PoSITIoN FoR gRoWTH: A coNVERSIoN-FocUSEd CoNSULTANcY gRoWTH STRATEgY

Cultivating consultancy growth is easy. You design the best website, deliver the best pitch, provide the best service, and all the best clients come flocking to your doorstep.

Right? Well, yes and no.

Yes, getting all these things right will pave your way to success. But who is defining what ‘the best’ means? Your board of directors? Your current clients? Your neighbour who ran a consultancy in the 90s? (Sorry, Keith).

Achieving the sustainable growth every consultancy dreams of demands a strategic approach, ensuring every step of your customer journey is tailored to your ideal customer, delivering ‘the best’ experience based on their needs.

That means adopting a conversion-focused growth strategy designed to truly set your consultancy apart.

If you want to stop treading water and start building a high-converting, predictable pipeline, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll walk you through how to create and implement a conversion-focused growth strategy that can significantly elevate your consultancy’s growth.

What is a growth strategy?

Every consultancy wants to grow. The good news? There are a million different ways to achieve this growth. The bad news? You need to choose the right course of action for your consultancy based on its services, ideal customer’s needs and competitive challenges.

This is why it’s crucial you have a great growth strategy that lays out the route you need to take to get from point A (where you are now) to point Z (your growth goals).

In the context of consulting, a good growth strategy outlines the steps needed to achieve the desired level of growth, such as increasing conversions, market share or profitability by optimising the consultancy’s business practices, differentiating its offering from the competition, improving customer acquisition and more — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

There are several different types of growth strategies you can adopt to drive organic business growth, including:

1. Market penetration, which aims to increase a consultancy's market share in an existing market.
2. Market development, which helps consultancies enter new markets or target new customer segments.
3. Product development, which focuses on improving a consultancy’s current offering.
4. Diversification, which involves launching new services that fill a previously unmet need in a new market.

Whether you intend to drive growth by increasing market penetration or achieving diversification, you’ll follow the same process for building your growth strategy. 

So, what’s a conversion-focused growth strategy?

We can answer this question in fewer than 10 words: it’s a growth strategy that focuses on driving conversions. Ta-da!

OK, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. But before we get into the meat of the matter, let’s look at what ‘conversions’ mean in the context of consulting.

A ‘conversion’ is when the recipient of your marketing message responds to your call to action. In other words, they do what you want them to do, at the many and varied stages of the buyer journey. This could mean that they:

• Submit an email enquiry
• Book a consultation
• Request a proposal
• Sign a contract

So, a conversion-focused growth strategy aims to increase the number of conversions a consultancy sees — in particular, the percentage of prospects that convert into paying clients.

The core elements of a conversion-focused strategy

Any strategy is only as strong as its foundations. Building a robust growth strategy that’ll send your conversions through the roof means getting these key elements down pat.

Audience targeting and segmentation

We assume you’ve heard the saying "When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one" before. And if you haven’t, you’ve clearly been sleeping on our articles!

Audience targeting and segmentation are essential to creating impactful campaigns and experiences that drive conversions. By dividing your audience into smaller, more easily defined segments based on their challenges, categories, behaviours and more, you can easily target each segment with highly targeted, highly relevant messaging — increasing the likelihood they’ll convert.

Let me share an example from back in my days of running Influence Agents (an inbound marketing consultancy). We massively improved the quality and volume of legitimate leads being generated for one campaign. Our “Social Media Strategy Template” had a huge number of downloads and form submissions, adding a good many new contacts to our CRM. The trouble was almost 95% of them were competing marketing professionals, agencies, and curious students — not exactly the money-waving prospects we were seeking!

A simple tweak of focus allowed us to tap into a rich vein of specific prospects that we knew offered us opportunity and scale; Channel Sales Managers. We had a big focus on technology clients and knew that the big vendors had the ear of many tech consultancies via their channel partner programmes. By retiring our social media template offer and, in its place, launching the ‘Channel Sales Manager’s Guide to Improving Partner Marketing Performance’ (which aligned with a major challenge faced by this persona), we were able to laser-focus our approach and filter out those who offered us little-to-no value. Specificity sells!

