Hi and welcome back. I'm Samantha Hartley, and this week's episode is How to Find Clients for Your Consulting Business. Last time we talked about perfect clients and how essential they are to a profitable and joyful consultancy. It's like everything that makes or breaks your business is how perfect your clients are, how aligned they are, how they bring out the best in you. And very often, once I've defined them and people are excited about going and finding and working with those clients are like, okay, so where do I find them? How do I find them? So I wanted to get really into practical details this week before we go any further into any other topics. And as you listen, I want you to be thinking about, like, how you can implement this. You should leave, and put the earphones on and head out and start looking, OK? So these are those kinds of practical tips. What we're going to cover are basically three of the best ways that you can find those perfect clients and what you need to have prepared before you do, and so let's just dive into it.

You know, what I think is really important about finding perfect clients is, you know, you have to have the clarity about who they are and knowing who they are is like almost 80% of finding them. Very often they say that in formulating a very good question, you're almost like seventy-five percent of the way there to answering that question, and I don't know if you do this, but I find this myself when, the better I can formulate a question. Sometimes I don't even have to ask it. It kind of answers itself, and the question of where I find these clients can often be answered as I mentioned last time, in the detail of creating that perfect client profile like you layout that profile and as you're doing it, you suddenly realize, like, I think I know where this person is. So if that has happened for you, awesome, and here's a few more ideas about it. So say stay super clear on who you're looking for because they're out there for you and you can find them, and knowing this is why I recommend having that profile in front of you and like reading it every single day, just like the people who read their goals every single day achieve them. It's because you keep these things top of mind. You keep your mind actively looking for them. So having the clarity about who you're looking for is a great prerequisite.

The second thing is, can be really important for you is mindset. Okay? It's really important for you to have conviction. I want you to know that this is what you're doing. I'm going to go out. I'm going to find these clients, I'm compelled to serve. You're being called and imagine because this is true. It connects to the idea that your perfect clients are out there, they're like hoping and wishing and praying for you to show up. Right? They are tormented by whatever's going on with them that you can solve for them. So I love to connect to that when I'm looking for them because it doesn't make me feel like I'm being pushy and needy. It's not about me at all. It's that somebody out there really needs what I do, Someone out there really, really needs what you do. So use that conviction to really motivate you to go and look for them to put yourself in front of them.

The next thing is confidence, you can solve their problems and you can find them. Be confident that they're out there and that you can connect with them. So if you start any marketing effort with that kind of confidence, like I'm going to find people this way, this is going to work for me. Those are things that you can affirm for yourself and make sure that your marketing does work and your search for clients does work.

And the last one is about receiving. I'm sure you've worked on this. Most women I know are working on the issue of receiving more and we're putting out an intention to the universe, send these clients to me. I'm looking for these clients. I'm putting myself out there for these clients to find and I'm open to receiving them, I'm open to bringing more clients into my business. These are things I love to affirm, and it's the attitude and the mindset and just the energy in which I like to conduct my marketing.

The third thing that you need to have prepared as you're about to go out is your message, right. People are going to say, what do you do? They're going to think, why do I need to know you? And we need to be ready and prepared with a concise, clear, compelling message to communicate to them. So I'm going to get into more details of that in a minute. Just remember, there's a little bit of homework and preparation that you can do so that when you're out in front of those perfect clients, you can really make sure that you maximize those opportunities.

Today, specifically, I'm going to be talking about three off-line methods. These are the things that all my clients have in common. The successful clients I have, they are successful because they have mastered these three specific techniques. And so these are fundamentals. It's funny because so many people who are struggling to grow a consulting business, they are overlooking fundamentals. They're like, oh, there's a new thing or there's a complicated thing or there's something I see someone else doing and. Very often they're just avoiding or overlooking the very basic things. I heard one time that I'm Tiger Woods. What if he had a bad day on the golf course? They said, well, what do you do, you know? I don't know, go and drink or go in, you know, beat yourself up somewhere. He is like no, I go to the driving range. So he goes back to something where he just goes back to return to the fundamentals because in their case, it's muscle memory. In our case, it's returning to the simplest, most basic marketing techniques and that work. They work every time and one of the most important fundamentals is and why I'm talking about offline marketing is the importance of face to face in an online world, I mean, listen, it's awesome to market at scale. It's great when you can send out a Facebook ad and reach thousands of people and have them convert and all of that. That's great.

