How I Approach Crafting Offers for Consulting Projects in Corporations and Businesses

INTRO: After generating over a million dollars in sales and selling one of her businesses with a single email, your host, Kathryn Thompson, takes an unconventional approach to marketing and sales. So if you're ready to tap into a more powerful way to be seen her and a sought after entrepreneur in your industry without having to spend endless hours marketing your business and chasing clients, you're in the right place. Be The Sought After Entrepreneur Podcast is here to help you ditch the cookie cutter once and for all. Size fits all approach to marketing and use your unique energy to effortlessly attract the most aligned clients. When you do this, you can spend less time marketing your business and more time doing your soul work and enjoying the richness of your life. Welcome to Be the Sought After Entrepreneur podcast. And here's your host, Kathryn Thompson.

Kathryn Thompson: Hey, hey, I am super stoked that you're tuning in to this week's episode. I cannot wait to dive into [00:01:00] today's topic because I'm going to be answering a very specific question that I received from a beautiful community member in the DMs, you know who you are, and I really truly believe that diving deeper into this on a podcast episode is not only going to support her, um, but also support anybody else that is in a similar position.

And the question was, What would I advise when it comes to packaging and positioning your services for a corporation or a business? And for those of you that don't know, I spent the first seven years of my career as a management consultant, and this is exactly what I did. I didn't work within the company or the business.

I was independent of it. And so how I approached this is actually slightly different than how I approach my wine business, for instance, or my online business. And for those of you that don't know, I have a variety of different offers online in my online business, Spellbound, the Offer Architect, the Alchemy of Attraction.

And I spent a lot of time crafting [00:02:00] those offers, meaning I got really clear on who I wanted to serve, how I wanted to serve them, what transformation I was going to deliver. And then what I needed to include in those offers in order to deliver on the promise. And so I spent a lot of upfront legwork really crafting those offers out and then obviously selling them and the strategy behind it, casting sort of that wide net, as I say, using ads and social media to put the offer out there, to get it visible, and then to sell it to a handful of people.

Let's just say who are interested. but you're casting this wide net that is not necessarily, not everybody in that wide net might need the offer that you're putting out there. How I approach working with corporations or businesses, whether I'm a consultant or an advisor within the company, I'm independent of it.

I'm not a salary staff member or employee. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about project or [00:03:00] contractual or long term strategic partnership within a company or business, but I am independent of it, then I would approach it slightly different. Obviously, I would get really clear on who I am and what I bring to the table and what services I would be able to sort of fulfill within a company.

Company and advise on, but I wouldn't spend any time like crafting out what needs to go in, quote unquote the offer in order to deliver on the promise. And here's why. When I was in management consulting for seven years, we never had packages like that. We knew kind of our base rate and what. Our rate was, but what we did was we sought out projects.

So within our civic government, within our provincial government, federal government on their website, there's a portal that has proposals, right? That they're looking for something outside of their business. They don't want to hire staff to do it. Let's just say it's maybe a [00:04:00] short term project. Maybe it's a three to five year project, but it's not something that they're wanting to hire maybe full time staff for.

And therefore they're looking for subject matter experts within it to support them on that. And so what we would do is that we would, somebody within our business or firm would actually look through the proposals. That was like one of their jobs was literally to go through the proposals and. Find out which ones really aligned with our subject matter expertise and what we knew we could deliver.

And then based on that, the proposal, what they would be asking for, project scope, all that sort of stuff would be written in that proposal. And it was very specific and very specific around the length of time that they were looking for somebody to come in. And then what we would do is we bid on that project.

And why I do it this way versus spending a lot of time crafting an offer, outlining that, all those sorts of things is, is that the bidding process and the proposal [00:05:00] process is a lot more direct, and the energy that you're putting into writing a proposal that's very specific based on what somebody's looking for cuts out all of the other work that you're doing to craft an offer, to market and to sell it, and to pitch it, and likely blind pitch it, right?

