3 Daily Steps to Grow Your Consulting Business

Video Transcript
There are three steps that you can take, three very simple actions you can take on a daily basis that will significantly help you to build your business if you’re not already doing something like this.

Let’s get right into it.

If you want to grow your business, right, essentially, there’s one thing that you always want to keep in mind and that is that you want to have more conversations.

The more conversations that you have, as long as they’re meaningful conversations, the more business that you’re going to generate because all consulting business, the vast, vast majority, 98% or more will come from a conversation you have with a buyer.

Knowing that it’s important to have more conversations, you want to always be focused in terms of your marketing, your business development around what can you do to create more conversations. I’m going to offer you just a very simple kind of process that you can use on a daily basis. If you really commit to it and you’re intentional with it, it’ll help you to grow your business, so here’s the three, right? It’s three phone calls or three outreaches that you do every single day.

The same way that you wake up and brush your teeth, the same way that you … like whatever habits you have, you have a cup of coffee, you go to the gym, you take your dog for a walk, you create habits in your life. Everyone creates habits. This can also be a habit in your life if you choose to make it one. I would suggest that if you really want to grow your business that choosing to make this a habit in your business will be very beneficial.

It’s either three people or types of people that you should contact, okay? Number one is contacting what we’ll call a key contact and the goal for this is to ask for a referral, so asking for a referral. Now, this is really important because the more people that you reach out to, the more people that you kind of connect with to ask for a referral, the more referrals you’re going to actually get.

These might be friends, family members, past colleagues, employers, vendors, suppliers. It can be a lot of different kinds of people but the more people that you reach out to, to have a quick conversation, to learn what they’re doing and to find if they might know somebody who would be a good fit for you, the better, right, so you want to do that. That’s on a daily basis. It’s daily basis, one phone call. Boom. Call someone up. Send them an e-mail but phone calls are always better in most cases.

Number two is you want to reach out to a past client. I don’t know if I can write today. You want to reach out to a past client. Why reach out to a past client? Well, reach out to a past client because past clients are actually the best source of new business for you.

A lot of people believe that they need to somehow be doing new marketing, like they need to be getting new business, like new people into their pipeline all the time and while there is truth to that, you will be able to win significantly more business faster and typically at higher levels with existing or past clients than with new ones.

Why?

Well, because you have a relationship with them. They already trust you. They know that you can deliver results and so because of that, they’re much more likely to want to work further with you.

Now, there’s a couple of different options here or ways to think about it. One is just working on a new project with the same exact client. The other … This also what we kind of call … the work you’d be doing here will be called client development. Essentially, what you’re doing is you’re developing business from within your clients.

Now, the second is a new department. If it’s a larger organization, they’re going to have different departments and if you connect with your previous contact and you ask who else in the organization should I speak with or maybe you’re just around in the organization, you meet people, there’s almost always opportunities to win additional business from different departments in that same organization but you got to be reaching out.

You got to be asking. You got to be inquiring. You got to be active to find those opportunities.

Now, number three is a prospective client. Prospective client. The idea with the prospective client is that they are someone who you’ve identified as an ideal client. You don’t yet really have a relationship with them and so you want to start that relationship. You want to identify one person, reach out to them each day and the other part of this, kind of would be a secondary part but in the same category is follow-up, right?

People are busy but if you pick up the phone and give them a call, there’s a better chance you can actually engage in a conversation. Now, if a phone call doesn’t work, that’s okay. Then, send an e-mail.

You can choose to either reach out to someone brand new or you can choose to do follow-up to someone that is also brand new but the idea with this is that you are making these three phone calls … E-mail’s okay but it’s not going to be as effective typically because people can easily just put an e-mail to the side or forget about it or like star it. We get a lot of e-mails or I get a lot of e-mails.

I get a lot of e-mails and I will star ones that I’m going to come back to later on for whatever reason because I’m busy or this is not a priority.

I might then forget to respond to someone if it’s not like of top importance. If it’s not from a client, I might delegate to someone else or say, “Okay, I’ll come back to that later in the day or the next day,” or whatever it might be.

It’s the same thing with prospective clients. People are busy but if you pick up the phone and give them a call, there’s a better chance you can actually engage in a conversation. Now, if a phone call doesn’t work, that’s okay. Then, send an e-mail.

Then, do follow-up, right? Keep working through but here’s the key to all of this. If you work through these steps like every single day, you do it consistently, you get in front of people, you do three phone calls or three outreaches to these people every single week, just think about it.

That’s three times five. That’s 15 per week. That means you’re having 15 touch points per week. That means you’re having 60 per month. That adds up like, are you currently having 60 per month right now?

You might be saying, “Okay. Well, Michael, I’m actually doing five prospective clients per day.” Even better. That’s awesome. I’m already doing three of these per day. Wonderful, but if you’re not doing these consistently, then create a habit.

The more that you do this at early in your consulting business, the better because you want to build momentum and as you build momentum, then you’re going to start having a more pipeline, so, especially in the early days, the more outreach, the more of this that you do in the early days, either of your business if you’re a new consulting business or if you’re an established consulting business but you’re new to marketing and new to like really being intentional with that, then the more that you do of this process consistently, the more that your business will grow. You’ll attract more clients.

You’ll create more conversations and you’ll be on a path, a nice growth curve but it does require that you’re doing these things consistently and that you’re creating a habit with it but as you can see, just three now straightforward steps. That’s all it takes to really build your pipeline an opportunity.

Give it a go if you’re not already and I think that you’ll see some nice results for it as well.