Whether you are a freelance consultant or working in a consulting company, the process to get consulting clients can be one of the most challenging parts.
You might be following many strategies and tactics to get consulting clients, like improving your online presence, promoting on social media, sharing helpful content related to your niche, and partnering with other consulting firms, to name a few.
Some of these might be working well for you. But the challenge over here is it takes quite a lot of time to do all the inbound and outbound activities.
Have you thought about cold outreach? Where you can automate the entire process, and it would be targeted to your niche. The best part is you can directly get in touch with the decision-makers.
Sounds interesting, right? Before we start with the cold outreach strategy, let’s just quickly have a look at the challenges you might be facing as a consultant.
Challenges faced by consultants in getting clients
Acquiring new clients can be a significant hurdle for consulting firms and freelance consultants.
Some of the challenges that consultants and consulting companies face are below.
- Standing out with a unique value proposition is crucial amidst competition.
- Building trust is vital to showcase expertise and ensure client confidence.
- Juggling client acquisition and project delivery is challenging for solo consultants.
- Staying updated on trends is essential for relevance in the competitive consulting industry.
- Miscommunication causes delays and misunderstandings in projects.
- A positive brand reputation is key for client attraction.
- Setting appropriate fees is important to avoid financial struggles.
- Attracting and retaining top talent is challenging in a competitive market.
There can be many other issues and challenges that you might be facing, but these are some of the prominent ones.
In this blog, I shall discuss an outreach strategy that will help get consulting clients faster.
Key takeaways are:
- T Balancing client acquisition and the current ongoing project
- Proper communication & transparency across the team
- Target niche audience that would convert faster
- Automate your cold outreach process.
How to get consulting clients that convert?
As a consultant, you might be struggling with different activities to get consulting clients, like writing an introductory pitch, managing all your prospect’s information, sending emails and follow-ups, etc.
With the help of automated tools, you can reduce your repetitive tasks, saving time to do something more productive like strategic planning, etc.
A sales engagement platform would be an ideal fit in this case.
As per Gartner, sales engagement platforms provide the highest return on investment, and more than 90% of sales leaders consider that it contributes highly to their success.
Sales engagement tools like SmartReach.io provide a platform to organize your client outreach process, helping in building a reliable pipeline to attract more clients to your business.
Let’s go step by step to see how you can set up a client outreach process.
Identify the right client
Identifying the right consulting client is crucial for any consultant’s success.
A good fit ensures projects align with a consultant’s skills and expertise, increasing the likelihood of positive outcomes and satisfied clients.
Identifying the ideal client often starts with understanding your own niche and target persona. Identify the essential qualities and attributes of your ideal clients. This helps with effective targeting and attracting the right clientele.
By focusing on a particular area in the consulting field, you can attract clients facing similar challenges and requiring specialized expertise. Develop a clear picture of your ideal client persona.
The below points will help you get started:
- As per your specialization, are you targeting individuals or a larger organization?
- If individuals, then what is their designation?
- If larger organization, then what is the size of the org?
- Are there any geographical considerations?
This persona can guide your marketing efforts, allowing you to tailor your messaging and communication style to resonate with them.
How to build your prospect client list?
Before starting your cold outreach, you need a verified prospective client list. You may already have one with you, but is it verified? Sending email to a non-verified list is a big NO.
Now I shall be sharing a tool that would provide you with a list of verified information of your prospective clients.
ProspectDaddy is one of the top prospect finder tools that provides information such as full name, designation, company, location, business email address, LinkedIn profile, etc. Using ProspectDaddy’s Chrome extension, you can collect all the information.
For your better understanding, l will explain by taking an example.
Let’s say your firm has consultants who have expertise in financial analysis, mergers & acquisitions. So, your target audience would CFOs, General Manager (Finance), Finance Directors, and basically all the financial decision-makers.
Utilizing LinkedIn, you can conduct a focused search of “CFO”, “Finance director”, etc.,, apply relevant filters, and obtain a curated list of profiles that align with your outreach goals.
Then you have to open and run the ProspectDaddy extension. It will start searching for the information of the list you have shortlisted.