We also have to think about companies and businesses operating quite a bit differently than a solopreneur or, um, a small enterprise, right? Corporations and businesses, depending on the size, often have a budget that's allotted every year of what they can and can't spend on Whatever projects they're wanting to do, right?

So we want to consider that when we are thinking about how we want to work with those people. So, for example, if somebody has a 12 month plan of what they're wanting to achieve in that year, and they're putting out proposals looking for bids for people, if we're cold [00:06:00] pitching in that, It's just going to go to radio silence, right?

I'm just going to be really honest with you, right? They're, they're not going to receive those cold pitches within the company because oftentimes it needs to go through approval hoops. It needs to get approved by, I don't know if they have a board or if they've got CEOs and VPs or department heads or whatever it is.

We've got to look at that sort of differently, right? It might take time for those things to actually go through an approval process. So. If I was starting again from scratch and I was just focusing on being a consultant, that's where I would start. Uh, I would look at, and I would get associated with, the organizations that have these proposals or this bidding portal or whatnot.

And it might look different for where you live, but I'm in Canada. And so, uh, I know a lot of companies work this way. I have a really good friend who's in the construction industry and he works in commercial construction and that's how they bid on all their projects. Right? So they're not going around pitching [00:07:00] a bunch of people being like, Hey, you want to renovate your commercial space or you want to do something differently.

Like that's a waste of time. Because again, if you look at the budget and what's required for the project, I mean, that's going to take, approval, budget approval. And within companies and businesses, there is that budget approval. Now with a solopreneur or an entrepreneur, again, there's less of that. I don't want to say red tape, but there's less of an approval process.

If you're just going to a CEO or a solopreneur, right, they're the only one that has to make the decision. But if you're going to like, like an HR department, let's just say you might go to the head of the HR department, but that HR department. they might not be overseeing the budget, right? They might have to get an approval from a CEO or a VP of HR, whatever it might be.

So the reason why too, is that honestly, if you're cold pitching an organization with a predefined offer, oftentimes it's not maybe [00:08:00] what they're looking for or what they think that they need. And therefore, again, it could be like, A needle in a haystack sort of thing. You're like shooting a dart blindly at a wall, hoping eventually something sort of sticks.

I would really advise actually going the route, like I said, where it's almost like a job. You're looking at job boards, right? It's far easier to apply for a job, a very specific job. When you know the person or the company's looking for it and you can tailor your resume and tailor the app application or whatnot to really suit what that specific person's looking for.

That's far more less time consuming than trying to like have one offer that's going to fit within a company because like, When I was a management consultant, like I said, I worked a lot with, you know, consumer buy in, customer engagement, increasing satisfaction, internal and external, right? We all, I often looked at customers as internal stakeholders and [00:09:00] then external, right?

And so companies would hire us, um, for a variety of different projects. And some would be like really short. They just wanted like a report. So they just wanted us to do research and then report on that research. For example, One of the companies we work for was looking to expand their operations in a northern community on indigenous land, right?

And this company is well known around the world, and they wanted to get a sense of what the community buy in would be. And then that was the baseline that we worked with, and so we did like surveys, Quantitative research and we did qualitative and then that was the project. We would just report on it.

Like you've got 10 percent buy in, you're probably going to need to get up to 50 to 70 percent like, well, 50 percent at least, right? To be able to sort of move ahead with the project. Otherwise, it's going to be a huge backlash and you're not going to get the approval. So they just wanted to know, like, that was enough.

That short term project was [00:10:00] enough to figure out whether or not they should even be allotting budget to expand there, or if they need to consider, consider other areas, right? So, that was one project. I mean, I worked on another project with a clothing company. They were a startup, and they wanted to launch this brand, and they wanted to launch it to a specific demographic, and they put out a proposal, and we bid on that, and thank God this company invested in this, because what they found through the research, through the qualitative research through focus groups, was that, Nobody was gonna buy it.

Like, the designs of it weren't speaking to their demographic. And so they had to go back to the drawing board, right? But that would save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in like, designing, inventory, shipping, you name it, right? And like, setting up the whole company. Another project was like literally on a commercial ad for a specific demographic, men around 19 to 21, right, does this actually speak to them?

