Because marketing and trying to attract clients do not bring in any immediate monetary benefit, individual consultants often view these to be low priority activities. Paradoxically, this is one of the main reasons why many consultants struggle to secure regular work throughout the year. In this article, we offer some tips on how individual consultants can find clients regularly and efficiently.
One of the biggest challenges that many experts such as yourself face is ensuring you have regular work throughout the year, especially those who are just starting out on their solo career. This usually happens because doing the actual work itself is not all that is involved. You must also market your services, find new clients, issue invoices, file taxes, and so forth. Since these activities will not result in any income, they are often fall fairly low on the list of priorities, but if you don’t work on finding new clients, once your current assignment finishes, you will be left with no income until you land the next consulting project. To avoid this, it is important that you find a way of scheduling these secondary tasks into your monthly routine.
In this article, we provide tips on how individual consultants can keep a steady pipeline of new clients in an efficient way.
How individual consultants find clients
🔹 Tracking tenders and grants for individuals
Nowadays, calls for tenders in the development sector are widely scattered across the internet. Each donor and implementation agency usually publishes these on their own website, which means you will have to check many online pages on a regular basis just to find potential clients. For individual consultants who operate as a sole trader, this is a bottleneck that can be a real concern, given that you have very limited time to undertake unpaid activities. That is why platforms like DevelopmentAid are so useful — they compile all these tenders in one single place and allow you to filter them according to your preferences (e.g., location, sector), ultimately saving you many hours in tender searches and fit assessment.
As an individual consultant, you will find it extremely useful and convenient to create a tender or grant alert on the DevelopmentAid platform and receive notifications about that specific sector or donor or location that fits your specialty. Thousands of professional development consultants do this – and so should you.
Read more: How to stand out from the competition with DevelopmentAid’s career leverage tools
While information brokers can be extremely useful, many work opportunities for individual consultants can evade the public eye. Quite often, consulting assignments circulate on a mouth-to-mouth basis so if you are not in the right circles, you will never hear about these. To gain access to them, you need to do some networking, and LinkedIn is currently one of the best online platforms to do just that.
🔹 DevelopmentAid and LinkedIn tips for individual consultants
To begin with, make sure your DevelopmentAid and LinkedIn profiles are complete. Add your relevant experience, degrees, and any other details you think will be pertinent. The next step is to add a comment to the LinkedIn posts of the right people.
Who are the right people? The people who will offer you visibility in front of your target audience so this includes:
- Potential clients
- Your competitors
- Any industry-relevant thought leaders
Start engaging with these profiles by adding comments for a couple of months, and then — and only then — reach out through a direct message and ask for an introductory call. Use this call to get to know each other and strengthen your mutual trust; do not treat it like a sales pitch.
How individual consultants are found by clients
While in the previous section, we considered how you can actively find new clients and consulting opportunities, here we offer tips on how to convince potential clients to take the initiative to reach out to you with new assignment proposals. The trick here is to increase your visibility online to maximize the chances of that happening.
You have three main options to increase your online visibility as an individual consultant:
🔹 Consultant databases – DevelopmentAid.org
There are many consultant databases online, and you should register on those that are relevant to your sector, as implementing organizations and donors often use these to screen for potential applicants. For example, DevelopmentAid has the largest database of consultants in international development, with over 130k experts already registered.
As well as commenting and having a complete profile, you should also start to publish your own content on LinkedIn. There are many guides and advice about how to gain more visibility on LinkedIn. Our tip is to be consistent in posting and commenting.
🔹 Own website
Having your own website can also be a great tool for new clients to discover you, especially if you invest in content creation with SEO optimization.
These options are not mutually exclusive, and for maximum results, you should implement all of them.
Tips to saving time when submitting applications
Application formats can be quite different for individual consultants:
- If you are interested in consulting vacancies that are not explicitly labeled as tenders, you might just be required to submit a CV, a cover letter, and a portfolio although the latter is not always required.
- If you are looking at tenders, you will typically have to submit a tender proposal as well as all the elements mentioned in the previous bullet point.
Read more: How to win a tender?
And, yes, to maximize your chances of success, each element must be specifically tailored to the call or position advertised. Once again, when you are a team of one, this work can soon add up pretty quickly but fortunately, there are certain services and platforms you can leverage to make life easier:
🔹 Portfolio
If you are looking for an easy way to display your best online work, such as blogs or social media posts, you should consider using Linktree. Just add a title, a cover image, and a link for each one. And that’s it — you are good to go. You can also organize your work under different categories, which is quite useful. No need to compile articles and social media posts into clunky PDFs. Here is an example of a Linktree portfolio for inspiration.
🔹 Write tender proposals
To write a personalized tender proposal that meet the requirements of each call, you can use online tools that have certain AI capabilities such as BidNexus and BidScript. They can prepare a first draft for you to then review, edit, and submit, which will save many hours of preparatory work.
Read more: 10 tools to upgrade your grant and tender management
Final thoughts
Working as an individual consultant means that, as well as the actual work for clients, you need to undertake business development, marketing, accounting, and many other activities that are not directly linked to any income. Finding and working with new clients is of utmost importance to avoid dry spells when you are left without sufficient work to fill your weekly schedule but, as a one-person business, the hours available each month are very limited. To maintain pace, you should take advantage of those online platforms that can save you time in finding new clients or that allow clients to find you. DevelopmentAid, LinkedIn, and your own website are three tools that, when used effectively, will keep your work pipeline steady while saving you a great deal of time.
