Very few people start consulting when immediately out of the womb. One's first client or few clients is often sourced by one's personal network: an old day job, a college buddy who went on to work somewhere, someone you met at the local meetup for Pythonistas, etc.
After one is actually working as a consultant, one can fix the "I have no testimonials or referrals" problem fairly quickly. Do great work. Explicitly ask clients, as part of your aftercare (or before), to give you testimonials and/or referrals. e.g. "I'm really happy that this engagement seems to have worked well for everyone. Over the next couple weeks, I'll make myself available to the team if they have any questions about $PROJECT. Naturally, I'm also going to be doing the consulting rainmaking dance. I've really enjoyed working with you -- do you know anyone else who would enjoy working with me?"
There are a few other methods which work in a repeatable fashion:
a) Go to events populated by people who can say yes to consulting engagements. If you cannot be invited to these for whatever reason or if they don't exist in your area, throw the event yourself. Do presentations which relate in any way to the sort of work that you do and then ask people at the end of the presentation to continue the conversation offline if they found it interesting. You will get 5+ coffee dates per 50 people you present to. Work on converting 1~2 to clients.
b) Figure out who should be buying your services. Cold call or cold email them. This strikes engineers as Black Magick Most Foul, but it is actually pretty routine in business, and clearly works in a reproducible fashion. Business owners mostly will not be offended if you send them a considered, personalized, one paragraph pitch to explore business together. Selling and being sold to is what we do all day.
c) I hesitate to mention it, since it is a long-ball sort of strategy and typically will not help you pack Q1 with engagements when starting from a standing start in December 2014, but putting a few writeups of what you do for a living on the Internet (you can use WordPress for this but, crucially, you're not shipping blog posts) plus an email capture opportunity can get you a lot of leads over the long run. Virtually anyone on HN who has ever shipped software with a business impact could spend four hours writing about that experience and get a handful of leads every month from now to forever for that investment. Assuming one's consultancy is known to work given people to sell services to, this strikes me as a good use of one's time between engagements.
After one is actually working as a consultant, one can fix the "I have no testimonials or referrals" problem fairly quickly. Do great work. Explicitly ask clients, as part of your aftercare (or before), to give you testimonials and/or referrals. e.g. "I'm really happy that this engagement seems to have worked well for everyone. Over the next couple weeks, I'll make myself available to the team if they have any questions about $PROJECT. Naturally, I'm also going to be doing the consulting rainmaking dance. I've really enjoyed working with you -- do you know anyone else who would enjoy working with me?"
There are a few other methods which work in a repeatable fashion:
a) Go to events populated by people who can say yes to consulting engagements. If you cannot be invited to these for whatever reason or if they don't exist in your area, throw the event yourself. Do presentations which relate in any way to the sort of work that you do and then ask people at the end of the presentation to continue the conversation offline if they found it interesting. You will get 5+ coffee dates per 50 people you present to. Work on converting 1~2 to clients.
b) Figure out who should be buying your services. Cold call or cold email them. This strikes engineers as Black Magick Most Foul, but it is actually pretty routine in business, and clearly works in a reproducible fashion. Business owners mostly will not be offended if you send them a considered, personalized, one paragraph pitch to explore business together. Selling and being sold to is what we do all day.
c) I hesitate to mention it, since it is a long-ball sort of strategy and typically will not help you pack Q1 with engagements when starting from a standing start in December 2014, but putting a few writeups of what you do for a living on the Internet (you can use WordPress for this but, crucially, you're not shipping blog posts) plus an email capture opportunity can get you a lot of leads over the long run. Virtually anyone on HN who has ever shipped software with a business impact could spend four hours writing about that experience and get a handful of leads every month from now to forever for that investment. Assuming one's consultancy is known to work given people to sell services to, this strikes me as a good use of one's time between engagements.