And will this actually change their [00:11:00] perception around a specific topic? That was kind of what they were looking for. And they had gone into like pre production of it. And we found out that It didn't land and they had to go back to the drawing board. But like I said, I couldn't have crafted that offer and being like, Hey, I'm a marketing expert and this is how I can help.

It was like, I know I can help in this capacity based on the proposal that you're putting out there. And then within the proposal that they were asking for the specific things that they needed. And we had a proposal writer, right? I'm not saying that you have to have this huge team of people that scours proposal websites and.

then you have a proposal writer and that sort of thing. If you're looking for like one to two jobs, some of these jobs are like very lucrative, right? And so we had a bigger team, it was a bigger firm and therefore there was more salaries and different things like that. But if you're a solopreneur that wants to do consulting gigs, this is exactly how I would approach it.

Um, because you're very, very clear then on what that [00:12:00] project is and you're bidding on it. And it's a way more direct path and it's something that You know, you could start to do like tomorrow. You literally could start to look for different types of job boards or proposal boards, depending on how your governments are structured.

But again, a lot of big corps, that's what they do, right? Because it's all under budget. It's got to be approved. The project has to be approved, then the scope of work has to be approved, then the budget has to be approved. And so, rather than you pitching them, And then them going, well, this sounds really cool.

They would still have to go through that process of putting the job out there. And so the company is just doing the legwork of that, of what they sort of need. Now, if the idea is, well, what if they don't need, what if they don't know they need what I have, then I want you to kind of reconsider that perspective.

Because. Sometimes the proposal on face value, right, is like, we want X, Y, and Z, [00:13:00] whatever it might be, right? You can come in with how you're different or how you would propose to do things differently, um, But you still want to kind of work within that sort of scope of work. But I would be surprised if out of all the proposals out there and all the companies in the world that are seeking this type of thing, that you can't find projects that align with you and what you can bring to the table and how you sort of want to bring it, bring it to the table.

So that is how I would approach. consulting and contractual work and advisory work. I want to share with you some of the mistakes that I made post the consulting. When I worked as a management consultant, I worked within a firm. And so we had lawyers and we had accountants and we had all that, right? Um, and that was all taken care of.

And I probably never really saw sort of the backend of the terms and conditions and the negotiations and stuff like that, because that wasn't sort of my role in that. I was a consultant that would go in on subject matter expertise. And I'd be on a team of [00:14:00] other consultants, right? So, so there were things within the firm that I wasn't privy to, or I wasn't, didn't have my hands in.

And then when I went full time into corporate and quit corporate and came into the wine business and then came online, there were consulting gigs that I took on. And there are some that I am in right now, and there are proposals that I'm waiting for as we speak, and I really want to share some of the mistakes that I made in the early sort of days as a contract worker, um, and that had to do around the scope of work.

So, when I I completely probably forgot how I approached the consulting world, world originally, because what I did was I actually did focus on crafting an offer. So people would come to me, let's just say, as a marketing advisor or a copywriter or a messaging strategist, right? And they'd say, I want you to come within my company.

And we're talking seven, eight figure entrepreneurs. I want you to come in my company and I want support with marketing, messaging, [00:15:00] copywriting, X, Y, Z. Right? Yep. Yep. What I found is, is that I would put together the package and I would put together my pricing and I would pitch them. So they would come to me via my website, recommendation, word of mouth, whatever, or they were a client in one of my offers and then graduated into, well, I don't actually want to do this within my company.

I want you to do it. So they would come to me and they would ask for my services and then they would ask for me to pitch them and where I went sideways with this is that I would actually craft a proposal with my pricing and all those sorts of things. Why this was a mistake is, is because my expectation and my perception is quite a bit different than a business owner, let's just say an entrepreneur that might not know what they don't know, right?

So I might be using language that they're not privy to, or I might be using language that they're actually looking through a different lens. For example, the [00:16:00] word advisor can mean different things to different people. The word. Marketing expert can mean different things to different people. Copywriting, right?

