Marketing Mondays: Strategic Consulting Partnerships

You don't have to do everything yourself you know? Consultants often feel they have to offer every service and do every task by themselves.

Connect with other professionals that can offer complimentary services to you and watch your business soar.

Sometimes it's their ego that drives them. Other times it's the fear of losing money on a project if they give the work to someone else.

Let me propose an idea to you...

Create strategic partnerships. Connect with other professionals that can offer complimentary services to you and watch your business soar. Take the business consultant. She can spend time updating a client's website. Helping them with their marketing, and designing marketing materials for them. Or she can charge her client almost the same amount if not slightly more for the same result, but this time, give the work in the areas that are not her specialty to her strategic partners to work on.

There are a few dynamics at work here...

• You can take on more work that is in your area of specialization and that you can charge the most for.
• The other work for your client gets done by a specialist in that area, so the result is often better than you could do, plus you can pay your strategic partners slightly less, or charge your client slightly more...so you end up making money off of that work you refer to them.
• You can still keep full control of the work, as much or little as you want.
• The more business you 'refer' to your strategic partners, the more they'll refer to you.
• Your strategic partners have needs, just as you do. So when their clients need help with an area that you specialize in, guess who they'll call - that's right - you!

This approach is marketing. It's smart marketing. Because you're leveraging the connections and clients of your strategic partners. You'll spend less money and time trying to acquire new clients. And you'll get more referral business through your partners. Partner strategically.