Note: You may know that LinkedIn displays ten profiles on a single page. With ProspectDaddy, you have the flexibility to navigate through multiple pages, allowing you to collect information from a substantial number of profiles. Post that, you can run the extension.
Once the search is completed, you get the option to either download the information in a CSV format or directly import the prospects into the campaign.
Communicating with prospective clients
Now that you have your prospect list ready let’s take the next step and set up our cold outreach campaign.
To make your outreach successful, you need to use multiple channels. Email is still one of the most effective channels of communication, but in order to reach out to a wider audience, multichannel outreach is a must.
Sales engagement platforms like SmartReach.io provide multichannel outreach where you can reach your prospective clients via different channels like email, LinkedIn, call, WhatsApp, and messages.
You may be using an outreach tool for your marketing purposes. But wouldn’t it be great if you could just automate the entire flow?
This would reduce your manual efforts and increase productivity.
When you are using a sales engagement platform for your multichannel outreach, then helps you to maintain consistency across all the channels. This would give the prospects a clear idea of what is expected from them.
Later in this blog, we have listed down the features you should be looking for while shortlisting a sales engagement platform.
One of the important things to keep a note is to create magnetic messaging for your clients that would provide more value to your communications. So, before you start drafting your email content, some points you should keep in mind are:
- What message would resonate with my ideal customers?
- What specific pain point can I uniquely address for them?
- What are the goals and aspirations of my ideal clients?
- What are the current challenges faced by my target audience?
To help you solve this, SEP like SmartReach provides AI content generator. Where you can seamlessly generate content by giving a few prompts.
Now, let’s see how you can design your multichannel sequence.
Sample structure for consulting client outreach sequence
Based on the data analyzed from past consultant-based outreach campaigns, it’s recommended that consultants aim for at least six touchpoints across various channels to achieve optimal response rates.
Here’s an example of how you can structure a sequence using different outreach channels. Depending on your requirements, you can utilize emails, messages, calls, or LinkedIn.
Step 1: Introductory email
(Day – 1)
In the introductory email, you give an overview of your expertise in the field of financial analysis and strategy. You can mention some bullet points on how your service would be beneficial to your prospective client’s company.
You can refer to our blog on writing email subject line and body copy for reference.
Step 2: LinkedIn profile view
(Day – 2)
There is a high chance that email might have gone unnoticed. So, viewing their profile as the next step might catch their attention.
Also, a lot of people are interested in knowing more about their profile views.
Step 3: LinkedIn connection request
(Day – 3)
Now that you have caught the attention of your prospective clients, you should establish a connection with them.
Make sure to add a personalized message while sending a connection request.
Step 4: Follow up email
(Day – 5)
Set up an automated follow-up email that will go out on the scheduled date and time. You need not worry about sending it manually.
Also, a CTA should be added to ask the prospective client to book a 15-minute call.
Step 5: Send WhatsApp message
(Day – 7)
You can set up a short WhatsApp message highlighting the issue that you can resolve.
Step 6: 2nd Follow-up email
(Day – 9)
This follow-up would include a friendly reminder to your prospective client to either respond or book a call with you.
Step 7: Calling
(Day -11)
If you haven’t received any responses so far, then you can call your prospective client and pitch your consultant service.
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By using this approach, you reach out to potential clients through various channels to let them know about your service.
If they respond, the campaign stops for that particular prospect.
Now that your outreach campaign is in place, you need a collaborative tool to help you manage all your incoming responses.
Managing responses from prospective clients
Some of the sales engagement platforms, like SmartReach.io, provide a shared inbox where you can access all the responses coming from your prospective clients. With a shared inbox, all your team members get access to any response or queries coming from your prospects.
It helps keep everything organized and accessible for your team. Messages won’t be scattered, and you won’t make the same mistake twice. Shared inbox makes handling responses much simpler and easier.
If prospective clients are interested in booking a meeting, then SmartReach provides a complementary meeting scheduler tool. You can integrate it with Google Microsoft and sync your calendar.
