How to Attract Big Clients to Your Consulting Firm
In today’s world, large corporations are within reach of anyone.
Landing a big-name client can give you the biggest breakthrough you can ever imagine.
The presence of a big client in your portfolio will make people want to work with you.
A big client will attract bigger clients and lots of smaller ones to your consulting firm.
I like the site of Marc Thomas, a digital designer, and front-end developer. He has big-name clients like the Vanity Fair, Glamour and Discovery Network in his portfolio.
More large clients will want to work with Marc.
Landing a big client may seem impossible to you because you’re small. And maybe you run your consulting firm alone.
But even the biggest companies are always looking for the up-and-coming stars.
As long as you’ve got a compelling story to tell about who you are and what you do, you’ll have large companies wanting to work with you.
We’ve loved stories since we were kids. We tell stories to our friends, and to persuade someone to support our projects. Top executives or decision makers also love storytelling.
Your story will attract large clients to you.
For example, Hiten Shah uses storytelling to attract startups to him.
Be prepared to write a lot of stories about you and what you do.
What unique skills do you have?
As a consultant, the more skills you have, the more marketable you become.
Large companies want consultants with a wide array of skills, who bring unique insights and ideas to the table.
For example, the combination of these skills is valuable to a marketing consultant:
- SEO
- Google AdWords
- Google Analytics
- Facebook advertising
- Freelance writing
- Email marketing
- Cold emailing
- Web development
- SQL
- Link building
- Recruiting
- User interface design
- Customer support
For example, at the beginning of 2017, I started learning PHP and JavaScript.
Gaining new skills will make you invaluable to any large client. It will also separate you from other consultants in your niche.
Speak at events
I recommend taking public speaking courses and practice regularly.
Coursera and Udemy have some of the best public speaking courses online.
Warren Buffett said “anyone could improve their value by over 50% by learning public speaking.”
Public speaking is one of the most effective ways to acquire large clients.
For example, Neil Patel spoke at a gambling event, and one online casino hired him at a rate of $100,000 a month.
Imagine you can charge whatever amount you want to speak and still get big clients to hire you?
Isn’t that amazing?
Let people know on your website that you’re available to speak at their events.
Karen Brody is a relationship coach for men. She also speaks. She uses speaking to promote her service.
For example, Josh Marinacci specializes in real-time web and chatbot development.
Josh speaks regularly at events related to tech. He recently spoke at Developer Week in NYC and JazzCon.Tech in New Orleans.
There’s no doubt that his speaking engagements are increasing demand for his consulting services.
Gary Vaynerchuk used speaking to build a digital agency that services Fortune 500 clients.
When you visit his website, you’ll see a big image of him speaking at an event.
When starting out, you may not be as popular as Neil Patel or Gary Vaynerchuk, but they started somewhere.
Offer yourself to speak at any events where you have something valuable to share. Speak for free. Also, organize events where you can speak.
For example, Stephen Elville, the principal of Elville and Associates, organizes events where he speaks.
Gradually, you’ll start making a name for yourself through your speaking engagements.
Soon, individuals and organizations will start offering you money to speak at their events.
Before you know it, large clients will begin to hire you for consulting.
So, start today.
Create a page on your website dedicated to speaking.
For example, John Weltman, the founder of Circle Surrogacy, a surrogacy agency in Boston, regularly speaks at conferences. Speaking helps him generates more awareness for his company.
Start a blog and teach everything you know
Nathan Barry wrote about reading blog posts from people like Jason Fried of Basecamp.
People in the startup world see Jason Fried as an expert. Jason teaches everything he knows.
On his blog, Jason wrote an article titled “Why we choose profit.”
He discussed how Basecamp has been profitable from the very first year. He talked about how his company’s revenue grew every year since it launched.
Nathan Barry started following Chris Coyer of CSS-tricks.com in 2006.
Back then, Nathan was new in web design. And even Chris was new too.
But Chris was seen as an expert by Nathan because he teaches everything he knows even though they were both beginners.
When Nathan decided to start teaching everything he knows too, he became successful, popular and respected in the digital world.
For example, Nathan wrote about how he went from losing money to a 51% profit margin in 5 months.
Nathan took his company from nothing to making over $700,000 per month by teaching everything he knows.
Start a blog where you teach everything you know.
Regular blogging will help you generate lots of consulting leads because your blog will receive traffic from search engines and social media daily.
A survey conducted by ConvertKit showed that people who blog could use it to sell anything such as digital and physical products, services, advertising, software and even donations.
Here’s what John Doherty wrote about teaching everything he knows through blogging.
“The single best thing I did for my career was launching this site, johnfdoherty.com, in February 2011.
For the next 3 years, I published a new article every Tuesday and Thursday, teaching things I was learning.
Sometimes I gave away templates for link building or prospecting, or I showed how to audit a site, or I zinged the marketing industry to tell them to stop talking about themselves.
I’ve done videos, I’ve written short posts, I’ve gone viral on Hacker News. Some posts hit, others flopped. And that’s fine.
By blogging consistently and seeking to teach others how I do what I do, I established myself as an authority in the SEO and digital marketing space.
