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.
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:
Whether you intend to drive growth by increasing market penetration or achieving diversification, you’ll follow the same process for building your 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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
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:
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!
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
Now you’ve got your growth strategy locked and loaded, it’s time to launch. Here’s how.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
By keeping an eye on these metrics, you can steer your consultancy toward greater success with a fine-tuned strategy.
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.
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.
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:
And don’t forget to return to this article whenever you need a reminder of the power of implementing a conversion-focused growth strategy.
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: