There are very few industries that are as poorly understood as consulting. Irrespective of the niche you are consulting for, very few people know exactly what a consultant does.
This is part of the magic. Consultants don’t have to leave a huge paper trail behind and, oftentimes, you can’t even pinpoint the exact things that they did for you.
But you do know one thing for sure: before the consultant came in, your business wasn’t doing great. When they left, your business had wings. This happens, of course, if the consultant is worth their salt.
How can you be that consultant — the one who leaves a trail of thriving businesses behind? We’ve got the inside scoop from the SyncApps subscribers and their permission to share some of their trade secrets.
We sat down (virtually) with Absolute Advisory’s Paul J. Sawchuck to learn how he helps his customers thrive and how he leverages integration to help them reach their goals. This is what we learned about success in consulting businesses — for yourself and for your customers.
…really well! We all have a vague idea about what one industry or another does. But it takes time, research, and hands-on experience to really understand their struggles and their challenges and to be able to help them meet their goals.
At SyncApps, for instance, we serve a lot of consultants. But to really help them, we took deep dives into their customer support messages and constantly asked them how we can help them better. We used that feedback to create better integrations and new features.
In our chat with Paul, he referenced a client of his in the nonprofit industry. This was not Paul’s first time working with an organization in this industry, so he was able to help them streamline processes quickly and effectively.
But knowledge of the industry isn’t the only thing that empowered him to empower his clients in turn:
Paul knew that his nonprofit client was working with Salesforce and Constant Contact to keep in touch with their stakeholders and leads. As someone familiar with both solutions, he was able to take a quick look at their processes and pinpoint what was missing: the integration between Salesforce and Constant Contact.
It’s a consultant’s job to come up with ways to improve everything in a business. Anyone can tell you that Salesforce and Constant Contact are great solutions — that’s why they’re used by millions of people all over the world.
But only a great consultant can tell you how to get more out of the solutions that everyone uses. This is how you get leverage over your competition and pad your bottom line.
You can never know everything in this business. By the time you’ve acquired considerable knowledge, markets have changed, customer demands have increased, and technology has evolved considerably.
Following up on our story, Paul knew that iPaaS is “a thing”, but he didn’t rush to offer his clients the first available solution or integration that wasn’t the ideal fit for them. Instead, he kept searching for solutions that are flexible enough to meet their specific needs and affordable enough to match a nonprofit’s budget.
This is how he stumbled upon the Constant Contact for Salesforce integration by SyncApps. The fact that we have an ongoing 50% discount policy for nonprofits, along with the most flexible features in the market made him decide that this was the best solution for his client.
We were stoked to see that Paul’s client doesn’t just use our integration for basic features. They also use it to:
When a subscriber’s use of our features changes over time, we know that it’s because someone who knows what they’re doing handles the account. And we know that someone has measured results and found new tweaks to get even more out of that integration.
This is how you grow and evolve. By measuring what works and what doesn’t and by constantly streamlining your processes.
Want to learn more about how Absolute Advisory helped their client and how they, in turn, thrived by connecting their two mission-critical solutions? Check out the full subscriber story here.