The most successful consultants are those who are able to promote themselves in some way and show that they are really good at what they do.” — John Doherty
Protect your reputation online
As a consultant, someone is typing your name into that search box on Google.
They’ll judge you based on what they find.
Ensure that people see positive things about you when they search for your name.
For example, when you search for Mark Schaefer’s name on Google, you see good things about him.
Mark Schaefer is a social media marketing consultant.
His Wikipedia’s page, website, blog, LinkedIn, Twitter and Medium profiles rank on the first page of Google.
Nicholas A. Parr is an experienced attorney based in Baltimore, Maryland. When you type his name into the Google search engine, you’ll see that his website and social media profiles take up the entire Google first page results.
Your online reputation is the information people find about you on search engines and social media.
You should control what people see and read about you.
The content people see about you should be positive.
Anyone can write bad things about you online.
A jealous competitor could write a bad review about you and post it on Ripoff Report.
An angry customer could write a horrible review of your business anywhere online.
You should report a fake review from a jealous competitor, and try to resolve issues with a disappointed customer.
Review the search results for your name and company.
If there’s a harmful or irrelevant content showing up, create better blog posts to push it down.
Or, you can delete the content if it’s within your control.
For example, if you’d posted weekend party pictures on your website, you can delete them now.
Review your entire Facebook, Twitter and other social accounts to see if there aren’t any content that may damage your reputation.
Also, try to address any mistake you’ve made that might lead to a flood of negative content about your business.
For example, American Apparel decided to send out an email to their subscribers during a hurricane.
Consumers criticized the brand. A Twitter user wrote that she “will forever boycott their stores.”
American Apparel never responded to any of these negative tweets.
Actively search and respond to social media mentions.
Tools like Mention.com, SocialMention.com, and Hootsuite will help you monitor what people are saying about your consulting business on social media.
Don’t just monitor what people are saying. Be active.
Engage with prospects and fans every day by commenting and liking their social media updates.
Develop relationships with influencers on social media
Social media can produce big results for your consulting business when you connect and develop meaningful relationships with relevant influencers.
Some established experts in your niche have thousands of followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
For example, Michaela Alexis has over 76,000 followers on LinkedIn.
Each post she publishes on LinkedIn receives lots of likes and comments.
For example, if you’re in the marketing niche, developing a relationship with an influencer like Michaela will spread your name on LinkedIn.
A “Like” from an influencer will make thousands of people aware of your business.
If you want to become an influencer, you need to enlist the help of another influencer.
For example, Sam Hurley became popular on social media without having a website because he engages with influencers. And he’s not shy about saying that on his LinkedIn profile.
Developing relationships with influencers on social media will increase the reach of your consulting firm.
Dominate relevant platforms
Your target audience spends time on other channels that are related to your niche.
For example, in the marketing niche, there are other relevant platforms like GrowthHackers, Inbound.org, Quora, Warrior Forum, and related Facebook groups.
Talking about Facebook, if you’re a social media consultant, for example. Josh Forti has a Facebook group about social media for entrepreneurs.
You may want to join this group.
Entrepreneurs are asking questions about social media in this Facebook group that has over 18,000 members.
Dominating the group with lots of helpful answers will lead to potential clients contacting you.
Quora is another platform you should dominate.
For example, Asim Qureshi is a consultant for startups and the CEO of his company, LaunchPad.
He dominates Quora by providing helpful answers to questions on the platform.
As a result, his answers have been viewed 6.5 million times this month according to Quora.
You can dominate Quora too. Answer questions that are related to your niche.
By providing lots of helpful, quality answers to questions on Quora, you’ll dominate the platform and increase demand for your service.
Send cold outreach emails
Cold emailing is a powerful strategy that can help you acquire lots of clients within a short period of time.
For example, Ambition, a sales management platform, cold emailed 578 prospects.
The cold email campaign helped them generate 73 new leads.
In the first seven months of his freelance career, Jake Jorgovan used cold emailing to close $12,030 of business from a few batches of cold e-mails.
Below is an example of an email Jake used to land a $4,250 client.
“[Prospect names],
Recently I came across [Company name] in the [Directory where I found their information] and I wanted to reach out. My name is Jake Jorgovan and recently I finished up a website design project for [case study client] and wanted to reach out to similar companies.
When I came across the [Client’s website], I noticed [review of 2–3 things that I found wrong with the clients website]. With the [case study client], we were able to build a professional site and get it up and running in under three weeks. Their site is mobile friendly and extremely easy for anyone at the company to update.
If you are interested in rebuilding your website, please let me know and we would be more than happy to help you out. Also, I have attached a case study for [Case study client] with a raving testimonial from the owner of the company.
Thank you [Prospect name] and I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Jake Jorgovan”
Cold emailing is highly effective, especially for B2B companies. For example ShoeBoxed helps business turn receipts into data so that they can get rid of paper in the office. The company could take advantage of cold emailing to drive new clients.
By using the marketing strategies revealed in this post, you’ll start attracting a lot of large clients to your consulting firm.
What other strategies can you use to win big clients?
Tell me in the comments.
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