Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

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The constraints being a fractional CMO (audio)

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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.

What to do if your marketing feels generic

If your marketing feels generic, it’s probably a sign your positioning isn’t risky enough.

You’re probably trying to blend in, which is the opposite of what you need to do. You need to stand out.

To stand out, you need to be different in a meaningful way. Not meaningful to everyone, but to some people.

And that’s the hard part: choosing who and what to say “no” to in your positioning.

You need to be specific to be different. And that means making trade-offs. This creates a degree of risk.

But as Peter Drucker said, “all profit is derived from risk”. No risk, no reward.

Find the problem you solve better than anyone else and focus your energy on that one thing.

Not only will this make your marketing better, it will make your products and services better, too.

 

Stagnancy is death

The first draft of my daily posts are usually pretty rough.

It often takes several passes before the idea becomes clear in my mind, let alone “on paper”.

It’s no different with any other area of my business. I’ll be refining what I until my last day on the job.

Your business is a living organism almost in the same way you are.

As soon as you stop innovating (growing), your business starts to stagnate and then decline.

Stagnancy—in nature and in business—is death.

You can either lean into change or simply hang on to the things that are working in the hopes you don’t lose them all.

But you can’t do both.

Staying in business requires forever innovation, iteration, and change. It’s not easy, but that’s the natural order of things.

When is the last time you took a meaningful leap of evolution?

Niching makes it easier to build an email list

For a long time, I struggled to build an email list.

I finally got traction once I started specializing in the coworking niche.

At first, I wrote a lot. Daily for a while. My blog was one of the only places that exclusively shared marketing tips for that industry.

Indirectly, I also got access to my ideal audience through conference talks, guest webinars, and podcast appearances.

It turns out, writing a lot in a niche helps build credibility. And credibility opens doors to new audiences.

Niching down makes a lot of things easier. Building a list is one of them.

The power of an email list

Your email list can be one of your most valuable assets.

Social media platforms will come and go. Algorithms will work for you one day and not the next.

But your email list is gatekeeper-free. As long as you keep it in good health and out of spam issues, it can be your biggest driver of revenue.

Whether you’re doing a webinar, podcast interview, conference presentation, designing your new website, or almost any other form of marketing, you want to focus on inviting people to your email list.

Never add someone to your list without their express permission, though.

And remember, the more call-to-actions you have, the less likely people will do any of them. Focus on email subscriptions as your single or main call-to-action and let the selling happen later.

Aim to make your email newsletter so good you can’t help but invite people to it. Transfer your genuine enthusiasm about it in the process.

It sets the bar high for your email list and forces you to actually work on making it the best it can be.

But if you do it right, you’ll be glad you did.

Do what works for you

Something you did recently netted you good results.

Maybe you did a guest webinar, or got featured on a podcast, or created a new opt-in incentive for your email list.

Maybe you’ve been writing daily or did some outreach on LinkedIn.

Whatever it was, it got results. This is your reminder to do more of that.

We so often complicate our businesses when really we should be asking how we can successfully do more of the things that work for us already.

Look for signs of success in everything you do, from netting new email subscribers to signing new consulting clients—it all matters.

Replicate the one or two things that work best for you. Those are your big rocks until or unless they stop working.

Everything else should fit around those things—including your client work.

Don’t overcomplicate what works. Do more of it.

Don’t fall into this trap

When you first get started in consulting, you’ll be tempted to take on any work you can get.

And that’s totally fine. You should take on enough work to hone your skills, pay the bills, and keep from feeling desperate.

After all, desperate consultants don’t close deals. Not good ones, anyway. Not high-profit ones.

But if you take on too much work, you’ll get too busy to spend time working on your business.

You’ll stop marketing yourself. You’ll stop creating assets. You’ll stop innovating with your business model.

And when that happens, you’ll find yourself needing to take on any opportunities that come your way because you’re not being proactive.

Pay the bills whatever way you have to, but keep enough bandwidth to build the business you really want.

Competition is a good thing

Do you ever feel like the “competition” is a threat to your business?

Without knowing your situation, I know for a fact that there’s more than enough business for everyone.

Some people will naturally resonate with you and some people will gravitate towards “the competition”. And that’s a good thing. You should be repelling some to attract the right people.

Also, people often do business with several “competitors” and you. It’s not a marriage, after all. People shop around.

And lastly, you probably only need a small number of clients to have a fabulously profitable consulting business. I max out around 10 if you don’t count members, product customers, and group coaching clients.

Competition is a good thing. It means they’re out there creating demand for your services. It means there is demand in the first place.

Rather than treat the competition like an enemy, try befriending them. See how you differ and identify your lane relative to them.

Differentiation is always your best friend, regardless of how “competitive” it is. Double down on your strengths and you’ll stand out.

But before you can even try to do that, you have to legitimately know that competition is a good thing, not a threat.

There are no shortages of opportunities out there.