Linking Content to Revenue in Consulting Benchmark Report

Introduction

Success for consulting firms is a function of winning clients, retaining them, and turning them into loyal advocates. When firms can do these things efficiently, they enjoy higher margins. Efficiency in the consulting profession comes down to utilization, enabling consultants to stay focused on the highest and best use of time for their firms.

Pursuing clients and fulfilling their needs is a labor and content in tensive endeavor. Managing the intricacies of producing content is an activity that takes away from consultants staying focused on sales and high, value-add billable work.

However, many consultants find that they must remain very hands-on to get the content they want, but they pay a price for their involvement in the form of lower utilization.

Sales enablement is a category of solutions that streamline the process of creating content. Organizations that embrace sales enablement technology enjoy better alignment and collaboration between marketing and business development teams, leading to more effective content and, ultimately, higher revenue.

Demand Metric partnered with Seismic to conduct this research study to benchmark how sales enablement technology can impact consulting firms.

The study’s hypothesis was that sales enablement technology improves collaboration and agility in pursuing clients, resulting in greater content effectiveness and higher revenue. This report shares key insights from the study and provides data that is useful for building sales enablement best practices.

The largest segment of this study’s respondents were in consulting roles. A majority of the firms in this study experienced revenue growth during the past fiscal year. The nature of consulting work in which participants are engaged included strategy, operations, IT, financial advisory, organizational, and other types. Over one-third of the consultants in the study are involved in strategy consulting.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Executive Summary
3. Business Development Agility
4. Technology’s Impact
5. The Role of Content
6. Content Effectiveness Drivers

7. Content as an Alignment Indicator
8. Analyst Bottom Line and Action Plan
9. Acknowledgments
10. Appendix: Survey Background

For consulting firms, the success formula for winning clients, retaining them, and turning them into loyal advocates is to keep consultants engaged in doing these things.

While this formula is conceptually simple to understand, putting it in practice is not easy. Consultants often find themselves pulled into work that doesn’t align with their highest and best use to the firm.

When that work involves developing and managing content, this study shows that sales enablement technology is taking much of the manual work out of creating the content needed to win pursuits. This reality allows consultants to focus on more value-added client work rather than provide oversight to how their content is produced.

The study’s hypothesis was that sales enablement technology improves collaboration and agility in pursuing clients, resulting in greater content effectiveness and higher revenue.

The results of this study resoundingly support this hypothesis, providing compelling evidence that sales enablement technology produces a range of benefits: greater agility, collaboration, alignment, efficiency, and content effectiveness. Each one is a highly sought-after benefit.

Collectively, they allow consultants to produce the most sought-after outcome: revenue.

Research Methodology

This 2019 Sales Enablement Benchmark Study survey was administered online during the period of April 2 through April 10, 2019. During this period, 222 responses were collected, 194 of which were qualified and complete enough for inclusion in the analysis. 

Only valid or correlated findings are shared in this report.The representativeness of this study’s results depends on the similarity of the sample to environments in which this survey data is used for comparison or guidance.