Managing prospective client’s pipeline
Very few sales engagement platforms provide opportunities for pipeline features.
SmartReach recently introduced its new feature opportunities pipeline, where you will be able to track your opportunities in your consulting client pipeline.
With an opportunity pipeline, you will get a clear picture of your sales process, along with the value and volume of opportunities at each stage. You will then be able to focus on the high-value client as soon as possible.
You can forecast your revenue accurately and make informed decisions. Opportunity pipeline will help you prioritize your tasks and activities more effectively, increasing productivity.
Simply put, the sales engagement platform is a great tool for consultants. It makes their work easier by helping them find the right client information, send messages through different channels, keep track of responses, schedule calls, and smoothly pass the baton to the closing team or management for the next steps.
Keeping up with the latest outreach trends
Everyone may know how to get consulting clients. Hiring experts in outreach can be expensive, affecting the team’s knowledge of the newest tools and strategies.
Some team members might not know the best ways to reach potential clients, like optimizing outreach domains, checking for blacklist issues, or using personalized content effectively. This lack of knowledge could be a problem when competing with other events in the market.
But with a sales engagement platform, you don’t have to worry about industry trends and the latest features. Your platform will keep you updated and add new features to stay current, making it easier to get consulting clients.
Must have features for your sales engagement platform
You might get an idea of how a sales engagement platform can help get consulting clients faster without any manual intervention.
In this section, we shall see what features you need to look for in a sales engagement platform while shortlisting one.
Note: SmartReach.io has all the features listed below; in case you want to compare them with other tools, we are providing the complete list.
Prospect finder
Before you start your cold outreach, it’s important to use a prospect finder tool. Make sure the platform you pick has a prospecting feature or can connect with a prospect finder tool.
Select a prospect finder tool like ProspectDaddy, similar to SmartReach’s offering. This tool provides information about potential clients, such as business emails, LinkedIn profiles, names, companies, job titles, locations, and more.
Multichannel Outreach
Relying only on email might not get consulting clients as per your goal. Look for a Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) that offers more options. The best ones let you reach out through various channels, like email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, messages, and calls.
You should be able to access all these from a single platform without having to juggle between different tools.
Also, make sure the SEP gives both semi-automation and complete automation.
Cold Email Automation
Unlike Gmail or Outlook, where you have to copy and paste email content for each person you want to reach, in a SEP, you just set up a campaign with the content for the first email and the follow-up emails once.
Your campaign will run automatically without any manual intervention.
Make sure the sales engagement platform you shortlist has key features like unlimited sequences, auto-pause a campaign when there’s a response, direct & indirect reply detection, and a holiday calendar to avoid sending emails on your prospect’s holidays.
Having a free AI content recommendation feature is a great extra.
Check if the platform allows A/B testing to see which subject line or email content gets better responses.
Remember, you can also use other channels and emails.
Email Deliverability – reach the primary inbox
Some sales engagement platforms, like SmartReach, mimic human-like sending, increasing the chances of your emails landing in your potential clients’ main inboxes.
The platform you are considering should have features like spam test reports to fix any issues with authentication or campaign setup, and email warmups to keep your email reputation good. This means they will watch your emails closely and fix any problems if they end up in spam, so they will reach the main inbox instead.
Check for complementary features like email verification, which ensures your emails are valid, and auto-pause if there are issues like missing details or broken tags. Look for options like spintax or campaign soft start, where you can slowly increase your email sending for new domains.
Using these features improves the chances of your email landing in the main inbox. This, in turn, will increase the engagement and also help your achieve your goal to get consulting clients faster.
Personalization at Scale
Sales engagement platforms (SEPs) should make it easy for you to send personalized messages to your prospective consulting clients without any manual intervention.
Check if the platform has features like custom columns, merge tags, spintax, and conditional merge-tag for hyper-personalization.
The SEPs takes the data from the prospect finder and turn every email into a special, personalized message for each prospect. And the best part? It all happens automatically—you don’t have to do it manually.
AI-Powered Content
Not all sales engagement platforms come with AI-powered content. See if the one you have shortlisted has AI-generated email content based on the inputs you give about the email and your audience.
