I have to do something to drive more consulting business.
I started my business in 2017 after losing my VP of Sales job. My original purpose was to write the Inside Sales Dude blog to use as a resume enhancer that would help me land my next job. To my surprise after just a few months, I had landed 3 good consulting gigs in part due to the blog
One was with my most recent employer, one was with a local startup and one was with a former employee who had started his own company. These gigs went well. I made decent money part-time and was having fun running my own business. I decided to make a go of running my own consulting biz, using the blog and an email newsletter as my primary method of marketing.
Unfortunately, the demand for my consulting services dried up after those first 3 gigs.
Although I’ve never had much of a problem finding a full time sales or sales management position, it’s become clear to me that there’s much less demand for sales management consulting. Most companies that I am in contact with want full time employees.
I could pivot to sales training or recruiting where there is a real market, but that doesn’t excite me at all.
After working more than 25 years in tech sales, I am good at what I do. There’s no doubt I could land another sales management job working for someone else again.
But I’m not interested in that anymore.
It would have to be a very special opportunity or I would need to be in desperate straits for me to consider this.
I am now starting to think about what comes next.
Aside from those initial consulting projects, Inside Sales Dude has not been a revenue generator.
I don’t have enough blog traffic to make it worthwhile to sell advertising. My newsletter has about 500 subscribers. According to Mailchimp, about 150 of these subscribers open my newsletter regularly. Each week, about the same number of people visit my blog.
I’m not getting consulting offers from it.
Traffic comes from my newsletter and cross-posting blog posts on LinkedIn.
But clearly, just writing in depth posts on sales and sales management isn’t enough to drive consulting business.
That said, I still enjoy writing my the blog there and will continue to do so as long as I have something to say. It’s helped me to become a better writer and learn to present my ideas more coherently.
I know it has helped some of my readers because occasionally someone will email me to tell me a post has helped. I like when that happens.
I think a number of people read my blog because they know me and it’s a way for us to keep connected. That’s OK too.
One thing I am trying is testing Drip, which is an email based eMarketing automation tool. This has been an interesting learning curve for me. I will be focusing on this for the next few months and getting up to speed on it. I think it could become a good channel for cresting business for me. I could also help my customerd with it.
Another thing I want to test is creating and selling some lower cost products like ebooks and short courses.
I am avoiding cold calling because I’m done with that.
I’ve thought a lot about going after a broader market, but my expertise is technical B2B sales and sales management. Going wider just means I’m another generic consultant.
If you get a chance, check out my site at Inside Sales Dude and let me know what you think.
If you do know any small teams that want to increase sales, I’d be grateful if you pointed them to my site and told them sign up for my newsletter.