How do buyers check a consulting firm?
Kyle Meagher of Kung Pow Marketing finds that buyers check the partner before the firm. When a referral reaches a CEO and a CFO, they look up the partner who would lead the work, so a consulting firm earns the engagement by publishing how that partner thinks, written from interviews and aimed at the 2,000 people in its market who could hire it.
On an intro call at a B2B consulting and training firm we work with, the prospect's sales leader explained that his boss already had a trainer in mind and kept saying he had "this guy that we've used before." Buyers in this business go back to people they've used before, and when they change companies they bring their consultants and trainers with them. Each move puts your firm in front of a new team that has never heard of it, and that team runs the check before anyone calls.
Say a COO you worked with three years ago has moved to a new company. Her new CEO wants the supply chain fixed before the next budget cycle, so she tells him about a partner who has done it and sends your name. Before anyone books a call, the CEO looks that partner up, and so does the CFO who would sign the engagement letter.
They look up the partner because the partner is what they'd be buying. A company that hires a consulting, training or advisory firm is paying for a few months of one partner's judgment applied to its problem, so the CEO's question on that search is how this partner thinks and whether he has handled a problem like this before. The firm's website covers what you sell, which leaves the partner's name to answer the rest.
I'm Kyle Meagher. I've worked in B2B marketing for more than ten years, managed more than $11M in ad spend and helped 123 businesses, including a B2B consulting and training firm and an IT consultancy. At almost every expert firm I've worked with, the partners were better than anything a buyer could find about them. Looking one up turned up a bio page with degrees and former employers and a LinkedIn profile with a title on it. None of it showed how the partner would approach the buyer's problem.
Credentials tell a buyer a partner is qualified. Every firm on his shortlist has qualified partners, so credentials don't help him choose. A partner with twenty years of directly relevant experience loses the check when the buyer can't find any of it.
Consulting firm marketing is getting your partners' thinking in front of the people who could hire the firm, so a referral still stands when the buyer looks up the partner. People who have never met a partner already know how one thinks.
Professional services marketing is the wider term for the same work at law, accounting, engineering and consulting firms, where the buyer is hiring people and checks the people first.
The first guide in this series covers how B2B buyers check any vendor before they call. This one is for firms where the thing being checked is a partner. It covers what a partner should publish and how it reaches the people who could hire your firm.
Where referrals come from
Ask a managing partner where his last ten engagements came from and the answers are personal. A past client brought the firm into her new company, a partner's old colleague called, a lawyer who sends work made an introduction, or someone came up after a conference talk.
Those channels close the best work a firm like yours gets. Hinge Research Institute's 2015 guide on referrals, which gathered data from 523 professional services firms, found that 81.5% of buyers have received a referral from someone who wasn't a client. Hinge split the referrals from non-clients into referrals based on a person's general awareness of the firm and referrals based on "the referrer's understanding of your specialized expertise." Four in five buyers, in other words, have been pointed to a firm by someone who never hired it. Those referrers know the partners' work from what they've heard and read, so the number of referrals a firm gets rises and falls with how many people know what its partners know.
Giving referrers something to forward
A referrer can only pass on what he can describe. An accountant who tells a client "she's sharp, you should talk to her" passes on a name, and the client starts his research from nothing. An accountant who forwards the partner's article on the exact problem the client just described passes on the partner's reasoning, and the client reads it before he decides whether to call. The second introduction arrives with the first part of the sales conversation already done.
Referrals also sit in a few people's hands. In the expert firms I've worked with, a handful of senior people hold the relationships that send most of the work. When one of them retires, the people who knew his work stop hearing from the firm unless the other partners have been publishing where those people read.
Past clients who change companies
Of all those sources, the past client who moves is the one I see firms track least. Everyone who hired your partners or worked beside them on an engagement will change jobs at some point, and each move puts someone who has seen your work up close inside a company where nobody else has. Whether she brings you in depends on whether she thinks of your partners when her new boss asks who she's used, and that depends on whether she has kept seeing their work since the last engagement ended. Put your own numbers in below.
What a job change is worth
What the people who know your partners' work bring in when they move to new companies.