But that is usually connected to and grounded in the fact that if that person stood face to face looking at their perfect client, that they would know exactly what to say, what to ask, how to engage that person to get them interested in their services. And so I love when whenever I have an opportunity to have a conversation with someone who is a potential client so that I can watch their face, I can watch their face from micro-expressions, I can watch their energy to see how they seem when they talk about what their challenges are. Those kinds of fundamental pieces of feedback are really critical. Now, that might have come from when I was working at the Coca-Cola Company and we would do market research and I very often sat behind that two-way glass mirror and watched focus groups take place, and when you watch your ideal client have a conversation, in this case, their consumers who watch these, teenagers, sometimes moms have conversations about your product and what they say. It's really interesting. It takes a lot of its theoretical marketing stuff that we're doing and it grounds it in the reality of this is a person who is consuming our product, that this is a person who is going to be potentially receiving your service. So there's so much that you can learn from face to face. And I want you to prioritize offline marketing, offline connections so that you can see that when you deliver your marketing message, you're going to see a lot of micro expressions that might be interested. It might be confusion or like what is that about? Those things are important because even in that 15-word message, you might get, you know, five different expressions and that'll give you information about how to make your message more clear, more compelling, and more effective for next time.

One of the main reasons that I emphasize offline marketing is because anyone can do it. Now, you don't have to have great technical skills. You don't have to have a high-speed Internet connection. You don't have to understand the ins and outs of social media. You can just walk out your door and go and connect with potential clients, and listen, I live in a remote area. I can't easily get to my private clients. It takes quite a schlep to find potential clients, but I'm willing to travel for it, and when I do, it's very gratifying because the things that work off-line will work online and the things that don't work off-line very often don't work online either. So I have this expression which is as on as offline, so online.

And what I mean by that is if you're at a coffee shop and somebody says, Oh, I have this really great case study I'd like to share with you, and you go, cool and they said, well, here, just sign up for my email newsletter. Well, you wouldn't say that in real life and you wouldn't also do that, doing that online also isn't very often effective, in like a LinkedIn messenger conversation when somebody sends me to sign up for their thing. I think, listen, this is LinkedIn, like pretend it's a coffee shop, and being salesy in your communication is not effective offline. It's not effective online. You have to be sincere. You have to be engaging and you have to really connect to people before you can sell them something. So practicing those things offline I think makes you a sharper online marketer. And so all of these will eventually translate once you get them online.

So the first thing that I wanted to tell you that almost all of my clients have in common and most successful clients have consultants have done, is that they have turned their former employer into their client, almost all of them. To a person has done this, and so I always say, do not burn your bridges when you leave that less corporate employer. Well, a lot of my clients have worked for a small family-owned businesses, open even like 50 million dollar manufacturing companies. When you leave, those companies do not burn your bridges because you're going to have a whole network of people that you're connected to there who are familiar with you, your skills. They're going to know you as the value that you can deliver and it's important that you keep that network intact and you keep nurturing those connections because this can be not only your first engagement, your first consulting engagement, but for a lot of people, they return again, again and again, to do those that, like their former employer, is a major piece of their business and I think that's really important. I had a client who was a printing company and I asked them where they got, how their business grew, where they got clients. And they said very often someone who worked for one of their clients would leave and go work somewhere else and would call them in so that their business grew organically as people migrated from job to job. So that's the thing to pay attention to with your Linkedin connections. And just in general, with staying in touch with your former colleagues and with your clients, whoever is working there and where they go because your business can grow if you maintain those relationships well, maintaining relationships is key, this is why I say not to burn bridges unless you have a major, you know, a crisis of conscience about the place that you worked, then it's really best to try to maintain a connection. I mean, the truth is, in my personal example, I was very unhappy in corporate, I'd been with my former company, for a long time in the field. But I was very unhappy at corporate, but what I didn't do was act out or unpitch fits or go and tell people what they needed to know about themselves because that wouldn't have been effective. So I just left. I took a year off and after that year, people who had been my former colleagues working there started to call me and offer me consulting engagements, they knew the work I could do, they knew that and trusted me and they would call me in and this happens with many, many of my clients. So you can either take the job that you were doing for them and then do that as a consultant on your own and then add other clients that you work with. Or you can go away, create something, and offer that back to your former employer. So there are many creative ways to do this. and I think the best thing is that it shows you that you already have a network, even if you don't feel like you do. It's the people who have already worked with you before. So make sure you're maintaining those connections.

