How to Use An Assessment To Elevate Your Consulting Lead Generation

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Introduction

As a coach for independent consultants, I get so many questions related to consulting lead generation. The two most common are:

• How can I get the attention of potential consulting clients just to get the conversation started?
• How can I elevate my value earlier in the sales process?

In this article, I share a strategy you can use to both

1. Create more conversations with potential consulting clients and
2. Elevate the conversation with potential consulting clients, so you're able to charge more and make more impact for them.

What's This Lead Generation Strategy for Your Consulting Business?

The lead generation strategy is using an Assessment or Scorecard.

Click here for an example so you can experience what I'm talking about first-hand

Why Use An Assessment for Consulting Lead Generation?

Have you ever filled out an assessment or scorecard?

I'm guessing you have. If you're like most consultants, we all love measurements, scorecards, and ways to analytically compare ourselves and what we're doing against industry standards and best practices. We love these types of tools.

And, so do your potential clients.

An assessment is a simple way for you to

• Help a potential consulting client measure their business against the best practices you typically recommend
• Point out potential blindspots in the potential client's business practices
• Get basics about that potential client, to qualify if they'd be a good fit for further conversations
• Demonstrate your expertise and value to the potential clients by helping them lift out of their day-to-day to see the bigger picture
• Easily assess areas for improvement that can be discussed in more detail

A Few Examples

So, if you're this far down the article, you are probably intrigued but not 100% sure how it might apply to you and your consulting business.

I'll give you some examples of how you could use an assessment for your specific type of consulting:

• If you're an Agile Consultant, you could use an Assessment to help potential consulting clients assess their current process vs. Agile standards so they identify areas of opportunity to improve their development efficiency and predictability
• If you're an HR Change Management Consultant, you could use an assessment to help potential consulting clients assess the quality of their current retention programs
• If you're a Healthcare Compliance Consultant, you could use an assessment to help potential consulting clients assess and identify the root causes of their lower compliance scores
• If you're a Fractional CFO, you could use an assessment to help potential consulting clients assess the quality and thoroughness of their budgeting processes
• If you're an Enterprise Events Strategist, you could use an assessment to help potential consulting clients identify gaps in their annual planning process
• If you're a PR and Communications Consultant, you could use an assessment to help potential consulting clients pinpoint areas of opportunity to increase adoption of their PR strategy
• If you're a Product Launch Consultant, you could use an assessment to help potential consulting clients identify gaps in their launch methodology

A Real-Life Assessment Example

To see this in action, go check out the Assessment I created for you as an Independent Consulting Business Owner.

The assessment is focused on helping you pinpoint gaps in your consulting business processes so that you don't underearn and overwork.

Click this link to take the IC Business Predictability Assessment.

As you know, seeing something in action is a great way to see how the concept could apply to you.

How To Set-Up An Assessment For Your Consulting Lead Generation: Reverse Engineer It

You're still reading, so you must be considering this consulting lead generation strategy!

So, I'll tell you how to set up an effective assessment for your consulting business development/lead gen process.

1. First, get clear on one problem you solve for your ideal consulting client.

• Use that list of examples I shared with you in the section above as your starting point.
• In my example, as I was designing the IC Assessment, I chose the problem that many ICs ask me for help with. That is, "what are the basic practices I need to put in place to grow my consulting business?" So, that's why I created a "Growth Assessment."

2. Next, identify the indicators that your ideal client has this problem.

• Ask yourself - what does one of my clients need to have in place to be successful? What are the indicators that they don't have these in place?
• In my example, for the IC Assessment, I identified 4 key pillars of an IC Business that need to be well-defined in order to grow a consulting business: (1) A clear business plan (2) a predictable demand generation strategy (3) a scaleable capacity planning system and (4) a repeatable client delivery framework.

3. Finally, combine the problem with the key indicators to build out your assessment questions.

• You can ask yourself what you need to know about a client in order to determine the severity of their problems. And also, what do you need to know in order to prioritize which problems they'd want to tackle first. These become the questions in your assessment.
• In my example, I asked 3-5 questions within each of the IC Business Growth Pillars in order to assess the strength and opportunity for that IC Business. You can see the example by clicking here: https://assessments.melisaliberman.com/icbusiness 

An Easy Way to Automate Your Assessment Lead Generation Process

One of the main concerns I hear from independent consultants when I share this strategy is - that could be hard to set up and administer.

I agree if you were trying to do it manually through a Google form or Typeform or a similar tool.

I recently found a tool that makes this process of setting up, scoring and producing results incredibly simple.

It's called ScoreApp.

• If you'd like to use my referral link, click here. It will give you a 30-day trial.
• Or, you can access the ScoreApp directly, not going through my link, by clicking here.
• To be clear, I'm not in the referral marketing business. I'm not recommending this tool for any other reason than it's the best I've seen in the market, by far.

It's an all-in-one tool that allows you to:

• Create the assessment
• Set up the scoring criteria
• Establish a simple website/URL that you can send to potential clients
• Design a results page
• Produce a results report
• Collect and send emails with the results, and so you're able to follow-up

In Conclusion

Assessments are an easy and powerful way to get the conversation started with your potential consulting clients.

I recommend ScoreApp as a very easy tool to create and facilitate an assessment as part of your consulting lead generation strategy.

For more on the topic of assessments and how you can leverage them in your independent consulting business:

• Listen to Episode 057 of the Grow Your Independent Consulting Business Podcast where I dive even deeper into this topic of Using An Assessment for Consulting Lead Generation
• Take the Business Growth Assessment for Independent Consultants to "kill two birds with one stone." You'll see how an assessment works in practice and you'll get insights into your business areas of opportunity at the same time!

Here's a quick screenshot of the top of the results page. There's a lot more detail underneath re: how you scored against the 4 independent consulting business pillars. It also includes recommendations and next steps to consider based on your score