Like all of those sorts of things, they might have a different perspective of what they actually need, but they don't actually know how to articulate it. So they'll come to me, they'll say, this is what I want within my company. And I would get investigative and I'd ask the questions and all the things, put together a proposal with a price, all that jazz.

And oftentimes the project would go ahead. The problem is, is that it wasn't clear to them often what they actually needed until I was in it. And I've been in this a few times where the, where it was like 6 or 12 months where we never really got in rhythm, we never really got in flow, but all of a sudden the job morphed, right?

So, What I do now is I actually ask if someone wants me to be an advisor, a consultant, or there's any sort of contractual work where I'm doing work for them, then I'm asking them to actually craft [00:17:00] the scope of work. I want them to craft what they need, what they want, and what they expect by the role, and then also what they're willing to sort of pay for that role.

And the reason I do that now is because, like I said, I've either gotten to projects where we were on very two different levels of what the project actually entailed, and that's just a mismanagement of expectations, or because I come with the marketing experience, oftentimes people hire me as a copywriter, but they'll expect me to wear the marketing hat, which I do, but in a role That's if you're paying me for copywriting, it's actually not up to me to come up with the strategy.

So these are some of the mistakes I made. So now when somebody wants me to be an advisor or consultant, I'm asking them to, to develop the scope of work similarly to how I did when I was a management consultant, where I would bid on projects or I'd bid on things, right? You get clear on what [00:18:00] you want. You come up with the terms and conditions.

You come up with the scope of work, you come up with what's required, and you come up with the value that you're wanting to pay somebody, and I will say yay or nay to that, rather than I develop all of that for them, right? Because even though I'm independent, even though I'm independent from their business, It's still their company that I'm working in.

It's not like I'm offering a service like Spellbound or the Alchemy of Attraction or the Alpha Architect where I'm the one that's actually delivering on the service to my clients, right? This is me going into somebody else's company and working within it, even though I'm independent, I'm still working within it.

So if your company is seven, eight figures, it's actually your responsibility to come up with the scope of work. It's not my responsibility. It's not my responsibility to come up with the SOPs of it, unless that's written into it, right? But a lot of the mistakes I made was I would go into a seven or eight figure business with the [00:19:00] assumption that they would have the systems in place, they would have the SOPs in place, and that would sort of wreak havoc on it.

And so that's how I would navigate That to me is, it's about, as an individual and not someone working within a firm, I would be asking the company to pitch me actually, like, tell me what you want and then I will decide whether or not I actually fit within that scope of work and whether or not the pay or whatever is suffice.

A couple other things that I made the mistake on, for sure, as well, is considering the scope of work and, you know, accepting rules within a company that was paying me, let's say a retainer price, um, three, six, 12 months as a retainer fee. And then that company goes on to scale drastically. There are some things that you can write into a contract depending on what your role is [00:20:00] within the company.

If you're an advisor, for example, and you're sitting on a board of directors, or you're sitting within the company as a strategic partner, and it's really your thinking brain or your intuition or whatnot that they've hired you for, and you're not, not actually doing deliverables, you're not doing reports, you're not doing any writing or anything like that, that you're just providing advisory services.

that you could look at something like if it's a long term agreement, like equity within the company, depending on what the relationship is, right? There, you know, there's revenue sharing that could be discussed if, for example, like for copywriting, right? If I'm writing copy for you and it's converting, like, is there a commission or a revenue share, uh, that could be added in there?

And here's another mistake that I think some people might make. Profit sharing or revenue sharing, to me, needs to be mutual beneficial. But, if you're hiring an expert to work within a company, and you're asking them to do work based on time, right, that [00:21:00] we can't just do a straight up profit or revenue share, because, Unless there's equity in the company, let's just say that, right?

And usually when there's equity in the company, you've put money into it. And the reason I say this is because I've seen a lot of people come and ask me this question. Hey, would you want to do a straight profit share within my company? You write my sales pages and create my website and all the thing.

