Finding Clients

How Consultants Get Found Without Hunting

January 18, 2023 · Team at Mylance

You get consulting clients by getting found on LinkedIn for a specific offer, not by hunting. If you can already close, the work is a weekly habit in your voice so buyers come to you.

This is not a starter kit. If you do not have an offer yet, this is not the article.

Go lock who you help, what problem you solve, and what they buy. Come back when a buyer can say yes or no in two sentences.

I work with B2B independent consultants and seated fractionals who can already close. When the person shows up, you know how to run the call. Hunting is the failure, not the work.

Here are seven ways that fill a pipeline when you already have something to sell.

1. Treat hunting as the failure

Most advice on how to find consulting clients is a hunt list. Past employers. Expert networks. Job boards. Cold blasts. A marketplace with 40 people pitching the same scoped project.

If you can already close, you do not have a closing problem. You have a being-found problem.

Buyers look you up on LinkedIn. If they cannot tell what you do, who it is for, and why you, they bounce. Then you go hunt, feel rejected, and decide business development does not work.

Stop asking how to chase more people. Start asking how the right companies find you in your voice, without you becoming a content person.

2. Lock positioning before you post anything

Weekly posting without positioning is just more noise.

Who is the buyer. What pain do they feel in their own words. What have you already solved that lets them skip expensive mistakes.

When I was consulting, I did not say I was great at strategy and operations. That sentence is empty.

I talked about launching Uber Eats in two markets, one in the US and one in Italy. I looked for companies trying to scale a food delivery marketplace or a freight marketplace.

I had already solved that problem. A company about to expand is terrified of expensive mistakes.

Paying me 20 grand a month was cheaper than making millions of dollars worth of them.

I won my first client the same way. They were looking to launch a food delivery marketplace.

I had done it twice. I asked for 25 grand a month.

They said okay, because we were going to make almost no mistakes and raise the next round off the launch. That is exactly what happened.

If your one sentence still sounds like a job title, you are not ready for the rest of this list. "I'm a product leader" tells a buyer nothing. Header, about, and how you introduce yourself should name the buyer, the problem, and a proof point from work you actually did.

3. Keep referrals. Make them a system, not a hope.

Referrals are a real channel. They are not a strategy by themselves.

Your network works because the trust is already built. They know you. They know what you are capable of.

They can hire you in a second or send you to someone who can. Make a list of people who already trust you, not only people who can hire you.

Former managers belong at the top. So do current clients.

When I had clients, I sent a simple Google form. How am I doing. What could be better.

On a scale of one to ten, how good am I for the company. Can you write a testimonial.

If the score was high, I asked for two introductions. Two. Not "a few." Then I followed up until they actually made them.

I had an old manager reach out after five and a half years. He said it was random. He had a project. It ended up being a $20,000 project. When I asked how he thought of me, he said he saw on LinkedIn that I was consulting.

That is a referral from a shaking tree, not a blast. Referrals dry up if nobody can explain what you do. Positioning still comes first.

4. Get found on LinkedIn in your voice

LinkedIn is where your existing network already lives and where a large share of decision makers live. I will die on that hill. Not YouTube. Not Instagram. Not a blog you will not maintain.

You do not have to become a content person. You have to be findable.

A few months ago I got on a call with a business owner. She runs a small consulting business. Real clients. Real revenue.

She had already rescheduled once. She told me she was trying to get more visibility into her business with her being invisible.

She was scared to fail in public. When I asked what would actually happen if she had a bad take, she thought for a long time and said she had absolutely no clue.

Another founder told me if a post took off, people would poke holes in his business. He subscribed for two months and never posted once. He would comment all day. He would not post.

Mediocre posts get ignored. That is the usual outcome. The fear is huge. The consequence is not.

The content that builds trust is a firsthand account. Specific. Detailed. Something you lived. A mistake works as well as a win. Sometimes better.

I wrote a post that started like this. Uber and Lyft both launched UberX in Raleigh on the same day. Fast forward six months, Uber had 90% market share in the area. Here's how we won.

