A Step-by-Step Guide to Selling Consulting Services Do people often ask for your professional advice? It's time to start charging for your consulting sessions.
By Alex Berman Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Ever since I launched my YouTube channel where I talk about different strategies regarding B2B selling and inbound marketing, I've gotten a lot of requests from my audience to hop on a call with them and help them out.
Related: How to Start a Consulting Business
This is how I got started offering consulting services to different companies and entrepreneurs. Based on what I've learned, here's how to structure these consulting calls so you can start selling them on your own.
1. Selling
I usually use a pretty simple email whenever I'm asked a detailed question that requires a decent amount of my time.
This email includes the price for the consulting call, which can vary, but generally starts at $300. Usually, that email is enough to get viewers to buy in.
You want to price your consulting services in a way that it makes you want to work for that amount (even if you're not in the mood). By charging a certain amount for the consulting call, you make sure that you're adding value and the other person is also taking your notes more seriously.
Related: Too Much? Too Little? How to Set Fees for Your New Consulting Business
2. Mindset
For those who are just getting into coaching and consulting, the best way to start is to assume that the person on the other end is going to get good information out of your session.
People usually join a coaching session either because they have a burning problem or they are so close to a solution that only few words are enough to solve it for them. In some cases, people paying for a consulting session already have an idea or solution to a specific problem, but they want to have your ideas or expertise.
It is important to remember that the person won't reach out to you for coaching if she didn't like something about what you're doing.
3. Scheduling
To get this meeting on the calendar, I use a tool called Calendly. There are a bunch of alternatives out there, but Calendly is a pretty popular solution. The tool is free, but I use a version that charges about $10-$15 a month and plugs directly into my Google calendar. There are a lot of similar tools out there that you can choose from if you don't like Calendly.
Related: 4 Reasons to Add Consulting to Your List of Services
4. Payment
I recently discovered and started using Google Wallet. It is a free tool from Google and its pretty similar to Venmo. It allows you to input your credit card info and the amount billed is directly transferred to your account on the same day.
I've previously also used Venmo and Paypal, and as a company (Experiment 27) we used Chargebee for a while. With Chargebee, we had a problem where it would mess up our revenue numbers and our churn rate. A lot of these coaching sessions are one- or two-time purchases for a very small amount of money compared to our main service offerings, so it would mess up our purchase rates.
Setting up a Google Wallet account is pretty simple and it also provides invoices. The last coaching session I did, an invoice was paid within two hours.
Related: Why Building a Consulting Business Is Harder Than It Initially Seems
5. Process
It is important to know whether the person purchasing a coaching session is getting value out of it. I picked up this idea from someone with whom I used to do a bunch of coaching sessions who runs his coaching session using Google docs. He opens up a blank Google doc at the start of a coaching session and adds notes there. Using that model, my clients and I go over different goals and questions by writing them in a Google doc and I also assign homework. Here's an example of a document like that.
And because all of it was done in a Google doc, everyone has easy access to it. At the end of each coaching session, I think it's necessary to have a homework assignment that would set up the attendees on something to work for the next week.
Bonus: Should your consulting landing page have short or long copy?
There's been a long debate among the copywriting community about whether short copy or long copy is the best. Some say that you need long landing pages outlining data point after data point in order to make someone take action and buy your services.
But, there's another group of copywriters who believe that the short copy is more effective because of its to-the-point approach and easier click and buy operation.
There are always two sides to all advice, but for us, short copy didn't work.
Our coaching funnel normally consists of our clients watching a YouTube video and then booking a consulting call directly. The clients would usually find the consulting page and would be welcomed by the headline, "Want me to help you double, triple or maybe even quadruple your revenue for the next quarter?" Our landing page was converting about two clients a week who wanted consulting services on how to improve their agency business.
Related: 5 Steps to Building a 6-Figure Consultancy
Being a fan of testing, I thought we could do better. My favorite coaching page of all time is one that is literally a picture of the coach's face along with a description that says "Did you know Neville takes on four different private consulting clients?" along with one paragraph of copy and a "buy now" button -- that's it.
So, we wrote a version of our consulting page based on Neville's, but we saw our conversions drop from where they were before down to almost zero. We had just one conversion for the entire month that we had this landing page.
Since this approach clearly wasn't working for us, we changed back to our previous landing page. We kept a few items from the other approach. For example, we changed the pricing section and began offering consulting packages. Having packages on the copy page increased the revenue dramatically.
The other thing that this experiment taught us is that we needed a more intense email drip to sell people on coaching. We rewrote our email sequence, which is now a five-day drip in which we basically hard sell people on coaching as they sign up for any of our lead magnets on our YouTube channel.
Even though the short copy approach wasn't right for us, we did gain some valuable insights from the experiment.
