Finding clients for your IT consulting business

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936.

An understanding of how to find clients for your IT consulting business requires first of all an understanding of the nature of entrepreneurship.

To be a successful IT consultant means that you have to be highly capable in a number of different fields. Clearly you have to be an accomplished IT professional, but that's not enough. You also have to be a perceptive marketing manager so that you can conceive of and execute a marketing strategy for your services. In addition you have to be capable of selling, which of course is a quite different skill set to marketing.¹ Once your business has begun to succeed then you will begin to employ others and you will need general management skills. Thus you need to have a plan as to how you are going to master marketing management, salesmanship, sales management, financial management and then general management. In fact quite a tall order! But in reality not necessarily as difficult as it may look.

However, even more than all these skills together, it is essential that you be an entrepreneur. Sometimes it is thought that entrepreneurship is a skill much like sales management or financial management. But it is also said that it is a fundamental personality characteristic as the essence of entrepreneurship goes far beyond simply having knowledge or acquiring skills.

6.1 Entrepreneurship – the name of the game

Being an entrepreneur is about being several things and having a number of different skills and especially attitudes at one time. Entrepreneurship is no one single thing or skill but rather a package of attributes. Entrepreneurship is about being able to spot opportunities that others do not see. It is about knowing what type of new product or service will actually be needed and for which there will be a demand.²

Entrepreneurship means being able to identify the type of organization that could become a client for you. It also involves an understanding of whom in your prospective corporate client you might approach to buy your service. This issue of finding the right person to talk to is a big challenge especially when you want to do business with large organizations where it is notoriously difficult to find the right person to approach. You may have to be quite persistent and go back to the organization several times before you find the right person.

Entrepreneurship also requires competence at knowing how to set up a business in such a way to take advantage of these new ideas. It also involves being sensitive to the risks involved and being able to assess these risks. Entrepreneurship also requires you to be able to manage these risks well.³

… SKILLS ARE CERTAINLY INVOLVED IN BEING AN ENTREPRENEUR …

Thus skills are certainly involved in being an entrepreneur but entrepreneurship does normally go well beyond clearly or easily learnable skills. For example, when it comes to the central entrepreneurial issue of risk taking it is not at all certain that being able to take a risk in business is actually a teachable skill rather than a personal characteristic. No matter what their formal training some people are simply risk averse. Thus there is some debate as to whether entrepreneurs are born to this way of thinking or if entrepreneurial ability can be taught and thus actually learnt.

Whatever the case, unless you have a fair share of the abilities of an entrepreneur you might as well not try to set up your own IT consulting business. Your entrepreneurial flair is what is going to drive your business and it will be your skill as an entrepreneur that will largely direct your client finding successes. Getting to know if you are sufficiently entrepreneurial before you start your IT consultancy business is a challenge. This may not become obvious until you actually start. The act of starting up on your own is a very entrepreneurial move in itself and this will discourage many armchair captains of industry. One of the ways of feeling your way into entrepreneurship is to start up your IT consultancy business only after you have secured your first assignment. There are two ways of doing this. The easiest, cleanest way is to negotiate a deal with your employer. Your employer may find it advantageous to reduce the head count but at the same time the organization may still need your skill, perhaps not full time, at least for the time being. If you are in such a situation you might be able to negotiate a one or two day a week assignment with your employer. This is an ideal way to start your own IT consultancy business.

The second way is to make it known to your acquaintances and associates, but perhaps not your colleagues, that you are considering starting up on your own and that if they have a need for your services you would be pleased to see if you could help them. Even if nothing comes directly from this it is probably a useful way of conducting a type of market research. If no one shows any interest in acquiring your skill set then perhaps you should rethink your idea of starting up your IT consultancy business. Note there is a possible danger in this strategy if your employer finds out what you are doing. It could be argued that you are setting up your business on your employer's time and this could be grounds for your being dismissed. Of course if you are committed to leaving your employment you might not care too much if you have to face such a crisis. But it is probably better to avoid this type of situation. However, if you can possibly manage it, having a fee-paying client on the day you start your new business is indeed a great advantage.