Each year about 30 people who know your partners' work start at a new company, usually one where nobody else has heard of your firm. If 10% of them bring you in, that's 3 engagements a year, worth about $450K in first engagements alone.
Example values; set your own. Counts one first engagement for each person who brings you in and leaves out any follow-on work.
In the firms I've worked with, partners hear about these moves by accident, months later, from a LinkedIn notification. Past clients and the people who worked beside them belong on the firm's target list from the start, so a partner's posts are already in their feed on the day they start somewhere new.
Your best writing goes to one client
The best writing most consulting firms produce all year is in their proposals. A good one names the client's problem more clearly than the client has and explains why the obvious fix won't hold. Then it goes to three people at one company and into a folder.
The rest of a partner's week works the same way. A workshop deck, a steering committee readout, a post-engagement review and the answer a partner gives a CFO on a call all hold the judgment buyers pay for, and each one is seen by the client who paid for it and nobody else. The record a future buyer can find is still the bio page.
The training firm we worked with had the problem in its plainest form. When we started, it had 32 drafts and a library of workshop decks that it hadn't been able to publish or put to work. Its market made the gap expensive. The CEO said of the companies the firm sold to, "The overwhelming majority have not received any training," so a buyer arriving cold had nothing to tell him why the problem deserved a budget line, let alone why this firm should get it.
What we found
has run two programs to cut indirect spend since 2023. Both hit their savings target in the first quarter and gave most of it back by the fourth.
The new purchasing rules lived in a spreadsheet the buyers never opened, and nothing in the purchasing system changed. By the fourth quarter, people were buying the way they always had.
We recommend changing the approval path in the system for three categories before setting any savings target.
Twice this year I've walked into a company whose cost program worked on paper and then gave the savings back.
The pattern was the same both times. The savings got booked in the first quarter. The new rules lived in a spreadsheet nobody in purchasing opened, and the purchasing system itself never changed, so by the fourth quarter people were buying the way they always had.
We now change the approval path in the system for two or three categories before anyone sets a savings target. The first month is slower, and it's the only version I've seen hold past a year.
The post in Fig. 1 leaves out everything that identifies the client. A buyer at another company gets what the partner noticed and the decision he made because of it, which is what he was trying to learn when he looked the partner up.
Client confidentiality
Confidentiality obligations cover the client and anything that identifies it. The patterns across clients belong to the firm, including the question you ask first, the order you do the work in and the mistake you watch companies repeat.
| In the proposal or on the call | What gets published | What stays private |
|---|---|---|
| The diagnosis | The pattern you see across companies like theirs | The client's name, numbers and people |
| The order of the work | Why you sequence it that way, and what goes wrong when companies don't | Scope, fees and the engagement letter |
| The CFO's objection | The objection and how you answer it | Who raised it, and in which meeting |
| The result | A case study with the client unnamed, or a range across several clients | Anything the client hasn't cleared |
We write the private side down at the start as red lines. No client gets named, ever, and the partners add their own items, usually fees, proprietary tools and anything under a specific NDA. Every draft is checked against the list before a partner sees it, and the partner approves each piece before it goes out.
Why generic professional services marketing fails
Every managing partner I talk to has seen thought leadership that said nothing, like the article on five trends reshaping the industry or the post about how listening to clients is everything. Plenty of them have paid an agency for some of it.
Marketers call publishing your expertise under your own name . Buyers have learned to expect little from it. In the 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report that LinkedIn produces with Edelman, less than half said the overall quality of thought leadership they read is good, and only 15% described it as very good. The people answering were B2B decision-makers and C-suite executives, the kind of people who sign consulting engagements.
Weak content hurts a consulting firm more than most, because the product on display is the partner's thinking. A buyer who reads a vague post under a partner's name learns that the partner thinks in generalities, which is the thing he was checking. He is usually an expert himself, a CFO or a head of procurement who has read the generic version of every topic in his field. What he can't get anywhere else is how one partner handled a situation like his, in enough detail to test it against his own experience.
Would the partner sign it?