Value proposition and positioning

How your consultancy is positioned = how prospects perceive its value. We like to think of positioning as a lens through which they see your value proposition. If the lens is focused, they’ll see your value and want to learn more. But if the lens is foggy… Let’s just say they won’t be picking up what you’re putting down.

Getting your positioning right is all about strategically aligning your services, marketing messages and sales approach with your ideal customers’ needs, and making converting a no-brainer.

Marketing and sales alignment

Your marketing team is responsible for bringing in leads, but what happens once they hand the lead over to the sales team?

Marketing and sales can often be considered two islands, with alignment acting as the bridge between these functions. When there is a lack of alignment, it looks a bit like this: leads start off on sunshine-filled Marketing Island, where they are promised the world and expect this positive experience to continue throughout their journey. However, as they cross the rickety rope bridge to Sales Island, they find themselves in a world of frustration and unmet expectations.

Alignment, on the other hand, ensures that leads receive the same positive experience on both islands, creating a seamless customer journey from first contact to offboarding, and can be achieved through:

• Constant communication between the two teams
• Consistent messaging delivered at every touchpoint
• Sharing of insights and data
• Creating a smooth handoff between the functions

The goal here is to reduce friction and provide the best customer experience possible, which will significantly increase your chances of converting a lead into a loyal client!

Why you need a tailored growth strategy

We know that building a conversion-focused growth strategy offers many benefits, from increasing consultancy revenue to expanding market share. But not all growth strategies are created equal.

If your goal is differentiation, following the crowd is going to get you nowhere, so you can’t treat developing a growth strategy as an out-of-the-box solution to your growth challenges.

The best practice is to tailor your strategy based on your consultancy’s unique value proposition, services and ideal customer, ensuring your action points are designed to incrementally work towards your specific growth goals. Put simply, creating a tailored growth strategy will:

• Provide a unique path to follow with clear objectives
• Give you a competitive edge by making it easy (or easier) to outperform competitors
• Enhance the client experience
• Support marketing-sales alignment by providing a common goal to work towards
• Create long-term sustainable consulting growth!

How to craft your consultancy’s growth strategy

Finally, the reason we’re all here! To get started with crafting your very own consultancy growth strategy designed to win the eyeballs (and investment) of your ideal client, follow these three simple steps.

Set clear objectives and goals

Before you do anything else, you need to set clear objectives for your strategy and define how you’ll measure your success. Failing to do so will limit your ability to optimise your approach later down the road, leading you right back to the drawing board.

• SMART goals. Setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) is a no-brainer, naturally. But we suggest going a step further, selecting growth-focused goals that’ll keep your eye on the prize. For example, a consultancy may say their goal is to ‘Increase client acquisition by 20% within six months through targeted marketing campaigns.’
• KPIs. Clear, quantifiable KPIs will help you effectively measure your strategy’s success and track your progress towards your SMART goals. We’ll talk more about selecting your performance metrics later…
  
  

Conduct market research and analysis

You need to understand where you stand in the market right now — and what opportunities you can potentially leverage in the future to achieve your growth objectives. Get started with:

• Market gap analysis. Here’s where you can begin identifying opportunities to differentiate your service offerings. Market gap analysis helps reveal unmet customer needs, emerging trends and market gaps that your competitors have left open for the taking.
• Target audience research. Any good strategy is highly targeted, but you can’t tailor your messaging or approach to a specific segment if you don’t understand its pain points, challenges and aspirations.
• Competitor analysis. If you want to feel like a real-life spy and uncover opportunities to improve your consultancy’s positioning, it’s time to start looking at what your competitors are up to. Performing a SWOT analysis will help you uncover their strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities to leverage and threats you can exploit.
  
  

Develop a unique value proposition

Talking about value propositions is one of our all-time favourite hobbies at Total Growth Ownership. We believe, nay, we know, that having a clear and unique value proposition is the secret to driving high conversions because it’s the most effective way to position your consultancy’s services as the answer to your ideal client’s problems.

