This year alone, I spoke to 12 consulting firms that turned to cold outbound because "revenue was behind".
“Let’s do some outbound to improve revenue.”
Surprise, surprise – it doesn’t work. Zero results. This strategy fails to fix the revenue problem in the short term. Even worse, it further aggravates fundamental issues that were causing the problem in the first place. It’s just time and money down the drain.
Now, when I say “outbound doesn’t work”, I mean cold outbound – pushing prospects into a conversation, often executed by an external agency promising "30 new leads per week".
How does a cold outbound campaign work? There are several strategies, but the main one comes down to building giant lists of prospects using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, etc., finding email addresses of the prospects, and then blasting them with emails. There is the intro email, and then many many follow-up emails.
Most prospects don’t engage. The vast majority simply click “delete” and move on. Sure, a few may bite and agree to a call. A couple may even convert into clients.
The problem? That client, chased into the pipeline today, often becomes the problem client tomorrow: misaligned, margin-draining, and hard to develop and retain. We’ve seen it multiple times. And I have been there myself.
These clients were not attracted based on trust. They were chased and persuaded. So they tend to have weaker urgency in resolving a problem, a less defined problem to begin with, and lower commitment to change. They are also likely to compare the consulting firm on pricing, require more “hand-holding” during onboarding and engagement, and have expectations that don’t really align with what the consulting firm actually delivers.
Scope creep becomes a recurring issue. Constant adjustments and customisation take a sledge hammer to profitability. And a long-term relationship with this client is highly unlikely.
Recommended reading: Most Consultancies Design Their Own Scope Creep
What many consulting leaders do not anticipate – or even consider in the first place – is the damage cold outbound strategies inflict on the business’s foundations:
Rising Acquisition Costs: Chasing clients is not a free exercise. It costs consulting firms time, effort, and money, pushing CAC through the roof.
Weak and Constantly Changing Value Proposition: As response rates decline, consulting firms find themselves constantly adjusting their messaging. It may seem harmless – “just being flexible”. But in reality, this constant change in messaging alters the core parameters of the firm. Its value proposition was probably weak to begin with – hence, the need for cold outbound. But with every iteration in an attempt to capture attention, this proposition grinds to nothing.
Lower Conversion Rates: Uninterested prospects take longer to close, and often never do. Many prospects agree to a call out of curiosity rather than a genuine need, so they never become paying clients.
Longer Sales Cycles: When there is no pull, there is no urgency. Deals stall or take time to close. Decisions get delayed and budgets get reconsidered.
Procurement Tunnels: Rather than engaging the consulting firm as a trusted advisor, these prospects often funnel the conversation into formal procurement processes or competitive RFPs. Again, there is no urgency – may as well put the consulting firm through the long and painful review process and see what comes out of it. Good luck standing out.
Price Pushback: These clients didn’t seek out the firm’s expertise. They were chased, they were talked at, they were pushed into conversations. They negotiate harder and pay less. There is always the pressure to justify every line item.
Unstable Pipeline: Cold outbound is unreliable. Sometimes it leads to a couple of clients, sometimes it doesn’t. Without a pull-based system, new business stays lumpy and unpredictable.
Eroded Margins: Acquisition costs go up, sales cycles become longer, delivery expectations from clients are unpredictable. Pricing is often compromised by discounts and scope creeps. The outcome? Margins take the hit.
Weaker Relationships: These clients are more demanding to work with, harder to satisfy, and rarely grow or get retained.
No Referrals: The strongest referrals come from clients who actively seeked out the advice of a consulting firm and experienced high-impact results. That’s not the case with cold outbound prospects-turn-clients. They don’t become advocates. They leave when the project is finished.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways for a consulting firm to acquire new clients:
They come to the firm because they’ve heard of it, follow its thinking, and trust its track record. That’s attraction.
The firm goes after them, trying to persuade or push its way into a conversation. That’s chasing.
In our experience, client attraction is a far more reliable solution, both in terms of pipeline consistency and profitability.
The reason so many consulting firms fail to set up a strong attraction mechanism is two-fold: it often requires a complete redesign of the foundations; and it compounds slowly and takes time.
Strong client attraction is built on three pillars: value clarity, credibility, and consistent, proven outcome delivery.
Value Clarity: A consulting firm must be able to articulate who it helps, what problem it solves, and what outcomes clients can expect. This explanation should be clear and compelling. And I’m not talking about presenting a list of services. No, in fact, the list comes out later in conversations, when discussing the implementation roadmap. What I’m talking about is building a reputation for the ability to solve very specific business problems. This makes it easy for prospects to recognise themselves in a consulting firm’s messaging. Prospects don’t care about the list of services. They care about resolving high-stakes problems.
Credibility: Even the most compelling value proposition will fail to attract clients if it is not supported by evidence. When prospects come across a consulting firm, their first thought shouldn’t be “this sounds too good to be true.” So how does a consulting firm establish credibility? Through visible expertise, client success stories, referrals, and consistent knowledge-sharing. When credibility is there and it’s strong, prospects enter conversations with confidence. They have the evidence that the consultancy can be trusted.
Consistent, Proven Outcome Delivery: With value clarity a consulting firm gains prospects’ initial attention. Through credibility-establishing efforts, it engages the prospects in a conversation. Through a consistent, proven outcome delivery system, it closes the deal and maintains a strong relationship with the client throughout the lifecycle. Outcome delivery is the last piece of the puzzle. It’s about walking a prospect through the client success journey and making it easy for them to understand how the consultancy plans to take them from Point A to Point B. It enables prospects to make an informed decision with confidence. Equally importantly, it sets the expectations and assigns accountability from the start, eliminating surprises and misaligned expectations later on.
Recommended reading: Winning Consulting Clients: Start with Their Problem, Not with a Service List
Outbound strategies are valuable. However, they are most effective when used as a mechanism to engage prospects, not to deliver them in the first place.
Even the most high-performing consulting firms only convert a portion of prospects. So what do you do with the rest? How do you keep the channels of communication open with prospects who are not yet ready to pull the trigger? You use outbound strategies – informative newsletters, periodical check-ins, invitations to events and webinars, relevant case studies, timely updates, and so on. This is done to stay visible, continue to nurture trust, and remain top of mind until the prospect is ready to engage fully.
Such outbound efforts are significantly more likely to produce outcomes. These prospects are more likely to open an email from the consultancy they sought out in the first place, are more likely to attend a webinar, and more likely to read a case study and see themselves and their business problems reflected in it.
When revenue is declining, the instinct of many consulting firms to “do some outbound” is understandable. It feels like taking action. It’s something that can be measured.
It is also a panic-driven reactionary decision. It does not solve the underlying problem. At best, it masks it for a little bit.
So instead, I invite consulting leaders to dig deeper. Look at the foundations and identify the root causes of revenue problems.
Redesigning these foundational elements and then building an attraction mechanism may sound overwhelming and “too long-term”, but I’ve discovered that it’s the only way to build a reliable, sustainable consulting business model.
High-performing consulting firms do not chase prospects. They invest their resources in becoming the obvious choice for a well-defined problem. They invest time and energy into building and optimising delivery models. They constantly deepen their expertise and strive for clarity in messaging as a way to differentiate themselves.
“Why aren’t the right prospects coming to us?” – that’s the question that consulting firms that find themselves in a revenue downfall should be asking themselves. And the answer typically doesn’t lie in “Because we didn’t chase prospects hard enough.”