What are clients really asking when they want industry experience?
Clients asking about industry experience are asking about risk, and specifically whether they'll spend the first two months teaching you their world before any work gets done. That's a reasonable worry from someone whose name is on the decision.
Underneath the question sit three separate concerns, and they need different answers:
- Will you understand our situation? The real question, and the one you can answer immediately.
- Will your recommendation survive contact with our constraints? Regulation, procurement, a union, a board, a busy season.
- Will I look careless for hiring you? The one nobody says out loud, and it drives more decisions than the other two.
Notice that only the second one truly needs sector knowledge. The first is about how well you can describe their problem, and the third is about how confident you sound doing it. When you treat the question as a challenge to your credentials, you answer none of the three.
What do I say when the industry isn't on my resume?
Describe what you understand about the client's problem first, then be specific about what carries over from your other work and what doesn't. The order matters, because leading with your background invites a comparison you'll lose, and leading with their situation changes what's being evaluated.
A shape that works, in four moves:
- Describe the problem back to them in their words. Not your framework's words. Theirs, including the parts that are annoying and unglamorous.
- Name the closest thing you've done. "I did this for a regional health system, which has the same approval structure and a different vocabulary."
- Say what's different and how you'd handle it. Naming the gap yourself is what makes the rest of it credible.
- Ask what an outsider usually gets wrong in their world. Their answer is the best briefing you'll get, and asking is itself evidence you'll do the homework.
One thing to avoid completely: claiming the industry is basically the same as one you know. Even when it's true, it lands as dismissive of the thing they live inside.
And keep the corporate language out of it. If you find yourself synergizing anything, you've stopped saying something. Plain words about their real problem do more work here than any amount of positioning, which is why the questions you ask on a first call carry more weight than the answers you prepare.
How do I learn enough about an industry to speak credibly?
Learn an industry by going where its people talk to each other, and listen to how they describe the problem when no vendor is in the room. What you need isn't sector history. It's the vocabulary and the specific complaints, and both are sitting in public.
Where to listen:
- Review communities and forums where practitioners compare notes.
- Reddit threads and industry Slack or Discord groups, where the language is unfiltered.
- Industry podcasts and conference talks, especially the audience questions.
- Trade publications, read for the recurring complaint.
What you're collecting is how they say it, not what the analysts say about them. One consultant I know works with healthcare innovation clients, and what she hears from them is a version of "we can't innovate as fast as we want because the regulations haven't caught up to us," expressed in considerably more colorful language. That sentence, said back to a client in their own register, does more than a decade in the sector would.
And you know more than you think. You've had years of conversations, you've run projects, and some of your past clients were closer to this world than you're giving yourself credit for. Take an educated guess, put a stake in the ground, and let real conversations correct it.
Should I just pick one industry and stay in it?
Picking one industry is one way to solve this, and it isn't the only way, because a focus can be built on a moment or a situation. Plenty of consultants with real specificity work across industries, and they're specific about something else.
The other axes a focus can run on
A company that just lost its head of marketing has the same problem whether it makes software or sells insurance. A team that started an initiative and stalled at month four is recognizable across sectors. An organization heading into its first audit, a founder handing over a function, a department that has been reorganized twice in a year: each of those is a specific, findable moment, and none of them requires you to pick an industry.
That's the route I'd look at first if your range truly makes you better, which for a lot of consultants it does. Choosing an ideal client runs on markers, and a moment is a perfectly good marker.
What doesn't work is treating cross-industry range as the pitch. Range is what a client appreciates in month three. It's a weak answer in the first conversation, when what they want to know is whether you get their problem, and being findable at all depends on being specific about something.
Leah's take
I want to say something about the range, because the women who ask me this are usually right about it. Working across industries does make you better. You've seen a problem solved four different ways, you know which fixes travel, and you can tell when a client's constraint is real and when it's a habit somebody defended for eleven years. That's genuine expertise and it's rarer than sector knowledge.
Here's the difficulty. It's expertise a client can only recognize after they've hired you, and they're deciding before that.
So stop arguing for the range in a first conversation. It puts you in a debate about whether your background counts, and that's the one comparison where the person with the sector on their resume wins. Describe their problem so precisely that the question stops occurring to them. A client who hears her own situation described back to her accurately doesn't go on to ask for proof you know her industry. She asks what you'd do about it.
And if you keep meeting this objection with the same client type, that's information rather than a verdict on you. It might mean you're aiming at a group that screens hard for sector experience, and there are neighboring groups that screen for something you have.
