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Increase Consulting Revenue: 10 Proven Strategies for Success
Introduction
Being a top consultant, you must be aware that growing your organization requires an increase in consulting revenue. However, as there is so much competition in the market, it can take time to differentiate yourself from competitors and attract new customers.
What Is a Revenue Strategy?
A revenue strategy is your internal plan for increasing revenue. Revenue strategies include short term solutions like optimizing your sales to long term solutions like more strategic focus on customer retention.
For every business increasing revenue is an important area of focus. Everyone has different strategies to increase their revenue every financial year.
Here we are going to discuss top 10 business strategies that can definitely increase your business revenue this financial year.
10 Proven Strategies To Increase Any Business Revenue
Leverage Technology and Automation
Leverage technology and automation means save time, automate tasks, and increase productivity. Many of the latest technologies and automation software tools can help to strengthen your business automation processes.
For automating processes many companies are using a CRM software. With the help of a CRM software you can follow up leads, maintain organization, and build everlasting customer relationships..
These days many of the companies are using time-tracking software to monitor whether your team is being paid reasonably for their time or not.
Additionally, Some of the companies are also using a project management software for team collaboration, communication, and project planning and tracking.
Building a Strong Online Presence
Building a strong online presence is very important for any organization. A website serves as an online sales platform for any revenue generated business. A website should be well-designed from a customer point of view. A website should clearly communicate services, value propositions, and contact information. In addition there should be regular posting of blog posts and articles on website that can be shared on different platforms to target niche audience and grow our online presence.
Apart from website design and development, being active on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter also helps to robust your online presence. Social media platforms allow you to connect with your niche audiences. With the help of these platforms you can share your expertise.
Financial Management and Expense Control
Being a consultant means there are so many things that you have to focus on regarding your finances. You may want to focus on how to limit your expenses and be aware of your finances. For controlling your expenses you may have to set up budgets and create a financial strategy for your business by maintaining a close eye on your income and expenses.
Various accounting software systems have been developed to track cost management systems and financial management services. Cloud-based accounting software is one of them that helps in generating financial reports and automating your bookkeeping.
Continuous Professional Development
The consulting industry is continuously growing in terms of technology development. Stay up to date with the latest technologies and development.
For this, there are various online courses that can be attended for personal and professional development. One can also refer to trade journals, and participate in conferences and seminars that can assist in developing professionalism within you and your team and increase your team to work efficiently toward bringing leads.
Tracking and Measuring Success
There are different techniques that can be used for tracking and measuring your progress. Tracking important factors like lead creation, field team performance, website traffic, event marketing,sales by location, customer acquisition and many more can help you to measure success of your business and increase consulting revenue.
By monitoring your success, you can find the areas for improvement and make the required changes to your strategies.
Diversify Your Service Offerings
A strategic approach can empower business to tap into new markets, attract a broader customer base and boost your revenue.
For example, if you’re a marketing consultant, and have expertise in web design and development services together with social media marketing services. You may offer web design or social media marketing services to a client who only wants email marketing services. This is called cross selling of services that helps to improve your chances of booming your business by getting new leads.
Streamline Operations for Efficiency
Examine your business operations and identify areas to streamline your processes carefully.
The more efficient your operations are, the more time and money you’ll save.
It may involve using technology, outsourcing tasks, or assigning tasks to team members.
Streamlining your operations helps you to free up your time so that you can focus on more important things like growing your business and serving your clients.
Client Relationship Management
Success requires you to establish and nurture good relationships with your clients. Ensure that you stay in constant contact with your existing clients, providing them with project updates, and go above and beyond their expectations. Remember succes doesn’t only come from new customers, so take care of your existing customers too.
CRM software facilitates the tracking of your clientele, the management of their requirements, and the delivery of first-rate customer care.
Optimize Your Pricing Strategy
Pricing strategy is one of the important part that influences consultancy revenue. It is supposed to be lucrative and competitive. To meet the needs of various clientele, you should provide multiple pricing options.
Not everyone is going to sign up for all your services, some of them will need limited services. So it’s better to mention that prices may vary according to specific requirements of the services.
Maintain a competitive edge in your pricing strategy, but ensure you’re charging enough to cover your expenses and make a profit.
Invest in Marketing and Branding
Branding and marketing are an essential part for any organization to maintain its growth in this competitive world. Marketing and branding facilitates expanding your client needs and reaching a larger number of audience.
