Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Strategy Advisor and Mentor

All Audiences

Don’t bonk out

I’m no professional distance racer, but I am aware of a concept that I think applies to us all in business.

It’s a concept called “bonking out”.

Bonking is a common term for the functional depletion of glycogen, brought on by exercise. In other words, it’s the condition in which your muscles run out of fuel, with profound effects on performance and well-being. [Source]

With long-distance running, the key is to go as fast as you reasonably can without going over your “red line” and bonking out.

Your red line is that place where you’re pushing deep into your reserves to gain a little extra speed to put you in a better spot.

It’s that level where you can’t talk while you run. You’re in an anaerobic state (without oxygen). You can do that for a while, but you can’t sustain it. And once you burn through your reserves, it’s extremely hard to tap into them again later in the race—they’re depleted after all!

The issue is, if you start “red-lining” too early, you risk bonking out early.

You can push things a little, sometimes easing over that red line. But once you burn through your reserves, they’re gone.

It’s similar in business when it comes to burnout. You can push for a long time without burning out. But eventually, you begin to see the signs.

Maybe it affects your sleep. Or your stress levels. Or you start dropping balls. Or sabotaging your own efforts.

If you’re not careful, you won’t want to do anything related to your business. And that’s a problem.

So what do you do if you’re on the verge of burnout?

Back off your commitments. Do less for a while.

But because you’re a type-A, that’s precisely the hardest thing you can do. It’s also the most important.

The way you succeed in business is by staying in it. You can’t win if you’re not in the race.

And the thing about burnout is that it will take you out of the game if you’re not careful. And it’s super hard to come back when you do.

Use the throttle.

Ease off before things get bad. When you need to rest, rest. Everything I’ve learned about peak performance is that to operate at the highest level, you also need to recharge.

There comes a time when pushing through burnout and ignoring the signals will not only affect your health and relationships, it may also take you out of the game.

You may have a high threshold—and you can work a lot harder than most people think. But if you never take time to actively recharge, it’s a matter of time before you burn the wicks completely and bonk out.

You’ll want to do something else. Game over.

Don’t bonk out. Keep some fuel in your reserves at all times.

—kw

P.S. In case you missed it, here’s the latest episode of Mindshare Radio, What to Do if Nobody is Buying Your Productized Service.

The inner game of what we do

I had a great chat today with members of the group coaching program about the inner game of what we do.

I call this topic “Mindset” but you could call it something different.

We talked about things like managing stress, context switching, allowing tension in an engagement, confidence, healthy habits, mental bandwidth, measuring progress, goal setting, free time, prioritization, habits, lifestyle planning, and a wide range of other unexpected topics.

If you think the inner game is too fluffy or not practical for discussion, I could see why you might think that at first glance.

I used to think ‘mindset’ was some kind of woo woo self-help term. But in reality, what goes on between your ears underpins everything else.

Without a solid inner game, nothing else works. You can draw a straight line from your mindset to your income.

So, I’m curious to explore this topic further. What tools or practices do you use to keep your mind in the right place?

Hit reply and let me know.

How to create super crunchy testimonials

When your clients hire you, they usually want to improve a few key things.

Things like revenue, client growth, lead volume, acquisition costs, conversion rates, or any number of other things.

During the sales process, your goal is to get clear on what specifically they’re hoping to accomplish. You’re pricing against the value of those outcomes, after all.

Then, to track progress, you begin by taking benchmark measurements on those key areas and others you plan to improve.

At the end of the engagement—and along the way—you can compare and contrast the results against their starting point.

You’ll be surprised how much you help people when you actually track the before and after. It also makes for super crunchy testimonials.

And if you’re not moving the needle, it might be a sign you’re either working with the wrong clients or you need to sharpen your methodology.

Worth noting either way.

Nobody buys “advice”

When a people hire an advisor, they’re not really buying “advice”.

They’re buying things like less risk and greater upside potential, more confidence, easier terrain, and faster outcomes.

If what you sell is “access to you”, you’re missing the point. Clients don’t want access to you. They want to alleviate pain and achieve their goals.

Focus all of your marketing efforts on the outcomes your ideal clients want, prove you understand and can solve their problems better than anybody, and it doesn’t matter that you sell after that.

People don’t buy the features of what you do, they invest in outcomes.

Sell the outcome in everything you do.

Come hell or high water

Once you decide to publish content, having a “come hell or high water” mentality makes things a lot simpler.

When you publish on a pre-determined schedule no matter what, it forces you to create content with whatever time and ideas you have available.

Committing is a forcing function that allows you to be consistent and ultimately create good content most of the time.

Sure, forcing yourself to publish even when you don’t have a lot to say may occasionally produce mediocre content. But more times than not, you’ll find a way to create content that resonates.

You won’t let yourself ship poor content too often, believe me. And most of the time, what you have is better than nothing.

So ask yourself this: do you publish content, whether daily, weekly, or monthly with a “come hell or high water” mentality?

You may not need to take this approach, but it does help build the consistency is that’s what you’re seeking.

Forget passion, follow your curiosity

Tonight I was listening to the podcast, How I Built This.