The test we hold every piece to is whether the partner would put his name on it unchanged and send it to the procurement head he most wants to impress. A piece that fails doesn't go out.
Early in the training firm's engagement, its most senior trainer argued that the firm had to establish the partners' background before publishing big opinions, and I agree with him. For an expert firm, the first months of publishing should establish the track record, meaning who the partners have worked with, what changed for those clients and the specific calls the partners made along the way. The strong opinions come after, once readers know whose they are.
Free offers pull junior people
The other common failure is chasing downloads. When the training firm planned a free video series as an offer, I warned that it would pull in junior account executives instead of the team leaders and executives who buy training. A free checklist or a broad ebook does the same thing for any consulting firm. It collects the names of people who can't hire you, and the monthly report counts them as progress. For a firm selling six-figure engagements, 2,000 people who could sign are worth more than any number of downloads from people who can't.
The pieces that work for this buyer are narrow. Each one is a partner's account of a real decision, with enough of the numbers and the reasoning that a CFO can test it against his own company. When buyers don't yet budget for the category at all, as in the training firm's market, the early pieces also have to put a cost on the problem in the buyer's own numbers before he'll read about the solution.
Do the partners have to write?
A partner at full utilization treats any writing assignment as the first thing to slip, and a ghostwriter working from a two-line brief produces the generic piece from the last chapter. We build the work on interviews, because a partner who won't write 800 words on scoping will talk for twenty usable minutes about the engagement he scoped last week.
It starts with the documents. The firm sends what it already has, including proposals, workshop decks, readouts, reports and the emails partners send to prospects, and I read all of it before the first interview so the questions come from the firm's own material. After a kickoff interview and a follow-up to fill the gaps, each partner in the program sits for one hour every other week. The red lines get written down once. LinkedIn posts in the partner's voice go out by week two, followed by a newsletter, articles, bylines, guides and case studies, all built from those conversations, and the partner approves each piece in a few minutes. The CEO of the B2B consulting and training firm we worked with put the whole time cost at "probably 45 minutes of total work on our end." The guide to founder-led marketing covers how we keep each piece in the speaker's own voice.
The IT consultancy we worked with is the clearest case I have of a firm whose partner was the constraint. Before we started, its president told us, "it's clear that I am the bottleneck."
Which partner goes first
A firm with several partners doesn't need all of them publishing in the first month. Start with the partner buyers ask for by name, plus the partner whose practice you most want to grow if that's a different person. Each partner in the program gets his own interview hour and keeps his own voice, and everything is aimed at the same list of buyers. At the training firm we wrote for four of its leaders, each from separate interviews.
The training firm's co-founder told me, "you know how to put blocks down one by one at our stage much better than we do." A firm at that stage needs one person deciding the order of the work. When the posts go to one freelancer and the conference follow-up goes to whoever has time, the pieces end up aimed at nobody in particular.
If a partner leaves
A partner can leave, and his audience can follow him unless the firm holds it. The newsletter list, the articles on the firm's domain and the Sniper Sheet in the firm's CRM belong to the firm and stay with it, and at least two partners publish, so no buyer's idea of the firm rests on one name.
Who gets origination credit
When a post brings in an engagement, the credit follows your firm's existing origination rule. We record which partner's piece the buyer read first and report it each month, so the compensation committee has that fact in front of it before it decides.
Getting quoted by AI tools
The articles do a second job. When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Google's AI answers which firms handle a problem like his, the tool builds its reply from what firms have published, and the firms that explained the problem best get named. The training firm got two deals over $100K straight from , and its traffic grew 243% year over year.
The 2,000 people who could hire you
Most consulting firms can name their market more precisely than they expect. Take a firm that fixes procurement for manufacturers with $50M to $500M in revenue. Its buyers are the heads of procurement and the CFOs at those companies, and the whole list runs to a few thousand names.
I describe what we do to founders in one line: "We make you micro-famous with the 2,000 best customers for your business in your market." For a consulting firm that means the people on that list know a partner's name and how he thinks before they need the help, so the firm is already in the buyer's head on the day a project gets funded.
