Introduction
In my opinion, for any person who carries knowledge of a certain field which can be used to guide or help people is an opportunity for the person to become a consultant and earn from it. To ellaborate this using a few examples, we are talking about a person who is doing a full time day job and still remembers his elementary algebra which he enjoyed when he was a kid, can now help students guide them through their algebra course. A housewife who is known within her family for the great Indian food she cooks, coaches young girls who are about to get married, with the skills of cooking. A product manager in a tech startup, guiding college kids aspiring for an offer during their upcoming college placement season, with art of writing a great CV. The possibilities here are end less.
Relevant Questions
I am sure all of us when going through the above introspection would end up identifying atleast one opportunity. This is when the below questions would cross your mind.
- How do I find people seeking guidance related to my identified area ?
- How do I structure my knowledge in a deliverable format to those seeking it?
- How do I convince the interested people that connecting with me will actually help them ?
- How do I charge for my consultation ?
In this post, I shall address each of the above questions in a structured manner.
How do I find people seeking guidance related to my identified area ?
Once you have identified your domain, finding the seekers (we will refer to the people interested in taking guidance on your topic as ‘Seekers’) can be very broadly done in 2 ways:-
- Push
- Pull
Under Push based strategy, you proactively reach out to your target audience. This inherently means that you :
- Exactly know who that individual person is
- Have their contact details
This becomes a blocker for many of the aspiring consultants as collecting and maintaining a huge database is the basic requirement for such a strategy. The second big challenge under this strategy is the involved cost as you shall be using some medium for reaching out which might be email , SMS, Whatsapp, telecalling etc. Each of these channels when used at scale carries a heavy cost which can be prohibitive when you are just starting out.
Under the pull based strategy, the Seeker discovers you on his own efforts. The seeker searches over search engine or social media and tries to explore the available information online. Tapping into this strategy is a cost effective, sustainable and a long term viable approach. For this you will have to create your presence over social medial. Putting up engaging content over platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Instagram etc. can be a viable way. The typical flow involves user search for the service related keywords > discovering your content over social media > engaging with your channel on a regular basis > finally converting into a paying client for you.
The details of Pull v/s Push marketing can be found in the HBR article here.
How do I structure my knowledge in a deliverable format to those seeking it?
The knowledge around which you plan to orient your consultancy business needs to be converted into a format which can be easily understood by the seeker and conveyable from your end in an effective and time bound manner. The knowledge which you want to delivery to the seeker can be split into 2 kinds:
- Free content through social media
- Monetized knowledge through the paid consultation session
The free content which you want to circulate on the open web via social media should hold the right balance of engagement and relevance. Engagement would ensure that seeker has a tendency to come back again and agin to consume it while relevance would make sure that the seeker finds value in it to further pay you for personalized consultation session. A good strategy here is to do competition research and analysis and try to discover what topics and in which format works the best.
The second category of content relates to what you will be delivering during the paid consultation session with the seeker. For this, you should have certain frameworks ready with you. Frameworks are a way of spliting your conversation into different sequential segments which help in putting them into logical flow and makes the conversation easy and wholistic. One such framework is the STAR framework. This framework is generally used in interview scenarios but can very well fit in here as well. The details of this can be found here. You may search for more such frameworks.
How do I convince the interested people that connecting with me will actually help them ?
This question is the most tricky to answer. In my personal experience of interacting with consultants and being a consultant, I have realized that the online consultation funnel looks like below.
At each step of this funnel there is a 90% drop in the user going to the next step. The overall funnel conversion by this logic comes out to be 0.1% which implies that if 1,000 seekers exist in the market then only 1 will end up paying for the guidance or consultation. In this section, we are discussing the last 2 steps of the funnel where the seeker has dicovered you but has still not paid you for a consultation session. Following our previous laid down advise relating to pull strategy, in this scenario, the seeker would have engaged with your social media channel and consumed your content. Post doing so, he would have realized that you would be the right person for him to connect to. However, you have still not been able to break the barrier or hesitation in the seekr to Pay You for the consultation. For breaking this barrier, a very good confidence builder is to let the user connect with you for free to begin with. Thsi might be in the form of exchange of a few chat messages whee you let the user describe his / her requirement and you giving him / her the confidence that you would be able to solve the problem. During this initial interaction, you also disclose the charges you will have, the time you will devote and what will the user get in the end. From my personal experience, if this step is done properly then the last stage of drop off can be reduced to half which implies that while earlier there were 90% users dropping off while moving from the second last stage of the funnel to last, now only 45% would drop off therey doubling the overall funnel from 0.1% to 0.2% and consequently your revenue.
I will like to introduce Joinitlive.com here which is a free tool developed by me for consultants. The free tool enables you to create your free profile. The profile has paid audio call, paid video calls and paid Whatsapp chat functionality. You can circulate your profile URL among the seekers via your social media channels or directly. The seeker can intiate the Whatsapp chat with you for free using your profile where your direct pphone number is not exposed to the seeker. During the free chat, once you feel that the time is right, you can request a payment with the sekker on the Whatsapp chat which gets credited into your Joinitlive wallet and later into your bank account. This way you can smoothly turn the free conversation into a paid consultation session. During the chat, at any moment, you or the seeker can initiate a paid audio phone call or paid video call as well where the seeker gets charged on a per minute of consultation basis. The below image shows how a typical Joinitlive consultant profile looks.
How do I charge for my consultation ?
Coming to the last question which is more tactical in nature. There are 3 broad ways to go about charging for your service which are:
- Directly through mobile transfer, bank transfer etc.
- Sharing a payment link
- Using a specialized tool / platform
While the first method is very patchy and generally instills less confidence among the seekers, the second method involves some work at your end where you first integrate with a payment gateway. The payment gateways usually require proper documentation, validations which many a times can be time consuming and effort demanding. List of top payment gateways can be found here.
Conclusion
There are 4 broad questions which a consultant needs to solve for effectively scaling the business online. There is a set process to solve each of these questions. There might be moer ways to solve for these but I have given the ones which I have found to be the most effective. The road to scaling your online consultation business might be long and demanding but at the end of it, you will land up with lifetime worth of business along with fulfilment like in no other profession.
