Consulting is expected to generate over $70 billion in revenue in the next few years. If you have skills that you know how to scale, you can easily get a nice chunk of that revenue share.
Thousands of businesses are struggling to grow, failing to overcome plateaus, and feeling like they’re stuck “keeping the business afloat.” In short, there’s a huge demand for consulting.
Consulting is an umbrella term. You have plenty of opportunities to niche down and find a consulting field best suited for your skillsets.
Finding success in consulting means knowing how to market yourself and finding prospects that benefit most from your services. We’re here to show you how to get started.
What is Consulting?
Consulting is the culmination of experience, expertise, and talent. Think of consultants as business coaches. They teach business owners, individuals, or entire companies how to grow and become more efficient at what they do best.
Consultants offer feedback, give advice, diagnose underlying issues, help build strategies, and even oversee how strategies are implemented. They look beyond the obvious and make connections business owners could miss.
That’s because consultants look at things from an unbiased perspective. Once they’ve identified an issue, they help businesses take the initiative and be confident in how to solve it. How consultants do their work depends entirely on the niche and type of consulting they’re in.
Types of Consulting To Niche Down Into
You can be a consultant in any field. Some offer career consulting to higher management, and others do sales or operations consulting. Here are some of the most popular consulting specializations you can niche down into:
Sales Consulting
Sales consulting means coaching a sales team or sales director. Your goal is to help businesses improve sales performance from strategy to execution. Tasks include analyzing a business’s current sales approach, identifying weak spots, and offering solutions to boost results.
This could involve anything from refining their sales process and training sales teams to developing targeted marketing campaigns and implementing new technologies.
Marketing Consulting
Marketing and brand development can be tricky, even for experienced professionals and entrepreneurs. They might have good products, but without an identity, audiences won’t have something to latch onto. That’s where marketing consultants come in.
Marketing consultants guide businesses through trends, customer behaviors, and strategies for reaching their target audience. They're not just fixated on short-term gains; they're building sustainable and scalable strategies for long-term growth.
If you want a career as a marketing consultant, you need to understand how to refine a brand’s messaging, create engaging campaigns around that messaging, and build an online presence.
Management Consulting
Many businesses make the mistake of scaling too fast. As businesses grow, operations become more complex. Management consultants simplify this complexity.
Being a management consultant means enhancing a company’s efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability. For example, management consultants help businesses develop lead management strategies, set up CRMs, or lower customer acquisition costs.
Career Consulting
Career consulting is more than helping individuals advance their positions. Businesses also hire career consultants to foster and retain top talents. Career consultants perform career assessments, help write resumes, and prepare for interviews.
To be a career consultant, you need to have a knack for identifying potential in an individual. It's a rewarding field where you can make a real difference in people's lives and contribute to the success of organizations.
Go-to-Market Consulting
Launching new products is always a nerve-wracking experience. It’s the “make-or-break” moment for a lot of businesses, especially start-ups. Businesses should always take the time to craft a solid go-to-market strategy.
But developing a product and launching it to a new market are two entirely different tasks. Each is important in its own right. Go-to-market consultants help with product roll-outs from identifying the best ways to penetrate the market to marketing operation executions.
5 Step Plan to Start Any Consulting Business
There are dozens more consulting specializations you can niche down to. But when it comes to starting a consulting business, the fundamentals stay the same. Here is a simple 5-step plan on how you can start your own consulting business.
Assess Your Skillsets and Niche Down
The first step to starting a consulting business is to identify your area of expertise. Are you a sales rockstar? Do you have experience helping companies scale? Have you found success with outbound marketing?
When possible, try to niche down. In most cases, finding a niche means higher demand and lower competition. For example, you could be great at outbound sales—specifically with cold email marketing.
So, instead of being a general sales consultant, you could be an outbound campaign consultant who helps businesses set up the right infrastructure for cold email marketing and how to best align unique selling propositions to prospect needs.
Develop Your Brand and Offering
Before reaching out to potential prospects on LinkedIn, you need to develop your brand identity and the structure of your services. Your offer should be laid out in a way that’s clear to clients, attainable, and easy to follow through with.
Be as specific as possible about your offer and the costs involved. You don’t want a situation in which the client says, “I thought you were also going to help with . . .”
Don’t make the mistake of taking on clients you know aren’t a good fit for you, just for the sake of getting a client. Remember, your reputation and success rate are tied to your branding.
Evaluate all the potential risks of every client, project, or task. If clients have unrealistic expectations or if you can’t handle their needs, turn them down.
Invest in the Right Tools and Technologies
Consultants need tools for prospecting, outreach, and managing leads and clients. Instantly provides all three. No need to switch between apps, learn different tech, and move around data.
With Instantly CRM, you get centralized communication, automated follow-ups, personalized outreach, sales pipeline management, and AI-powered insights. We’ll get to these later.
