Every consultancy dreams of landing the perfect clients – the ones who value its expertise and invest a pretty penny in long-term engagements.
In reality, attracting and retaining ideal clients is often an uphill battle. It’s not only about standing out in a crowded market but also about being the right fit to the right prospects at the right time.
Yet, as challenging as consultancies may find the process of attracting and retaining ideal clients, the alternative is bleak. Targeting the wrong clients or failing to retain great ones inevitably leads to wasted resources, poor ROI, demotivated employees and high client churn.
Mastering client attraction and retention is as important to consultancy growth as Robert Downey Jr. to the success of Marvel.
And we are here to tell you that there is a surefire way to consistently attract and retain ideal clients.
In this guide, we outline actionable steps that you can implement right away to increase the volume of ideal clients in your pipeline.
In the immortal lyrics of Rodgers and Hammerstein sung by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, “Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.”
What makes an ideal target client? Here is a list of attributes to consider when pondering this question:
Throughout this exercise, make sure to check the alignment of this fictional character’s attributes with your consultancy’s expertise and capabilities. Your ideal client might be a CIO of a Fortune 500 company, but does your consultancy have the expertise and capabilities to execute a multi-regional cloud modernisation project that will take two years and involve 100+ stakeholders?
Sure, there is always the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach, but it’s unlikely to take your consultancy far. Mismatched expectations and difficulty in delivering results will eventually catch up with your business.
Mapping out the characteristics of the ideal target client will serve as the foundation for creating the right messaging.
There are examples of ideal target audience-centred messaging all around you if you pay attention. The “Red Bull Gives You Wings” messaging is all about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Nike aims to inspire its audience, urging them to put their fears and doubts aside and “Just Do It”.
What messaging will resonate with your audience? How do you inspire your ideal clients to take action?
Talk to your past clients who fit the criteria of an ideal target client. See what specifically convinced them to go with your consultancy, what pain points you helped them resolve, how that improved their business in the long term and so on. Take note of both larger themes that they touch upon and specific terminology that they use.
The goal of this analysis is to help you craft messages that catch the attention of your ideal target clients, make them curious to learn more and, ultimately, take some form of action – download a lead magnet, for example. Carefully designed messaging is the fuel that powers your client acquisition engine and consultancy growth.
Positioning is the process of designing and continuously strengthening your consultancy’s identity in the market. It’s a lens through which your ideal target audience will see your value proposition.
Strong positioning utilises everything at a consultancy’s disposal to create a distinct, memorable and appealing identity. It communicates not just what a consultancy does but how it does it, who it offers value to and what makes it unique.
Let’s look at some real-world examples.
Great Place To Work® specialises in helping employers quantify their corporate culture. They are positioned as a “global authority on workplace culture” – a bold claim that they back up with a set of custom methodologies.
Is this brand perceived as a global authority on workplace culture? Log into your LinkedIn account around the time when one of its Best Lists gets published and observe the flood of company and personal pages proudly displaying the Great Place To Work® badge.
Here is another example: Singularitee – a managed IT service provider and a client of ours. We helped them refine their positioning by telling prospects that they shouldn’t settle for the status quo. “Expect More From IT Support”.
This claim is supported by transparency in the outcomes that clients can expect to achieve:
There are a few different ways to go about carving out your niche. See what works best for your offering.
What makes positioning irresistible? What magic formula brings clients knocking?
Alright, now that you’ve determined your consultancy’s identity and ideal client persona, how do you connect the two?
Through strategic messaging that communicates your unique value.
Your value proposition is a statement that clearly articulates what transformation you offer, the tangible outcomes you can successfully achieve, and who would benefit the most.
Let’s get straight to the examples that illustrate the power of a value proposition.
Prospectus. is a strategy advisory firm. They positioned themselves as “the world’s only strategic certainty consultancy”. Their value proposition centres around their ability to deliver strategic and operational clarity within 90 days.
“90 days? How?” These are the questions that the prospects start wondering, prompting them to take action.
Another example is HubSpot. It offers software “that’s powerful, not overpowering” – a subtle statement with a massive appeal. It addresses the problem that so many businesses face when integrating new software in their tech stacks – they feel overwhelmed.
How do you communicate your value proposition? Loudly!
Also, directly and indirectly.
The spirit of your consultancy’s value proposition should underpin every outgoing piece of communication.
If value propositions are so mighty, why are so many consultancies failing to realise their full potential?
Most likely, it’s because the value propositions do not resonate.
Let’s look at the specific tactics that will help you reach and engage your ideal target clients.
You don’t need to start from scratch. Chances are that unless you’ve lived under a rock for the last 10 years, you already have connections and avenues to get your message out there.
You can’t rely solely on referrals to fuel your client acquisition. You want to be discoverable by prospects.
