Building Authority: Step 1 to Consulting Sales Mastery

How to build authority in the eyes of your perfect clients - part 1 of 3 on mastering the art of selling consulting services

Jun 06, 2024

Many (most?) consultants find the idea of sales…distasteful. Awkward at best. Many are scared by the idea of asking for money or appearing to be pushy.

Let’s face it - we’re in our comfort zone helping people, solving problems, and convincing clients to take action. If you’re anxious about the idea of having sales responsibility, check out our earlier article Fearful of sales? Start by shifting your mindset…, before you dive into this one.

This month, TSC is focusing on sales and business development (BD) skills. This will be a practical look at what it means to be great at consulting BD, tackled in three parts over three weeks, because there are three phases to the sales cycle:

Building Authority: Being known for something specific and starting conversations with the people you want to help,
Consulting: Framing the issue for your client, co-creating an approach to solve it, and writing a compelling story (in the form of a proposal) that helps them make a decision,
Selling: Pitching your solution, handling objections, agreeing commercials, and getting the green light to kick-off the work.

We summarise these in the Honeycomb Consulting BD Pyramid:

This article is all about ‘Building Authority’. Part 2 will focus on the ‘Consulting’ phase, and Part 3 will be all about ‘Selling’ to close the deal and get that revenue booked.

Building Authority - what does it mean?

Building authority is about getting from a point where somebody doesn't know anything about you, what you do, or the problems you solve, to a point where they want to have a conversation with you about a potential project. This process takes time and involves several stages of pulling someone closer to you.

Stages of the client journey from first noticing you to them getting in touch.

Luk Smeyers, of The Visible Authority, analysed 200+ LinkedIn profiles of recent Partner promotions in boutique consulting firms. Of those, he could only identify six individuals who were clearly recognisable as authorities in their area of expertise.

Six, out of over two hundred. Not even 3%. The opportunity to stand out is huge.

Why LinkedIn? It’s the platform to build on for the majority of consultants, because that's where your potential buyers are already placing their attention.

So, how do you become one of the few who do it well?

On our consulting BD pyramid above, you'll see that within ‘Building Authority’ there are three main building blocks: habits, personal brand, and hooks. These each have an important role to play in this phase of the BD process.

Habits: you reap what you sow

You could start posting the most engaging, insightful content on LinkedIn today, and you are very unlikely to see anything tangible happen. Building authority is a long-term game, and you have to trust that actions taken now compound over time when you achieve habitual consistency.

Our MD, Deri, provides an example:

One of our main clients in 2024, that we're going to do 10+ separate pieces of work with, is someone I was introduced to back in 2019. We had a discussion about whether or not Honeycomb could support their business and, back then, the fit wasn't quite right. So, we connected on LinkedIn and that was that, for a while.

I’m fairly active and consistent on LinkedIn and take a strategic approach to being a visible authority. I had no direct contact with this client for 4 years, but they kept seeing me in their feed and I stayed top of mind.
In May 2023, they booked an intro call directly into my diary (we have a sign-up link on the website). At the time, it felt like it had come out of nowhere. But then I joined the dots back to that initial referral in 2019, and the consistency of effort on LinkedIn ever since our first meeting. From that intro call we had revenue in June 2023, a follow-on in September, and already this year ten separate engagements and discussion about a long-term partnership model.
An ‘overnight success’, from 4 years of consistently building authority on LinkedIn.

This isn’t dark magic. It’s just about doing a lot of little things, consistently, over time.

As you work through this article, keep track of the habits you could start to bring in. Try them out. Build systems to make them consistently non-negotiable. Reach a level of unconscious competence.

Then, add some new habits on top.

Had Deri not remained visible, it’s unlikely that his client would have thought to contact him four years down the line. The reality is, most of your prospects are not in the market to buy when they become aware of you. The goal is to be the first person they think of when they realise they have a need.

Which begs the question: what exactly is it you want them to think of you?

To learn about active vs. passive buyers, the customer buying stages, and non-linear buying journeys we highly recommend this insightful article by

Pierre

: 7 B2B Buying Trends to Understand in 2024

Personal brand: how others see you

Your personal brand is the process of creating and maintaining your public image. You want to build a reputation as an authority in your industry. Aim to differentiate yourself from the competition by demonstrating experience, expertise, and competency.

Your brand is a perception or emotion, maintained by somebody other than you, that describes the total experience of having a relationship with you.

You already have a personal brand with lots of different people. Your friends, family, colleagues, and clients. They all have some kind of perception about you, and attributes they associate with you. You may have cultivated that deliberately, or it could just be where you’ve ended up.

For the purposes of selling, you want to cultivate a strong personal brand as someone your ideal prospects see as valuable. To do that, you need to define two things - who they are and what you help them with.

A great way of encapsulating this with a Fishing Line (taken from David A. Fields’ The Irresistible Consultant's Guide To Winning Clients).

At Honeycomb, our fishing line is:

We help consulting team leaders develop exceptional teams.

Simple. Clear who we work with. Clear on the problem we solve.

Knowing your fishing line is your first step to guide the development of your personal brand. It tells you who you should be talking to, and what about.

Don’t be this guy - get a good fishing line.

Don’t have a fishing line yet? Stop right now and write something down. ‘I help (ideal customer) to (value proposition)’. Max 15 words. Refine it to something that feels good to you. Share it in the comments below and we’ll give you some feedback.

Hooks: pulling people closer

Hooks are anything that provide an opportunity for you to be visible to a prospect and help them step a little closer to you. Thinking back to the client journey we shared at the start, hooks are helping to pull your potential clients along that path.

Different types of Hook are appropriate for people at different stages of that journey, and you will hopefully have prospects at all stages. It makes sense therefore to cover a few bases.

Examples of Hooks include:
- posting on LinkedIn (or other channel),
- paid ads (search or social),
- research based, targeted outreach (account based marketing),
- regular emails to a ‘warm’ list,
- bulk cold emails,
- referrals,
- new blog or website content,
- newsletters,
- podcasts,
- e-books,
- webinars,
- networking events,
- even… a phone call!

There are so many that it's easy to get overwhelmed and spread yourself too thin. This is another reason building habits is so important.

To prioritise the right Hooks for you and your target clients we recommend looking at an impact versus effort matrix. This helps you identify the things that are going to give you the highest impact for a proportionate amount of effort.

A typical approach for consultants could include posting three to five times a week on LinkedIn, building a warm contacts list with a value-add newsletter, calling 5 people a week, and being present at industry events and conferences to meet people in person.

This is all about building relationships. It's not about selling, just about understanding your prospects, considering their challenges, giving them space to talk about what they care about, and trying to be useful to them. If you can do that consistently through the habits that you build, you will find that the sales conversations can easily follow.

We will delve into that one next time….

A final word from Deri on building authority:

My goal with Honeycomb is that no consulting team leader, initially in the UK, and then across Europe, and ultimately globally, thinks, ‘I need some help with developing my team’ without thinking, ‘I'll get in touch with Honeycomb and see how they can help’. That's the ultimate measure of being a true visible authority.