Ask HN: How do you get started in B2B consulting?
Hey, curious to know if anyone has advice on how to break into business to business consulting. Is there a marketplace where white papers can get posted or companies post request for proposals?
First, you need to know what you are doing exactly. What is your service? What are you solving? If these questions' answers are vague, you are have to go back to your drawing board. Consulting cannot happen unless you are an expert or somewhat very good at something. Better than the client you are trying to consult and ask money for.
Once you are really good at what you are doing and have confidence as well as persuasion skills, you will need to identify your niche's client sources. This could be word of mouth, SEO, door-to-door, hiring a salesperson, or simply finding a way that other consultants couldn't figure out yet so you can get those clients they didn't.
There are so many things to cover. But firstly, you must have a valid product and solve a real problem others, including the clients, cannot solve themselves or they are willing to pay someone else to take care of it for them because it is time consuming or would cost too much to hire a full time employee due to insurance, HR stuff, and liabilities.
Companies are not hanging out in a single place. Most of the companies out there don't even look for a consultant until someone brings it up to them.
Don’t fall into freelance sites consulting gigs. It will be minimum wage type of work.
so, he wrote some, sold some, etc.
said he plans to, as his next phase, start heading back to various industry conferences and just start shooting the shit with people and make contacts and talk shop and presumably find some contract work that might end up becoming a product (again) -- something like that.
which actually all sounded pretty reasonable.
but it didn't really resonate with me mainly b/c i don't specialize in anything - i don't know any vertical really well, so i feel like i just can't empathize all that well with that situation.
but i guess i can empathize well enough to know that it sounds reasonable to me.
i guess you'd probably have to be open to spending $1,500 or so and heading to AWS re:invent or whatever other specific trade shows there are and at least giving it a go.
i also feel like there are other 'weird' middlemen/people of sorts who hang around in these business 'spaces' - not the physical space, but the connection/business-making space.
i guess you could always go to a trade show and say, "Hey, i'm bob, i do b2b consulting for 'x'. Do you know anyone who does that type of thing besides me? Yeah, i do x, y, z, etc. I'm not sure what all I do yet. But i'd like to give it a go, whatever it is. Are people using your tool? yeah? oh, that make sense. and you have a field consulting team or you use VARs?"
Talking to the decision makers and having friends or intros to help with that will by far be more effective than cold emails or random RFPs as a new company.
This will save you time, money and failure.