Customer First Work
How Net Promoter Score Can Grow Your Consulting Business
Hello!
Have you ever wondered if what you think you're selling is actually what your clients are buying?
The first iteration of my Saidin Strategies website talked about the various services I provided to potential clients. They included things like creating civic engagement plans and budgets. Some folks did hire me to help with civic engagement. But over time, I realized that's not what they really wanted from me, and it was holding me back from growing my roster of clients.
To put it in business terms, my value proposition — the unique thing I was providing — wasn't creating civic engagement plans. It was something else.
What that something else was: not that important right now. What is important is how I figured it out. And that's where I want to introduce my friend and collaborator Kent Peterson.
Kent is an amazingly successful independent consultant who has advanced education, poverty alleviation, and public welfare across the country. Kent is the founder of The Strategic Organization, which provides tools that help organizations plan and track their strategic progress and pinpoint how to improve capacity to deliver the results that matter most.
Kent shared with me his foundational framework for his consulting business. It has served him well over decades of doing the work. He calls it "Customer First Work." This probably won't sound new to many folks with a background in business, but for those who have backgrounds in the nonprofit or social impact space, it can provide a valuable perspective. It certainly did for me!
How Net Promoter Score Can Grow Your Consulting Business (Without Changing Everything You Do)
For small consulting firms, especially those with fewer than 40 clients and under $5 million in annual revenue, growth doesn't come from cold outreach or clever marketing alone. It comes from the clients you already have.
And if you're not leveraging your current clients' satisfaction and advocacy to grow your business, you're likely leaving your most powerful growth lever untapped.
At The Strategic Organization (TSO), Kent has found that one of the most effective ways to channel that lever is through the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It's simple, scalable, and can turn happy clients into your greatest sales force.
What Is Net Promoter Score, and Why Should Consultants Use It?
At its core, NPS is a single, potent question:
"On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our services to a friend or colleague?"
Your clients' answers place them into one of three buckets:
Promoters (9-10): Delighted, loyal clients who will advocate for you.
Passives (7-8): Satisfied, but not energized enough to tell others.
Detractors (0-6): Unhappy clients who may hurt your reputation.
Your score is the % of Promoters minus % of Detractors. It's a quick snapshot of how well you're performing not just at delivering, but at delighting.
And for consultants, especially small or solo shops, this is everything.
Bquast, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
NPS: A Fit for Firms Under $5M
Larger firms can afford to spend heavily on brand awareness and lead generation. If you're running a leaner practice, with under 40 clients a year, your best bet is making every single engagement a referral engine.
That's where NPS shines.
Why?
It's easy to implement (a Google Form will do).
It centers your attention on what your clients value most.
It gives you a clear, repeatable process for engaging, learning from, and leveraging client feedback.
But don't stop at collecting scores. Use those scores as a springboard to activate promoters and better understand everyone else.
How Kent Uses NPS
Kent is a firm believer that our most important work begins after the engagement ends. Our clients help make our next work possible. NPS helps us know where that potential lies.
Here's how Kent has taken it a step further:
1. From National Association to Member Network
One of our clients, a national nonprofit association, brought us in to help with strategy and capacity building. They gave us glowing NPS feedback—and more importantly, they saw how our support could benefit not just their HQ but their members.
So we built a suite of offerings adapted to local affiliates: toolkits, peer learning networks, tailored workshops.
Result? More impact for the association and more business for us—built entirely on their recommendation.
2. From Philanthropy to Grantees
A private foundation engaged us to assess and build evaluation capacity. Their senior leaders became key promoters. When we asked what delighted them, they said, "You made us smarter and made our job easier."
We asked: Could we do the same for your grantees?
They said yes—and we co-designed tools and capacity-building supports for those nonprofits.
Lesson? Great consulting creates ripple effects. Use NPS to identify where and how your expertise can increase your clients' impact and their promotion could amplify you.
3. From One Public Agency to an Entire Sector
We worked with a department within the U.S. Army helping implement systems to connect community supports to Army families. After they rated us highly and shared what mattered most—our deep understanding of mission-critical tasks—we asked: Who else has these same needs?
We were introduced to adjacent units in the other branches of service and the Department of Defense and expanded our portfolio from a single engagement to multiple interconnected ones.
Pro tip: Ask your promoters to make introductions with a purpose:
"Who else needs to solve the problem we helped you with?"
Your Score Isn't Where You Want It To Be: Now What?
As tempting as it might be to do a deep dive into your work product or communications style, Kent's Customer First framework would direct your energies outwards: to your clients.
What are your clients' most important aspirations? What are their pain points or the problems they need to solve? Put yourself in their shoes and try to make the strongest and most articulate case you can for what they need.
If you're not sure, ask them! Open-ended questions can help surface valuable insights. A few to have ready:
What were your biggest priorities at the time you hired me?
When you hired me, what was the biggest problem you were hoping to solve?
Was that problem your biggest pain point? Or were there others?
What did you hope the outcome would be?
Then examine what you actually delivered to the client. What solutions did you create? What did the client see, feel, and experience as a result of your work? How did your work relate to their hopes and aspirations?
Beyond the Score: Turning Promoters Into Partners
NPS is just the start. The real magic comes from what you do with the responses. Here's how Kent acts on it:
Realigning Your Value Proposition
The feedback you receive might reveal that your perceived value proposition doesn't match what clients actually value most. This is exactly what happened in the Saidin Strategies example. Clients weren't primarily hiring for civic engagement plans but for something else entirely.
Here are some steps to realign your offerings with what your clients really want:
Map the gap between what you think you offer and what clients say they value
Revise your service descriptions and marketing to emphasize what clients truly value
Adjust your delivery process to highlight and strengthen the elements clients appreciate most
Develop metrics that track improvement in the specific areas clients care about
Remember that this is an ongoing process. As Kent's Customer First Work framework emphasizes, your success depends on continuously understanding and delivering what makes your clients better.
Implementing NPS for Independent Consultants: A Practical Guide
Don't overthink it. Here's a 3-step starter kit for independent consultants:
1. Build the Form
Use Google Forms, Typeform, or SurveyMonkey. Include:
The NPS question
A follow-up: "What's the main reason for your score?"
2. Schedule the Send
After project closeout (within 1–2 weeks)
Biannually for retainers
Within 48 hours of a workshop
3. Track Results
A simple spreadsheet is all you need. Log:
Name of client
Score
Open-ended feedback
Follow-up steps
The Real Goal: Help Clients Promote You Because It Helps Them Too
Here's what many consultants miss: your client doesn't just promote you out of generosity. They do it because it reflects well on them.
When they introduce you to a peer or partner, they're:
Extending their influence
Sharing tools that helped them succeed
Advancing their mission
You can make it easy for them to do so:
Offer custom presentations or internal debriefs they can share
Co-create tools they can give away (with your branding)
Package your work as a resource for their network
Beyond referrals, you're creating vehicles for your work to scale and for your client to shine.
The Bottom Line
If you're running a consulting business with under 40 clients and <$5M in revenue, Net Promoter Score is a growth engine.
It helps you:
Understand what clients really value
Identify your strongest advocates
Learn how to improve
Grow your practice from the inside out
Kent asks for feedback, then he acts on it. And more often than not, that feedback has led us to his next best client.
Your best new client? You've probably already met them. Let NPS show you who's ready to help bring them to you.