And that takes me sideways me into networking. So networking is the second really critical technique that I consider a fundamental skill, a life skill, in fact, that you need to learn and that can help you to connect with your perfect clients how you can find them. So you're already in circles with people who know you and so what you're looking to do is communicate who you can help and how you can help them. So we come back to the marketing message. What's funny is how very often I'll say, you know, your friends and family or some of the best people to talk to you about what you do and it sounds like, you know, those uncomfortable situations where somebody maybe, I don't know, they start selling Amway and then suddenly they need to sell it to you or they start selling insurance not everybody who sells insurance is bad, but you know what I mean. They start selling something and then they come and sell it to you. And it feels really awkward. I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is not marketing to your friends and family, but through them right, they're connected to tons and tons of people and they love you and they want to help and support you, this is the great thing about them. is that your friends and family know you want to support you and I consider colleagues, friends, too, in many cases and so if you can share with them what's going on with you, hey. I am. I'm a consultant now or you've been a consultant for five years now, you have a new aspect of what you're doing or a new offer or something like that. You can say to those friends and family. Hey, here's something new I wanted to share with you and tell them about that so that they can share that with other people.

So a marketing message needs to contain who, the problem you solve, the outcome you get for them, and sometimes you can share the benefits. So it can sound like if I'm sharing this with someone that I work with, they haven't seen me in a while and they say, oh, wow, cool, you're a consultant. What do you do? And I can say, well, I work with B2B Women Consultants. That's the WHO, and you know, if I were going to look at the components of who they are, you see, that's the problem I solve is that they're overworked. They're working with clients who are too small. They're not earning what they should be. You know, I can talk about that for a while or I can just very quickly say overworked over busy business-to-business women consultants, that's what my audience is and I help them with the outcome. I help them double their business without exhaustion. I can also condense that down to I work with women consultants, I help them to double their business without exhaustion. You can hear how it can be a very concise message. We can also expand it. I could say a much longer version of that where I tell a story that's an example of who I work with. All we're looking for is that that person that you're talking to would know how to recognize who you're talking about and they say, oh, cool, I know someone like that, I'll tell them about you and then at that point, you can say what's going on with you. This is what we're looking for is to me, the definition of networking is connecting meaningfully with people who have mutual benefit with you, you can benefit them and they can benefit you.

So it's a win win for everyone. It's a win win win because it's for you and the person that you're talking with and also for whoever they share that with, right, the person that you serve. A lot of times people feel an aversion to networking because if they go, they think of it as going into a room, full of people where they don't know anybody and they feel pressure that they've got to go sell somebody something. right. Well, I would hate it too, if it was that. You do sometimes have to walk into a room full of people. Sometimes you don't know them but what you're doing is you're connecting meaningfully with people that you might like to know. So if it's a room full of strangers, you know, just look for your people. People always tell me, like you know, there's this gross chamber meeting and I want to go there. and I'm like, listen, you know, like your perfect client, you love her, right? You love your perfect clients and so if you went in that room, do you feel like you could look around the room and find the her in that room, but you could find like three to five of them, three to five of your people? And that's all you have to do when you're in a networking situation, is just go in and be like, where are my people? Right, and I think that's the thing that makes it fun but here's a thing that makes it a lot more fun and I hope this helps you don't just look for potential clients. There are all kinds of people in that room that you can benefit and they can benefit you. So who can that be? Yes, potential clients, but also colleagues. There are other people who do what you do or other self-employed people and a lot of times it's really lonely when you're self-employed. It's great to meet others who are self-employed, so definitely look for them, and team members, do you need an assistant or do you have somebody else you know, who is looking for one? I just connected with someone on LinkedIn who is a PM project manager, and I was like, oh, I have a client who's looking for a PM. That's a sincere ask and a helpful thing and so that's a great way to connect and begin to build a relationship and this is one of my favorite things, is referral partners.

Referral partners. I'll talk more about them in a second but those are, you know, people who you can be connected with, where you can benefit each other and growing your own businesses. So look, there are all kinds of people that we've just talked about meeting, and they don't have anything to do with you selling them something. So it takes the pressure off. It makes networking time a lot more productive because there's a lot of benefits, like if I have to network a event and I didn't get a potential client, but I found a potential team member, someone who can help one of my clients and a potential referral partner, I would feel like that was time really well spent. Networking is a skill that you can use in your life over and over again, you know, I taught a networking class really early in my career and I was writing the description for it and I realized as I was writing it up that I had never found a job, I found a husband. I found my first client. It was all through networking. I'd never found these things without the benefit of networking. I hadn't thought of myself until then as a networker because I just don't feel like, you know, what's the association with some kind of glad-handing type and that wasn't me and so your identity can be I'm a person, you can be an introverted person who likes to deeply and meaningfully connect with people, you can be that person and be good at networking.

