David A. Fields Consulting Group Capturing follow-on business from current clients is relatively easy. But how does your consulting firm win that crucial, first project at a new client?
One effective approach, especially during times of high uncertainty like now, is offering an irresistible PIE.
Before I explain what a PIE is, let’s review the virtuous business cycle that can develop for your consulting firm:
Your firm produces outstanding work for your client, which…
…enhances trust in your consulting firm, leading to…
…more, large, lucrative consulting projects.
An obvious question surfaces: how do you start that cycle with a new client?
It’s fairly easy if you start your prospecting conversations with a high level of trust due to your reputation, brand name, or high-profile case studies.
In those cases, the high trust in your consulting firm (or you as an individual) outweighs any trepidation the client feels about engaging you for a high-fee engagement.
Conversely, if your starting point with a new prospect is moderate or low trust, closing a high-fee engagement is much harder.
One strategy is to bolster confidence in your consulting firm, which you can accomplish via thought leadership, industry presence, and multiple, trust-building conversations with your prospects.
Confidence-building through these approaches is mandatory for your consulting firm.
However, the strategy is time-consuming and difficult.
Fortunately, if you’re starting from a low trust position, there’s another strategy that works well:
Reduce the trust necessary to secure a project.
In other words, lower the risk of engaging your consulting firm the first time.
And the way you do that is by offering an irresistible PIE.
PIE = Prospect’s Initial Experience.
Your irresistible PIE is a low cost, low risk, high value project that can jump start the Trust Cycle.
You might think of this as a sample of your capabilities, or a pilot project, or a trial engagement.
Do you have a scrumptious PIE all baked and ready to serve?
Ingredients for an Irresistible PIE
Fast
A typical PIE is a short-duration project anywhere from one hour to a few weeks.
Finish up quickly so you can move onto the high-value, burning issues.
Simple and Repeatable
Promise value that is easy for prospects to understand and efficient for you to deliver.
If it takes you too long to explain your PIE, your prospect’s appetite will wane.
And if you create a new PIE from scratch every time, it will be horribly inefficient to deliver tasty results.
Clear, Immediate Value
Ensure your PIE delivers an obvious win, with concrete, easily recognizable value.
For that reason, assessments aren’t great PIEs—increased understanding isn’t concrete and the value isn’t immediate.
Direct Experience with You
PIEs should be as high-touch as you can make them, while keeping the fees low.
The whole point is to give your client a taste of working hand-in-hand with you.
Low Fees
Your PIE must be easy to digest financially, without discounting your fees.
In other words, your PIE shouldn’t be the same work at a lower fee.
Rather, your PIE is different work at standard or premium fees.
Connected to Follow-On
Create an obvious path from your PIE to the next engagement with your consulting firm.
Avoid selling during your PIE; however, before and after the project runs, clearly define how the initial project fits in with a broader stream of work.
Have you had success offering a low-risk, low-fee, high value initial experience to clients?
Text and images are © 2026 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.
I’d consider my “agility strategy workshop” a PIE. But it’s a relatively big pie which might affect its irresistibility –
It is a low five figure engagement that requires 2 days from a leadership team.
So I’m trying to figure out hand-PIE versions that would be more snackable and less of a time/budget commitment.
Training used to be a PIE as well but it’s losing its market attractiveness in recent years.
I think I need to figure out a half day high intensity workshop session that can still deliver an outcome that sets up fast follow engagements such as the full workshop and execution of the strategy.
Good thinking, Yuval. Low five-figures is definitely in PIE range for most consulting firms in most industries. However, two days of leadership team time is costly and you’re savvy to realize that makes the offering high-risk, high-cost.
By way of contrast, one of our PIEs is low five-figures and consists of about 3 hours total “delivery” time over four weeks. Very low time commitment, and very high benefit.
I appreciate your chiming in with your thoughts, Yuval. Extremely helpful!
As always a timely article meets my dilemma. I’ve been working with a prospect for several months. I’ve submitted 2 proposals after context discussions. Yesterday he reviewed the latest proposal and said he wanted to move forward with a few tweaks. After the conversation I’ll have to start over and prepare another proposal. I think PIE is the answer – is this a good fit not only for him, but also for my firm. Thank you .
Hooray for the right information at the right time!
Yes, if a prospect is hesitant to move forward you either have a Want issue (lack of urgency) or a risk/value problem. A PIE is the answer to the latter challenge.
I’m glad you contributed your situation to the discussion, Molly. Let me know how your new proposal works out!
David… Fantastic articles; thank you!
One request: can you fix your website so that I can print the articles? Now, the header and widgets also print and overlay the article text. Now, I have to go into the code and manually edit the HTML so that it prints correctly. A `@media print` query could handle that much more easily.
Thanks again for all the great ideas.
Thanks for your feedback and request, Jon. We’re in the midst of a website refresh project. I will forward your comment to the team so that they can take it into account!
I was looking for a PIE in 2025 and thought I had found it in a 3-week, 4-figure business intelligence roadmap. After reading your article, I am not so sure anymore. I would call it an assessment but it provides a very concrete implementation plan with cost and time estimates, etc. Is that kind of strategic+technical paper enough value for trust and PIE?
Great question, Corrina. A roadmap project typically isn’t a great PIE, although it can work to build trust in your firm. The challenge is that roadmaps only tell clients where they’ll have to spend more money and time, which is often an unsatisfying result.
If the client is already well attuned to the amount of time and money that will have to be invested to achieve their end result, and the roadmap is providing concrete direction without negative surprises or, better, yet, shows them how to save money and time along the implementation path, then you could have an excellent PIE.
Net: in the right circumstances, you may have a good PIE; however, I’d continue developing other PIEs that deliver instant gratification.
Thanks for the smart question and concrete case study, Corinna!
Thanks a lot, David! I appreciate your insights. That makes sense to me. I’ll keep looking for better pie then.
We have been trying to work out what our PIE is for a while now. Our projects really start at £25k but we have recently run workshops and also ‘facilitated’ versions of our process where we don’t do the work but handhold a client through the process, not sure those are really right, as the facilitated process may not encourage them to use us to deliver the process in the future. We’ve also done a strategy Audit recently for not a lot of money, basically reviewing their strategy and the process they used to get to it and suggesting gaps or methods they can use to improve it. That did feel like it added value and provided a taste, the CEO of that business moved to another business and did buy a larger project from us. It’s hard to work out what PIEs are working for the type of work we do (growth side; strategy and proposition).
It can be harder than it first looks to develop a great PIE. A DIY version of your regular work tends not to be a great PIE because the client completes their mission, and the follow-on aspect may not be obvious. As you noted—and as I mentioned in the article and in some other replies—assessments (including audits) typically don’t work as a PIE.
Think of a PIE as a sample of your work, not the whole of your work in a different form. Perhaps you could deliver just one piece of a typical project. For instance, I’d guess that in your typical strategy projects, there is at least one small piece that consistently generates an “Oh, wow!” reaction from your clients. If you can find a way to separate out that piece and deliver just that in an inexpensive-but-profitable project, you have your PIE.