Everyone wanting to start their own business should be in sales first. You don’t really have a company, unless you have a client, and no one understands that better than a commissioned salesperson.
As an independent consultant, you understand your first goal is to find and service customers. Luckily, you have a lot to offer in terms of coaching and advice. What you lack as a small contractor, is time. Time to build sales training and materials to help leverage your consulting skills.
I had the opportunity to start a consulting business after 10 years in sales and sales management. It was another of those things everyone should experience. The biggest challenge was that you could either spend time finding and servicing new clients or spend time creating good training and content to leverage your efforts.
You can create more meaningful opportunities to coach your clients when they learn concepts on their own first. Concepts you can then coach and train them further in. You have this knowledge, but many consultants lack a good sales training product to build their consulting around.
If you find yourself struggling to create sales training material for your consulting business, luckily there are other options. A casual approach is to have a client read a great sales training book, and use the concepts to coach them further. Another would be to find online training that would benefit your client’s sales efforts, and create another training and coaching opportunity for you.
So you have a choice. Stop down long enough to create your own training, or partner with someone who already has. Informally or formally, your clients will benefit.
There are lots of choices depending on the focus of your consultancy. As Director of Content for The Center for Sales Strategy, I welcome you to include us in the partners you consider to help your clients achieve more success.