You're going to go in your life and in your business especially. You're going to connect with people. You're going to go to seminars and workshops and events, and you're going to have, you're going to be connecting with people online. So the skill of being able to meaningfully connect, to be curious enough to ascertain how you can help someone else and to be skillful enough and clear enough in your communication to share with them how they can help you, that's going to help you for years in your business. So our first two ways to find perfect clients are to look for your former employer and those former colleagues. The second one is through networking, which is a skill you can do online and off. You can do in all kinds of situations, places where it would be otherwise appropriate to market an inappropriate to market like at church. You’re just meaningfully connecting at the grocery store. You know, marketing or selling to someone. You're just meaningfully connecting and at all of those workshops, events are the places that you meet people.

So let's now look at our last one, the last one, I think is really essential for growing your business is referrals and referral partners. So let's talk about both of those individually. A funny thing that happens when people try to explain what they do to me and if I can't understand it which, to be honest, a lot of times when people say their marketing message, other people can't understand them and they just pretend that they do, so I said, what do I do? And they say something, and I'm like, I don't understand that. So very often, but I'll ask is how would I recognize a good referral for you? So this is one of the nicest questions you can ask someone anyway because it's taking a sincere interest in them and their business and kind of proactively offering to benefit them. How would I recognize a good referral for you? What also happens is that people take that message that maybe they crafted carefully or maybe they just didn't even bother with and they explain it to me in a way that suddenly I understand what they do, not always, but a lot of times. How would I recognize a good referral for you? helps them to tell me how I would recognize them right. They describe it better and they describe the state a person is in before they bring in help, if you know what I mean. So I think what's really key to this is being able to describe what a perfect client looks like for us, so that a third party would recognize them. I'm going to give you a couple of these examples because last time I talked about the idea of culture and how someone said, you know, good fit for me would be a company that is struggling with its culture and I would say and I don't understand what that would look like. So give me some images so that I would understand what it looks like when a company struggling with culture. In this case, I have met numerous people who I say, what do you do and they say digital transformation? And I'm like, great. What the heck does that mean? right. What do you mean when you say it? Because I've talked to a lot of people and I don't think they're always talking about the same thing. So when you say digital transformation, what do you mean? So sometimes the more they explain to me the literal whatever, and then I'll end up having to say, well, what would a good referral for you look like? And then a lot of times they can’t tell me what they mean. So, for example, a company that's got all kinds of different software and processes, and none of them align. See the difference between digital transformation and that, so if you're looking for referrals, it's going to be important for you to be able to say clearly to someone, I need this kind of a client. So, first of all, the demographics, which a lot of times people exclude, they'll say, you know, companies who are struggling with culture, I'm like, well, companies are anything from like a fifty thousand dollar a year business over here all the way up to a multibillion-dollar company. So when you say companies, what do you mean, get really clear on that in your communication, so nobody else has to ask you that because a lot of people won't spend the time ask that and the key, if you're not getting referrals or if you're not getting good referrals, it's possible that people don't understand what makes a good referral for you.

Another example is I have some clients who are I.T. specialists, and one of the ways to recognize someone they need is if there's a company who has all these sophisticated systems, but they're still doing payroll by hand. That means that something in their system is broken and they need my clients. So that was super informative for me. I know the size of the company to refer to them and I understand what some of those challenges should be. So if you're looking to get referrals, a really helpful thing would be to say a good referral for me is, in my case, a woman consultant who works with business to business, who is as busy as she can be but wants to grow the business. So there's nowhere for that new business to go. That's a really good fit for me and if they say, well, how would you help her? I can say, well, I can help her double that business, double her business without exhaustion, meaning she can add all a bunch more new business, but it's not going too closer to implode. Right? So if you think about how you would communicate what you do, what makes a good referral for you, who should people send your way? Get really clear and specific on that. So referrals are fabulous, obviously, they're wonderful surprise business and the thing about them is that they're a surprise, you might have, I'm talking about the kind that comes, you know, from time to time and what I really like is to turn this into something that has some regularity by taking the people who tend to refer to you more than once ever, like your clients, will send you somebody from time to time. What I like to do is create referral partnerships. So if you have someone who's, like, can send people to you on a regular basis, let's take that and formalize that relationship.

