The Revenue Rollercoaster
Why sustainable growth depends on consultants doing more than just consulting
We are fortunate to welcome guest author Martin J Williams — a consulting firm growth advisor who helps firm leaders build their strategic growth engine. Martin has recently launched the Executive Marketing Strategy Masterclass, consolidating his decades of experience into an accessible, self-paced course for consulting firm leaders who want to build a marketing engine that can be relied on. He’s also given us the best of his insight and advice in this exclusive article…
Ask any consulting firm leader about marketing and sales and the response is typically the same:
“We don’t want to market and sell. We just want people to come and buy.”
That’s understandable — consultants spend many more than 10,000 hours honing their craft. They’re experts at helping clients overcome their most pressing challenges.
However, when it comes to generating leads, many firms assume great work is enough. They expect their reputation to do the heavy lifting — that clients will queue up based on expertise alone. But that’s rarely the case.
To consistently and predictably attract new business, you need more than delivery — you need visibility. And that means marketing. Prospective clients must first know your firm exists. They need to understand exactly who you help, and what problems you solve.
It’s not enough to chase the ‘Now’ buyers
Consulting firms often focus their marketing on those people ready to buy right now. The result is self-centred messaging — their services, team bios, and firm history — while saying little about who they help or what problems they solve.
To make matters worse, research by Ehrenberg Bass Institute for Marketing Science determined that:
“Only 20% of business buyers are ‘in the market’ over the course of an entire year; something like 5% in a quarter – or put another way, 95% aren’t in the market.”
So if you only market to prospects who are ready to buy today — those ‘in-market’ — then you’re choosing to ignore 95% of your potential market.
But it gets worse. Gartner determined that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time meeting with potential suppliers. When comparing multiple suppliers, that time shrinks substantially per supplier. Furthermore, research from Bain & Company revealed that many clients compile their list of potential suppliers well before making any direct contact.
The impact of this is significant. If you aren’t raising you firm’s profile with the 95% not currently ‘in-market’, then your lead generation efforts will remain limited to repeat business, referrals, and the perpetual farming of founders’ networks.
These methods — great as they can be — are passive, unpredictable, and they don’t scale. This risks growth stalling, and a free ticket on the revenue rollercoaster!
Why outsourcing doesn’t work
Getting known and focusing efforts on the ninety-five percenters can sound like a lot of work. The instinct of many is to seek to outsource the problem. But, as the Gandalf of business, Tom Peters, allegedly said:
“You should never outsource a problem.”
There are two core issues here, the first of which lies with the marketing industry itself — full of tacticians who specialise in execution. Web developers, ad agencies, automation experts: they’re easy to find and many are good. But few understand strategy or know when a firm is truly ready to market.
The second issue is with outsourcing your thinking. Even just saying that highlights the flaw. How can you expect someone else to be your thought leader?
It’s your consultants that are working with clients. They have an intimate understanding of client problems, and how to overcome them. They understand the intricacies, the obstacles, and the myriad ways that work best in each unique situation.
This knowledge and expertise is what you must capture in your content marketing and thought leadership. You can’t simply outsource this.
Marketing is a team sport — consultants must be on the field
The co-founder of HP, David Packard, said:
“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”
This is never more so than in the context of consulting. The marketer or marketing team in your firm should be the ones that understand how to operate the marketing engine. The fuel they need is the knowledge and expertise that rests with the consultants.
However, consultants are experts in producing content for clients to consume. This content — be it a report or a presentation, or even a talk — generally focuses on gaining consensus. Delivered to an audience that expects it, and from whom feedback is usually positive.
Contrast that to marketing, where good content and thought leadership seeks to take a stand. It might be an unpopular opinion. It might not be wanted, and it might result in feedback that isn’t especially positive. Most consultants aren’t prepared for this experience. This is why they need to be trained in how to be an effective thought leader.
If culture eats strategy for breakfast, it starves marketing by lunch
Some firms are fortunate. They understand they can’t grow on referrals and repeat business alone, and that they must raise their profile with prospective clients. Especially those not currently in market. These firms resist the temptation to outsource their thinking. They might even go so far as to train their consultants as thought leaders.
But there’s one final — and often overlooked — challenge, and that is culture. As Peter Drucker said:
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast!”
Marketing through thought leadership is the backbone of any firm that sells the intangible expertise of its people. And content marketing is the set of skills and technologies that enable marketers to get that thought leadership out into the market.
For the marketing engine to keep running and delivering, it needs constant fuel. It needs input from the consultants. And never is this more at risk than when a big engagement lands.
Ironically, whilst marketing helps land big engagements, sales success often causes marketing to stall. Without cultural embedding, marketing is treated as a short-term fix. Once big engagements land, marketing gets pushed into the long grass, losing all momentum.
In firms where marketing isn’t embedded in the culture, consultants go all hands to the pump to focus on delivering the engagement. These firms fail to ring-fence time from consultants to support continued thought leadership and content creation.
For these firms the danger is a return to chasing referrals and repeat business, with all the earlier marketing gains undone.
Great delivery earns trust. Great marketing turns it into attention
Engagement delivery builds trust, proves capability, and fuels the stories worth telling. But unless that expertise is captured, packaged, and shared deliberately, it remains hidden.
Sustainable growth comes when firms stop treating marketing as a separate function and start seeing it as the natural extension of their delivery expertise. That shift doesn’t happen through delegation alone. You can absolutely get support in shaping your marketing strategy, but no one else can think on behalf of your firm.
Marketing must be embedded in the culture of the firm. That means creating the space for consultants to contribute, respecting marketing as a discipline, and recognising that visibility is a shared responsibility.
Only once the strategy is clear and the culture aligned does outsourcing specific tactics or execution make sense.
That’s when thought leadership becomes possible. That’s when visibility grows. And that’s when the right clients start to find you, not by chance, but by design.
What next?
Marketing has a unique problem in that everyone thinks they’re an expert!
The marketing industry also has a problem — and that is the dearth of strategy expertise. Far too much money gets wasted on agencies and marketing services because consulting firms have gone too soon. They’ve invested in tactics and channels before they’ve defined a winning strategy.
As Sun Tzu, military strategist in ancient China, said:
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.
Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
To help firms avoid these mistakes and stop wasting time and money on the wrong marketing, I’ve created a free Marketing Maturity Assessment. It’s a quick self-assessment that provides tailored insight into where your firm stands, and what to focus on next.
And if you’re a consulting leader who wants to get a firm grip on marketing strategy, take a look at the Executive Marketing Strategy Masterclass.
Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant, and thank you to Martin for contributing this article. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive future articles and webinar recordings direct to your inbox.
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