To build a successful consulting business, you need more than just expertise and experience in your field. You also need consulting skills.
After nearly two decades running my own consulting business and coaching other consultants, I’ve seen too many aspiring consultants skip the skill-building part. They announce they’re open for business and expect the rest will fall into place. This approach seldom works.
The good news is that most consultants are not starting from scratch with consulting skills.
Some skills, like project management, you have likely already developed in your prior roles. Now, you need to learn to apply them to running a consulting business. Other skills, like marketing yourself and your business, might feel daunting at first. But they can be learned and practiced.
In this article, we’ll walk you through 10 essential consulting skills that set successful businesses apart and share resources for further developing your own skills.
Professional Skills vs Consulting Skills: Understanding the Difference
One of the biggest challenges I see among the consultants I coach is confusion between the skills it takes to deliver a quality consulting service and the skills it takes to run a consulting business.
The distinction is more important than you might realize.
What are consulting skills?
Consulting skills are a combination of skills across management, interpersonal relationships, systems development, strategic analysis, communications, and marketing. Together, this suite of skills enables you to build the backbone of a successful consulting business, carrying you from managing your business admin and systems to cultivating lasting client relationships.
Consulting skills are used while working both IN and ON your business—from designing to pitching to delivering your services.
Consulting skills complement your professional skills and expertise.
In contrast, your professional skills are specifically tied to your unique experience and expertise.
For example, you might be a professional:
- Nonprofit fundraiser
- Health policy strategist
- Strategic planning facilitator
- Board development trainer
- Executive director coach
Even if you excel in your professional field, as a consultant you still need to complement that expertise with consulting skills when you’re working in and on your business.
10 Essential Consulting Skills
We group consulting skills into three “buckets”:
- Skills for running your business
- Skills for managing client relationships
- Skills for growing and evolving your business
Let’s take a closer look at each of these categories.
Skills for running your consulting business
Even if you are a one-person firm, running a consulting business is still running a business.
You need to cover your consulting business admin basics, design and structure your services, and develop systems that allow you to deliver services to multiple clients. And you need to do it all without getting burned out, dropping the ball, or missing client deliverables!
That’s where these four consulting skills come in:
1) Organizational and Time Management Skills
Being your own boss is a dream for many people. But it also means you actually have to BE the boss. You are in charge of managing your own time and workflow.
Even though being a consultant can come with more freedom and flexibility, especially when you’re getting started, structure is your friend. Consider:
- How many hours do you intend to work per month? How many hours will you spend on client deliverables and how many on business activities (such as discovery calls with prospective clients)?
- Which days will you work each week and for what hours? You’ll need to be sure clients understand your availability.
- How will you track and manage your time? Especially for new consultants, or if you are billing hourly, time tracking tools can be essential to help you understand how to price and streamline your services. If you overcommit and/or underprice on a project, you will need to identify the issue and address it the next time you deliver the service.
- How will you organize your workdays? This is an area that often evolves over time. Many consultants learn to align their schedules with their workflow and peak energy. For example, you might block time for creating presentations and written deliverables in the morning, and for client calls and marketing activities in the afternoon.
- How will you organize and maintain your to-do list? Some consultants use workflow management software, like Asana, while others rely on old-fashioned pen and paper.
- How will you organize your internal and client-facing documents? To avoid crises, you’ll need version control and regular backups.
For our tested recommendations on organization and time management tools, check out our roundup of free tools for consultants.
2) Project Management Skills
Every client engagement is a project that will need to be managed. That includes tracking a lot of data.
For every client engagement (beyond a one-off strategy or coaching call), you will need to track scope, contracts, invoices, deliverables, communication (more on that below), timelines, what clients need to get you (so you can complete deliverables), etc.
Now, if you have one client, your existing project management skills may be adequate. But imagine scaling to five clients, 10 clients, or more! Your project management skills and systems will need to evolve alongside your business.
3) Problem-Solving Skills
Your clients will have problems to solve and so will you. It’s inevitable. You’ll hit business challenges and roadblocks. Just as you do for clients, in your business you’ll need to be able to identify when something isn’t working, why it isn’t working, and how to fix it.
You might encounter challenges across many different aspects of your consulting business. For example, maybe you aren’t getting enough new client prospects or prospects aren’t converting into clients. You could find that you’re struggling to manage uneven seasonal workflow. Or you may have too many client opportunities and need to decide whether to create a wait list, delay start dates, or bring on a subcontractor.
You’ll also use your problem-solving skills with your clients. They are hiring you, the consultant, to help them solve a problem!
4) Strategic Analysis
One of the biggest questions consultants come to us with is: How do I price my services?
