software, consulting, business-proposalI’m in the very early stages of starting up a software consultancy with a friend, and am wondering what the best ways are to meet your first potential clients?
I’m putting together a slick well seo-d website, but would rather get boots on the ground and talk to some real people!
We’ve both been working for various software companies for 10+ years, so i’m comfortable with both our technical abilities and with our ability to deal with people, but i’m not sure where to go or who to talk to to get started. We’re project scale and stack agnostic, so will do projects of any size on the tech that suits the client/project best.
We’re fully commited so open to traveling anywhere in the world (Currently UK based) and putting in whatever effort is required.
You need to think about two things: selling to the world and selling to your world.
First, selling to the world. It’s relatively unlikely that there are lots of people searching for a two person software consultancy willing to take on any size project on any technology stack anywhere in the world. So you should choose a niche.
How do you do that? Well, you want to start out with an unfair advantage. So pick an industry sector, a project type and a technology focus where you have credentials - where real people are going to be willing to give you testimonials. Do your SEO homework. If nobody is searching for this, it may be too fine a niche. If every keyword and combination comes up as super expensive for paid search, maybe it’s too competitive. And if you can’t think of posts and pages where you can show depth and point of view while building out a website that will work up the page rankings, you either need to do more research or try another field.
Once you have your niche, you have the basis of a marketing programme. You can build lists of prospective customers, find out where they gather in the real world and online, work out what level in the organisation the decision makers sit, start writing content that you can push to LinkedIn, produce white papers or ebooks people can pay for with their email address. You can interview people, get their stories, find the pain points, start to design and test value propositions that have more resonance than “hire us by the hour and we’ll do our best for you.” You can network for all you’re worth, and put in place the activities that will generate a sales funnel.
All this is possible because you made hard choices. Targeted is what makes “busy” productive; scattergun almost never works.
But what about selling to your world? Consultancy is all about developing relationships. So you need to draw up a list of all the decision makers and influencers you know. And you need to reach out to them, let them know what you’re doing, how you’d like to help make their lives better and how you’d like them to help you - giving you opportunities, recommending you, feeding back, whatever.
Personal networks work differently than the world at large. In particular, where you’re already known, people will have an idea of areas where you could help, and if you build relationships and communication channels, a personal connection won’t worry that the opportunity they’re bringing you relates to the skills they know you have, not the brand and proposition you’ve chosen.
In the long run, you’ll be investing maybe a third of your time looking for projects. Today, it’s nearer 100%. So make sure you’re investing time, not just expending it.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.