Ask HN: How do I generate leads for my software consultancy business? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I generate leads for my software consultancy business?

11 pointsmaxrev179 comments

Currently I've got a strong base of clients via word of mouth and using my small network of local business owners. I'm now looking to expand, but often people don't really know they need a software consultancy to help until they have the specific way in which software can solve their particular problem explained.

Maybe naively this rules out Facebook marketing, email, Google ads and those channels. I appreciate the question is quite open ended, but wonder if there's anything I've missed.

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I ran a consultancy for 8 years (sold last year), and we focused on the niche of internal business software - that is, un-sexy software used by mainly boring businesses to get their internal stuff done. I feel focusing on a niche ended up getting far more leads than when we were just a generalist "We can do anything for you!" company. We had a tailored website to focus on business automation, and wrote quite a lot of blog posts on the topic - being quite specific on what we can do and examples. It took close to a year after niching down like this, but eventually we started getting some good leads from good old google search. Keywords such as custom software, business software, business automation software etc.

Having said all that - at the end of the day my consultancy also get it's best and biggest projects via word of mouth. In the end I realised it was very stressful for a small consultancy to work with too many clients, and we we small (5 people), so eventually I decided we need to focus on going deeper with our current client base rather than looking for new clients. This was ultimately a superpower, and took us to a consistent 7 figurers per year with a tiny team and a few key clients.

I sold my agency last year and have recently started writing some insights on my blog https://devtoagency.com - you guys may be a bit past this (as my target reader is a full-stack dev wanting to start a custom software agency), but you may find something insightful - I actually found it really hard to find good information on the internet about software agencies/consultancies, which is why I want to try and capture my thoughts.

Amazing, sorry for delay - thanks for this info - really appreciate the advice!

I would love to talk to more about this. What's the best way to reach you aside from The Twitter? :)

Sure, feel free to email chris at devtoagency dot com

- find a niche you enjoy you think is marketable

- strongly engage the community in that niche

- advocate strongly and support that community, so that you’re an integral part of it

- Hustle to advocate for the community. This means educationally, with outreach, running conferences, writing books, speaking, etc

- Avoid selling your business hard (though make it clear you’re a consultant).

You’ll organically grow your network of potential clients and fellow consultants. Naturally some will seek you out for advice as your authority in the niche becomes clear.

Be prepared with small offerings like trainings or workshops they can grow a bit of trust with you before taking the plunge on a bigger project. These are usually fairly transactional engagements, easy for the client to buy. If things look promising for the relationship, then you can decide to do a more complicated proposal and contract, scaling not sides investment with the trust.

It was rarely worth the effort to invest in AdWords or social media ads. But we were also open to the idea we weren’t doing it right. Rather our North Star was the authority and long term page rank of our content.

I recently left consulting after 8 years, I wrote a blog on my experience:

https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2020/12/22/hack-your-career-wi...

Thanks, I'll take a read, great advice, thank you :)

Do you want to generate leads or increase profit? I'll assume you want to generate leads in order to increase revenue and profit.

Generate more leads, convert more leads, increase average contract value with each client, increase repeat business with each client, re-sell the same thing for categories by abstracting into a product.

# Increase ACV:

Have you considered having a few large clients with "more figures" contracts vs. many small clients with fewer figures?

# Convert:

- Do you have testimonials from your previous clients where they write about how the collaboration went?

- Can you cluster them into sectors and industries? [ours are mainly in energy, transportation, telecommunications, banking, communication, retail, high-end goods, and others]. Do you have an offer tailored to each sector/industry that you can quickly send?

# Generate:

- What is your software consultancy specialized in? [we help large organizations with machine learning]

- What does your ideal interlocutor do, what do they read, where do they spend time, which websites they visit? You can put content there. One example is contributing content to a medium they use.

I wrote a bit about this here: https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/131066829330549965...

I'm heading over for a read now, thanks so much for sharing :)

One option is to specialize in a niche, and build an audience in it, so you become perceived as a domain expert

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