What’s keeping them from hiring you

When consulting firm owners tell me they're having a harder time bringing in clients, one of the first things I hear is that they need more leads.

Sometimes they do.

But there’s a bunch of stuff that has to happen between someone becoming aware of you and deciding to hire you. And if you don't know where things are breaking down, generating more leads may not help much.

I've been thinking about this from the buyer's point of view. What needs to be true for someone to hire you?

I came up with five things.

1. Do enough of the right people know you exist?

Obviously, people can't hire you if they don't know you exist. But I’ve found the real question is often whether that's really your problem.

Established consulting firms generally have a lot of people who already know them. Past clients. Former colleagues. Referral sources. People they've met over the years who might become clients.

If you already have enough of the right people who know who you are, focusing your efforts on getting in front of new people isn't likely to fix what's keeping them from hiring you.

2. Do they understand what you do and why it matters to them?

Knowing you exist isn't the same as understanding what you do.

I look at a lot of consulting firm websites and marketing content where - after reading all the polished language -I still have no idea what the firm actually helps its clients do.

That clarity is only part of it. Prospective clients aren't looking for consulting services because they want to buy consulting services. Something is going on in their business that they want to change.

Can they make the connection between what you do and what they care about?

3. Does the problem matter enough to act on?

This one has two parts.

First, is the problem you solve important enough that companies are willing to spend money to solve it? I sometimes see consultants focused on legitimate problems that just aren't big enough to get much attention or budget.

Second is the individual client. A problem that's important to one company may not be important enough to another company right now.

This is an especially big deal when there's a lot of uncertainty. Companies tend to become more cautious about spending and more selective about what really needs to be done. A problem can be real and worth solving, but still not important enough to make the cut right now.

4. Do they have a reason to choose you?

Let's say they've decided the problem needs to be solved and they need outside help. Now they have choices. Lots of them.

Consultants tend to lean heavily on their experience here. The problem is you know your 20 years of experience is different from another consultant's 20 years, but buyers often can't tell the difference.

To them, you're both highly experienced.

5. Do they trust your ability and your intentions?

This goes beyond believing you have the expertise to solve the problem. Can you actually get the work done inside their company, with all the personalities, competing priorities and internal complications that come with it?

And do they trust you to make recommendations based on what's best for them?

The person hiring you is putting their own reputation on the line. They need to believe you'll tell them when you think they should take a different approach, do less, wait, or perhaps not hire you at all.

They need to trust that you're not going to let them down.

Buyers are still buying and consulting firms are still doing well.

That doesn't mean it's easy to bring in clients right now. Buyers are more cautious, decisions are taking longer and there's a lot more for them to sort through.

Which makes it even more important to understand them. Is one of the five things I mentioned keeping them from hiring you?

Would you respond to your own outreach?

“If I could put 10 to 15 introductory calls with potential clients on your calendar every month, would you be interested?”

Your inbox is probably full of these, and I’m asked pretty regularly by clients and prospects whether they should try one of these services, or maybe stick with one they’ve already hired.

I get why the offer may be tempting.

You need to talk with more potential clients to meet your goals. You’re not a full-time salesperson. You don’t have hours a day to spend finding the right people and reaching out to them. And let’s face it, you don’t really want to do all that anyway.

An offer like this can sound like nirvana. But there’s another way to look at it that I think gets overlooked:

How does this type of outreach make potential clients feel about you?

Think about what happens when you look at one of these messages yourself.

You’re probably pretty good at detecting the BS in them. It may mention something “the writer” found on your LinkedIn profile or website, but you can usually tell when they don’t really know anything about you or have a particular reason to talk with you. You know instinctively you’re just one of many.

And outreach that’s designed to look like a personal message when it really isn’t is no way to start a trust-based consulting relationship.

There’s something else that can come across with that: my time is more important than yours.

“I didn’t spend the time to figure out whether there was a good reason for us to talk. I sent this to a bunch of people and left it to you to spend your time deciding whether it has any relevance.”

That’s not a great way to begin a relationship.

There’s nothing wrong with making outreach more efficient. The problem is when efficiency removes the very thing that can make it work: your judgment.

