Two Consultants, One Busy Calendar
Consulting averages 4.7 stars, the highest this trade scores on anything, and only 30.6% of its homepages carry a box a stranger can type into. Two consultants called me the same month, and that gap was the difference.
I’ve hired a consultant twice in my life, and both times I picked the person the same way, which was badly.
The first came from a friend who’d used him once and liked him. The second turned up in my inbox during the one week I happened to have a problem shaped like her.
No shortlist. No comparison. No research of any kind, from a man who audits websites for a living and lectures other people about proof.
So I’m not standing above this. I’m standing in it.
How did you pick the last professional you handed real money to?
Two calls, six weeks apart
Two consultants rang me inside the same couple of months last year, both of them wanting a new website.
Both were good. I mean properly good, the kind you can hear inside ten minutes on a first call, where they ask you something about your own business that you’ve been dodging for a year.
One was turning work away and wanted a site that would help her charge more for what was left.
The other hadn’t heard from a stranger in over a year, and her whole pipeline was three people she’d worked with before the pandemic.
Same trade. Similar rates. Neither website was any good, and I say that as the man they were both about to pay to replace one.
So whatever separated those two, it had nothing to do with me. It’s the same thing missing from every website quote a consultant ever gets, mine included.
The one thing this trade wins
A few weeks before either of those calls, I’d been counting this industry.
One evening I lined all the trades up by how well their customers rate them, and consulting came to rest at 17 of 47, on an average of 4.7 stars.
Nothing else about consulting lands anywhere near that high. Not the speed, not the code underneath, not a single one of the checks I run on the website itself.
The most valuable thing this trade owns is the opinion of the people it has already worked for. Twenty-six reviews on the average listing, and the people who wrote them were generous.
Both of my two had earned that opinion. Only one of them kept it somewhere a stranger could read it.
That split runs right through the trade. When I went looking for a consultant to hire myself, an empty profile cost five of them the job before I’d finished my coffee.
Where the proof lived
The busy one had a Google profile with real reviews on it, written by real clients, several of them rambling the way honest people ramble. One mentioned a Tuesday in February and a spreadsheet that had been wrong since 2019.
The quiet one had a testimonials page.
Nine paragraphs of praise, each signed off with “Director, manufacturing company”. Beautiful writing. She’d clearly given up a weekend to it.
I believed every word, and so would you, and it counted for nothing at all, because she wrote that page, she chose those quotes, and she could have invented the lot over a coffee on a Sunday afternoon.
A stranger knows that. Not out loud, and not unkindly, but she knows.
Whose testimonials page have you ever actually believed?
What lands in the other person’s inbox
Most consulting work still arrives as one person forwarding your name to another. “You should talk to her.” Then a link.
What turns up on the other end is either a small card carrying your face, your name and a line about what you do, or a bare blue string of characters with your domain buried in the middle of it.
Open Graph tags decide which of those two she gets, and 75.1% of consulting sites carry them. The rest send their own recommendation into a stranger’s inbox looking like something a spam filter should have caught on the way past.
A referral you spent eighteen months earning, arriving looking like a coupon.
Manufacturers have it worse. Two shops chasing one buyer, and the field nobody filled in decided which link looked like a company.
When did you last paste your own web address into a message and look at what came out the other end of it?
Neither of them had a broken website
It would suit me to tell you the quiet one’s site was a disaster, so let me be careful.
It wasn’t. 80.4% of consulting sites pass Google’s mobile checks, a shade above the 78% I get across everything I audit, and both of these two cleared that without any trouble.
I counted 4,317 consulting businesses across 24 markets before I let myself believe any of this, and audited 3,055 of their websites. If you’d sooner check the numbers than take my word for them, choose consulting from the industry list in the explorer on my report and leave the city box alone, because the card that comes back prints every check with the number of sites standing behind it, and it’s the same screen I had open during both of those phone calls.
Nothing on it explained why one phone rang and the other one didn’t.
The gap I could see
One thing did separate their two sites, and it’s the dullest thing in the world.
The busy one’s homepage had a box a stranger could type into. The quiet one had an email address in the footer, in gray, at the bottom of a page nobody ever scrolled to.
30.6% of consulting sites put a contact form on the homepage, better than the 28% I get across every trade, and still an enormous number of consultants asking a nervous stranger to compose an email from scratch.
That email is harder to write than it sounds. She has to describe a problem she can’t name yet, to a person she’s never met, in a message she can’t take back once it’s gone.
Would you have written it?
So what was it, in the end?
I asked the quiet one a question I now ask everyone. When a stranger who has never heard your name types it into Google, what does she find?
She had never looked. Almost nobody ever looks.
Eleven years of delighted clients, and no way on earth for a stranger to meet a single one of them. Her reputation was real, it was expensive to earn, and it was entirely private.
Searching your own name is part of the upkeep now, along with everything else that keeps a site honest after launch day.
Consultants are most of what I build for now, and both of those calls turned into projects, and I’ll happily tell you which one was easier. The busy one, by a mile. Her site had something to put on it.
Tell me your trade is different
A few of you are already composing an email to me, and some of you have a case worth hearing.
Confidential work. Clients who can’t be named in public. Public sector rules. A buyer who would never dream of reading Google reviews about an adviser.
Maybe. I’ve been argued out of a position twice this year and said so out loud both times.
Which of those four is true of your own practice, though, and which one did you inherit from a conversation you overheard at a conference?
Before you write, though, do the search. Type your own name the way a stranger would, look hard at what comes back, and send me whatever site it lands on if you want a second opinion on that half of it.
Then come and argue. Tell me what’s different about your corner of this profession, and tell me how your last three clients really found you, and if you change my mind I’ll write the follow-up myself and put your name at the top of it.
