Consulting is a high-touch, authority-based business dependent on trust. Whether your firm offers advisory, implementation or training services, how you market to your clients and potential clients is critical.
In this post we describe three Infusionsoft campaigns for consulting firms that engage and help convert prospects into long-term clients. We have implemented these campaigns successfully with our Infusionsoft / Keap services.
Infusionsoft Campaign #1 – High Value Newsletter with List Segmentation
To be successful in the consulting business you must demonstrate your firm’s expertise on a continuous basis.
On the typical consulting project there are only a few key individuals on the client side that your team engages. This small client group maybe impressed by your team’s knowledge, but the ability to expand your firm’s footprint beyond the current project may be limited.
Here is where a high-value Infuisionsoft email newsletter campaign can add significant value. There are millions of newsletters out there — most add zero real world value. Your email newsletter needs to be a high-value information source and that segments your subscriber list automatically.
To start, you need a collection of outstanding blog articles on a range of topics that help clients and prospects solve the challenges and goals in their business.
Producing a lot of long-form blog posts that deliver significant value is a challenge. So how do you do it?
Make it mandatory for each Consultant in your firm to write a 1,000 word article on an area of professional interest, client case study or latest industry development. Have an editor review and spice up the articles, add an interesting image, then post to the blog section of your website.
Next, summarize each article in 200-300 words. Create a series of emails in your Infusionsoft newsletter campaign using those 200-300 word summaries, an relevant image and a link to the full-length blog post on your website.
Finally, add a topic-specific tag to the email link in Infusionsoft so the contact is tagged when he or she clicks the link to the blog post. Now you’ve created a system that segments your contact list by different interests, helping you target your sales efforts.
Infusionsoft Campaign #2 – Post-Project Client Engagement
When implementing Infusionsoft for consulting firms, we look for ways to help our clients engage and re-engage their customers at the right time with the right information. This takes some planning.
After a client project is completed, you don’t want your team to just walk away without any further engagement or a game plan to generate more revenue from that client. What’s the solution?
You set up Infusionsoft as an automated client re-engagement system.
Here’s how:
STEP 1: you need a series of related service offerings that fit together well. For example, an IT security firm might offer a security audit as a loss leader, then upsell a security analytics package, followed by a further upsell to a recurring IT security managed service. Similarly, a HR consulting firm might offer background checks, a benefits cost reduction plan, employee video education package, etc.
STEP 2: The Project Manager is tasked with tagging the client in Infusionsoft on the project end date. When the Project Manager finishes Project #1, she (or an administrator) goes into Infusionsoft and tags the client with a “Project Done” tag.
STEP 3: The Relationship Manager is automatically tasked in Infusionsoft with scheduling a client appointment to see how the project has gone. This provides an opportunity to personally congratulate the client, address any concerns, build on project success and discuss ways to deliver further value.
STEP 4: An Infusionsoft campaign is kicked off automatically on the project end date with a client satisfaction survey. This gives the client an opportunity to provide feedback on the project, your firm and any improvements you can make. This shows high integrity and is respected by clients that use metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge customer success.
STEP 5: 3-5 emails are sent 1 week apart with valuable information about the new capabilities and benefits you’ve just implemented, and how the client can take advantage of them. These can be FAQs, articles, a white paper, helpful PDF guide, or a short series of educational videos. These artifacts should be part of the project, with links to the repository where they are stored.
STEP 6: Introduce a “soft upsell” email sequence at the end pitching the next related service you want to upsell to the client. Your Relationship Manager should be tasked in Infusionsoft with following up by email and phone a few days after these upsell emails go out.
This step-by-step Infusionsoft campaign creates positive engagement and client goodwill for your consulting firm and sets you up for the next project opportunity.
Infusionsoft Campaign #3 – Integrating Infusionsoft with Your Project Management and Support Systems
Consulting firms who deliver large-scale projects, such as civil engineering and defense service firms, usually have complex client interactions with many issues to address. A common complaint of consulting clients is that their Relationship Manager only gets involved when problems have been escalated. This is also an issue from the Relationship Manager’s side who gets alerted to problems too late after the client is already upset and it’s become an urgent situation.
Infusionsoft can be used to head off these type of client issues and tie all of your client-related project workflows together.
Firms that use Basecamp, Trello, Asana, Mavenlink, SweetProces, Slack, Freshdesk, JIRA, Zendesk, etc. can integrate their project management applications with Infusionsoft to create a seamless client engagement platform. The idea here is to integrate relationship management with the project to increase the care given to the client.
The first step is to connect your project management system(s) with Infusionsoft using their APIs. This allows Infusionsoft contacts to be automatically sent project status and issue tags, such as “phase complete” or “project behind schedule”.
The second step is to automatically send the issue tags from the project management system when certain project metrics and milestones occur. This tags trigger a task in Infusionsoft for the Relationship Manager to set up a meeting with the client to get ahead of any issues during the project. By adding issue tags to a contact through the Infusionsoft API, then assigning outreach tasks, your Relationship Manager will be prompted to preemptively engage the client and project manager before it escalates.
Consulting firms can also use Infusionsoft to automate scheduling of periodic project client meetings. By integrating a scheduling app like AppointmentCore with Infusionsoft, the Relationship Manager can automatically schedule periodic check-in meetings with the client based on the project schedule.
This integration between Infusionsoft and your consulting firm’s project management software helps improve the business relationship with the client, your Project Manager and Relationship Manager throughout the project.