Consulting Company Marketing by Offering Free Advice

The best way to do consulting company marketing is to give away information for free. I know it sounds like a self-defeating activity. If you give away your information for free, why would anyone pay your consulting business anything? That's a great question that I'll get to soon. But before I do that, let me tell you a why it's a great consulting company marketing strategy for you to give away free consulting information or advice.

Promotion and Publicity

Giving away free and useful information, whether it's on your website, a newsletter or one on one communications like phone and email conversations, is a good way to promote your business and do consulting company marketing. When people can get ready access to useful information that helps them, they go back to that source time and again. And if that information is on a consulting business website or newsletter with your branding and name on it, than it is serving as a promotion and publicity.

Good and useful information tends to be viral. If you offer highly useful information in your consulting area, people will forward and link to that information source, which is you! So provide good and useful content on your website and newsletters and it will become a viral consulting business marketing tool.

Building Relationship

All sales professionals understand the power of building solid relationships with your prospects and clients. Not only do you have a higher chance of making the sale, you also have a much greater chance at getting repeat business which is a vital component especially in a recession economy.

Offering free advice to prospects that they can use will engender good will, trust and emotional connection that will pay off in the long run. Building relationships and network of contacts is the best consulting company marketing strategy out there. In order to foster those relationships, you need to give of your expertise for free. Believe me, you will get a good return on that investment.

Organic Needs Assessment

I find that most consultants don't really take the time to do a full assessment before they start their consulting engagement. One of the ways to really help you clients is to have an accurate picture of what their real needs are. And the best way to do that is to offer free advice to engage them in conversation about what they are dealing with in their business.

My consulting motto for consulting company marketing is give free information and charge high for application. Most people can only use disconnect pieces of information to a limited extent. At a certain point, they will most likely need you to execute a consulting project. That's when the money rolls in.

Learning information and executing information is the difference between you and your prospect. There's a saying that amateurs talk strategy and professionals talk logistics. It's true in any field. You can give your prospect mounds of useful information but they will be able to execute only a portion of it without your involvement.

This is where you take all the information you gathered about your prospect, all the advice and information you've given them from your consulting company marketing strategy, and compile it into a consulting project proposal, which will include a hefty price tag for you to execute something by this time your prospect knows he can't.

I've used this strategy with my sales consulting clients. I share with them as much as I can about what they need to do about their sales and marketing aspect of their business. I listen to their issues, learn about their business and offer as much help as I can within reason. Most business owners are not natural sales people and don't have any experience at hiring and managing a sales force. That's where I come in.

They soon discover that it's inefficient for them to execute everything that I've told them they need to do or they discover that their time is better spent on other places in their business. I can help a management consultant run their sales campaign anywhere from $50-100 per hour. Most management consultants charge $200-400 per hour depending on their specialty. It makes more sense for me to run their sales and for them to execute the consulting projects.

Consulting engagements are like any business deal.  It has to make sense financially and economically for both parties.  You won't know what those opportunities are without first finding out what their situation is and offering free advice.  If I had not offered free advice, I would not have known that he charges $300 an hour for his consulting service and after I spoke with him, I knew it would take him at least 100 hours to get traction for what he wanted to do, losing him $30,000 in time when he could pay me a fraction of that and get more results.