You can look at someone and see more than a title, industry and company size. Because you know your clients and the problems you solve, you may see something that tells you there’s actually a reason for the two of you to talk.

The way you get into a conversation matters as much as getting the conversation.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Susan’s telling me I have to spend all my time doing personalized outreach.” I’m not. You don’t.

High-volume outreach needs high volume because so few people respond. If you’re focused on the right people and have a good reason to talk with them, you don’t need hundreds or thousands of names. And other people can help with plenty of the work.

But your judgment about who is worth reaching out to, why there might be a reason to talk and how you want to approach them is harder to hand off.

Thoughtful one-to-one outreach is still, in my experience, one of the fastest ways to get into worthwhile conversations. It doesn’t have to be a pain in the butt. It does need to be human.

Don’t judge an easier way to get conversations only by how much time it saves or how many meetings it promises.

Put yourself on the receiving end too.

Would this approach make you want to have the conversation? And what would it make you think about the person who sent it?

Are you neglecting the people who would take your call?

If I asked you how many people in your network would agree to a call or meeting with you right away, no questions asked, what would you say? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? More?

One firm owner I’ll call Chris told me her answer was twenty.

By her own admission, she knows she should be talking with them. But she isn’t.

That’s because her network isn’t just twenty people. There are hundreds of contacts Chris has collected over the years, even decades, of her career. When she thinks about staying in touch, she doesn’t see twenty people. She sees all of them. She sees hundreds.

Sound familiar?

I know you’ve heard plenty of advice about staying in touch with your network. And if you’re like me and a lot of firm owners, the problem isn’t that we don’t agree it’s important. The problem is that when we think about following up with people, they all tend to get lumped together into one overwhelming blob.

Former clients. Colleagues. Referral partners. Prospects you talked with two years ago. People you barely remember. They’re all sitting there together in your CRM. Indistinguishable from one another.

And the twenty people you could be talking with right now get lost among the hundreds.

I’m not going to suggest you carve out the time to get your lists in a nice tidy order. I wouldn’t want to do it either.

My point is, if the size of the job is keeping you from talking with those twenty people, there’s good news.

You don’t have to figure out what to do with hundreds of people before you start with the twenty.

Give yourself permission to separate them from everyone else.

These are the people who know you, trust you and respect what you do. They’re relevant to your business now and willing to talk with you.

They’re the names that come to mind when you think, “I really should call her,” or “I can’t believe I haven’t talked with him in so long.”

They’re likely to be one of your fastest paths to the conversations that can surface new business.

There are other people worth staying connected to, even if you can’t give all of them individual attention right now. And there are probably plenty of people in your network who are no longer relevant at all.

You can sort that out later.

Start with the twenty. What if you reached out to just one of them a day for the next four weeks?

You may be surprised at where it takes you.

When Your Pipeline Needs Help, What To Do First?

Let’s say you’re really hungry and you ask me where you can get something good to eat. I hand you a recipe and point you toward the grocery store.

Technically, this could solve your problem. In reality, it’s going to take a lot longer than you want. This is what I see happening with too much of the marketing and bizdev advice flung around today.

When you find yourself without enough opportunities to support your revenue or growth goals, you’re looking for something that will help get you back on track quickly.

Most of the advice you’ll hear puts you on a much longer path to new business.

When you’re responsible for bringing in business while also running your firm and serving clients, you have to be selective. You may have money to invest in business development. What you certainly don’t have is unlimited time.

So the question isn’t only what an activity might eventually produce. It’s also: how quickly is this likely to get you into worthwhile conversations with the right people?

The advice for getting more clients is usually some version of “you need to create more awareness.”

From posting and commenting on LinkedIn to starting a podcast to driving more traffic to your website, this stuff is mostly focused on attracting or engaging people who don’t already know you.

And now you’re probably thinking, “What’s wrong with that?”

Nothing, if your main goal is to become known by more people over time. The more potential clients who know about you, the better your chances of finding someone who needs your help. Consulting firms do need to keep developing new relationships.

The problem is expecting these activities to solve a pipeline challenge you have right now.