Remember the conversations you’ve had with your past clients to understand what made them pick your consultancy? Well, let’s hope you were taking notes and came out with a list of relevant themes and topics. This will be the foundation of your content strategy – blog articles, lead magnets, social media posts, guest posts, podcast episodes, webinars, etc.
Create content regularly, post thoughtfully and promote diligently.
Successful marketing combines inbound and outbound strategies. It’s allbound.
Don’t go down the rabbit hole though, downloading lists from Zoominfo and launching cold email campaigns that will sink your email domain’s reputation. You are better than that.
Instead, focus on high-value outreach. Initiate meaningful conversations with prospects. Send an insightful article to a relevant contact you connected with on LinkedIn. Drop a message with a summary of the research your consultancy conducted to a past client.
It’s quality over quantity!
And remember: marketing tactics that lack the foundation of clearly defined positioning are a waste of time. To be effective, marketing efforts need to be focused. They need to utilise a language that appeals to a very specific segment. Without such precision, you may as well go fishing by throwing pebbles in an ocean.
The next step is to review your sales pipeline to make sure it doesn’t hinder your client acquisition efforts. Audit your sales process for hidden flaws. You may find issues that are costing you clients or bottlenecks that unnecessarily lengthen the sales cycle.
Be scientific about it: collect data, analyse it, identify bugs, design fixes, test the new approach and measure the results.
A LAPS dashboard is an effective way to track leads, appointments, proposals and consultancy sales:
Based on these insights, design and implement fixes. These fixes might be incremental yet make a world of a difference.
For instance, are you receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback on your lead magnet but not enough people download it in the first place? Try updating your long form with progressive profiling.
Other examples of simple tweaks that can help you improve lead qualification and increase conversion rates:
In most cases, consultancies don’t need to reinvent the wheel. They already have systems in place that will enable them to scale their business. It’s just a matter of optimising them.
In the age of limitless options, client loyalty is a privilege. It needs to be earned and continuously reinforced.
Client experience is all-encompassing. Your consultancy is being evaluated by clients based on the results it can achieve, how it is perceived in the market, how well your consultants understand specific pain points and needs, how responsive the consultancy is to the client’s requests and so on.
There are very few instances where these facets of client experience don’t matter because clients have no other choice.
Clients want to feel important, heard and appreciated.
Client experience is not a one-and-done exercise. It’s a collection of small and large interactions.
At the centre of your relationships with clients is value delivery. It’s what your clients pay for. You should be able to demonstrate how your consultancy can deliver value regularly.
The second foundation of successful client engagement is trust. No long-term relationship can survive without it. It’s true in our personal lives, and it’s true in business.
Trust is earned through honesty, transparency and accountability. Celebrate successes and own up to mistakes. Encourage your clients to be open about their experience with your consultancy. Don’t be afraid to point out when roadblocks are the direct result of the client’s lack of commitment (in a tactful manner, obviously).
“Are you mad? We can’t raise prices! We risk losing our clients.”
If you find yourself thinking that way, you are probably experiencing one of two problems:
There are many reasons consultancies may want to increase their prices over time:
Price renegotiations are an opportunity for sustainable client retention and consultancy growth. It’s a chance to strengthen relationships with some clients by engaging in a meaningful discussion about the value your consultancy delivers. It’s also an opportunity to free up space in your pipeline for ideal clients by letting non-ideal clients drop off as a result of a price increase.
Client retention is vital to maintaining a healthy pipeline of work and revenue. However, you need new clients to grow.
Strive to find a balance between the two without compromising on the quality of either. Create a system to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. For example:
Periodically assess your services to make sure they still align with your ideal clients’ needs. Market conditions can change overnight. You don’t want your consultancy to be left in the dust of irrelevancy.
At the same time, pay attention to the changing needs of clients to identify service evolution opportunities.
As you scale your business, audit your positioning and value proposition. Are you diluting either by launching a new service? Should you pivot your positioning now that your services offer greater value? Stay on top of these critical business parameters.
Finally, measure your performance. Metrics like retention rates, customer lifetime value and net promoter score will help you assess your clients’ satisfaction. Metrics like conversion rates, tolerable cost per acquisition and returning visitor sessions will give you an idea of how effective your client acquisition strategies are.
Positioning and differentiation are not feel-good concepts taught in marketing classes. They are frameworks that can make or break a business.
Without strong positioning, prospects will not understand what your brand is about. They will not relate to your messaging.
Without differentiation, you will be just one of the many consultancies pushing the same uninspiring messages.
Be different, bold, authentic and precise about the value your consultancy can deliver to ensure long-term client attraction and retention.
And if you want to audit your positioning, download our checklist to ensure it wins both mindshare and market share. Download: The 11-step positioning template for "Boring" consultancies.