SEPs, such as SmartReach.io, let you generate free AI-content by giving some prompts like your target audience, writing style, tone, words, etc., and then it gives you options to generate the content.
Also, see if the tool lets you generate a subject line based on your email content. Having the option to rephrase or shorten paragraphs would be a helpful bonus.
Inbox Rotation
Some of the SEPs like, SmartReach.io, provide this feature, where you can limit the number of emails to be sent out from each email address on a single day and yet send a big list of emails.
With the new sender’s policy, this feature can be a value addition to your client outreach process. As the sending limit is applicable, if you are sending emails to a big list, then you can distribute them to a bunch of email addresses.
With this feature, the system automatically sends emails, picking random email addresses that you have set. So that you can thousands of emails without having to worry about the limit.
Some sales engagement platforms have this feature, but it’s important because it gives you a clear view of all messages from potential clients.
Make sure your shortlisted platform allows a single sign-on to manage all your sending email in one place. It should also provide reply sentiment, that will help you understand how well your potential clients’ engagement is going.
The tool should provide transparency across the whole team and give an overview of how well your sales team is doing.
Opportunities Pipeline & Statuses
Very few SEPs like SmartReach.io provides this feature to keep a track of your opportunities and pipeline.
Keep a note to check if your shortlisted SEP provides you with pipeline dashboard, where you can create multiple pipelines & statuses as per your requirement.
The tool should be able to a unified view of your pipeline status. With the overall data you will be able to make data-based decisions to get consulting clients fast.
Detailed reporting
Every sales engagement platform gives reports, but it depends on what information the tool collects and how easy it is to understand the reports.
Make sure the platform you choose gives you straightforward reports. Look for reports like team activity, showing what your team does each day, team leaderboard to see where your team can do better, and prospect category reports to check the quality of people your team contacts.
Also, look into other reports like advanced tracking, best time to send, and hot prospect report, which shows people interested in your emails.
CRM Integration & Workflows
A few sales engagement platforms offer workflow automation, letting you set up a series of actions for certain events and triggers.
This feature eliminates the need for manual work, lowering the chances of conflicting information. Your team can always get the latest data, no matter which platform they use.
See if your chosen platform has a two-way sync with CRMs. SmartReach.io, for example, syncs with popular CRMs such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive, and others.
Note: Choosing the right sales engagement platform might feel overwhelming. The best way to decide is to try a free trial. Almost all platforms offer a free trial for a few days. SmartReach.io, for example, gives a 14-day free trial. If you’re interested, click here to start your free trial.
Practical example
Let’s see how these SEP features can solve your challenges.
Say there is an SDR, Alex, who works as a consultant. One of his jobs is to reach out to potential clients and pitch his consulting services.
One of the major challenges that Alex faces in his daily activities is going back and forth between acquiring new clients and also delivering projects to current clients.
In this scenario, Alex can get the list of prospective clients using the prospect finder tool and start an automated campaign using a sales engagement platform.
With the help of the SEP, he doesn’t have to spend a lot of time crafting messages, sending emails, and following up every day. He just needs to keep track of where he spends a fraction of the time compared to earlier.
Another challenge he faces is communication delays and missing out on a few communications. Using a shared inbox, Alex and his team can check all the incoming messages, resulting in timely replies to all the sales and client queries.
With a shared inbox, even Alex’s team can keep a note of how they are performing. He will also get an understanding of what his sales pipeline looks like.
Using SEP, Alex does not need to worry about the latest industry trends. The tool will take care of it.
Final thoughts on outreach strategy to get consulting clients
Consultants can face challenges in getting consulting clients, but if you follow this strategy, most of your issues can be resolved.
To give an overview:
- By defining your ideal client persona, you can tailor your outreach efforts to resonate with your target audience.
- Utilize sales engagement platforms to automate repetitive tasks, personalize communication at scale, and gain valuable insights through detailed reporting.
Remember, consistency is key. By implementing these strategies and persistently following up with potential clients, you can get your consulting clients more than expected and significantly improve your chances of securing new business and growing your consulting practice.