Awareness can be miles away from a worthwhile conversation.

The path from being aware of you to being willing to invest time talking with you is a winding trip through understanding what you do, recognizing a need for it and believing you can help.

At this point, you may have some of the ingredients. You still don’t have dinner.

When you need business sooner, evaluate what you’re doing by how quickly it can get you into the right conversations.

Look at the business development activities already taking your time and money. Are they designed to build awareness that may pay off later, or are they likely to create worthwhile conversations sooner?

You probably need some of both. But if you’re deciding what to do first, start with the activities that provide the shortest reasonable path to those conversations.

A recipe may be useful. Sometimes what you need is a meal.

Your Best Prospects Are Hiding In Plain Sight

When the heat is on to bring in new business, most consulting firm owners go looking for new leads. Content marketing, website traffic, cold outreach; all aimed at people who’ve never heard of them before.

That’s a lot of energy to spend on a stranger when your best next client usually isn't a stranger at all.

It's someone you’ve already met; you just haven't talked to them in a while. They're sitting in your CRM, buried in a spreadsheet, or just floating around in your head.

Your existing network is closer to a "yes" than anyone you meet cold

Think about what it takes to get a total stranger to take a meeting with you. You have to capture their attention, build basic familiarity, and prove you have something valuable to say just to get them to put a phone call into their busy schedule. 

The people already in your network are past all of that. 

Maybe they were a client a few years ago, or maybe you had a great call last quarter before their budget got frozen. 

Whatever the history, they already trust you enough to take your call. One of the hardest hurdles in business development - getting them willing to invest their time in a real conversation with you - is already done.

So why don't we keep them warm? 

Most firm owners avoid this because they think they have to do it perfectly for everyone, or not at all.

Let's say you decide to get back in touch with your network. You sit down, look at the list, and immediately realize how many people are on it. 

You want each message to feel personal and relevant, and that's a good instinct. But you’re running a company, serving clients, and trying to meet a payroll. The whole thing feels impossible so you set it aside. 

Or you could toss everyone into a marketing newsletter hoping something sticks. That doesn't feel right either, and it shouldn't, because it mostly doesn't work.

The list keeps getting colder, and you go back to looking for new leads. 

You don't need more hours in the day to fix this. You just need to split that list. 

Instead of facing an unmanageable single list, divide it into two groups and treat them differently.

Group 1: The Inner Circle  

Start with the contacts who genuinely deserve your full attention. The relationship is warm enough, or the potential real enough, that a personal note from you once a month is worth the time.

In my experience, that’s usually between 10 and 20 people. If that still feels like too many, start smaller. Reaching out to some of them is better than reaching out to none.

Once a month, you sit down, spend a few minutes on each one, and write something that shows you've been paying attention to them.

The starting point is simpler than it sounds. Loos at what's going on with them right now, and ask yourself what you know that might actually be useful to them. That's enough to get started.

Group 2: The Radar List 

The connection here is real, but the relationship hasn't developed to the point where a customized note each month makes sense. They just need to know you're still there.

Think of a short email that reads like a note from someone who knows them. Less formal than a newsletter, no header or footer, just a useful insight or perspective in their inbox once a month. Same message for everyone, but written like it’s personal.

More work than Group 1, but much of it is admin and easy to delegate.

Suddenly, it’s manageable, and with greater return on effort

The consultants I work with find that once they split their list this way, the whole thing starts to feel manageable. The first group is small enough to give real attention. Getting some outside help with the writing or logistics of the second group is where the real time savings show up.

The new strategies you spin up to reach total strangers take a long time to pay off. But the opportunities sitting right under your nose are a lot closer, and they're just waiting for you to reach out.

What would change if you blocked out twenty minutes to message three of them tomorrow morning?

Why Winning New Business Has Gotten Harder, and Where the Real Shift Is

Some version of this comes up in almost every conversation I have with boutique firm owners:

"I had no problem getting clients for the first several years of my firm.
Now nothing seems to be working."

Maybe you've said something like it yourself.