That post got 700,000 impressions. I got 22 inbound leads from it. It is my most viral post ever. That does not happen every time. It worked because it was specific, it had a hook, I was there, and I did not leave the details out.

We launched in a small geo. Lyft launched across the whole triangle.

Our team used one metric, five minute ETAs. We had a dedicated city team. Lyft did not.

We did not expand until we had enough drivers in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. Their service was terrible because they covered too much too soon. Ours stayed better because we were methodical.

The line I closed with was simple. You don't have to be first. You just have to be focused on what matters most.

5. Make it a weekly habit, not a campaign

Someone asked me if once a week was enough. She did not want to bombard her network.

I post every day. I have 26,000 followers. I can guarantee you 26,000 people are not seeing every post.

The algorithm shows a small fraction. You are not bombarding anyone.

If daily is too much, three times a week is doable. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Reusing a post from six months ago is fine. Most people only see one of every few posts anyway.

I like posting at 6am Central. East Coast sees it first. Then Central, Mountain, Pacific. I have kept posting on weekends. Saturday and Sunday are sleepers. People are on.

When I ran my consulting practice, I was trying to have two conversations a week. Six to eight to ten a month with people who could hire me or refer me.

My retainers sat between 15 and 25k a month. I wanted two to three clients at a time.

Not every month was 40k. Some months were 40 or 50. Some were 7 or 10. The average sat around 25 to 30k because the conversations stayed consistent.

The habit is the product. Inbound is the ad. If you only post when the pipeline is empty, you will always be empty.

6. Grow the right network. Do not cold blast.

Everyone can blast cold emails and LinkedIn DMs. Everyone is doing it. When spray and pray "works," conversion is 0.1%. You message thousands of people to get a few calls. That is not the reputation you want.

Adding connections is not a cold blast. It is putting the right people in the room where your weekly posts already live.

I add people every week. A hundred new connections a week is 400 a month and almost 5,000 a year.

People asked how I got to 22,000 followers. Part of the answer is I add fractional executives, independent consultants, and operators on purpose.

Then the posts do the trust work. An old coworker sees you are available. A buyer you have never met reads how you launched a market and messages you.

A series A company reached out because I was posting about launching Uber Eats. They wanted a head of operations. I pivoted it into a consulting engagement. They paid for the corners I could already see around.

If you DM a stranger "I do this thing, we should work together," they do not know who you are. If they have been reading you, the same message is a different conversation. Response rates can look like 40% versus 0.1%.

7. Talk to the people who already raised their hand

Likes and comments are not vanity if you treat them as a list.

Two or three times a week, look at who engaged. Thank them. Look at the profile. If they could be a buyer or a referrer, ask for a call. You are not opening with a pitch. You already added value. They already responded.

Take the calls even when the person cannot hire you. I took every conversation for a while. "Can we chat" turned into referrals that turned into clients. At the end of the call, ask for two introductions. Then follow up.

Give this 90 days. Two months with one call and then quitting is how people miss the snowball.

Relationships get deeper in month three. The calls come after you wanted to stop.

Most people read and never like. I am one of them. I read a ton of posts and almost never tap the button. The relationship is still being built.

What I am not telling you to do

I am not sending you to Fiverr. I am not sending you to job boards. I am not sending you to GLG as the plan.

I won a $21k project on Catalant when the client had $5k. They asked me to pitch anyway. I scoped the real work. They said yes. It worked once. It is still unreliable. That is why I did not build Mylance as a marketplace.

Cold blasting is not the move. Hunting is the failure.

If you already have an offer and you can close, get found. Positioning first. Referrals as a system. A weekly LinkedIn habit in your voice. The right people added to the room. Conversations with the ones who already leaned in.

I live in Austin. I came out of Uber. I built Mylance because this is the part consultants hate, and it is also the part that keeps the practice alive.

If you want help locking the sentence and getting two posts that sound like you, start free at https://app.mylance.co/onboarding. Positioning plus two posts. No card.