If you want to find businesses that fit your ideal customer profile, you can use Instantly B2B Lead Finder. This cuts down prospecting from hours to minutes thanks to advanced filters.
Once you’re happy with your lead list, you can directly add them to a new or existing email campaign. Then, you can use Instantly’s AI prompts to create personalized emails for each lead.
Legalize Your Consulting Business
To kickstart your consulting business, you'll need to sort out the legal side of things. First up, decide on the best structure for your business—are you going solo, partnering up, or forming a corporation? Each has its own legal and tax rules, so choose carefully.
Next, register your business name and get a general business license. Depending on your consulting specialty, you might also need specific permits or professional licenses. Make sure you're registered with the tax authorities and have the right insurance coverage.
Finally, create a standard consulting agreement that outlines what you'll do, how much you'll charge, and the scope of your services. The paperwork you'll need can vary depending on your business structure. It's always a smart move to chat with a lawyer or business advisor to make sure you're doing everything by the book.
Market Your Consulting Business
You've got the skills, the experience, and the drive – now it's time to get the word out! Marketing your consulting business is all about showcasing your expertise and building trust with potential clients. Here are a few strategies to get you started:
- Craft a Killer Website: Your website is a 24/7 lead generator. Articulate your services, showcase your expertise, and include testimonials from happy clients.
- Content is King: Share your knowledge through blog posts, articles, and social media content. This establishes you as a thought leader and attracts potential clients.
- Network Like a Pro: Attend industry events, join online communities, and connect with potential clients on LinkedIn. Building relationships is key in consulting.
- Leverage Referrals: Happy clients are your best advocates. Encourage them to refer you to their network and offer incentives for successful referrals.
- Paid Advertising: Consider targeted online advertising to reach specific demographics or industries.
How to Find Clients as a Consultant With Instantly
There are dozens of ways to market your consulting business. But, if you want a direct, scalable, and automatable way to find clients—nothing beats cold email marketing.
Instantly.ai knows what it takes to make cold email marketing work. Here’s how you find consulting clients using Instantly.ai.
Use B2B Lead Finder to Zero In On The Perfect Customers
Finding the right leads takes a lot of time. If you’re a solo consultant handling multiple clients or projects, you might not have the luxury of spending hours on prospecting.
With Instantly B2B Lead Finder, you can use advanced filters to find the perfect customers for your service. Let’s say you’re a career consultant.
You can use Lead Finder to search for middle-management leads. Chances are, they’re looking for ways to advance to the executive or senior management level.
Lead Finder also has the evergreen feature. This saves search preferences for future campaigns and can be set to automatically add leads to campaigns. Pipelines will never run dry.
Add Leads Instantly and Run Personalized Cold Email Campaigns
After creating a lead list, you can immediately add them to your Instantly campaigns. Instantly automatically removes any duplicates so campaigns always have fresh leads.
Once leads are added to a campaign, you can start creating your sequences. These are your first cold emails and follow-ups. If you’re a complete beginner, you can also use the AI Sequence Generator.
Instantly will ask you to enter key information about your offer, case studies, number of emails, and target audience. Then, it will create an entire automated email sequence complete with variables for personalization and spintax.
If you want to get more personalized, use Instantly AI prompts to add columns to your lead list. These columns can be used for further personalization in your cold emails.
For example, you can use a prompt that creates pain points based on the company description. So, instead of a generic {{first name}} variable, you can add a unique {{pain point}} variable for each lead in your list.
Manage Leads and Clients With Instantly Dealflow CRM
Once your campaigns are running, it’s important to keep track of where leads are in your pipelines. Instantly Dealflow CRM is the best tool for the job. It’s a CRM designed for cold email.
Consultants can use lead data from Dealflow to personalize outreach, unify inboxes across multiple campaigns, and manage clients, projects, and tasks, all in one platform.
It helps consultants respond as soon as prospects reply. Dealflow’s AI Inbox manager automates replies based on the context. You’ll essentially have a 24/7 support agent.
Dealflow also has the Unibox features that connect all communications from emails, calls, and SMS. This helps you set up the proper sales cadence for each lead. More importantly, you don’t have to jump between multiple databases to find insights on high-priority leads.
If you’re running a consulting firm or agency, you’re in luck. Instead of buying seats for each of your consultants or sales reps, you just need one subscription at a fixed monthly cost. One subscription, unlimited seats. You’re free to invite as many teammates as you want.
Key Takeaways
Consultants are in the business of growing businesses. Learning how to start a consulting business is the first step toward a career that’s not only lucrative, but also fulfilling. To recap, here is the 5-step guide to starting your first consulting business:
- Assess your skill set and try to niche down
- Develop your brand and clearly state your offering
- Invest in the right tools and technologies to help you scale
- Identify what your business structure looks like and complete all paperwork
- Market your consulting business through multiple channels
Looking for a tool to help you manage leads and scale outreach? Instantly Dealflow CRM has everything you need to kickstart your consulting journey. Try it today!