6.2 Entrepreneurship is not enough

However, entrepreneurship alone is not enough. What is also needed is a systematic approach to understanding the market and to converting prospective clients into satisfied customers. In fact undisciplined entrepreneurship can be as much of a problem in starting up your IT consultancy business as not enough entrepreneurial flair or insight. There is no doubt that to succeed you are going to need a complex set of skills and attributes and many people do not possess these. If these skills and attributes were common there would be far more successful IT consultants than there are today.

By the way, with all the things that you will have to learn and all the skills and attitudes that you will have to develop it is probably true to say that if you take on the challenge of creating your own consulting business and especially an IT consulting business you are committing yourself to lifelong learning and relearning – more than in most other professions. This will mean finding the time to read and to attend courses throughout your IT consulting career. Of course the IT consulting work itself will be a great learning experience but it will not on its own be enough.

6.3 From business strategy to marketing strategy

In the first chapter you saw that you needed to answer three key business strategy questions related to what service you are going to be offering, to whom you are going to be offering it and why anyone will buy from you. You now need to translate the answers to these high-level business questions into a marketing strategy.

6.4 Marketing strategy

Even as a small start-up IT consultancy business you will need to give a lot of thought to your marketing strategy which will include issues such as what you are actually selling, your fee level, your target market, how you will segment the market and how you will differentiate yourself, how many clients you would like, your promotion materials, etc.

However, as a first step your marketing strategy will have to address the following three issues:

1 How do you convey to the market exactly what it is that you can do?

2 How do you make your competence clear to your prospective clients?

3 How do you ensure that you are perceived to be offering value for money?

To make sure that these three important things happen you need to:

1 Have a clearly defined IT offering.

2 Express the value of the offering in a marketing document or brochure.

3 Ensure that your message gets into the right hands, i.e. that someone with an interest or a need and the money to spend receives it.

6.5 Have a clearly defined IT offering

Many potential IT consultants are really quite versatile with the possibility of offering a range of different services or solutions⁴ to prospective clients. However, out of all the different IT consulting services that you might offer you need to focus on something quite specific. It needs to be an area in which you have considerable expertise and in which you can deliver real benefits for your prospective clients for a price that they will consider value for money. In general terms the more focused your offering the better.⁵ Of course you may be able to deliver a number of different services and in the course of a relationship with a client you may well provide different solutions at different times, but you should not appear, at least initially, to be a jack-of-all-trades who will undertake anything if the money is right. It is clear that one of the marks of the professional is to specialize and to know his or her limits.

If, for example, you decide that you will base your IT consulting business on an offer to help companies with their strategic information systems planning or perhaps risk management or information systems project commissioning assistance then you need to define carefully where you regard the boundaries or limits of this activity to be and then largely stay within them. It is indeed most important that you do not confuse the issue by trying to be all things to all people or companies. This just won't work.

On the other hand consultancy is quintessentially opportunistic. What this means is that even if you have decided to be a ‘strategic information systems planning’ consultant but you receive an offer to do some IT related change management work you should be sufficiently flexible to consider this work opportunity. Of course this assumes that you are sufficiently competent in IT related change management work. The issue is that flexibility – taking an assignment you weren't looking for – is at the heart of successful IT consultancy.

You need to prepare marketing material, which explains what you will actually do for a client and how you will work on a step-by-step basis. You need to make quite sure that this material details the benefits of each of these steps as well as the benefit of the consulting exercise as a whole. In all your marketing material always bear in mind that your potential clients will be looking for the value proposition for them. This is sometimes expressed as the five-finger rule which is traditionally counted on the fingers of one of your hands and says ‘what's in it for me?’ If your prospective client cannot clearly see what's in it for him or her then you are not likely to get an assignment or make a sale.

