How we do sales

Syncopate consultants mostly sell themselves and each other. Most of our sales is reactive (clients contacting us) rather than proactive (us contacting clients). That’s why we don’t have a sales department (although we do have a business developer, explained further down) - our strong brand minimizes the need to “chase” clients.

As a consultant or contractor, timing is a huge challenge. How likely is it that my next client, client B, will come knocking on the door precisely when I’m done with client A? Forget it! Instead, client B will get in touch while I’m still busy with client A. Or I’ll finish with client A, and there’s no other client knocking on the door. Consultants tend to have too much work or too little work, never just enough.

The solution is load balancing - having a group of trusted colleagues that you can send clients to and receive clients from. And that’s exactly what Syncopate is - a bunch of trusted colleagues!

The muffin protocol is our main tool for routing client requests between each other. It helps connect the right client with the right consultant at the right time, which benefits everyone! And it works pretty OK without any kind of central control :o)

How do we handle conflicts, such as two consultants competing for the same client gig?

See the muffin protocol page for answers to that and many similar questions about how we route clients internally.

Do we have a “finders fee” for finding client gigs for each other?

Nope. If you pass a client on to a colleague, you won’t earn a provision or finder’s fee or anything like that. Why? Because the underlying purpose of Syncopate is not to maximize profit, it is to maximize happiness. We earn money from our clients, not from each other.

Some other similar firms have a finder’s fee model. Each client had an “owner” (the person who was first contacted by the client, or the person who first started working with that client). If other consultants work with that client, they pay 10-30% of their revenue to the “owner”. We believe this causes a bunch of bureaucracy, sub-optimisation, and confusion. Who “owns” a huge client like Westpac? Do I still count as owner for client X if they get bought by client Y? Is ownership permanent or time-limited, and if so how do I “renew” it? Instead, our guiding principle is “what goes around, comes around”. Today I give you a client, tomorrow someone else gives me a client, and over time it more or less evens out. 100% “fairness” just isn’t worth pursuing.

What about the business developer role?

In reality, some partners play more of a business developer role, adding an element of pro-activeness and long-term strategy to our otherwise mostly reactive sales process.

As opposed to most traditional consulting companies, the job is not to maximize profit or sell as many consulting hours as possible. Instead, it is to optimise for the happiness index, which means learning and adapting to each person’s individual needs. Some want to work a lot, some don’t. Some want a lot of help with sales, some want just a little bit of support, some don’t need any help at all.

A business developer complements the consultants by focusing on things like long-term strategy, seeing connections between different clients we’re working with, networking with possible future strategic clients, spotting market trends, etc. As an individual consultant that kind of stuff is harder, because you spend most of your time in the trenches with client X.