The answer can be found with strategic analysis, something you will need to be doing regularly for your business and your clients.
Take the example of pricing your services. You need to assess:
- How much you want to earn (annually)
- How many hours you want to work (monthly)
- What types of services you want to deliver
- How you will package your services (e.g. ongoing retainer vs project-based)
- Your ideal client and their budget (consider type and size of client and geographic region)
- Whether there is any relevant market data available for your service (this is not always available)
Once you have these answers, you can analyze the data and start to build out options for how to align your goals, services, and rates. Note that most consultants adjust their pricing strategies over time, so your analytical and problem-solving skills remain essential at every stage of growth.
If you’re struggling with the specific question of pricing your services, check out our more detailed article: 5 steps to price your consulting services.
Skills for consulting client management
As a consultant, you don’t just need clients. You need happy, satisfied clients.
Every client relationship must be proactively managed each step of the way. This includes engaging with prospective clients, transitioning prospects to clients, delivering services to clients, and then renewing or completing client contracts.
There are three important skills you’ll use in your client relationships.
5) Communication Skills
“Communication skills” is a very broad category that is often overused and poorly defined. So, we’re going to get specific on what consulting communication skills actually are.
As a consultant, you need to be able to do three very specific things with your communication skills:
- Speak about your work with clients, whether it’s describing your services or presenting a deliverable.
- Follow up in writing with clients, including sending scopes of work, writing clear emails, creating written deliverables, organizing meeting follow-ups, etc.
- Answer specific client questions (verbally and in writing) in a way that draws on your expertise.
It’s common for consultants to be strong in one of these areas and need to develop in others. For example, you might produce incredible written documents, but struggle to talk in the moment about your work or respond to questions in a way that shows you’re an expert. These gaps can be fixed with coaching and intentional practice.
We find that a lot of new consultants struggle at first to introduce themselves and their services. In our 60-Day Consulting Boot Camp, we organize a private “pitch session” to help consultants hone and practice their verbal pitch with peers. The more you practice, the easier it will get.
For more standard written communication, such as scopes of work, you can also create templates to save time and streamline workflow. If you are uncertain about your writing skills, copywriters and writing coaches can be a great resource.
What about AI in consulting client communications? Even if you are using AI tools in your written products, it will not solve all your communications needs. The majority of clients will still need verbal communication: phone calls, video calls, in-person meetings, etc.
6) Listening Skills
One skill that sets good consultants apart from great consultants is the ability to listen. This is especially essential when bringing on a new client.
Most consulting clients aren’t looking to be sold on an off-the-shelf service. They come to you because they have a problem or a need, and they are hoping you, the consultant, can help them solve it.
During discovery calls and intake sessions, you’ll want to listen for:
- The client’s immediate problem, the one that brought them to seek out your service.
- The unique factors that may be affecting the client’s immediate problem or that may even point to a root cause.
- The client’s actual root need. This may be different than the problem they think they have! For example, a client may come to you for grant writing, but what they actually need is a comprehensive grants strategy that includes grant templates.
- The concerns the client has that may keep them from moving forward with a contract.
If you can identify and engage with the client around these four points, the client will feel heard, and you will be confident that you’re pitching and delivering the right service.
Listening this closely during a client call can feel overwhelming at first, especially if you’re not used to talking about your services yet. As with other consulting skills, coaching can help, as well as lots of practice.
Try this listening skills exercise: You can build your listening skills starting today, in your daily life. With your family, friends, and peers, practice being intentional about listening and asking follow-up questions in a way that is thoughtful rather than rushed. You can even tell folks in your life that you want to practice being a better listener and ask for feedback along the way.
7) Conflict Management Skills
When you’re working full-time within one organization, it’s easy to fall into the habit of avoiding conflict. Many managers and leaders are conflict-avoidant. But as a consultant, avoiding conflict is not an option.
You WILL have problem clients and projects that don’t work. You WILL need to renew contracts and raise your rates. You WILL need to manage scope creep and renegotiate relationships.
When you’re building a business, you can either lean into proactively managing these conflicts or work yourself into the ground.
One of the best ways to learn to navigate conflict is by working with a coach who can guide you through specific situations. Your coach can help you assess each situation, develop a response that feels right for you, and even run through practice conversations.
This way you can gain new skills, deal with immediate situations in your business, and build your confidence in managing thorny consulting situations.
Skills for growing and evolving your consulting business
My consulting business today looks very different from when I first started in 2009! Most likely, your business will grow and evolve too.
That’s where this set of skills comes in. In order to connect with prospects, land clients, and build a business you love (rather than one you just tolerate), you will need the following three skills:
8) Networking Skills
For consultants, networking is not optional. It is a research-backed approach to building your business by forging new connections.
