Build Your Alliance: The Feedback Network That's Critical To Growth
Build a group of past clients and lost prospects who can regularly provide you with high-quality feedback to grow your consultancy practice.
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A coaching client mentioned he hadn’t tested their new website's launch and messaging. He hadn’t gathered any feedback or input on his new website. He had browsed the web, found ideas he liked from other consultants, and put together something he thought looked good.
A few peers had complimented him on the website, but he had no idea if it delivered what prospective clients wanted. It could be doing far more harm than good, and he wouldn’t know it.
The extent of his feedback was to see if people who liked him liked the site.
A deeper exploration revealed this problem extended far beyond his website. He hadn’t gotten feedback on anything he was doing. Not his services, design of deliverables, pricing, content, resources, etc.…
He was flying blind.
Forget Mentorships and Advisory Boards
You need to get advice from the right people.
Getting advice isn’t a new idea. Many of us have mentors or acquaintances to turn to for advice and support. But we usually get the wrong advice from the wrong people.
Take mentors. This is the popular idea independent consultants should have a mentor who guides them in their consultancy career. The problem with a mentor is that it’s just one person’s opinion, and times change quickly. What worked for them might not work today. Just browse the consulting books published 10 years ago and you’ll soon realise how outdated most of the advice is.
Friends and acquaintances can also provide advice. The problem here is the quality of advice usually isn’t very good. They want to support you and are less likely to be critical. They’re also not your target audience. Their views don’t reflect the people whose opinions you need.
Peer groups are another option. However, consulting peer groups are often populated by struggling consultants who share precisely the advice that didn’t work for them. Exclusive peer groups of top-tier consultants in non-competing industries are better - but how do you join them if you’re not at that level already?
You don’t want just one person’s opinion or advice from people who aren’t your target audience. The best feedback, by a long way, comes from the people you’re trying to reach.
Get Feedback From The People Who Matter Most
There’s a goldmine of information just waiting for you to find it
Imagine if you could ask prospective clients:
What services they want.
What price points work for them.
What they need to see in your website to trust you and want to hire you.
How they compare you with your competitors.
What they think of your proposal structures.
If there is anything that might stop them from hiring you.
What resources would most help them.
etc…
That’s an absolute goldmine of information, precisely the information that few consultants take the time to collect. And it’s the information that can change everything.
Turn Past Clients And Lost Prospects Into Allies
These are the best groups to give you advice and feedback.
At the end of every project, ask any client you’re on good terms with if you can contact them for feedback and advice from time to time. In the ten years I’ve been doing this, no one has ever said no.
You can even do it with clients you worked with months, even years ago. You should already be regularly engaging with past clients. There’s no shame at all in saying:
“Hey, I’m working on [x] and am keen to get advice from past clients like yourself. Do you have a spare few minutes?”
You should be able to build a group of five to ten past clients relatively quickly.
Another interesting group to target is lost prospects. Lost prospects are people you went through the sales process with but didn’t become clients. If you managed the sales process well, you should still be on great terms with them and have no problem contacting them for advice.
We’ve had several people we clicked with well but didn’t become clients for various reasons (typically changing internal priorities).
The great thing about this group is that they can often give you advice that explains why they didn’t hire you as a consultant.
Not everyone will say yes or be responsive, but you should be able to gather 15 to 20 allies you can turn to for feedback.
The Benjamin Franklin Effect
Asking for favours makes someone like you more.
You might be familiar with the ‘Benjamin Franklin effect’. This is essentially the principle, backed up by multiple studies, that asking someone a favour encourages them to like you more.
When you frequently solicit advice and feedback from a group of 15 to 20 people, those people won’t only give you good advice but are more likely to advocate for you, hire you, and support you however they can.
You’re bringing people a lot closer into your orbit.
Don’t Ask For Advice, Ask For Feedback
But Some Advice Is Just Bad
As the song goes:
Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth
If you ask for advice from this group, you’ll get advice and a lot of the advice will just be bad.
It’s not intentionally bad. It’s advice that worked in one context and wouldn’t work in another. I’ve acted on plenty of bad advice over the years which included:
Trying to get my courses accredited by a university (wasn’t a factor for B2B buyers for my course).
Hiring a salesperson to handle sales for me (achieved precisely zero sales).
Creating entertaining videos to build ‘affinity’ for my brand (expensive and had no impact).
Creating packaged-up consulting services for smaller clients (far more trouble than it was worth).
Hosting my own industry events (costly and time-intensive).
Generally speaking, feedback will be much more valuable than advice. That’s not to say people can’t give you good advice, but the best advice will come from people a couple of years ahead of you in your journey - not your group of allies.
You don’t want people who haven’t been successful consultants advising you on how to structure your business or sell consultancy services.
The dynamic you want is one in which you set up specific questions and understand what the individual would want in that situation. You want them to reflect on their experiences and share how they would feel or what would resonate. They’re serving as your focus group. You’re researching them.
Essentially, you want feedback, not advice.
Good Questions To Ask Your Allies
Focus on specific questions with close-ended answers.
Some great things to ask your allies:
UX Testing. Invite allies to participate in some UX testing on your website. See if they, as a prospective buyer, can navigate through it ok and what they thought while navigating through the website.
Positioning and messaging. Show them your website and competitors' websites. How do they feel about your messaging compared to theirs? What resonates on each of your sites, and what doesn’t? What words do they associate with you and do you come across as a trusted person?
Feedback on proposals. Remove any confidential information and gather their feedback and thoughts on proposal design and structure. What do they look for in the sales process?
Feedback on content and ideas. Before you write and publish anything, solicit ideas for the kind of content which resonates best with them and what would be most useful. What would make you stand out in the crowd? You can run early drafts of major resources past them too and see what they think.
Feedback on your services and prices. Do the services you’re offering precisely match what they need? How would they have liked these services structured? What would be a game-changer for them? What kind of precisely makes sense for them?
Feedback on the sales process. Many of these folks went through the sales process with you. Gather their feedback on what they thought about it. Did they enjoy the process? What could be improved? Where could you blow them away in the process?
There’s no real shortage of questions here. The key is to be very precise in the question you’re asking. Don’t ask for vague views and opinions - get detailed, specific, feedback that answers a key question. Asking whether your website makes you seem more trustworthy than a competitor’s is specific feedback. Ask people what they think of your website is not.
Before we relaunched our website, I spoke to several former clients to get their opinions about what they want to see in it, how they want it structured, and what matters most to them. The result is a site that performs a lot better than what came before.
Build a group of people around you who can regularly provide feedback and offer diverse views.
Thanks for reading.
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