How to Create a Service Strategy for Your Consulting Business

A service strategy for a consulting business is a roadmap that details how the business will deliver value to clients. The service strategy should be a living document that defines the types of services offered, the target market, the delivery process, and the overall approach to client engagement. 

Professional service businesses remain in high demand, but to stay on top of the wants and needs of customers, as well as emergent technologies like AI, a unified strategy is needed to support long-term growth. 

Creating a bonafide service strategy can help unify your processes, increase billable utilization, and keep your clients delighted and coming back for more. 

Find out how to create a service strategy for your consulting agency and how this blueprint can help you grow your business. 

What you’ll learn:

• What is a service strategy?
• Benefits & Goals: How a service strategy can improve outcomes for professional service firms
• Moving Parts: The 7 building blocks of a solid service strategy
• Implementation: Putting all the pieces together

What is a service strategy?

A service strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how your business delivers and manages services across the organization. The service strategy codifies the pervasive processes and operational details that play into servicing your customers. 

However, a service strategy is more than just operations; it also is meant to create alignment between operations and the overall goals/mission of the organization as a whole. 

Consultancy services are usually expertly tailored to individual clients and require direct personal interaction. A service strategy plan will essentially detail how that’s supposed to look in a repeatable, profitable iteration. 

Customer satisfaction and retention is another big objective of the service strategy. The goal is to meet or supercede customer’s needs and expectations with a clear process, and be able to repeat those steps over and over again, tweaking when necessary

Benefits & Goals: How a service strategy can improve outcomes for professional service firms

Crafting a bonafide service strategy takes time, but it’s worth the effort, bearing many fruitful results that can help drive sustainable revenue. Check out the primary goals of creating this strategy and how it can positively impact consulting firms and other kinds of professional service businesses:

Create synergy between operational service and overall goals of the business

By taking a hard look at your operational processes, aka how you serve your customers, you can make sure the day-to-day actions of your consultants align with what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization at large. 

Provide more value for customers through a deep dive into their expectations and motivations

It’s time to revisit your target market, what they expect, and what makes them tick. You can uncover motivations you may have previously missed, leveraging your team’s experience to provide even more value with every service you provide. 

Gain customer loyalty

When customers feel their expectations are met or exceeded and their motivations understood, they’re more likely to come back for more services. Help prevent customer churn with a loyal base that can help your consulting business grow exponentially over time. 

Increase your overall value proposition and point of differentiation

A big part of forming a service strategy involves tailoring your services, uncovering different ways you can customize the experience. Take a look into your processes and see how you can make them even more custom-fit for clients, so that you can further differentiate from your primary competitors. 

Streamline operational processes

Perhaps your consultants are operating along workflows that no longer serve the business. Perhaps there are certain tasks like time and expense reporting that can be automated. A service strategy will delve into what’s working and what needs improvement, to help codify service operations across the board. 

Optimize resource allocation for profitability, client satisfaction, and team morale

Optimal resource allocation means the right people are doing the right work at the right time. The service strategy gives you a chance to dial this in, making sure workloads are balanced, and project costs are kept as low as possible without negatively impacting the customer experience. 

Deliver services more efficiently while decreasing project costs

Because crafting a service strategy demands a hard look at your processes, you’ll be able to pinpoint areas for improvement. Viewing past project data on time tracking, for example, can help you create more accurate budgets. Scrutinizing your workflows can help you recognize where bottlenecks are most common. 

Maintain consistency with quality of deliverables

When everyone on the team is on the same page and your processes are efficient and repeatable, you can help guarantee a higher level of consistency with your services. This is one of the primary goals of any service strategy.

Identify opportunities for expansion into add-on services and new packages

The beauty of building a service strategy is that everything it entails, from deep diving into your target market to refining your operational processes, can help you discover new opportunities to grow your business. Perhaps you find that many clients want an additional service that you can sell as an add-on or perhaps the door is open for a new service package altogether. 

Moving Parts: The 7 building blocks of a solid service strateg

Now that you know the goals and benefits of a unified service strategy, it’s time to break down the moving parts that make it all possible. The best advice is to take these piece by piece, and then, before implementation, you’ll need to unify everything, standardize it, and put it to work across the organization. 

Here are the 8 building blocks of a service strategy, which must first be picked apart individually and then codified to streamline your service processes:

1. Target market

This step is that deep dive into the expectations and motivations of the clients you’ll be serving. First up, you need to pinpoint the target market you’re going after, identifying the specific industries, sectors, or types of clients the consulting business will serve. 

What do they need, what do they want, and what are their pain points? Until you know your target customer intimately, you won’t be able to know how best to provide them excellent services. 

2. Portfolio of services

What services, exactly, will you be offering your customers? Outline these in detail, clearly defining scope and any materials or technologies required. 

This part of the service strategy process also requires that you identify any methodologies and specific expertise you’ll need to complete each service. 