In fact, research shows that the most valuable career connections begin as “moderately weak.” This means that the fewer mutual connections you have with someone before connecting, the more likely they are to be useful in advancing your career.
Many aspiring consultants dread networking. They imagine having to work a room of strangers, introducing yourself over and over until you’re sick of your own voice.
But networking doesn’t have to be torture. In fact, it can be fun—even for introverts.
There are a few ways to network:
- Reach out to folks you already know. You never know where your best career connector might come from. Your neighbor’s cousin’s nephew might be running an organization that needs exactly the service you provide. Even if you don’t think your network is very strong, get out there anyway and start talking about what you do to people you already know. If you know someone with a successful business, ask them for advice. You never know where it might lead.
- Find or build a peer community. Your peers are out there—you just need to find them. We help consultants build community with intentional networking opportunities at our annual consulting conference and through our coaching and mentorship programs. In our digital era, it’s now possible to build a powerful peer network without ever leaving home.
- Connect locally. If you want to work with small businesses, attend events at your local small business center. If you want to work with nonprofits or foundations, look for local or regional conferences, trainings, community activities, or other events where you can start to become a familiar face. Even better, you can seek out opportunities to present at these events and be positioned as an expert.
- Join affiliated associations. For example, if you’re a nonprofit fundraiser, you can join dedicated groups like the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
Of course, you’ll also want to do the basics of updating your LinkedIn profile too. But it’s easy to get caught up in being “seen” online. Among the consultants we coach, we’ve found that the best connections are forged by connecting on a more human and individual level.
9) Presentation Skills
As a consultant, you will use presentation skills across your business activities:
- Presenting at conferences or training events, where you are positioned as an expert, often in front of your ideal client audience.
- Presenting to prospective clients, where you’ll be explaining your services, outlining scopes of work, and answering follow-up questions.
- Presenting to clients, whether it’s delivering a customized training, walking them through a project workflow, or presenting a deliverable.
- Presenting to peers and other consultants, where you can build your network, position yourself as a resource, and build referral relationships.
For a great presentation, you’ll need to hone skills like public speaking, structuring information in a way that’s organized and concise, and creating visuals, decks, or written documents that reinforce the message you deliver verbally.
The sooner you start practicing your presentation skills, the better. The webinar you create for a local association today can turn into a training you deliver to clients, peer networks, and in places where your ideal prospects show up. It could even turn into a future source of revenue!
If you’re stumped on WHAT you would present about, that’s often a sign that you’re not yet clear on what you are offering clients. If this sounds like you, our 60-Day Consulting Boot Camp is one of the best and fastest ways to hone your business services, messaging, and pitch.
10) Adaptability
The consulting businesses that succeed are the ones that adapt. As a consultant, your adaptability will help you weather ups and downs in your business and take advantage of new opportunities.
While adaptability might sound more like a mindset than a skill, we think it’s something that can and should be intentionally cultivated.
You can build your adaptability through regular planning and assessment of what is and is not working in your business. When you identify something that isn’t working—for example, discovery calls that don’t convert to clients—take the time to do a thorough evaluation and test new strategies and approaches.
Also, create intentional space to step back and ask questions like:
- What am I enjoying most about my consulting business? How can I do more of the things I enjoy (and less of what I don’t)?
- Which aspects of my business feel most burdensome or frustrating? How can I streamline, refine, outsource, or remove some of those frustrations?
- Which of my consulting services are most popular? Are these the services I want to sell more of? If not, how can I change the service, the pricing, or the process to make it more enjoyable?
Building a practice of continually evaluating your business gives you the chance to create a business you love while also practicing the key skill of adaptability.
Resources to Develop Your Consulting Skills
In our experience, the very best way to develop your consulting skills is by working with a coach or mentor.
Yes, individual trainings, courses, or curriculum can be helpful. But an online course won’t help you practice your business pitch until it feels natural. A one-time training won’t help you troubleshoot a difficult client situation.
Think of it this way:
A book about conflict management can help you understand the skills you need and provide general ideas.
Navigating a client conflict in real-time, with a coach by your side who knows you and your business, will help you develop those skills in a way that lasts.
At Funding for Good, we offer a range of resources to help you develop durable consulting skills. This includes regular live training and conferences, a vault of resources and trainings for consultants, and one-on-one coaching and mentorship programs.
For new consultants or those looking for accelerated results, we recommend our 60-Day Consulting Boot Camp, which runs three sessions per year.
For consultants who have been in business at least one year, we also offer a 1:1 Coaching and Mentorship Program that starts with a 6-month commitment with the option to extend.
