Consulting Journal: Techniques

Techniques: Increasing sales

by David Blakey

Don't allow consulting to become like improving your search engine ratings.

[Monday 14 January 2008]

I am going to make a point about the marketing methods of consultants, but I shall do this through an analogy.

Increasing web traffic

Many companies want to could increase the amount of sales that they make through their website. Often, they look at their statistics from the website. They may discover that they make 5 sales for every 100 people who visit their website. They extrapolate. If they make 5 sales for every 100 people, then they can increase the volume of sales if more people visit the website. They will make 50 sales for every 100 people. One way to do this is to increase the ranking of the website on search engines. If the website can be changed to be more attractive to the major search engines, then it is likely that it will have more hits. And hence the company will make more sales.

If you have the read the paragraph above, and can see nothing wrong with the logic, then you need to consider the rest of this article very carefully, so that you do not go down the same path with your own business.

Logical faults

The major logical fault in the example is that increasing web traffic will not necessarily increase sales proportionately. It may not even increase sales significantly.

This may not be a concern, except if the expense of increasing hits is not matched by profit. No one should spend $1,000 to increase profits by $500, and they certainly should not spend $1,000 to only increase revenue by $500.

The best advice that a consultant can give a company in this position is to increase the sales from their current website visitors. The company should be able to:

increase sales to existing customers, by encouraging those customers to return more often to the website;
to increase the number of purchases made by people who visit the website, so that fewer people leave the website without making a purchase; and
attract more people who already have a strong probablility of making a purchase.

Increasing consulting business

Consultants should look at their businesses in the same way.

There is no point in getting your message out to more people if they are not going to engage you.

While this may seem an obvious piece of advice when we are discussing company websites, it is not always obvious when applied to consultants. As an example, do the speeches that you make at conferences and the articles that you write in magazines actually help to bring in any more work? If not, are you getting revenue for them: do conference organizers pay you for your appearances, and do publishers pay for your writing?

Would your time be better spent on:

trying to find new assignments with your current customers and your previous customers?
improving your sales process so that you turn more prospects into customers?
finding new customers are likely to buy your services, because they have similar needs to your current customers?

Basically, it all comes back to seeking repeat business, to improving your salesmanship, and to becoming a recognized expert in a sector, locality or discipline.

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