By the way, the more unusual or indeed unique your service offering the better it is for you. If you come up with a new approach to strategic IS planning or to project management the more likely it is that you will win some share of the attention of the market. Not having anything new to say and being simply a me-too service provider will generally make it more difficult for you to establish yourself in the market place. Having something new to say is simply a question of your being able to differentiate yourself and it will give you the opportunity of trying to attract the interest of the press which will in effect give you free advertising which could be helpful.⁶ Of course this applies equally to any part of the media. Thus if you can obtain an interview on the radio or the television, even Internet television, it would be very helpful to getting your name around.

On the question of advertising, in general paid advertising is not likely to be of great value to your start-up IT consulting business. The services of an IT consultant are seldom purchased as the result of someone seeing an advertisement.⁷ Consultancy is more usually bought as a result of personal contact and after some considerable dialogue between the vendor and the purchaser. Also advertising is expensive and many start-up IT consulting businesses simply won't have the funds to buy the advertising needed to make their presence felt in the market place.⁸

6.6 Express the value of the offering in a marketing document or brochure

Make sure that you can clearly articulate the value of what you are offering. Consultancy will normally be bought only if there is a clear value proposition and if you cannot demonstrate this you will probably not get an assignment.

HAVING A REAL EXAMPLE OF PREVIOUSLY DONE WORK

Care needs to be taken with the marketing material – perhaps you will produce a paper brochure to indicate quite clearly the value of what you are offering. Reducing your value proposition to money terms is very helpful. If you can show that it will cost £Xs to hire you and that you may well save the organization two, three or 10 times £Xs then the prospects of your obtaining work are good. Having a real example of where you have previously done this is very helpful and of course if you can supply a reference, well that's ideal. However, being precise in a brochure is often very difficult. Perhaps detail such as the quantification of the value proposition is often better left to a specific project proposal.

6.7 Ensure that your message gets into the right hands

Brochure and other marketing material are of no value unless you can ensure that you can get them into the right hands. This is not a trivial problem. Some consultancies are able to target their promotion activities quite precisely but many have quite a lot of trouble with this. Accurate targeting requires you to carefully define the type of business you think is a good prospect for you and to try to attract the attention of the most appropriate person in these organizations. Targeting is a very important part of marketing and is sometimes described as segmenting the market. It will demand a lot of your attention especially in the early days of your business.

…ENSURE THAT IT GETS INTO THE RIGHT HANDS

The principle behind this thinking is that there is no use spending money trying to reach people or companies who will have no interest in your services. On the otherhand sometimes it is very hard to know who might actually be interested and you may not be able to or it might not be appropriate to be too specific in your targeting. A broad brush or shotgun type approach sometimes picks up unexpected prospects and clients that you had not previously thought of. Sometimes this approach can pay dividends especially if you can arrange the costs so that if you obtain one client from the shotgun distribution of your brochures, it will have paid for itself. If you decide to take this approach you might mail out thousands or even tens of thousands of brochures. You could insert the brochure into a management magazine or into the newsletter of a Chamber of Commerce.⁹ This will sometimes produce some leads, some of which may eventually convert to an assignment. However, there are many who would say that it is generally a very wasteful approach to selling IT consultancy. Mailing lists are notoriously inaccurate with many of the people on these lists having moved jobs. Some lists are simply invented with job titles rather than people's names being used. Also there is a very high rate of unsolicited mail being immediately discarded without being read and sometimes without even being opened by the recipient. It is possible to obtain current e-mail addresses from the Web and if you can use an e-mail type brochure you may get through to some of the right people at relatively little cost.

… UNSOLICITED MAIL BEINGIMMEDIATELY DISCARDED …

There is little doubt that IT consultancy is best sold through direct personal contacts and there is no easy way of developing these contacts. Some start-up IT consultants will spend the first three months of their new business life just telephoning one prospective client after another in order to try to establish contact. Generally receptionists and secretaries will refuse to put unsolicited telephone calls through to the person to whom you really need to speak. As a result you may well find yourself compromising your objective and settling for trying to obtain some information from the target firm – at least finding out the name and job title of a suitable person to which to send a letter and a brochure. Also sometimes receptionists and secretaries can inadvertently give clues to what sort of IT consulting services the organization might actually need. These need to be listened to.¹⁰ This is clearly very hard and very time consuming work indeed. But sometimes there is no other way of getting started.