We call the list the Sniper Sheet. It holds the companies the firm should be working with and the people inside them who sign or influence the engagement. For a consulting firm it gets built from the CRM and every proposal you've sent (the lost ones included), past clients and the people who worked beside them, conference attendee and speaker lists, association directories and revenue filters. It usually comes out shorter than founders expect. Marketing aimed at a named list like this is called , and the guide to account-based marketing walks through the build.
How the warm-up works
Once the partners are publishing, we connect with people on the list after they've liked or commented on a partner's posts, comment on what they publish and start conversations from there. Nobody on the list gets a pitch from a stranger. For a firm whose product is a partner's judgment, a cold pitch from that partner undercuts the product.
The order shows up in the numbers. When the founder of an 8-figure 3PL and eCommerce company we work with asked to connect with people who had already liked or commented on his posts, 81% accepted, against 21% for cold requests with a personal note. Some of that gap is warmth they had before they saw a post; the posts are how we find the warm ones and earn the request. Those numbers come from eCommerce buyers. The acceptance-rate data note has the counts.
When someone on the list is ready to talk about a project, the partner takes the conversation. It often opens with something useful to the buyer first, such as a custom breakdown of his own numbers or a short video made for him.
Getting more from a speaking slot
For a consulting or training firm, the industry conference does the job a trade show does for a freight company. A partner gets a 40-minute session or a panel seat, often with a table or a booth for the firm, and for two days the room holds more of the people who could hire you than anywhere else you'll be all year.
The talk itself usually goes well. A dozen people come up afterward, cards get swapped and a few emails go out the next week. By the time the partner is back on client work most of those contacts have gone cold, and the rest of the room, which had never heard of him before he walked on stage, never hears from the firm again. I tell founders that if you're going to trade shows and no one knows who you are, you've got a problem that can be solved with just 30 days of forward planning, and the same 30 days work for a partner's speaking slot.
The training firm we worked with landed a keynote at a large conference, along with a booth. Its CEO explained how: "We got it. Cause we had unbelievable client relationships that invited us in." He wanted to "blast that as many places as possible," and I offered to market the talk ahead of time and re-market the follow-up through LinkedIn, so the people in the room would know the partners' work before they arrived and keep seeing it after they left. In his words, the keynote and the booth produced "a ton of really good leads."
- Get the attendee list, or last year's, and match it against the Sniper Sheet.
- Publish the talk's central argument in two or three posts under the partner's name.
- Connect with the people on the list who react, and comment on their posts.
- Send a plain note the week before saying when the partner speaks and what about.
- The talk, with one page the room can take away.
- Meetings booked in advance with the people who replied.
- A written note that night on everyone who came up afterward.
- The talk's argument as an article, plus a short clip.
- A note to people on the list who attended, with the article and no pitch.
- Warm conversations handed to the partner, often with a breakdown of the prospect's own numbers first.
Pick events by counting the people from your Sniper Sheet who will be in the room. A regional conference with sixty of your buyers in the audience is worth more to the firm than a national one with two thousand attendees and six of them. The trade show guide sets out its full plan in more detail.
How will my partners know it's working?
In a partnership, marketing gets judged by people who each give up billable hours and a share of profit to pay for it. At a partner meeting in the first six months, someone will ask what the firm is getting for those hours, and the managing partner needs an answer they can check long before a large engagement signs.
So the work starts with a written 90-day objective and tracked from the first week. For a consulting firm those are the people on the list who accept a partner's connection request, the ones who ask to connect on their own, the replies and meetings that follow, and the first calls and referrals where the buyer mentions something a partner published. Each month the managing partner gets a recap he can forward to the other partners as is.
The longer-run number is engagements. Count the qualified first meetings your firm had last year and call it 60, and put a signed client at $100K a year, which is the low end for most firms reading this. Two more signed engagements a year out of those 60 first meetings is the number the tool below starts with. If the work finds only 3 to 6 best-fit engagements over its whole life, it pays for itself many times over.
What two more engagements a year are worth
Extra engagements from publishing, set beside the partner time it takes.
