As a startup entrepreneur, the services of a consultant can seem like a questionable expense when you’re strapped for time and have limited resources.
After all, what kinds of recommendations can be made by a consultant that an entrepreneur can’t simply research on their own for free?
How do you avoid paying for solutions you don’t need, and how do you know if the data you are receiving from a consulting firm is helpful?
In this article, we address all of those questions by discussing how an entrepreneurial consultant can help your startup company in five different areas of brand marketing:
- Problem-solving
- Information gathering
- Assessment and diagnosis
- Implementing change
- Organizational management
How Do Consultants Solve Problems for Entrepreneurs?
A consultant who thinks like an entrepreneur can help reimagine challenges and find fresh solutions for your startup company. The best consultants have a calming knack for addressing complex issues in simple ways, helping entrepreneurs think about situations differently.
In order to discover opportunities that will have the most impact for your startup company, a consultant might begin with some of the following questions:
- What strategies have other companies tried in the past?
- What strategies have you thought of but not yet tried?
- What is the current business climate in your industry?
- What are your 1-,3-, and 5-year goals?
- Is a solution necessary or could the situation rectify itself?
- How will a solution, if one is found, be applied?
- How can all stakeholders be aligned with a new direction?
A good consultant will also leverage your expertise to quickly fill any gaps in their knowledge. Asking the right questions is an essential step in developing a comprehensive strategy, managing growth, and scaling successfully at each stage.
Consultants Connect Entrepreneurs with the Right Information
An entrepreneurial consultant can help startup companies build a profitable customer acquisition pipeline – a system that leads buyers through a series of stages on their journey to becoming a customer.
From first becoming aware of a problem or need, to actively researching their options, to finally selecting a brand as the winner, this system will provide a wealth of data to guide growth.
This requires not only studying your buyer’s motivations, but also measuring how they interact with your website, email campaigns, social media and other marketing activities.
Tracking the online habits and behaviors of your audience is critical to developing the right brand messaging, so you can engage them at the right time, with the right next step – and grow your company profitably and predictably.
Key metrics a consultant might use to measure growth and success include:
- Organic website traffic
- Total website traffic
- Lead conversion rate
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
- Opportunities / New deals
- Revenue from new customers
- Revenue from existing customers
- Customer retention
- Customer satisfaction via Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Entrepreneur Consultants Diagnose Startup Companies
Just like an entrepreneur, a consultant must always anticipate the next problem well before it arises.
After content for the customer acquisition pipeline is created, for example, the job has only begun. The performance of that content must be continuously monitored in order to identify successes and problem areas.
A valuable consultant will have a data-driven strategy for analyzing the performance of your customer acquisition pipeline and making continuous improvements. The result: a more efficient, more profitable growth strategy.
How Consultants Implement Change
Attracting buyers is one thing, but in order to streamline their movement through your sales pipeline, you need to continuously test its performance and make iterative improvements.
The best way to do this is with a system.
A consultant with a systematic approach to testing and improving your pipeline will have a repeatable process for turning data into the decisions that fuel growth.
Working together, a consultant and entrepreneur can implement a system that makes it easy to continuously monitor marketing activities.
Whether starting a business or scaling an existing company, all players – entrepreneurs, consultants or agencies – must always be measuring, learning and improving their efforts.
Routine change is a core element of growth strategy.
Organizational Management
The best consulting agencies for startups will teach your company how to plan, research, set goals, assign tasks, and follow through with a well-developed system that you can test and implement gradually with no outside help.
Different Types of Consultants for Startup Companies
Now that you know what a consultant does for a startup company, understand there are several different types of consulting agencies for startup entrepreneurs to consider.
Identifying the differences between consulting agencies is key to determining if a consultant is needed in the first place and, if so, picking the best type of consultant for your entrepreneurial business needs.
Three different examples of consultants for startup companies are growth, agile, and demand generation consultants:
- A growth marketing agency will take a data-driven approach to quarter-over-quarter revenue growth.
- An agile marketing team focuses on micro-improvements in continuous 2-4 week sprints.
- A demand-generation consultant builds brand awareness and authority to win buyers’ loyalty before they are ready to purchase.
With each type of consulting, an agency will identify the topics that are most relevant to buyers. Those topics will be used to create compelling content for every stage of the customer acquisition pipeline, and can take many forms:
- Blogging – Search engine optimization (SEO) writing includes keywords to drive organic traffic.
- Paid advertising campaigns – Paying to promote content on platforms owned by others.
- Gated content – Guides, e-books, free offers, and other web content offered in exchange for a visitor’s contact information, to attract qualified leads for marketing.
- Lead generation – Creating and capturing buyers’ interest in your products or services.
- Lead nurturing – The process of following through with a lead to convert them into a customer.
- Case studies – Proof of work you have completed successfully along with testimonials.
- FAQs – The answers to frequently asked questions can improve conversion rates by building trust and authority before buyers ever contact a sales rep.
Is an Entrepreneur Consultant Right for Your Startup Company?
The practice of growing a company has become an industry of its own. There’s no shortage of books, courses, gurus, consultants and agencies offering expert advice.
A consulting agency is a great solution for many, but before you commit you’ll want to make sure it’s the right fit.
Our advice?
Look for a consultant with a record of success in their niche – whether it be agile, demand generation or growth marketing consulting. Make sure a consultant will tailor a strategy to your growth goals with a data-driven approach that ensures you’re always prepared to adapt on your journey.
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