Perseverance or determination is a key feature of the successful IT consultant.

Of course the likelihood of obtaining IT consultancy business from a brochure even when accompanied by a personal letter, which has been mailed to someone whom you have not at least spoken to, is as I already mentioned a long shot.¹¹

6.8 Making your competence clear to your prospect clients

It has been said that competence like beauty and contact lenses is in the eye of the beholder. Thus it is a major concern as to how you can portray an air of competence to your prospective clients. It is especially difficult to project an air of competence through a marketing document¹² or brochure.¹³ It is not a trivial matter to give the appearance of being able to deliver a solution to a prospective client's problem. However, one of the key issues in this regard is that your marketing document needs to be error free. Even one minor typographical error has been known to be sufficient to spoil the document's impression of professional competence. Competence in the specific task proposed might also be demonstrated by reference to previous work for an employer or some other organization you have been involved with. Of course if you use such references you need to make sure that you have cleared this, in advance, with the people concerned. Whatever you put in writing in your marketing document needs to be verifiable.

… AN AIR OF COMPETENCE TO YOUR PROSPECTIVE CLIENTS

The question of a reference or references is a very important one and is a key to successful IT consulting selling. What this amounts to is making it clear that in your previous work situations you have solved identical, or at least very similar, problems and that you were considered to have delivered value. In this respect it helps a lot if you can describe your previous work by means of an interesting story. Storytelling is a very useful attribute for a consultant. However, as mentioned before you need to be quite clear that what you say is verifiable. There is a lot of cynicism around consultants. It is frequently said that a consultant is someone who can read a book and who is prepared to travel. You have to make it clear that you have done this type of work and that you know how to solve the problem and deliver value for money for the client. Thus if you have someone who will give you a reference to this effect you will have a considerable advantage and you will probably benefit from using this.

There is little doubt that the question of creating an air of competence is one of the most serious facing the IT consultant. There are many characteristics of a competent consultant that you should ensure that you are able to emulate. These include actively listening, empathizing, searching for a solution, etc. However, before you will get a chance to demonstrate these you may have to convince your prospective client through your marketing material and perhaps a telephone discussion. This is what makes the marketing material so very important.

Presenting your competence is of course best done through face-to-face contact and consultants will often undertake speaking engagements at conferences and seminars to meet people to whom they can directly present their competencies.¹⁴ Having met a prospective client at a conference at which you were presenting or even attending can put you in an advantageous position.

6.9 What is your target market?

Choosing your target market is a key issue. It is sometimes thought that small start-up IT consultancies need to focus on other small businesses. Although it is possible to succeed with an IT consultancy business by operating in this business sector, this notion of needing to focus on like sized businesses is usually not useful. In general small businesses seldom buy much consulting services. They frequently don't really have the sort of problems that consultants can help with and perhaps more importantly small firms often just can't afford the cost of the consultancy time. However, there are clearly exceptions to this and some people have developed successful and substantial businesses from servicing small firms.

The next step up this size ladder is the medium sized business. This is usually a more fertile ground as some of these organizations do have the need for sophisticated information systems and also are sufficiently profitable to have the resources with which to pay for this service.

But start-up IT consultancies need not restrict themselves to thinking that they should only approach smaller firms. Most consulting is bought by big organizations that have big problems needing help and who have the money to pay for it. Therefore these organizations are a good target for the start-up IT consultant. The main problem you will face is finding out who in the large organization you need to talk to and once you have found this out, the issue is then how do you get access to this person. There is absolutely no doubt that getting access to the appropriate person is tough and you need to be resourceful to do this. If it is possible for you to get an introduction from a friend or former colleague or even a family member, this can be helpful.

You might also meet the right people at a variety of venues such as meetings of the Chamber of Commerce or professional societies or alumni clubs or hardware or software user groups, etc. It is probably worth joining a few of these even before you start up your IT consultancy business.