You have a real track record, good clients, a reputation that means something. You're doing the things you're supposed to do: reaching out, staying visible, following up. And still the pipeline feels unpredictable in a way it didn't before.

That's not a confession of failure. It's a clue.

The usual explanations miss the point

When people try to explain why BD has gotten harder, they land on a few things: more competition, buyers who are stretched thin, not enough time to market while you're also delivering the work.

These things are real. They are genuinely making BD harder.

But they don't explain why specific behaviors that used to produce results have stopped.

The problem isn't just that the environment got noisier. It's that the playbook most boutique firm owners are running (the one that actually worked for a while) is no longer producing the way it once did.

The playbook that worked for decades

For years, this model made sense: build a reputation, do excellent work, stay close to a handful of key clients, and let those relationships and referrals sustain the firm.

You weren't cutting corners on BD. You were doing exactly what the model rewarded.

And it worked. Which is exactly why it's hard to let go of.

What changed

Three things shifted. And they shifted together.

Buyers are harder to reach. Inboxes are overwhelmed, attention is scarce. Getting someone to respond to an outreach that isn't immediately relevant to something they're actively thinking about has become significantly more difficult.

Referrals still happen, but less reliably. Staying top of mind used to be a byproduct of doing good work. Now it requires something more intentional. Your clients aren't less loyal. They're just less likely to mention your name unless you're giving them something worth mentioning you for.

Ask buyers what they actually value in a consulting relationship and you hear the same things: insights they wouldn't have found on their own, new ideas that apply to their situation, introductions to people and opportunities that are useful to them. That's what makes a consultant worth talking about. Good work gets you kept. Referrals take something more.

Buying consulting services is under a lot more scrutiny. This one doesn't get talked about enough. Procurement is involved in decisions that used to be a handshake. Budgets are being questioned. The buyer who champions an engagement that goes sideways can personally take the heat. A strong relationship used to carry a deal across the line. Now it's necessary, but it's not enough on its own.

The replacement advice, and the gap it leaves

Into this environment came new advice: build your brand, post content, establish your point of view, be visible on LinkedIn.

This isn't wrong. A firm that does this consistently over time will eventually see results.

But it takes years. And it quietly leaves out two things that actually move the needle in the near term: staying in real relationships with the right people, and showing up with something worth their attention before they're actively looking for help.

Research on business development profiles in professional services sheds some light on why this gap matters. Matt Dixon's work on roughly 3,000 partner-level professionals identifies one type of BD approach, what he calls the Activator, as the only one consistently correlated with bringing in new business today.

Your expertise still matters. It's just not carrying deals on its own anymore.

The behaviors that feel like BD but aren't

Maybe you're relying on your expertise and reputation, waiting to be found. Maybe you have two or three strong client relationships and you're counting on those to sustain the pipeline. Maybe you reach out when you have capacity and frame it as catching up, but only when you need work.

Buyers notice that pattern, by the way. Even when they're too polite to say so.

And then there are behaviors borrowed from a sales model that was never quite right for a doer-seller in the first place:

• Reaching out only to people who seem to have an active project right now

• Leading every conversation with your credentials and track record

• Sending emails asking for time to hear about what you do

Some of these were never working as well as they seemed. The scrutiny environment just made it harder to pretend otherwise.

The real shift, and where it happened

The firm owners who are getting traction right now aren't doing more of what used to work. They're doing something differently.

But the shift didn't start on your side. It started on the buyer's side.

Your buyers have more access to information than ever, which means more options and less reliance on any one expert. They're getting more content and more outreach than they have time for. And the internal pressure on buying decisions is real. Budgets are questioned, decisions need sign-off, and the person who brings in a firm that doesn't deliver takes the heat personally.

That's a very different buyer from the one who used to call because they heard your name.

The consultants who are getting traction have picked up on this. They're thinking about what buyers need from them before there's a project on the table. They're showing up with ideas relevant to what their clients are working on, observations about what's changing in their world, connections that might be useful. Things that give someone a reason to think of you before they need you.

That's a different approach than most boutique firm owners were ever taught. But it fits how buyers are actually making decisions now.

Is it something you're thinking about?