And then we will like, you know, what profit comes in, we'll share, I'll share with you. The problem with that is, is that, and what I've encountered is oftentimes. Either people pivot, they don't see the results that they want, that sort of thing, and then they change course, and you've now done and delivered a bunch of work and haven't been compensated for it.

So I don't believe in a straight profit sharing model unless there's an equity. Investment in it, like you've put money in the company and there's an investment portion into it and this is where you'd want to get an accountant and a lawyer [00:22:00] and all those things and I am neither of those because there are ways to negotiate these sorts of things, but the long story short is, if it was me, And I was starting from scratch again, and I wanted to consult within corporations or businesses.

I would first seek out the opportunity to bid on proposals as the most direct, easy way to get going with it rather than flipping it and creating an offer around it and putting it on my website and trying to promote it that way, because Most companies and businesses don't buy like that, right? They're investing in a consultant based on their project scope and budget that they've put together.

And it's more direct and it's easy. And you can start getting clients like tomorrow if you wanted to. And then you're not spending the time creating content for social media and building a website. Of course you might, you'd want a website and something that the company can take a look at. But this is another thing that I will say, and It's really [00:23:00] important is that oftentimes when we were bidding on things, social media wasn't a huge thing back then, but LinkedIn, IG, Facebook was often looked at and is still often looked at when you are bidding on projects, specifically within a corporate business to see if you align your values, the line and what you're putting out there, whether that be personal or not, or it's a representation of the business.

They will, they will sort of do their due diligence and research that. So that's something to consider as well. That whatever you're putting out there as a representation of who you are, the values and that sort of thing, um, because the company will see that. So that's just something to consider as well.

But that to me would be the best way to do it. That way you're not pitching blindly. You're not. You're not throwing cold pitches out there like a dart in the dark, um, and you're not spending a ton of time crafting an offer that likely needs to shift and mold slightly. Again, it's kind of like applying for a job position, right?[00:24:00] 

Um, when you're writing a resume and a cover letter, you're not just swapping out the company's name, right? That's one of the big things. Biggest advice people will give you is like, customize that cover letter to speak to the very things that that company is looking for. The same thing is true for this, right?

If we're just creating an offer and offer suites within our business without customizing or making them really specific to the company, then What value is that to the company? Plus, also, to me, it's just a waste of time, if I'm being honest. So I would have a website for visibility, I'd have a website for, you know, with my expertise, what I sort of bring to the table, my experience, my credentials.

That's how I would have my website sort of set up, and like the services that I'm able to provide, like copywriting strategy, You name it, so that when somebody is looking at it, they can see what I bring sort of to the table, and then my strategy would be finding proposals and pitching on [00:25:00] those.

Therefore, I'm cutting down all the time. So anyways, I hope that's been helpful. That's how I would recommend doing it, and then I've shared with you a little bit of the mistakes that I made. around that having shifted out of a firm and doing this solo. And that really was around scope of work, ironing out expectations and really putting the responsibility on the company to come to you with what is exactly they need, because it's not your responsibility, in my opinion, as a consultant.

to craft the offer for them. That's actually up to them, right? If you, if you look at the role reversal here, if the company's looking for a specific service and they know what budget they can allocate to it, and they know exactly what they're looking for, it's up to them to actually craft the offer. It's up to them to get really clear on what that is and set the expectations for it.

It's not up to you, but if you're selling a product like wine or an online coaching, right, it's actually up to you to [00:26:00] put that together because you're the one Selling the service. Yes, you are being of service when you're a consultant, but you're not selling your consulting, right? You're not going out there and casting this wide net and doing Facebook ads and all.

I mean, you can if you want to, but, but the corporation is the one that's seeking the service. And you might say, well, Kathryn, entrepreneurs are seeking a service too. Right? But they're like customers going out and sort of buying, right? They're the customers going out. You're the customer in this relationship with the, with the company, right?

Your customer that then is going and seeking out different proposals that you can bid on. And your, your expertise and how you can add value to that company. But it's up to the company, first and foremost, to get really, really definitive about what they want. I don't think it's up to the consultant to go and blindly pitch a bunch of organizations going, Hey, I can be of service, right?