Of course as mentioned above some IT consultancy businesses are set up only after the entrepreneur has been able to land the first job. This could be regarded as a warm start to the business and is a very useful way to get going – in fact a great way to start up your own business. Having business from day one means that money can start rolling in at the end of the first month but perhaps even more important there is a great psychological or emotional advantage to begin a business from a running start. Working to find your first assignment is very stressful and if this takes more than a few months it may cause quite a lot of difficulty.¹⁵

If you are starting up your IT consultancy business cold then you have to expect the first few months to be espescially tough. Finding clients is not easy.

6.10 Finding your target clients

The process of identifying and contacting target clients is an important part of sales management and this is one of the key skills the start-up IT consultant needs to quickly acquire. The key issue here is not wasting any of your time.¹⁶ You just have to be as efficient and effective as you can be in finding business. You need to keep track of whom you have contacted. You need to record the type of discussion you have had with people and what sort of proposal, verbal or written, you have made. A simple database on a personal computer will be a great help with this. Some sales managers make a distinction between clients, prospects and suspects. A client is someone with whom you are currently doing business. A prospect, which of course is short for prospective client, is someone you believe is likely to do business with you and a suspect is a person or an organization about which you know very little but about which you feel there may be some chance of your doing business. Using this terminology many organizations will be suspects for you and the first task you have, as your own sales person, is to establish if there is any potential business there. It's very much like panning for gold. You have to shake out the duds and then focus on what is left. And of course only part of what you are left with after the initial shake out will actually be useful to you.

… EFFECTIVE AS YOU CAN BE IN FINDING BUSINESS

In the case of the start-up IT consultancy there are at least two key questions which have to be immediately answered to decide if you actually have a suspect that will become a prospect. The first is ‘Is the suspect a regular user of consultants?’ and the second is ‘Do they have a problem with which I can help them?’ If the answer to both of these is yes then there is a third qualifying question, which is ‘Do they have the money to pay for IT consultancy?’ With three yes answers the suspect could be considered to be eligible for promotion to the status of prospect. With one or more no answers the suspect should be put on the back burner for possible attention at a future date.

Start-up IT consultancies will probably have lots of prospects and one of the major initial tasks is to try to prioritize them. This is sometimes difficult and always be prepared to be surprised as to who ends up giving you business and who doesn't. You need to assess the prospects in terms of the probability that they will give you an assignment. Some people try to make an objective assessment of this probability but in reality any probability assessment of this nature is essentially a subjective opinion. The prospects that you deem to have the highest probability of offering an assignment need to be wooed most carefully. The lower probability prospects must not be entirely ignored but less attention needs to be given to them.

These probabilities are not fixed. In fact they will change all the time and you will find yourself changing your mind as to who will produce your next job. To give yourself any chance of controlling this you need to fully document all the contacts that you have with your prospects. Some sales managers believe that if a prospect does not develop into an assignment within a given period of time such as three months you as your own sales person should drop that prospect off your list. It is true to say that prospects should not stay on the list forever but the period of time which you give yourself to close a deal is very subjective and probably really depends upon which other organization you have on your prospect list. Your opportunity cost needs to be kept in mind continually.

Sales management is as much an art as a science and you will find that your own success or failure will teach you a lot as you proceed in building your IT consultancy business. In general it is important to ensure that your selling efforts are highly focused and as said before you use your selling time as efficiently and as effectively as you can. Well or productively used selling time is one of the fundamental contributors to business success.

It is worth stressing again that you need to be clear as to what you want to sell and who are likely to buy from you. You need to avoid trying to sell assignments that you cannot confidently do. You need to avoid trying to sell jobs that are too big or too small. You need to avoid selling jobs, which are in locations, that are too inaccessible and thus require too much travelling time. It is important to refuse jobs that you are not comfortable that you can competently perform. It is much better to refuse an assignment than to take on something you are not really able to deliver and face a subsequent row or even a law suit with a client. In summary the single most important issue the new IT consultant has to face is finding clients. Clients are the life and soul of any business. With satisfactory clients, i.e. those who pay promptly the fees you ask, your business will prosper. Without satisfactory clients a business will certainly fail.

