Ep 203: How to Get Booked Out With Relationship-Led Sales with Marjorie Agin
Most of us don’t “launch” a consulting business. We stumble into it.
We get laid off. We say yes to a subcontracting gig. We lean on relationships long before we have a neat offer menu.
Marjorie (Margie) Agin, founder and chief strategist of Center Board Marketing, has been consulting for 13 years. She works with companies at an inflection point: they’ve found product-market fit and are ready to accelerate growth.
We time traveled from her first client to her most recent one to pull apart what actually created momentum, stability and trust. Then we got into what buyers are still paying for right now and how to stand out when everyone sounds the same.
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The first client: subcontracting and your network
Margie didn’t set out to become an entrepreneur with a buttoned-up business plan. She was laid off shortly after returning from maternity leave.
(I’ve been doing this series with solo consultants, and I’d say about 80% of them have a similar origin story.)
Her first projects came from two places:
People from her network who knew her from previous companies
A former boss with her own consulting practice who brought Margie in when she had more client work than she could handle
Subcontracting was a great way to start. She didn’t have to market or sell. She could build experience, logos and confidence with less risk.
The downside? It took a few years before she decided to treat it like a real business. And people hired her because they liked her, not because they understood the specific outcomes she delivered.
The latest client: an 18-month retainer that started with generosity
Margie’s most recent client relationship has lasted 18 months across multiple projects. It started with someone she met through a former client.
At the time, that person was between jobs. There was no immediate opportunity. Margie simply made introductions and helped where she could.
Seven or eight months later, that person landed a role at a company formed through a roll-up of multiple acquisitions. There was a lot of work to do, and she called Margie.
I want to be really clear about this: relationship-led marketing is not manipulation. It’s building real relationships, adding value where you can and staying connected even when someone can’t help you right now.
Even if it never turns into business, maybe you just made a cool friend. That’s a win too.
What companies are still willing to pay for
Budgets are tighter. Decisions are slower. Many teams have been planning a quarter at a time because the future feels so uncertain.
So what are buyers paying for? Margie says it has to be at the top of their list: the biggest, hairiest, most expensive, highest-stakes problems.
It used to work to ask, “What’s something you don’t like doing that you’d love to get off your plate?” Now, if it’s at the bottom of their list, they’ll deal with it themselves, hand it to AI or let it slide.
Your work needs to connect to something that has to get off the whiteboard in the next 30 days.
This is also the time of year when many companies are building strategic plans and budgets for next year. Find out what they’re planning now and position your work around it.
Work that’s better outsourced
Some work is easier to justify bringing in an outside consultant for:
Voice of customer research and win-loss interviews: Customers are often more candid with someone outside the company.
Specialist expertise: When you’ve seen a specific technical or business problem many times before.
Facilitation: An internal facilitator often brings politics and bias into the room. An external facilitator’s goal is simply to help the group communicate and decide.
Facilitation, group decision-making and organizational change are all about human behavior. AI isn’t solving that.
My prediction for what AI can’t touch: collaborations with strategic partners, events and facilitation. The most human parts of business.
Also, many companies try to fix a problem themselves first. If an early conversation doesn’t turn into a project, check back in a couple of months. Once they’ve felt how hard the problem is, they may be ready.
Gateway offers and micro yeses
Margie is seeing more engagements start small, with tangible deliverables, even when there’s a bigger opportunity behind them.
Voice of customer research is a great example. It creates an aha moment right away. But there has to be a next step. What do you do with the insight? How does it change your messaging, product or go-to-market strategy?
That’s a gateway offer. It gives clients a taste of working with you and naturally leads to the next step.
I like to build gateway offers by taking pieces of discovery and onboarding and packaging them into one clear outcome. By the end, you can map out the journey and what a longer engagement would look like.
Then you look for micro yeses. One yes, then another, then another. That’s how you get to long-term retainers.
Move at your client’s pace
Consultants know so much that it’s tempting to explain everything at once.
But dumping everything you know on a client is like handing a kid the entire school year’s curriculum on the first day. They’re overwhelmed, and six months later they ask about something you already told them.
What feels like your whole world is one piece of their very busy world. Slow down and guide them one step at a time.
How to stand out when everyone does what you do
Niching doesn’t have to mean only choosing an industry. Margie highlighted a few ways to focus:
Industry: She works with technical subjects like cybersecurity, which many marketers avoid.
Specialty: Her zone of genius is storytelling, positioning and differentiation.
Scenario: She often works with companies after an M&A that need to tell a brand-new story to the market.
When you become the obvious choice for a specific scenario, it’s easier for people to say, “Oh, I know someone who does that.”
Clients are usually stuck at the symptom level. They know something is happening in their organization and what they want it to look like. Understanding that inflection point helps you sell the transformation.
Real stories beat AI sameness
AI has made a lot of us sound the same.
The best differentiator is real life specifics: stories about clients who went through the transformation, the mistakes that were made and what you learned. You don’t even have to name names. But nobody else can tell those stories because nobody else was in the room.
When I look back at my LinkedIn posts, the ones that performed best were the most real and raw. The ones where I was fully myself, a little unhinged and all.
Attract the right clients, repel the wrong ones
Consulting is an intimate relationship. You spend a lot of time together, and you need to trust each other.
So I try to be 100% myself on the podcast, on LinkedIn and in my emails. When someone unsubscribes in all caps or DMs me to announce they’re unfollowing, I know my content is doing its job.
It shouldn’t be a surprise what it’s like to work with you.
Try this
Write down the last three clients you worked with and trace how each one found you.
Then reach out to one person who can’t help you right now. Make an introduction, share a resource or simply check in. That’s how long-term pipelines are built.
Margie Agin
As a GTM advisor and operator, Margie specializes in cybersecurity, OT, and IT scale-ups that sell complex products and services to skeptical, technical buyers. Companies come to her when misalignment, murky positioning, and broken handoffs cause growth to stall. She helps them build a sustainable GTM engine so they grow more efficiently with best-fit customers. Previously, she led demand generation efforts for Blackboard and digital marketing for Cisco, and taught marketing at The Johns Hopkins University.
