HR Consultant
Alex M. · San Diego, CA
The Client
Independent HR/People consultant serving mid-size companies (200–2,000 employees) on comp design, org design, and engagement work. Sales cycle routes through procurement and multiple stakeholders (CHRO, HRBP, and CFO). Was running on a generic-looking site and a personal Gmail account, with inbound requests tracked in a manually updated spreadsheet.
Engagement Length
14 days from kickoff to live. Alex's only job was answering a few questions. We handled the rest, including hosting and support.
How an HR consultant started passing vendor screens it used to fail, and took its pre-screen rate from 55% to 89%.
We implemented a professional digital presence and a stakeholder-aware system that passes diligence, surfaces silent risk early, and accelerates every step of the buying process.
The Challenge
Procurement teams flagged the consultant's personal Gmail address and generic site as a diligence risk during first-pass vendor review; in two documented cases, that alone kept the consultant from being shortlisted. A review of the consultant's process showed an average time of 6 days to submit an initial capabilities response to an inbound RFP. With 3–5 stakeholders typically involved per deal, threads with individual stakeholders (especially CFOs who tended to enter later in the process) routinely went quiet without anyone noticing.
The Engagement
Branded domain and professional email; a site structured around scope-of-work and methodology instead of a generic "contact us" page; stakeholder-specific intake paths for CHRO, HRBP, and CFO; a CRM that logs every touchpoint per stakeholder within a single deal; an automated confirmation and document-request checklist triggered on first contact; a service agreement workflow where signing automatically triggers an integrated payment request, with confirmation routed back to the CRM record; and an automated review request sent to the client stakeholder team once an engagement concludes. Hosting and support included.
The Mechanism
A branded domain and professional email pass the instant "is this a real firm" check that procurement and CHRO teams run before they'll even open a proposal. Because the CRM tracks contact history per stakeholder within a deal, the classic failure mode (nurturing the HRBP champion while the CFO's sign-off thread quietly dies) becomes visible and fixable. The automated document checklist removes a step that used to eat a day of back-and-forth per deal. When an agreement is signed, payment is requested in the same motion rather than through a separate invoicing cycle, so the engagement can start without waiting on a finance-team turnaround. And because every completed engagement now automatically triggers a review request, the firm generates the kind of visible, third-party proof procurement teams were screening for in the first place, without relying on anyone to remember to ask for it.
The Results
SIX MONTHS POST LAUNCH
5
Enterprise deals closed
previously 2; same referral network, reflecting higher conversion
89%
First-round vendor pre-screen pass rate
previously 55%
9%
Multi-stakeholder deals with a stalled thread
previously ~40% of active deals
<60s
Inquiry acknowledgment time
previously 6 days
I run a firm of one, so I don't have time to chase down why a deal fell through. Procurement was never going to tell me why I got cut; I just stopped getting shortlisted. The moment we had a real domain and a site that actually explained our methodology, that problem disappeared. And the whole thing took two weeks. I answered a handful of questions and it was live.
— Alex M., HR Consultant
Procurement screens you out before the pitch starts.
Book a 20-minute call. We'll look at how your firm holds up in a first-pass vendor review today (domain, first-contact credibility, and whether a stalled stakeholder thread would even surface before it's too late) and tell you plainly whether infrastructure would move the needle for your practice. No pitch, no obligation. If our services don't align with your goals, we'll say so.
20 minutes. A direct answer. No obligation.