6.11 The project proposal

A project proposal serves several quite different functions. In the first place it is a selling document while at the same time it often serves as the basic agreement on which a contract of work may be drawn up.

There is no doubt that the project proposal is the key selling document for the IT consultant. It spells out precisely in as compelling terms as possible why the consultant should be engaged and what benefits the client will obtain by the end of the assignment. This document requires considerable attention to both the high level aspects of the proposed work and in some cases even to the detail of precisely what will actually be done. Sometimes a proposal can take weeks or even months to write, although months would be unusual and only happen in the case of the largest jobs. However, even for quite small jobs it is most important not to rush your proposal. Make sure that it covers all the issues you need to.

The proposal needs to be a document which explains just about everything concerning your possible involvement with the proposed assignment without you being there to explain what you actually mean. The things which are left out of a proposal often come back to haunt you and the project. Thus preparing this document is going to take time, effort and even money – and it is necessary to write the proposal well.

Therefore start out by asking your prospective client if you may submit a proposal. Do not prepare this document before you have got this go-ahead, as you don't want to waste the time on a proposal if the prospect is not going to read it and take it seriously.

Always remember that a project proposal is the IT consultant's ultimate selling document. A professionally prepared project proposal spells out what the problem or opportunity the consultant can help with actually is. The project proposal demonstrates how the consultant will help. It will itemize the deliverables. And it states clearly why and how the consultant is qualified to do this. It will detail the work to be done. It will specify how much and when the consultant will be paid.

Project proposals can be quite long, sometimes dozens of pages. Occasionally you may want to produce an even longer document up to hundreds of pages, for example. However, for the start-up IT consultant this would usually be an overkill. If you need to write a long proposal make sure that you keep the executive summary or overview short – perhaps only one or two pages and put as much of the detail as possible into appendices.

As well as producing a printed proposal you may also be asked to verbally present your ideas to key members of the client company.¹⁷ In effect this amounts to speaking to the key members of the prospect's staff in order to impress them with the fact that you are competent and that you can produce the ‘goods’. Always make sure that you do not speak for too long. Usually 10 to 15 minutes will be entirely adequate for this purpose.

If you are not a competent public speaker then you may need to be coached in this before you appear before your prospective client. It is important not to skip on preparation for such a presentation.

6.12 Clinching the deal with a contract

Some prospective clients will ask the IT consultants to sign a formal contract, especially for larger jobs. Other prospective clients will not bother with this formality and start you working with a verbal agreement or a letter or an e-mail.

Some prospective clients will be very formal and will insist on separate confidentiality contracts. Some prospective clients will require retaining the intellectual or copyright of anything which results from the work that you will do for them. There may also be clauses in these contracts with respect to restraint of trade, i.e. trying to prevent you from working for a competitor in the future. You may need to steer your way carefully through these sometimes delicate issues. If you do not feel comfortable about a proposed contract or if you think that you may not fully understand all the ramifications of it you may well want to take advice from your lawyer.

As a minimum you should have possession of a letter or an e-mail of appointment to the assignment.

The contract or letter of appointment should indicate at the very least the following:

1 When the assignment will start.

2 Who will be involved in the work.

3 What equipment will be involved.

4 A list of specific deliverables.¹⁸

5 When the deliverables are required.

6 Who will decide if the deliverables are adequate.

7 How much will be paid.

8 How and when the payments of fees will be made.

9 How the parties to the contract could get out of the deal if they wish.

It is very important not to sign the contract before you have read it carefully. As a general rule you should give yourself some time to think about the details as it can be very embarrassing if something important has been left out and you want to go back to the client and ask for a contract revision. Sometimes the client will simply refuse point blank to revise the contract.

6.13 What the Internet can do for you

There are numerous ways in which the Internet can be used to help you find clients. In fact marketing on the Web has become a recognized field of study and a field of consulting in its own right and there are now several books and courses on this subject.