Your value proposition focuses on communicating what makes your consultancy unique through targeted messaging, speaking directly to the needs of the market and ensuring your ideal client feels heard and understood, increasing their chances of converting.

For more advice on developing your unique value proposition, check out our in-depth guide.

How to implement your growth strategy

Now you’ve got your growth strategy locked and loaded, it’s time to launch. Here’s how.

Build an effective marketing plan

Before you can begin engaging with prospects, you need to establish your marketing plan. To save you from having to research the myriad of marketing strategies available online, we’ve compiled five effective marketing strategies for growth to leverage:

• Content marketing. Content is king when it comes to growth strategy in marketing. We’re sure we’ll still be saying this when we’re sitting in rocking chairs in a care home. Your content marketing strategy is essential for positioning your consultancy as a thought leader in its niche; through blogs, whitepapers and webinars, you can address your dream clients’ pain points and encourage conversion.
• SEO and PPC. Want to drive traffic to your website? Healthy SEO makes sure your site comes up when prospects search for relevant keywords, while PPC campaigns are great for driving qualified leads.
• Social media. No, we don’t mean TikTok. We’re talking about the stronghold for B2B networking and marketing: LinkedIn. LinkedIn outreach should be your go-to strategy for communicating with decision-makers in your market. We recommend posting thought-leadership content here and using Smart Links in your posts and messages, which allow you to track who clicks on your content.
• Email marketing. A strong email list is the B2B marketing equivalent of liquid gold. Email marketing is a fantastic way to connect with your prospects, as it allows you to communicate your message directly to your audience without pesky algorithms getting in the way. Make the most of this channel with regular newsletter-style emails that share business updates and thought leadership content.

Craft unique, powerful messaging

With unique, compelling messaging supporting your marketing growth strategy, your proposition will stand out among the countless copycat consultancies. You know you’ve got strong messaging on your hands when it:

• Uses a strong, clear voice that reflects the consultancy’s positioning
• Speaks to your ideal client’s pain points 
• Presents your consultancy’s methodology as the path to solving these issues
• Uses vivid imagery to make the intangible tangible
• Proves ROI with case studies, testimonials and data
• Leaves room for personalised communication, which enhances engagement by making your efforts feel one-to-one, even if they’re one-to-many

Your messaging should also be consistent, whether you’re communicating with potential clients via email, social media or carrier pigeon. This will help reinforce your consultancy's identity and ensure that all prospects receive a compelling experience at every point in their journey.

Strengthen your sales strategies

While your marketing will attract prospects like moths to a flame, your sales team has the tough job of getting them over the line.

Optimising your sales funnel is all about streamlining each stage of the sales process and reducing friction, guiding potential clients smoothly from discovery to decision-making.

• Develop a consultative sales approach. By leaning on the ideal client needs and challenges you identified earlier, you can do away with generic pitches and deliver tailored solutions, building trust while demonstrating value.
• Build a client acquisition engine. Designed to help you connect with potential clients, a good client acquisition engine should leverage your unique offer and complement it with a high-converting customer journey. 
• Incorporate a CRM. Implementing a Customer Relationship Manager like HubSpot is a must if you want to scale your consultancy to the next level. They’re amazing for maintaining detailed records of customer interactions, preferences and history — all the details your sales team need to provide a next-level experience — as well as automating nurture flows, creating tailored campaigns and enhancing data management.
  
  

Adopt client retention strategies

Don’t worry, we’re not forgetting about the fantastic clients you already have on your books! A great retention strategy will help you maintain existing relationships and may even help you upsell, driving further strategic growth and profitability. Here are three great strategies to try today:

• Deliver next-level client experiences by consistently exceeding expectations with timely delivery, proactive communication and great consulting services
• Check-in regularly with high-value clients. Taking the time to understand and respond to their changing needs will foster loyalty.
• Adopt upselling and cross-selling techniques to maximise revenue. When you know your clients’ businesses inside out, you may identify additional needs — which you’re best placed to address.

