A lot of IT consulting companies are destined to stay small forever. Why? It’s usually because they fail to make the cultural commitments and resource investments needed to grow their sales pipelines in a scalable, predictable way.

We talk about this issue a lot and drilled down into it during a recent webinar. In this post, excerpted from the recording of the Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Managed Services & IT Consulting, you’ll learn about using highly-valuable premium content assets, that position your firm as world-class communicators, as the leverage needed to grow your future sales pipeline.

How Can You Grow Your IT Consulting Pipeline?

It starts by looking at the content that you’re creating as assets. They’re not expenses. They’re assets. And these assets help you create leverage.

What do we mean by this?

In a typical month, 60% to 70% of the leads that we generate on SP Home Run’s website come from things that we created in previous months.

And it’s a very similar experience across the board with most of our clients. The overwhelming majority of leads that they’re generating in a given month don’t come from the efforts of what they’re doing today, but instead come from the efforts of what they did today plus what they did the month before and the month before that, and the quarter before that, and the year before that.

As long as the content is reasonably evergreen, everything builds on top of each other.

Grow Your IT Consulting Company’s Sales like Warren Buffet

From the famous billionaire investor, there’s a Warren Buffett quote that pretty much encapsulates all of this: “Someone is sitting under a tree today because someone planted the seeds long ago.”

If you only look at what you can get out of this immediately, and you have a really immature attitude with needing immediate gratification, this will not work.

Avoid Shredding $100 Bills

And it’s the procrastination and the need for immediate gratification that gets people in a lot of trouble because they rush off and they’re buying clicks at $10, $20, $50, sometimes as much as $75 or $100 a click in a desperate attempt to get traffic to their website.

But if you’re buying pay per click (PPC) advertising and you don’t have good persona-specific landing pages, conversion paths, and workflow sequences, you may as well walk over to the paper shredder, go to the ATM machine and take out $100 bills, and just feed those $100 bills through the shredder.

And on top of that, once you’ve depleted the $5,000, $10,000, or whatever it was that was in your budget to play around with pay per click, and you got all of two phone calls before you were turning off everyone that wasn’t ready to buy today, and you don’t have any research or persona-specific content, that’s done. You’re not going to get any more traffic from that.

The Recurring Impact of Investing in Content to Grow Your Sales Pipeline

If you’re creating blog content, if you’re investing in creating engaged social media reach, if you have high-converting landing pages, if you have YouTube videos, if you have SlideShare presentations, if you’re doing all of these things the right way, and you’re talking about issues that are going to still be relevant a couple of months, or a couple of years out from now, you have every reason to expect that a significant chunk of what you’re creating will still be attracting visitors and converting leads several months out, and in some cases even a few years out.

And this gives you massive, massive leverage to grow your IT consulting company’s sales pipeline.

And this is the reason why it needs to be looked at in terms of an investment and not an expense.

It’s kind of like the difference between owning and renting.

Do you want to buy your way in to interrupt people? Or do you want to own the asset that attracts people like a magnet into your website?

Editor's Note: If you need to grow your sales pipeline, be sure to also check out How Managed IT Services & IT Consulting Firms Accelerate Inbound Revenue Generation.

What’s been most scalable and predictable for growing your pipeline of future IT consulting sales? Share your thoughts in the Comments box below.

And to get the rest of the scoop from this one-hour webinar, be sure to watch the "Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Managed Services & IT Consulting."