Building a consulting website? Focus on the problems you solve.
When creating your website, many contractors and fractional consultants like to highlight their years of experience.
After all, isn’t 30 years of working in the same industry a big plus?
It is. But it’s not the most important qualification. Your ability to solve a problem – or different types of problems – has more value.
Clients hire independent contractors when they’re confident that they don’t have the expertise inhouse or enough internal resources to deliver. So, when you lead with years of experience – in a conversation or on your website – you aren’t connecting the dots for employers. You’re asking them to guess that you have acquired the knowledge, skills, and expertise to tackle the issue at hand.
It’s far better to make it clear what you can bring to the table on day one – in the form of problems solves or outcomes achieved – instead of asking clients to make those guesses.
Show the Problems You Solve
Let’s say you are positioning yourself as a customer insights contractor/consultant, and have spent your career analyzing data to understand customer behavior, preferences, and trends. The fact that you worked for 20 years for big commercial brands is a great bullet point and supports that you have a lot of experience.
But it would be far better to identify the business problems/outcomes you helped address during that time. For example: you can develop actionable insights to transform products from nice-to-have to must-have.
Further, you have the expertise and skills to make that happen because you can:
- Expertly collect and analyze customer data from all types of sources (social media, web analytics, customer transactions, surveys, etc.)
- Create meaningful segments that deliver true insights
- Understand customers’ needs and deliver those findings to senior and product management
Give Examples of Your Engagements
Another good way to paint the picture of your skillset and expertise for prospective clients is to give an example of your previous engagements or desired engagements.
Take, for example, our customer insights consultant. An engagement example could be something like “Contracted to optimize the data collection process for NPS scores in 30 days”. Or, it could be: “Revised a segmentation strategy to deliver greater product insights.”
Then, another sentence can explain that your segmentation strategy led to feature changes, which in turn, increased sales.
By explaining engagements you’ve had – or would like to have – you are showcasing your skills in a meaningful way to prospective clients, and not forcing them to connect the dots about what the need is and what you can deliver. You’re also giving them ideas about what you can do for them.
Put it all together for the client
The more you can present yourself to a client as a holistic fix for their issues, the better.
So, before you introduce yourself as “a 30-year accountant” , think of what you did in those 30 years and how you helped companies make or save money. Or if you worked for a non-profit, how you helped the common good.
Then, put it all together for a client and make your years of experience a supporting bullet. Not your top value.
For examples about how to do this, check out https://gigwisely.com/templates/.