I recently had a lovely catch up with a Consultant I first worked with almost 10 years ago – let’s call her Diane.
When I first met Diane she was very new to Consultancy work and did not really have a particular focus to her services. She was enjoying working for herself but finding the whole process of selling and marketing quite a struggle.
We were doing one to one sessions and it quickly became apparent to me that Diane wasn’t enjoying the projects that she was working on and they weren’t aligned well with the extensive skills and experience she had – she was taking the approach that she needed to accept anything that she was offered.
The problem was that she knew she wouldn’t be doing this type of work if she went back to an employed role and it was making it increasingly difficult to do her marketing as she felt quite negative about the results.
So we looked at the different types of experience she had and there was one in particular that she loved – her whole energy changed when she talked about it and she was like a different person. It was an area that she had a lot of experience in as an employee but she hadn’t considered offering it as a Consultant and wasn’t at all confident that it would work if she tried it.
I encouraged her to create an outline business plan based on primarily providing that service and making it the sole focus of all of her marketing for a few months – to see what would happen.
She was nervous but excited at the possibilities and loved the whole process of putting together a plan to make it happen.
It was so exciting to see how everything changed for her after that – she had a completely different approach to marketing because she was passionate about the service she was offering and how needed it was. She quickly built up visibility as someone who offered that service and the enquiries started coming in.
That was almost a decade ago and she is still offering that service, is very much the go to person for it, gets recommendations and referrals all the time and is loving what she does. And I love the part that I got to play in helping it to happen.
It can feel very counter intuitive to specialise in a particular service or sector. We think that we will be missing out on potential opportunities. But people with problems like to buy from specialists and it is a much easier and more effective route to finding clients and projects.
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