You can market or brand your services in a number of ways. Such as blogging for your website, going to industry events posting articles or posts on client sites, and spending money on internet marketing.
Additionally, create a merciless brand identity that represents your business concepts and range of services clearly. Don’t try to serve merely all customers, narrow down your niche to those you serve best and market them repeatedly according to their business requirement.
Conclusion
It is not always easy to stay on top of the current trends and best practices in the ever-changing consulting industry, but if you are going to use revenue strategies discussed above, you are surely going to boost your consulting revenue and reach your financial objectives.
Remember that it’s important to generate outstanding results, create a robust personal brand, offer high-value services, build a strong sales funnel, and specialize in a market industry that is highly demanding.
Following these strategies, you are well on your way to become a top-performing consultant and earning the revenue you deserve.
If you’re a consultant and want to increase your business revenue by building long term relationships, Sign Up today for ConnectPoints. We can help you develop a plan to supercharge your growth.
7 Deadly Sins Of LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a very powerful tool if used properly. It’s a great tool to be social and help with getting a warm intro to possible second-degree connections. However, it has several disadvantages too in the way it is now used by many LinkedInians.
For some LinkedIn users, for instance, unexpected LinkedIn messages are gradually turning the platform into a source of annoyance.
With the aid of LinkedIn, businesses and professionals can interact, network, and connect with other professionals. LinkedIn users, like those who use other social media sites, frequently use it incorrectly, which might have unfavourable effects on the user.
In this blog, we’ll go over seven methods NOT to use LinkedIn, as well as typical blunders and bad habits you should steer clear of.
1) Don’t use LinkedIn as a Sales Platform
The biggest mistakes people make on LinkedIn is using it as a sales platform, frequently for advertisements of goods and services that are released through LinkedIn itself. While LinkedIn is used to advertise goods and services, doing so will isolate your contacts and possibly lose your reputation. Focus on developing relationships by participating with your network and sharing relevant content rather than sending spammy sales messages to connect.
Every month, I receive dozens of cold introduction emails from people attempting to sell me something, and I’m thankful that I never answer because this fills my LinkedIn inbox with hundreds of irrelevant introductions that make no sense at all.
2) Pay Attention To Personalization
Neglecting personalization is another common LinkedIn mistake. Generic messages are rarely effective. Invest some effort and personalize each communication you send! Rather than sending generic connection requests, take the time to customise each one with unique information about how and why you know the person. This helps to create genuine connections, thus improves the likelihood of receiving a favourable response, and fosters the development of long-lasting relationships.
3) Don’t forget to Optimize your profile
Your LinkedIn profile acts as your online resume and this is the first thing that people prefer to see when they come across your profile. Therefore, optimising it to make a good first impression it’s important to use a professional headshot, attention-grabbing headlines, and well-written summaries. A long work history and keywords that are relevant to your sector so that others searching can quickly find you and demonstrate an interest in what makes you special as a worker or person. Additionally, must include information about you that goes beyond your employment.
4) Don’t Rely Solely on LinkedIn for Job Search
Although LinkedIn can be a fantastic resource for job seekers, we shouldn’t restrict its actual use to just that. Remember that networking involves giving before receiving; if you only use LinkedIn to look for jobs, you’ll be limiting your options and missing out on other opportunities that could arise. Instead, think about using it to connect with other professionals, build relationships, and broaden your network.
5) Don’t ignore the influence of engagement
Engagement is the most important part of using LinkedIn. It involves member likes, comments, and shares in order to increase your influence in your field and create new relationships and opportunities. In order to benefit from new connections and opportunities, make sure you spend your time each week engaging with the posts that other LinkedIn members publish by liking, commenting, and sharing them.
So be sure to maintain participation on this crucial platform by using your time to like, comment on, and share worthwhile posts and to start debates that will lead to longer conversations.
6) Avoid Annoying Your Connections
Sending unnecessary, or intrusive communications or requests, such as sales pitches or unnecessary requests, is a surefire way to turn off connections quickly. Put your attention on developing connections by posting relevant content that expands your reach. Send them a personalised note when you share an article with your network that they could find something useful in this article to demonstrate your consideration for doing so.
7) Be authentic
Being honest is crucial on LinkedIn since people can easily spot it through your actions or communications. Establishing trust with possible connections that could lead to more possibilities in the future requires to be honest when expressing your views and opinions and stop yourself from elaborating your background or abilities. They are already aware of your background from your LinkedIn profile.