Again, it's just, it's just looking at how we go [00:27:00] about doing this and really understanding the audience that you're wanting to connect with and speak with, because it's just slight variations on how we do this similarly with an advisor role, or even a copywriting contract role, right? Like, typically, I mean, you can go out in cold pitch.

You absolutely can, but the cold pitch way is typically pitching 10 to 50 people a week or something like that, right? Like those are, that's the advice out there is like have 50 conversations and that maybe one of those will turn into a client. That for me sort of feels a bit asinine, right? To me is like, why wouldn't I just go out and look for the companies that are seeking what I offer and throw my hat in the ring there?

There's a far greater chance that you will. Land jobs quicker there and in a lot less time and work. So why don't we do this as a coach or consultant? Why didn't I do this as the wine business? Because I'm creating the offer. I'm [00:28:00] saying, Hey, I have this thing of offer. I've got wine that I want to provide you.

Right? So I'm, I'm the conduit of the thing that they want. I'm putting that out there for customers, specifically for the wine, right? The corporation is the wine. They're going, I need a marketing expert or I need an HR consultant or specialist to come in. I need this. And I need this outside of my company for various reasons.

So they're looking for a very specific role to fill. And that to me, specifically companies and businesses, they're different in that they've got budget that has to be allocated. They got projects they're wanting to fulfill. I think about being in corporate and I remember us hiring an HR specialist. And the reason we hired an HR specialist was because we wanted a non biased person.

within our company. That's why we hired them. So we had a project scope, we had the budget we could allocate to it, and then we tendered that. And [00:29:00] people bid on it, and then we hired somebody. And so, some companies, if they have HR departments or they've got marketing departments, you might be like, well why outsource it?

When I worked at the public library, we tendered a job for an ad campaign. We had a marketing department, why do we need to hire an ad agency? Because we wanted outside perspective, right? We wanted a different perspective, but we also wanted the skills that they provided. And we also knew the scope of work within our company.

We couldn't, we couldn't take on both projects. We had graphic designers, we had a communications expert, we had me as the marketing person, but we couldn't fulfill what we needed from a library day to day basis of what we were doing. While also being able to do this. So the project was too big for our department to be able to handle.

Let's just say, so we outsourced it, right? So that's something also to kind of consider. Like some people say, well, why don't they, they'll just hire somebody in there or they'll use their department. They already have [00:30:00] that isn't. Always the case. So that's what I would do. I would take a look at these job boards within your region, government, uh, organizations, large scale companies.

You might want to sort of identify companies you want to work with, companies you don't want to work with, and just start doing your research around that and just see if they've got proposal stuff set up on their, up on their website and that sort of thing. And that's where I would start. And then I would kind of get clear on the thing I would get clear on is who I really wanted to work with, like the values of the company.

And then I'd get clear on, like, what do I really sort of bring to the table? Like, what's my. My thing kind of thing and then what's my rate just so you have an idea of your rate and that could be hourly that could be um Monthly that could be on a retainer basis, right? and just saying like Setting it sort of that way and in in saying that they will usually set the timeline of like the scope of work, right?

So that won't [00:31:00] really kind of be up to you to kind of set So anyways, I hope that's been helpful. That's how I would approach it. Slightly different than how I set up, you know, my, my wine business or my coaching business. But, um, it's just a slight variation and perspective shift of like whose responsibility is and what am I?

I am the customer to some degree. They are the customer. They are investing in the service, but They have to get clear on what they want. They have to craft the offer in this particular thing. You could go the other route where you crafted your offer in cold pitch. I just think it's a waste of time, in my opinion, and it requires a lot of like, wide casting of the net, cold pitching a bunch of people with the hopes of, you know, landing one client, let's just say.

So with that, I hope that's been helpful. Um, and if you have any other questions around this, uh, please do let me know. Cheers. Thanks for listening. We'll see you right back here next time. You can also find us on social media at Creatively Owned and online at creativelyowned. com. Until next time, [00:32:00] keep showing up as your authentic self.