It’s an NPR podcast featuring stories of highly successful “innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists”. The show is incredibly inspiring and well-produced. If you haven’t listened to it, go check out out.

In the beginning of a recent episode, the host of the show, Guy Raz, recalls an interview with author, Elizabeth Gilbert.

In that interview, Gilbert apparently advised people not chase their passions but instead to chase their curiosity.

It got me thinking about the people I talk to who are still looking for a niche that aligns with their interests.

In most cases, it’s extremely difficult to monetize your passion. You may not even have a passion. And this leaves people stumped about what to do next.

Do you become a mercenary and solve whatever problems you see as your biggest opportunity? Or, do you try to align your business with your curiosity?

I’m willing to bet you’ll have more longterm success by following your curiosity. And doing so will give you much of the same drive, energy, and determination you’ll need to stick with it long enough to succeed.

It may also reduce the pressure to pick a niche that is perfectly aligned with your passions.

Follow your curiosity.

The ‘Golden Goose’ approach

There are two ways you can find new clients.

  1. You can look for Golden Eggs (prospective clients) by reaching them directly.
  2. Or, you can find more Golden Geese (audience aggregators and influencers) by offering value to their audience in exchange for exposure.

The ‘Golden Eggs’ approach works well, but it is a very slow process. It’s a one-by-one method and is hard to scale.

The ‘Golden Goose’ approach is where you have more leverage.

If you can do things like training, webinars, guest podcasting, conference talks, community involvement, and/or guest writing in your niche, it’s a chance to get in front of a LOT of prospective clients at one time.

It’s a lot more scalable but it does still take work and preparation. What doesn’t?

That’s one of the reasons niching is so valuable. Most good niches have a place where they get together, usually around making connections and learning new ideas.

If you’re out looking for new business, see if you can take the Golden Goose approach.

Here is a related post on how you can create those opportunities.

The constraints being a fractional CMO (audio)

This is a preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a free Mindshare Community membership. Join today for more members-only content and community.

If you’ve done any fractional CMO/freelance head of growth/managed advisory work (as I like to call it), you’ll quickly notice how much it limits your time to work with multiple clients and do your own marketing.

In this episode, I unpack a few topics, questions, and constraints brought up by member Rob in a private discussion (with his permission to respond via podcast).

Rob currently does some execution work and is getting opportunities to do more involved fractional CMO work. As a result, it’s difficult to find time (and justify spending it) to market himself.

I talk about things like:

  1. My thoughts on selling days per week/month
  2. The risks of selling most of your time to a small handful of clients
  3. Hiring marketing managers instead of being the one to manage
  4. Focusing on selling advisory level as soon as you can
  5. What to do to market yourself when your time is limited
  6. And a lot of other limits, constraints, and ways of dealing with fractional CMO work in your business

Give this a listen and let me know what you think!

—k

Why FAQs are so great

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on your product or service pages are like magic.

That’s because they make it easy to add tons of important details to your page without overwhelming the reader.

Here are some of the main benefits I see in using FAQs:

  1. They’re easy to skim and either read or ignore depending on the person reading.
  2. They let you pack a lot of information on the page that would otherwise bloat the core sales copy.
  3. They’re a great place to position your product or service in terms of who it’s for/not for, what it does/doesn’t do, and how it works/doesn’t.
  4. They preemptively help you overcome objections by dealing with common push-back you may receive during sales conversations.
  5. They help manage expectations about how the product will be accessed or consumed, expected results, and/or other details that people may not be thinking about.
  6. They let you highlight key information that may get buried in the rest of your sales text.
  7. They can serve as “fine print” by outlining the scope limitations and terms of your offer.
  8. EDIT: They’re also great for SEO, especially when you use the questions as a heading element (h2 or h3) as it lets you use highly optimized keywords and common questions in a way Google recognizes as important. H/T to Alex, Luke, and Frank for pointing that out!

You can easily add or remove FAQs from a sales page without hurting the conversions. That’s because people can skim what they need to and ignore the rest.

People like to see you’ve thought of everything. It builds trust in you and the purchase decision. FAQs let you show that without creating additional friction.

By putting more content in the FAQs, you can focus your sales copy on the key information that matters instead of having people glaze over long paragraphs and miss the important parts.

Do you use FAQs on your sales pages? If not, this might be the reminder you need.

That’s not the real problem

Generally speaking, when potential clients want to work with you, they’re right that there’s a problem.

BUT, more often than not, their diagnosis of what the true problem really is, is wrong. Or at least, it’s incomplete.

If all you do is solve the problem they ask you to solve, you’re not doing consulting. You’re taking orders.

Which is fine if you work at McDonalds, but it’s not fine if you’re in the business of creating valuable business outcomes.

As a consultant, your job is to find the root cause of the problem. The bigger issue that led to the symptoms they ask you to help solve.

If all you do is solve those symptoms, you’re not doing a service. You’re ignoring the real underlying issues, which means they will reoccur.

So don’t let clients hire you purely on the basis of what they ask for. Expect there to be other things. There always is.

Be their advocate and plan for this in advance.