Many solo professionals and small consulting firms struggle to build a truly lucrative and fulfilling enterprise, because they lack the right strategic plan and roadmap for leveraging their expertise. This article discusses the limiting factors and offers a solution for growing your reach and maximising revenue.

I’m amazed in this digital age that so many consultants and coaches are still using very traditional methods to win new business, limiting themselves to local clientele and delivering an exhausting range of face-to-face, one-to-one or done-for-you services.

The first reason many professional services fail to grow is because they don’t know how to attract and nurture a consistent flow of good quality leads to whom they can sell their services and products. The second reason is they think that growing the business means working harder, putting in more hours or hiring more staff.

Increasing sales opportunities

Growing a consulting or coaching business is not all about marketing to get more customers. Most importantly, it’s about maximising business revenue by increasing your sales opportunities (so you cover more white space under the graph shown above) in ways that don’t depend on your being “in the office” day in and day out.

Leveraged consulting means scaling your business beyond the limitations of local clientele and billable hours (which would represent just one column on the graph). Your high-end consulting or coaching services should be the ultimate offer, but not your only offer.

When you think about marketing and delivering your expertise in digital formats, a global marketplace opens up of people hungry for a specific solution you can help them with. Massive growth in digital publishing and online learning are driving many consultants and coaches to become “educational entrepreneurs”.

Why educational content works best

The main success tactic is to create a compelling value proposition. The reason that educational content is such an important element of maximising business revenue for consultants and coaches is that it both generally fits your professional values for helping people and it engenders the trust and service needed to acquire a client.

Success stems from creating good educational content that serves a clear and urgent need. Such content needs to be:

(1) it is highly targeted to a specific problem that a specific group of people have; and

(2) it’s highly valuable in that it helps them solve it.

To start off, you could create a low-cost product that lots of people want and need or you could create a high-end programme that serves a niche market.

Choose one area of expertise you want to become well known for doing well, create a signature product around it and focus your marketing predominantly on that.

Attracting and nurturing targeted buyers

However, most websites are not designed to sell. I see so many beautifully designed sites that are simply not targeting their ideal clientele specifically enough and/or do not provide an straightforward buying experience. There’s little point working tirelessly to generate leads if they slip through the gaps of your marketing and sales process.

While your networking and advertising may generate leads, both tend to be expensive and don’t necessarily yield high-quality prospects for your business.

On the other hand, driving lead generation through education-rich content marketing with highly targeted keywords can drive your ‘front-end’ marketing and generate solid leads with zero or very low cost, but does takes time and consistent effort.

The way to uplevel your capacity for maximising business revenue is by creating a digital platform to generate leads and follow up with them.

Networking and advertising are continuous operational costs to your business month after month, whereas with a good automated follow-up system, content marketing can produce a continuous stream of leads long after the initial material is produced and published.

Your follow up should take your prospect by the hand, provide value and help them know what to do next. It should be aimed at attracting and building trust with your ideal audience as they move through your sales “pipeline”.

Creating products that lead into your high-end services

Once you have generated a lead, educational products and programmes offered on the ‘back-end’ enable your prospect to continue the relationship and achieve the results they want, whilst generating additional streams of income for you.

This dual strategy works like a funnel –your prospect enters at the top end and you make sales at the bottom end. This enables you to switch to a highly leveraged business model and a path to increased influence, impact and income.

Making it all work

Getting this strategy working comes down to how successfully you align your brand positioning with the needs of your target market, and how well you can systematise your expert process to scale both marketing and delivery.

Leveraged Consulting is a new book that shows you a 7-step strategy and practical process for improving the capacity of your business brand, marketing and offerings. When you implement this approach you can attract more of your ideal clients, generate multiple streams of revenue and impact more people than one-to-one-consulting alone can achieve.

Download free sample chapter of LEVERAGED CONSULTING to learn more about maximising business revenue with educational products.