In conclusion, LinkedIn is an effective platform that may help organisations and professionals in connecting, networking, and interacting with others. You risk losing the trust of people in your network if you misuse LinkedIn. It takes years to truly win someone’s trust, but only minutes to lose it. Like any other social media network, LinkedIn should be used properly and without making typical blunders. Avoiding the aforementioned mistakes can help you use LinkedIn efficiently, develop connections, and broaden your reach.
Let’s Uncomplicate Selling. Try these 5 Activities Every Week!
Let’s face it. Most of us don’t like to sell. In fact, hate might be a little too strong, but it makes most of us uncomfortable. Sometimes we don’t know what to do. Sometimes we fear failure.
What do you do to ensure your success?
The good news for all of you introverts is that my last post on digital marketing will come to your rescue. It’s why I look at three basic activities – connecting, marketing and selling as the components on how to grow a small business, or any business for that matter.
At the end of the day, we are always selling something. I met this morning with a client who has 4 children. I promise you he is selling every day!
So, what’s the good news?
The good news is that if you are connecting and engaging in digital marketing, you are building your personal brand. If your content is good you will move through the process I learned in a Shift/Co training session.
Friend > Follower > Fan > Fanatic
I’m assuming that you understand the reason we are connecting, and marketing is to build followers that we can develop into Fanatics!
The sales process is critical, but looking at these 5 activities will help.
- Warm Intros – set up at least one net new meeting every week.
- Meetings – set up a meeting at your existing clients.
- Discovery – learn how to have effective discovery sessions.
- Proposal – learn how to deliver a pre-proposal before you send a statement of work.
- Meeting Power – it is still important to figure out where the power is in a company.
A couple of additional details:
*First, the people in your network want to help you, but you have to ask. Figure out what company you want to call into and look to your relationships and your network. Network to get a warm introduction.
*Second, setting meetings is a habit. Existing clients are friendly territory and if you are doing a good job, you can ask them for introductions. In every meeting you should be asking “what else are you trying to accomplish at company X?”
*Third, a discovery meeting is much more than looking for requirements. It is taking the time to map the organization, understand the power and budget constraints, and develop a coach who will help you..
*Fourth, a pre-proposal as an interim step will ensure that you are aligned with the client prior to creating a statement of work.
*Finally, meeting “power” does not mean you have to do an end run and get to the CEO or CFO, but it does mean that you have to meet with power. People who have power set the budget and make the decisions on how to prioritize projects.
I hope those 5 selling activities help you. BUT…I also want to hear what you do!
Want to Hear How Marketing is Changing? Do These 5 Things to Establish Expertise and Credibility
Recently, I talked about 5 activities that help build a network. Here is the post.
Today, I want to outline the 5 activities that will help you establish your expertise and credibility.
I hope you will give me some feedback on how else you might do that?
5 Activities to Establish Marketing Expertise & Credibility
What’s fun about the #brand30 exercise is learning to fail fast and constantly improving your message. This is an example of that for me. My initial post was about my ConnectPoints plan and I have revamped that advice to be more relevant today.
So the three legs of the stool are connecting, marketing and selling. I covered connecting previously. Today, marketing.
Marketing and sales are converging and can no longer exist in silos.
Do you believe that? Many of my old school folks don’t. All of my new school folks do.
According to a Challenger survey, 88% of buyers research and find suppliers without engaging a representative of the company.
According to Gartner, buyers are increasingly discounting the value that sellers bring to the sales process.
Engaging in the marketing leg of the stool will overcome these two trends.
Marketing Activities
Speak – Speak in public on your expertise (5)
Publish – Write a post, blog or article (3)
Event – Attend a networking event in any medium (3)
Appointment – Meet someone in any medium (2)
Message – Reach out to a contact via email or social media (1)
“Content Generation Gap”
Finding time to consistently engage in these activities and keep score. I call the gap that is beginning to develop the “content generation gap” which I define as the lack of content being created by or for market facing individuals. By speaking, publishing and messaging, you are telling the market that you are relevant and credible. By attending networking events and meeting with people, you are spreading the word and building a network.
Every day, every week. Digital marketing matters and tracking your ConnectPoints is critical.
What do you do on a regular basis to develop and establish credibility?
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