Once you have acquired one or more clients it is important to reflect your new-found experience on your website. Publishing testimonials and references from satisfied customers will help reinforce your qualifications. If you present your competencies and examples of where you have applied them in an attractive and easy to follow manner on your website you can direct prospects to your site to learn more about what you do.

If you have written articles that may have been published on other websites include a link to them on your own site. If you have the permission you could also create on your own website an information centre about the area of your own competencies by publishing other material including interesting articles written by others. Your website could become a fulcrum for your marketing efforts.

If you have the time, consider writing something new for the site each month and send an e-mail to your clients and contacts to tell them about it. This will encourage people to return to your site and thus see the type of work you are currently doing. Keeping up the visibility is always important, and your website is a useful vehicle for this.

Search engines like websites that have external links to them. This means that if you can get your clients, suppliers, colleagues to include a link to your website on their site you are likely to be higher up the search rankings. The more specific you're offering is the better this can work for you.

6.14 Getting started

It is never too soon to start finding clients. Start putting feelers out the moment the idea of starting your own IT consultancy enters your head. Start keeping notes of whom you have met and what service they may be looking for. Put this on your computer so that you can eventually code it, file it and retrieve it in some useful way. Test your business ideas with everyone you can and listen to what they have to say. Not everyone will be positive so you don't have to be depressed if some people don't like your ideas. But listen to them and try to see what you can learn from them. On the other hand just because someone agrees with you or flatters your ideas they are not necessarily right. Beware of being flattered. The IT consultancy world is really quite tough to succeed in.

6.15 Summary and conclusion

It is very important not to underestimate how difficult it is to find clients. It is an endless job that nearly always has to be a priority. Despite what has been said during the e-business mania you just don't have a business unless you have clients.

You need to start building your network as soon as possible and to keep extending it right throughout the life of your business. Perhaps you can just never know too many people?

6.16 Checklist

Things to think about when working on finding clients

1 How clear is your market offering? Is it relatively unique? If not why should anyone buy from you? But of course beware of being too novel.

2 How can you clearly demonstrate your own competence? How can this competence be made obvious in your marketing material or brochure?

3 How can you ‘prove’ that you will be value for money? Have you got all the references you may need arranged in advance?

4 Can you get free media exposure – press, radio, television?

5 Have you started building your own virtual network? You can never start too soon.

6 Have you joined the right Chambers of Commerce and clubs?

7 Have you offered to give a lecture to or conduct a seminar for an appropriate user group?

8 How good is your telephone technique for getting to talk to the right person or at least getting information about who the right person is?

9 Have you designed a really eye-catching marketing document, business card and brochure?

10 Have you a strategy for getting the marketing document or brochure into the hands of the right prospects?

11 Can you write an effective or compelling proposal?

12 Can you speak well in public to a senior audience in order to sell your ideas and to sell yourself as the person who is needed to make the ideas a reality?

13 How skilled a salesperson are you? Are you good at asking the right questions? Are you a good active listener? Are you good at asking for the assignment?

14 Are you able to understand and interpret a contract?

15 Do you have a business lawyer available to help you if necessary?

¹ Selling skills are often thought of as being much more prosaic than marketing and involve such issues as knowing how to listen to your prospective client and when and how to ask for the order. However, it needs always to be remembered that no matter how smart the marketing a sales contract or letter has to be obtained before the actual work can begin.

² It is important to note that there is a difference between need and demand and that one of the key issues that distinguishes between these two concepts is the question of price. There are all sorts of needs that do not translate into demand simply because the price is inappropriate. Thus one of the key attributes of the entrepreneur is estimating the elasticity of price demand for whatever he or she intends to do, make or sell.

³ Some of the famous entrepreneurs who have been celebrated over the years have not been good at understanding and managing the risk that their businesses have faced. One famous example that comes to mind is Sir Freddie Laker who without doubt revolutionized the airline business but who apparently did not foresee the risk in rapid expansion.

