Some consultants say, “I don’t need a marketing strategy – I have many good friends in the industry”. This is short-sighted, foolish and not the red-carpet it might seem to be. The trouble with ‘friends in the industry’ who may suffer from lack of business etiquette, is that they can want to use you as a consultant on a “friendship” basis, meaning double the work for half the price, with the payment of fees sometimes rather slow – because you’re friends!

For some consultants, the search for new clients will be endless, even if their consulting practice is a success story. An attempt was being made to headhunt a well-qualified business psychologist as a new senior member of staff in a large change management consultancy working in a commercial environment and with more business than it could handle. The business psychologist asked if she would be dealing with client programmes. The company responded; “No, we will expect you to spend about 40 percent of your time on marketing.” She never joined them.

You may, by this time, be feeling that this article? is more about identifying the (pooh traps) (problems) there are likely to be in finding clients, rather than positive guidance on “how to find clients”. However, it does stand to be said that advice on where the pooh traps may be found ought to be useful as far as it goes.

There can hardly be a short answer even for a starting point on where to get clients. But what there is, almost overwhelming in quantity and quality, is the internet, It has grown into something that is absolutely matchless for this kind of thing. The trouble with most consultants is that they do not know how to tap into it to generate hundreds of prospects.

If you search Google for “How to get clients for an independent consultancy” it lists well over 400,000,000 sites. Serch it for “Books on How to get clients for an independent consultancy” and it lists over 2,000,000 million sites.

They all have search engines that will enable you to particularise the search more narrowly for the field of consultancy you are working in, or intend to be working in.

But far beyond this, there is much more to forming an independent consulting business which is capable of generating a pipeline of regular clients. With the correct strategy and knowledge, it is not very difficult to create such a pipeline, but it has been difficult until now, to know where to get such stategies and knowledge.

A lot of new independent consultants try to sell before they market to prospective clients and this is a big mistake which can end any chance they previously had on turning prospects into clients. There is a significant difference between selling and marketin, and every independent consultant should be aware of that.