A Step-by-Step Guide Through The Consulting Process

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A Step-by-Step Guide Through The Consulting Process

Assuming you have an email list, you have some sort of inbound marketing, you’ve grown a specialty and an audience, now it’s time to get some consulting clients. What is the step-by step process for you to get consulting clients?

Landing Page

If you have an email list of 500 people, it’s not enormous but it’s enough to reach out to for you to start some one-on-one consulting. Create a landing page for people to apply to work with you. This is not not just a Contact Us page, but it will have extra information in there such as:

  • Their name
  • Email address
  • Website

You specifically want to look at how much are they bringing in right now per month and what their goal is. Most consultants are helping with some sort of financial planning and ways to grow the business. This information is vital to know so that you can determine whether its realistic for this person to jump into consulting.

Questions you will ask:

  • What’s your biggest obstacle to success?
  • Where are you stuck?
  • Honestly, why haven’t you grown?

Get behind the scenes so that before you even talk to someone you have a good snapshot of what’s going on in their life.

Send An Email Out To Your List

Start with questions, stories, concerns and pains. Your email could sound a little like this:

“Hey, have you been stuck in your business? When I first started I didn’t know up from down, left from right. I wasn’t sure where to invest my time and money, I wish I had a consultant when I first started out that could have helped me move faster in my private practice. I have a few spots that are opening up and I would love for you to apply and we can talk about whether or not you are a fit for consulting.”

This is basically a lead letter, it’s an email saying to people ‘Hey, why don’t you do consulting?’

Then when someone applies you can have it directed to an assistant that goes through those applications and does some phone calls. Your assistant can also get them scheduled in and ask some extra questions. Or the responses can come directly to you when you’re first starting out. You’ll want to get that person scheduled and you may even have them automatically directed to go to a Calendly link to have that that pre-consulting conversation.

Pre-Consulting Conversation

Summary

Start with a summary of what the call is going to be, so for me this is what it looks like:

“Hey *person’s name*, I’m so excited about this call today. I have all the information that my assistant went through with you and I have your application in front of me. I’ve checked out your website a little but I’m really interested in just hearing about your practice and hearing about your goals. My goal for this call is to give you great information whether or not we work together, and then at the end I’ll tell you where I think the best use of your time and money is. We have enough people that are applying for things, so we just want people that are in the right place, we don’t want to put you into consulting if you don’t need it. Does that sound good?”

Provide Honest Feedback

Once they say yes they feel like you’re on their side and you’re going to help them decide what’s best. Then do that, give them honest feedback. The problem with a lot of people is they they do these bait-and-switch kind of things that get you to buy in and then the price is so beyond anything that’s normal or natural. for you

Transition to suggesting the best model

Give awesome information and the transition to ‘Here’s what I think would be the best model for you’. If it was consulting I might say something like:

“If we meet together twice a month, for two months, at 30 minutes each time, we’re going to get some very focused attention and we’re going to know exactly what’s going on in your practice. We’ll be able to grow things quickly, I’ll be keeping track of it and our project management system that we use called Trello. I’ll walk you through how to use that so if you have ideas of things that you want to make sure we cover, when you’re maybe standing in line at the grocery store, you can just put that right into the app. In this way we’re not searching for things from text and email all over the place. When we’re doing our consulting we can just dive right in and get a lot done. I’ll also give you access to the private Facebook community and all of our digital products. If we were to add all that up this is how much it would be, but because it’s a package (and that’s where you’re lumping it all together) it’s going to cost be this much per month now.”

Janie masters taught me that if you say it’s going to be $700 per month over six months just pause at that moment, then you can say ‘Did that give you a heart attack?‘ and if they say it’s way past what they were thinking, then you can suggest other options that are a little cheaper.

Send PayPal link

You then want to send them a PayPal link or whatever processing system you use, make sure it’s recurring. In this way you’re not billing people or invoicing people.

Schedule sessions

Once the payment link is set it up, schedule all those sessions right away. Just so that it’s in the calendar and everybody knows what’s going on.

Start Onboarding

First call

After all of this is done then the onboarding starts. During this the first call that we’re going to do I teach them how to use Trello. If the individual I was working is called Jim, we’d set up Jim’s board like this, keeping it very simple:

  • One thing: there would  literally be one thing in this column, this is the next thing Jim needs to be doing. We would have decided this at the the end of every call, what they’re going to be working on.
  • Next thing: these are things that are next for Jim all the way up through years from now.
  • Questions: things they want to talk about with me
  • Tools and resources
  • Completed

Following calls

  • KPI’s: On each call we dive into their key performance indicators. What’s going to keep us focused on exactly what they’re trying to achieve? Make sure that you stay singularly focused on those KPIs. How do we measure this success? This is one of the first things we do when we start consulting after the Trello walk through.

How are you going to know that you’ve been successful in consulting? What is the amount of  time you want to spend away from your practice? How many clients and money do you need?  These are the the types of things that we have as KPIs.

What’s The Next Step

At the end of consulting we want to ask what’s the next step? is that them working on their own for a while? Is it moving into a mastermind group or membership community? When most people are done with consulting, they want to do something more with you. You slowly want to build that whole spectrum. So that when people are done with consulting they can take the next step.

For more resources on consulting and growing your practice click here, we would love to help you continue to grow your consulting and your private practice.

Joseph R. Sanok, MA, LLP, LPC, NCC

joe-sanok-private-practice-consultant-headshot-smaller-versionJoe Sanok is an ambitious results expert. He is a private practice business consultant and counselor that helps small businesses and counselors in private practice to increase revenue and have more fun! He helps owners with website design, vision, growth, and using their time to create income through being a private practice consultant. Joe was frustrated with his lack of business and marketing skills when he left graduate school. He loved helping people through counseling, but felt that often people couldn’t find him. Over the past few years he has grown his skills, income, and ability to lead others, while still maintaining an active private practice in Traverse City, MI. To link to Joe’s Google+ .