How to measure and optimise your strategy

What’s all this work worth if you don’t measure it? Very little, actually, as you can’t optimise your strategy based on your learnings.

Adopting continuous improvement practices will support you in refining your processes, strategies and systems based on real-time performance data, leading to higher conversion rates and sustainable growth for your consultancy.

Track performance metrics

It’s important to note that tracking the success of a conversion-focused growth strategy looks a little different to traditional marketing techniques. But keeping an eye on metrics is just as important.

Think of these five metrics as the dashboard on your electric car, helping you understand how efficiently you’re using power — or your marketing budget — and your likelihood of reaching your destination with what you’ve got in the tank.

1. Conversion rate. The percentage of leads who complete the desired action (which we outlined above).
2. Lead-to-client conversion rate. The percentage of leads that convert into paying clients. This measures how effective your sales process is.
3. Cost-per-acquisition. How much hiring a new client costs your consultancy on average. A low number indicates an effective strategy; a high number spells trouble.
4. Time to convert. The average amount of time it takes for a lead to contact your agency and convert into a paying client. Again, the lower the number, the better!
5. Customer lifetime value. How much you can expect to earn from a client while it’s partnered with your consultancy. This will help your team understand which clients to invest time and attention into acquiring and retaining.

By keeping an eye on these metrics, you can steer your consultancy toward greater success with a fine-tuned strategy.

Experiment with A/B testing

If you want to achieve sustainable market growth, you need to iterate on your strategy. One way to continually optimise your conversion processes is with ongoing A/B testing.

A/B testing pits two variants of a message or design against each other, allowing marketers to measure how different wording, layouts, colours and CTAs impact conversion potential, making it easy to improve marketing efforts based on the results.

Inform continuous improvement with monitoring tools

Stop faffing around with manual monitoring processes — or worse, not monitoring your progress at all. Using purpose-built tools and software like Google Analytics, CRM systems and automation platforms to collect, measure and report on your data in real-time is like having a satnav for your business decisions.

With customer data, client feedback and testing results available at a glance, it becomes so much easier to identify the actionable insights you need to make iterative adjustments to your strategies and work towards your goals.

Next steps for consultancy leaders

Whew — that’s a lot of information to take in! Here’s a quick recap of the steps you can take to position your consultancy for growth:

• Decide on your objectives and goals. Make your progress measurable with SMART goals and clear, quantifiable KPIs.

• Check out the market landscape. Through market gap analysis, target audience research, and competitor analysis, you’ll get a sense of the terrain and collect the information needed to inform your positioning.

• Positioning, positioning, positioning. A unique value proposition will help you stand out from your competitors and increase the chances of your dream clients converting.

• Build an effective marketing plan. Figure out how to best engage with your prospects using a blend of content, SEO, PPC, social media and email marketing. Remember, you can create your marketing plan in-house or work with a specialist freelancer or agency.

• Craft your messaging. If you want to stand out among your competitors, you’ve got to nail your messaging (A.K.A., how you talk to your clients).

• Supercharge those sales (and retention) strategies. Your sales strategies will make or break your conversions. Get those perfected ahead of time, and the new deals will come streaming in.

• Don’t forget to measure and learn! Continually review your KPIs and success data using analysis tools, leaning on this information to inform continuous improvement.

And don’t forget to return to this article whenever you need a reminder of the power of implementing a conversion-focused growth strategy.

Ready to grow?

All that’s left to do now is put your plan into action. Get started on your consultancy growth journey with these handy tools and insightful resources:

• Free training: How to break through any consultancy growth ceiling. Our founder, Matt Hodkinson, teaches you how to guarantee a consistent and predictable flow of new clients in 17 minutes.
• 60 ways to market your consultancy guide. AKA, 60 easy marketing wins, from quick tricks to actionable conversion strategies, served up on a shiny gold platter. For FREE.
• The MEHscapology book. In this positioning page-turner, we give you a step-by-step formula for transforming your market presence and core business language. You’ll learn the true cost of bad positioning, the importance of differentiation and how language drives audience perception.