology background became smart technologists with the skills to apply the firm’s rigorous process.
- Culture and philosophy — Companies can differentiate themselves based on their core beliefs and how they treat their associates and clients. Rattleback client Jump Associates has built its business around an enablement philosophy that empowers the world’s largest organizations to build and execute future focused strategies. By helping executives and their teams think about what might happen in the next five to 10 years instead of analyzing current and past data, Jump instills clients with an organizational mindset that drives sustainable growth in dramatically changing times.
In most cases, one of these things in isolation is not the basis for meaningful differentiation; generally, a firm must invest in multiple areas in order to build something that’s truly unique and tangibly valuable. The combination of these factors crystalizes the company’s POV. Another Rattleback client, TBM Consulting, leverages its diagnostic process, proprietary management system, and a culture that’s grounded in working at the point of impact to drive efficiencies, remove waste, and generate immediate results for its clients. All this ladders up to the consultancy’s defining mantra: in manufacturing, speed wins every time.
Another resource related to differentiation you may find helpful:
#4. Thought Leadership
These days, the intelligent cultivation, development, and dissemination of thought leadership has become one of the most important and effective tools in marketing and branding a consulting firm. Indeed, this is what brings your firm’s differentiating POV to life. Done right, thought leadership can become one of a firm’s most effective and valuable tools for attracting potential new clients. Yet, doing it right is quite hard. And, with the rapid explosion of content, cutting through the noise has become harder than ever.
For thought leadership to work you need the following:
- A strategy for determining which topics the firm wants to own.
- A unique and well-developed point of view on those topics that demonstrates how your firm tackles the issue or solves the problem in a better, more effective, and/or less costly way.
- A defined approach to thought leadership development and content generation to bring that POV on those topics to life.
- A clear editorial process to ensure you have the ability to produce an ongoing flow of content in a sustained and timely manner.
- A detailed strategy on how you plan to distribute and promote it.
- And, you’ll need to support the whole effort with the resources (people, money and technology) to do it effectively.
Oh, is that all? Yes, it’s a lot. But firms that truly invest themselves in the process of thought leadership can attain extraordinary results — case in point, CEB changed the entire marketplace conversation on how selling gets done with the research, insights, and content it poured into its 2011 book, The Challenger Sale. The firm claims to have trained over 80,000 sales professionals on the Challenger methodology, and its stock price gradually grew from $37.39 per share on November 10, 2011, when the book was published to $75.90 on January 10, 2017, when it was officially sold to Gartner in a $2.6B transaction. For more on how they did it, check out the post Demand Generation at Training and Advisory Firm CEB.
AND FOR A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO GROWING YOUR OWN FIRM THROUGH THOUGHT LEADERSHIP, SEE:
#5. Website
Our research shows that the most successful high-growth firms consider their corporate websites to be their most valuable marketing asset. Further, they recognize that the website is much more than a capabilities presentation or a place for credentialing. It is a strategic tool that plays a pivotal role in client acquisition and in initiating new conversations with real prospects you want to do business with and whom you may already know, or not. When built correctly and with thoughtful consideration to where a prospect is in the buying journey, a website will enable a firm to:
- Attract potential clients who are looking for solutions to the problems they know how to solve.
- Showcase the firm’s unique point of view and approach in successfully addressing those issues and ingratiate prospects to that point of view.
- Demonstrate sufficient depth of knowledge with proof of results within the prospect’s industry and/or for similar organizations, thus reducing risk for the prospect.
- Align with the customer’s buying journey and move the prospect through each phase of their journey within a contained digital experience.
#6. LEAD GENERATION
Lead generation is the one tool that lets you identify and attract prospective clients and build relationships with them. Through lead gen efforts, you can target and reach your ideal clients, grow a larger client roster, and drive revenue.
Successful lead generation requires an understanding of your ideal clients, the right strategies and tactics, and an efficient implementation process. There are a few key ways to make sure your lead generation efforts are effective.
- Generate internal agreement on what makes a lead qualified. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between practice leaders or business development managers and marketing. What makes a lead qualified to a practice leader isn’t the same as what makes a lead qualified to marketing. Coming to a consensus drives efficiency for the rest of your lead generation campaign.
- Set a realistic goal. Strategic growth is attainable when your objective is rooted in reality. To inform that reality, take a look at your historical sales and marketing data. This data will determine how many leads you need to hit your growth targets. You can work backwards from revenue by using your average client value and win rates. When you understand how prospects move through your organizational pipeline, it’s easier to set — and hit — your target.
- Build a plan for generating leads. If you’ve hit the $5 million mark and have been sitting at a plateau, your strategy for growth needs to change. This means transitioning your strategy from attending events for networking to speaking at them. You’re the expert now, so go on the pulpit and show it. In addition to events, lean on earned and paid media to share the thought leadership content you’ve worked hard to craft. Post content to your own channels and employ targeted, paid ads on LinkedIn and Google. Then, turn to earned media by getting placements in industry publications and well-respected business journals.
CHECK OUT THESE RESOURCES ON LEAD GENERATION:
IF YOU BUILD YOUR MARKETING TOOLKIT, GROWTH WILL COME
While tools like thought leadership and websites have evolved over the past several years, the fundamental principles for growth-focused marketing for professional services firms remain the same. Know who you want to attract, what problems you can help them solve, and why you can solve them better than your competitors. Then have a solid plan for telling that story and promoting your POV. While this blog is far from a “how to market a consulting firm” list, I do hope it serves as a useful resource to put you on the right path as you embark on your new endeavor. If you’d like some help, give us a call. We can dive deeper into any or all of these fundamentals to make sure your marketing is working as effectively as it can.
Note: This article was originally published in May 2014. We’ve updated it in October 2022 and May 2023 to reflect new thinking and new reference materials.
