Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season we're talking about management consulting, and today's topic is one that all management consultants must focus on, and that is lead generation, biz dev, whatever you call it, marketing. It is getting a steady flow of leads coming into your business.

Years ago, my client, Donna, said the most amazing thing we were working on, like her vision for her perfect business and the perfect day and all of those kinds of idealized things. And she said about the business, somebody else would be doing the marketing.

And that is problematic. Especially if you're a small consultancy and you are, let's say, under two hundred fifty thousand a year and you are trying to figure out where your clients are going to come from. What's really important is that you have a focus on lead gen and business development. You, the principal, have to be focused on that.

One of the things that happens for some consultants is that they don't develop the skill to generate clients when they need them. And that puts them on the revenue rollercoaster because they're constantly, you know, getting business and then chasing business and on and on it goes. And that's a dreadful cycle for I've seen it inside of many businesses. The client chase is stressful.

So what you want to get to is a point where you have steady streams of leads coming into your business rather than the how to specifics of that. What I want to talk about is conceptually, how do we deal with this in our business?

The first thing that I want you to acknowledge is, you know, you're the rainmaker. This is who you are. If you're going to hire skills to bring in and you want to supplement that, that's fine. But people are probably buying you and buying from you if you're at that, you know, at a smaller size of your business. And that's just the way things are. So too often I see consultants try to get rid of this marketing function or, you know, avoid and ignore it. And then they end up with not enough clients and either struggling or going out of business. So the thing that you need to acknowledge and really embrace is you're the person who is bringing in the clients. And if you don't know how to do that, then that's a skill that you have to learn and you need to invest in learning, how do you get clients?

If you benefit from referrals, great. But if all your referral sources dried up, then you'd be in trouble. So you have to have at least 50 percent of the business that you're bringing in on your own from your own sources and clients. I don't expect people to know how to do this when they first start their business. But what's really interesting is that a lot of consultancies that I see, they've gotten pretty far in the business just by being charismatic and being well-connected. And those, by the way, are marketing qualities, like it's a totally valid way to bring in clients by being yourself and being visible. And so that actually really means networking, generating referrals, you know, direct outreach. In some cases you can just call somebody and get them on the phone. Plenty of consultants I see who are successful have built their business with these one to one personal relationships, and that makes the foundation of the business really strong.

So rule number one, wake up. It's you you've got to be doing the marketing. You've got to be doing the lead generation and getting clients coming into the business. At a certain size, you can make new decisions. But to me, I need to stress, and what I want all of my clients to know is, build this skill set within yourself, like at least be able to do some of this yourself.

Now, when you get to a certain size and you are able to hire it, it is a function that needs to be done. So if you don't want to be doing it yourself, you can hire it. I find that when people hire lead gen too soon, they aren't clear enough about how they get clients. And so they don't really know what the right messages are, that they're not super clear on who's an ideal client. And so that lead gen doesn't always work as well for them and they don't really know why. Very often if you hire a lead gen too early, it means you haven't yet figured it out for yourself. So it helps to figure it out for yourself and then say, OK, I got this ball rolling. No, I want to hand this off to somebody.

So who do we hand it off to? You can either keep doing it all yourself, you can hire it as a company, or you can hire someone, you know, an individual person or or team members to do this. What's the difference? When you hire a company you expect like they've worked this all out and they get results and that's probably going to be a lot more expensive. So you're investing for and in terms of buying a result, they promise this result. And that's what I'm paying this money for.

When you hire team members, you're hiring a skill set. There's the promise of a result, but, you know, they're coming in and they're going to do this for you. So it's probably not as worked out as it has been for this company. You know, this company has got to guarantee you a specific result. An individual is like they may get those results, they may not.

Another big difference is you're going to have to manage that person, that team member and any team members that, you know, end up coming in. So you might, for example, have like a marketing assistant or a social media VA or a content writer. You might end up like with a little team of people who are basically fulfilling marketing functions for you. And you're going to have to manage that. And is that something that you're going to want to do? On the one hand that could be cheaper than hiring the company, might not necessarily be, but you are going to exchange the cost savings for your time and your focus and you being like the leader, the strategic leader and visionary for the marketing function.

So those are two different directions. You can go with marketing and the things that you need to consider when doing those. In summary, this is the thing that needs to happen. You've got to make it happen. And I think the best thing for you to do is to figure out, like long term, how do you want, where do you want to see going with this?

I always try with my clients to help them find some kind of marketing, some aspect of it that they do truly enjoy. Because if about a third of your business is marketing, you know, doing activities which, you know, generate clients for you, so much of that focus is there that I would hate for it to be like it's all things that you don't enjoy. I would love it if it was like I really enjoy networking, but I don't like writing. OK, great. Like, we can work with that or the opposite. I really enjoy kind of like typing secretly behind my desk and I don't enjoy being visible. OK, fine, we can also work with that.

So get clear on what works for you and then think about whether you want to hire those other functions in or outsource them to a company or how you'd like to be in relationship to that. And remember that only you can be the strategic visionary for your business, you know, like what you're building and what your your drivers and your mission are. And no matter who is working for you in the marketing, they can't fully and accurately implement it for you unless they know those things, too. So it helps you so much to get clear on what those things are for you to clearly express them to your team members and then get the word out there. So I hope that this gives you some additional possibilities and ideas to think about for business development and lead generation and marketing, and that if you need any assistance with that, that you reach out to me because those are things I help my clients to do.

And with that, I wish you a profitable and joyful consulting business.