What is creative strategy development?

What does the sales/business development pipeline look like for independent consultants in different fields like business strategy,  marketing, software development and design?

• Specifically, what are the ranges for number of clients, project dollar values, and time-horizons. What is the typical conversion rate for leads, time spent on lead-generation versus serving existing clients etc.? How do you set minimums for hourly rates, project duration, total dollar value, etc.?

• Answer:

  That's a long list of questions. I don't think I'll be able to do them all justice. Regarding, effort on lead generation, I have some experience, though. At HubSpot, we work with about 250 marketing agencies. I'd say that 50 of them do a good job of generating their own inbound sales leads. They probably put atleast 5 hours/week of effort into it. Kuno Creative http://www.kunocreative.com is a good example of a company doing inbound lead generation right, but the probably put closer to 20 hours/week into it. Regarding the rest of your answers, getting benchmarks are good, but I'd recommend you start by asking yourself, "How much money do I want to make?" and then working backwards. If you're a freelance consultant or small firm, you'll need to spend at least 20% of your time on sales and marketing and 20% of the time managing your business. So, that leaves 60% of your time for billable. If you want to make $200k/year, you need to divide the hours you have by that number to figure out what your hourly billable rate should be. If you're doing more project work vs retainer work, you need to figure out how many projects you need to secure per year. If you're going the retainer route, the math isn't easier, but you just need to calculate the number of active clients. Obviously, the bigger the project or longer/bigger the retainer, the less you need. But, if you're not fishing in the right ponds, or don't have the right skills, it's hard to land the big fish. Here's a calculator that helps with some of this math: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/7894/2011-Revenue-Goals-How-Much-Traffic-Do-You-Need-to-Succeed.aspx Good luck!