Finally, list out all the different deliverables that your consultants will be providing customers. 

3. Value proposition

Identifying your value proposition is one of the first steps to building any kind of business. The service strategy gives you a chance to revisit the value proposition and make any necessary tweaks or even overhauls. 

You’ll need to arrive at absolute clarity on the specific benefits your clients can expect from your services. 

This is also an opportunity to refine your point(s) of differentiation, so your customers and everyone working on the team knows exactly what it is that makes your business stand out from the rest.  

4. Delivery Model

The delivery model will define exactly how the consulting services will be delivered. This is the part where you clarify your operational processes from deal to cash. 

The delivery model will include any project management methodologies you want to put into place, communication protocols, and reporting mechanisms. Everything needs to be put into organized workflows, so that your consultants know how these processes move sequentially. 

5. Pricing Model

Here’s where you determine how your consulting services will be priced. This involves considering factors such as the scope of work, the expertise required, and market rates. 

FYI the average billing rate for consultancy firms is between $125 and $400 per hour. Before choosing your pricing strategy, take into consideration the needs of your target market, revenue goals, competitor pricing, and USPs. For more details, this article has excellent information to help you get started. 

6. Client relationship management

You’ll need to establish a framework with which you can build and maintain good relationships with your customer base. The framework should include communication strategies, feedback protocols, and details on how to provide ongoing support. 

For many consulting firms, this will require onboarding a CRM platform like HubSpot to streamline all these processes. CRM platforms handle these things for you, keeping track of emails and deal pipelines in one organized place. 

7. Resource management

People are arguably your most valuable resource, but they need to be managed effectively in order to bring out their best work. This piece of the puzzle demands that you set out exactly how you will plan your resources to actually deliver the consulting services, including team members, technology, and tools. 

How will you allocate your resources? How will you evaluate their performance? Be sure you have a specific plan in place to encompass all these moving parts. 

Implementation: Putting all the pieces together

Now that you have all the pieces of your service strategy worked out, it’s time to put it into action. Implementing your service strategy demands super-clear communication, consistent reinforcement, and ongoing monitoring. Here's a step-by-step plan detailing how to get your team on board:

Step 1: Communicate your service strategy clearly to the team

You can begin by distilling the core components into a concise, jargon-free document. The simpler the better. Then, formally introduce the strategy to your team, clearly outlining rationale and key components everyone needs to be aware of. 

Be sure to explain the "why" behind your service strategy, connecting it directly to the team's daily work, client satisfaction, and the business's success. 

Highlight the direct benefits for team members, such as clearer direction, improved client relationships, and more efficient processes. 

Lastly, don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. Two heads are always better than one, and you may be able to improve upon the strategy with insights from the team. 

Step 2: Break it down into actionable steps

Start by defining measurable goals and objectives that directly align with the strategy's seven building blocks to make it tangible and achievable. When needed, assign responsibilities for each aspect of implementation, ensuring accountability and ownership. 

Don’t forget to develop a realistic timeline with milestones and deadlines to guide progress and maintain momentum. Document the specific processes and procedures team members should follow by creating standard operating procedures (SOPs). 

Small businesses can opt to simply create automated workflows in a project management tool and communicate to consultants how these play out. 

You should regularly review and adjust these operational procedures/workflows when necessary in the interest of efficiency. 

Step 3: Training and support

This is where you make sure everyone on the team has what they need to successfully follow the service strategy. You should provide everyone with adequate resources and support, which may include anything from one-on-one coaching to access to various software platforms needed to follow the strategy. 

Also, establish a feedback protocol to encourage team members to share their insights on the strategy and its execution. This feedback loop is invaluable for identifying areas of improvement and making necessary adjustments. 

Step 4: Consistent reinforcement

If you want your service strategy to work long-term, you have to develop a system, however simple, of consistent reinforcement. One way of doing this is to integrate the service strategy into performance reviews, recognizing and rewarding team members who are effectively implementing the strategy.

Reinforcement also mandates regularly reviewing and updating the strategy to make sure it’s still effective when circumstances change.

Continuous reinforcement will help your service strategy remain a living document, guiding daily actions and long-term goals, and ultimately, making it a cornerstone of your company culture. 

Step 5: Track progress

This is the part where you make sure your service strategy is working the way you want it to. You’ll want to identify key metrics that accurately measure success. A few examples are client satisfaction scores, project completion rates, utilization rates, and project profit margins. 

Regularly track progress against the strategy’s goals and objectives to identify areas of strength and weakness. And be prepared to adapt based on insights from this data. 

Time to get started!

A well-defined service strategy provides a clear direction for service businesses by promoting consistent service delivery and helping to attract and retain clients.

By following these steps, you can ensure that your service strategy is not just a document, but a living, breathing plan that guides your team's actions and drives your consulting business toward the long-term growth that will make it a success.