⁴ It is important for the IT consultant always to think in terms of solutions for their clients. Consultants are employed to solve problems or to help take advantage of opportunities and the consultant needs always to be on the lookout to be helpful in these ways. There really is no other rational reason why a consultant should be employed by any organization.

⁵ As your IT consultancy business develops you may wish to relax this tight focus and take on a wider range of assignments. Then the issue will become ‘How much of a specialist do you want to be or do you want to become a generalist?’ However, do remember that with a few exceptions it is harder to start an IT consultancy as a generalist rather than a specialist.

⁶ Like most things in life this notion of having a novel idea can be taken too far and sometimes a new service can be so new that no one will recognize the need for it. If you are going to follow the strategy of low cost regular work you will probably be better off if you are not too novel in your approach.

⁷ Of course there are exceptions to this comment and after all if you advertise and obtain only one new client you may well be on the right side of the financial equation. However, I have known advertisements for consulting services not to solicit even one enquiry.

⁸ The issue of engaging promotional consultants or personal publicists is similar to buying advertising. It is frequently too expensive for the small start-up IT consultancy and value delivered is unlikely to be great.

⁹ On one occasion I inserted an expensive glossy brochure offering IT consulting services into the mailing of a Chamber of Commerce. Although I did not get an immediate reply I eventually obtained an enquiry which led to a consultancy project which paid more than ten times the cost of the brochure and the Chamber of Commerce's fees. However, this was actually a very long shot and was more like to going to the casino than making a rational marketing decision.

¹⁰ The art of selling is a very challenging one. It is sometimes thought to be about being positive and making a big impression on the prospective client. In reality the most important aspect of selling is about listening – active listening. You will not sell anything (except by accident) if you don't know what the prospective client wants. Fortunately many if not most prospective clients will tell you what they want if you ask the right questions and then carefully listen to their answers. Active listening can be difficult especially for the more extroverted sales person. So practise it – lots.

¹¹ It used to be thought that a beautifully produced paper brochure was essential but increasingly IT consultants are using Websites and e-mailed brochures instead.

¹² Don't forget that your business card is also a marketing document and needs to be designed with that in mind.

¹³ You don't actually need to spend a fortune on a multi-coloured glossy brochure. You can probably produce a perfectly professional document on your desktop publishing system. However, you may find it very useful to seek some advice from a professional brochure designer as to how to lay out this brochure for best effect. It is also very useful to know about colour combinations and type fonts. It is surprising how many expensive brochures are actually quite hard to read.

¹⁴ There are numerous opportunities for consultants to speak at conferences and seminars especially if they will appear without being paid a fee. Although this will provide visibility for the consultant it is important not to take on too much unpaid work as presenting at conferences is very time consuming.

¹⁵ Some prospective IT consultants will just drop out and give up and go and find another job. They might in the meantime have wiped out much of their savings. Others will find the unsuccessful struggle to find work so stressful that it can actually make them ill. It is really a sad state of affairs if your prospective IT consultancy business fails and you were to end up both broke and ill. This does unfortunately happen to some people but fortunately not too many.

¹⁶ It is of course very difficult to know in advance what constitutes a waste of time when prospecting for new business. I have been surprised several times by business coming my way when I was sure that the business lead had long since died. In general I would say that if you get work from 1 in 10 prospective clients within 90 days of making contact you are probably working relatively efficiently. Other consultants would regard this as too slow. Of course the size of the assignment also needs to be brought into this equation. You might decide to hang in much longer and try much harder if there is a really big assignment in the offering.

¹⁷ If you are not asked to speak to the management team then volunteer. The more exposure you can get to as many of the senior members of the company the better. If you are going to present to the management team make sure you are very well prepared. If you have to, learn your talk off by heart. Use as much technology as is appropriate but do not exclusively rely on it. Thus if you are going to use slides on your computer and a data projector, also bring with you overhead transparencies. Risk management is the name of this game.

¹⁸ Stating the deliverable and when they will be achieved in the form of a table is a very useful approach. Such a table can subsequently be converted into a work schedule which could be the basis for a bar chart or network diagram for your own project management purposes.