If publishing adds 2 engagements a year at $150K each, that's $300K a year in first engagements and about $600K over three years once follow-on work comes in. The partner time is 36 hours a year, about $14K at your billing rate, or 10% of one engagement.
Example values; set your own. Partner time counts interviews and approvals at your billing rate and leaves out our fee, which depends on scope. Each follow-on engagement counts at the value of the first.
For an expert firm, the closest real numbers I have are the training firm's, from its first year with us.
The fixed-fee first step
Engagements start with a fixed-fee first step, either a diagnostic or a first phase of about 90 days, and then the ongoing program. Every client works with me directly, and the client list stays short. The training firm's CEO once told me, "Nothing irritates me more than slipping deadlines." The written 90-day objective and the monthly recap give you dates to hold us to. The guide to hiring marketing help compares the other ways to staff this work.
You can run a version of the buyer's check this week. Pull the last five proposals your firm sent and mark every paragraph that a buyer at another company would learn something from once the client's name is taken out. Then look up the partner who wrote them on your phone, the way a buyer's CFO would, and count how many of the paragraphs you marked he could find.
Or send me your lead partner's name and the firm you lose to most. I run the check a buyer runs on both, on video, and send you the recording.
Check me and my rivalQuestions founders ask us about this
Won't publishing give away what clients pay us for?
Clients pay a partner to apply his judgment inside their company, with their own data and their own people. A buyer who reads how you approach the problem still has to get that work done, and the piece shows him how much there is to get right and which partner has thought hardest about it.
The private side gets written down at the start as red lines. No client is ever named, and the partners add fees, proprietary tools and anything under a specific NDA. Every draft is checked against that list before a partner sees it, and the partner approves every piece.
Our partners bill full time. How much of their time does this take?
About an hour every other week for each partner in the program, plus a few minutes to approve each piece. We read your proposals, decks and reports before the first interview, so the partner spends the hour talking about work he has already done.
Most firms start with one or two partners. One is the partner buyers ask for by name, and the other is the partner whose practice the firm most wants to grow.
Will it sound like our partners, or like an agency wrote it?
Every piece starts as a partner talking, so the examples, numbers and opinions are his. We keep a list of each partner's phrases and the words he'd never use, and his red lines get checked on every draft.
The test is whether the partner would put his name on the piece unchanged and send it to the buyer he most wants to impress. Drafts that fail it get rewritten before he sees them.
Our client work is confidential. What can we actually publish?
The client stays private. The patterns across clients belong to the firm, like the question you ask first, the order you do the work in, the mistake you watch companies repeat and the objection a CFO always raises. Case studies run with the client unnamed.
The IT consultancy we worked with published 80 pages of expert content and a ransomware recovery case study, all built from recorded interviews with its president.
Do the people who hire us actually read LinkedIn?
The senior ones read and rarely react, so the feed looks quiet from outside. At an 8-figure 3PL and eCommerce company, about 4 in 5 of the founder's 2,025 connections are founders, owners, C-level executives, VPs or directors (account-based marketing guide), and they show up in who accepts his requests and who asks to connect.
LinkedIn is also one channel of several. The same interviews feed a newsletter, articles that get found in search and quoted by AI tools, and the material around a partner's conference talks. A B2B consulting and training firm we worked with got two deals over $100K straight from AI search.
How long before this shows up in engagements?
The first posts go out by week two, and the early numbers move in the first quarter: people on your list accepting a partner's requests, people asking to connect and replies that turn into first calls. Engagements follow your own sales cycle, and the written 90-day objective says up front which numbers you'll judge the work on and when.
The closest example I have for an expert firm is the training firm we worked with. It had $800K in pipeline within a year from $29.5K in spend.
We tried thought leadership before and nothing came of it. What's different?
Usually the earlier attempt was written by someone who didn't know the work, and it stopped once the piece was published. This program starts with the list of the few thousand people who could hire the firm, counted by name. The pieces come from partner interviews. After a piece goes out, we connect with the people on the list who react, with no pitch, and hand the conversation to a partner when someone is ready to talk about a project.
We report on what the people on that list do, so you can see in the first quarter whether it's working.