So I want to just talk in general about referral partnerships. The key to them is an abundance mindset because someone is going to bring you business and you may send them back business that may be part of your agreement. If you're going to send me business, I'll send you a business. Sometimes you're getting business from someone that you don't necessarily send it back to, and so the reciprocity in that might be a payment. Whatever you agree to, that feels fair to both of you. Sometimes it's 10 percent. If that's a fit, sometimes it's 40 or 50 percent, depending on what kind of business you have. But what I think is really important about it is especially for women, is to concretize those relationships, like with an agreement on paper where you say you're going to do this i am going to do this and this is going to be either the payment or this is how we're going to reciprocate this and then to sign that formalize that and I have basically a one-sheet that I use for that, that's just a very simple language that you can contact me if you'd like a copy of it. I'm not a lawyer, but what I think is it doesn't have to be necessarily super legally formalized but I do think having a face to face agreement about something like that is important. So for referral partners, these are online. They can be called JVs or affiliates and there are all kinds of a different language that refers to the fact that we agree to refer business back and forth. So a referral partner is someone who serves this very often, not always, but very often it's someone who serves the same audience but doesn't compete. So in my life, I've had other marketing consultants who don't do brand and messaging or who don't do scale, this scaling business or who don't work with business to business consultants. You know, anybody who is in the same realm but doesn't necessarily do what I do, I've had them refer to me, I've had a business loan officer who said if I give this loan, I want to know that this business is going to be successful. So they've sent business to me, oddly, I've had an ad agency because with the ad agency did, in this case, was a lot of the media and the design, but they didn't necessarily do brand and strategy, which is the piece that I do, so we've worked together and a commercial, this was a great one, a commercial insurance agent. So he's insuring these companies and they're talking to him about growing and he just mentions me and that, and I've gotten business from him in his case. I'm not really into a lot of people who do construction over rivers and need to know maritime law. So I don't necessarily have referrals to send back to him. So we set up a financial partnership, so just in general, as some ideas for how you can incentivize or reward referrals. One of the things I like to do is, you know, just send money, right. Just a payment.

Thank you for referring business to me. Here's 10 percent of what that was and in that referral agreement. Just a little tip. I usually specify that it's in the first year of work because thank you for this and for its first year and if they continue, then that's usually something to do with me. So that's the kind of detail that you can work out, whether that's lifetime commissions or just on the first year of work can be just on the first project of work, whatever works for you.

So let's talk for a minute about how to incentivize and reward referrals. I mentioned the 10 percent idea or 40 percent. You know, obviously, that one way that you can reward someone or incentivize them for referrals is just with money. You can also get creative with it. I had someone one time who referred me one guy for a small project. He referred me to a guy that he works with, that was for a small project and then that one referred me to another company that they worked with. And that was the third and it ended up being from her small single referral, over a hundred thousand dollars in business and so I gave her and her husband a trip to the Bahamas, all expenses paid. What happens when you're rewarding someone for referrals is that other people can find out about it in a good way. So they see that initial referral generosity and trust in referring to you and they also see what you have sent for them, the gift that they received or the money that they received and it just really encourages a kind of abundance. I want to conclude talking about referrals and especially referral partners without this idea. You know, I mentioned that it is about an abundance mindset, and really finding good referral partners is about the alignment of values. Your referral partners are going to be people who generally share your values. You know, it's important to them to have freedom, effectiveness, good work, doing good work, service, serving those clients, lifting up a women consultants. My referral partners share those values and I think you're going to find when you build your referral partners up, I mean, this is a strategy, this isn't a one-off. What I love about referrals is they're by chance and they're wonderful and you can encourage them. You can have a referral strategy but with referral partnerships, you're usually doing that on steroids. So you're really building a community of individuals who refer to you or companies who do that and that can be a major part of your marketing strategy. So these are three fundamental ways for you to find your perfect clients, for you to locate them and find them and these are also skills that are going to help you in your business, If I look at my clients who've been in business for three years or 20 years, every single one of them is using these techniques. Sure. You can also add on, you know, other online strategies onto this but you're going to see that many of them tie back to these fundamentals. A LinkedIn Strategy is going to tie back to networking. A joint Venture affiliate program online is going to tie back to referral partnerships. So getting these skills right and implementing them in your business is going to be really important. You heard the core skills that you need to have to make all of them work, most importantly, message, obviously, we'll talk about messaging much more deeply and in future podcast episodes.

But there's plenty of things from here today that you can take away and go and implement immediately. So if today's episode was helpful for you, I hope that you will, like, share or subscribe, leave me a review. What's really most important for me is that you implement and that you share this with other consultants who can be benefited from what we talked about today. So I wish you the very best. I wish you a profitable and joyful consultancy. Thanks.