Marketing Consultants

A few weeks ago, I invited Mindshare member and long-time marketing consultant, Mark Evans, to talk shop with me about the business of marketing consulting and fractional CMO work.

This was a really fun episode. We went deep into the nerdy nuances of fractional/interim CMO and advisory work.

Some topics we explored include:

• Mark’s transition from reporter to marketing consultant
• How he uses his training as a reporter to do positioning and messaging work
• The challenges and frustrations of fractional CMO work
• Why a strategic advisory work is his preferred way to engage with clients
• His thoughts on coaching, mentoring, and training in-house marketers
• The value proposition of interim CMO vs. fractional CMO
• Pricing and value calculations for advisors vs. fCMOs
• Refund policies and minimum commitment periods
• Setting expectations and getting clear on goals before starting engagements
• How and when to turn down clients who aren’t a fit
• The importance of continually marketing yourself
• Using video, podcasts, and showing up in person to build trust

Books mentioned:

• The Inside Advantage by Robert Bloom and Dave Conti
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug

Connect with Mark:

• Marketing Spark (consulting website)
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

 
Listen here or subscribe via your podcast player.

—kw

P.S. Looking to grow your marketing practice? Mindshare has you covered.

Doing execution work is not just an important part of a marketer’s journey—it’s essential.

The problem is, it can be stressful and exhausting if you aren’t intentional about how you do it.

It’s hard to relax when you’re spinning so many plates under the constant pressure of deadlines and deliverables. Your brain never really turns off.

That’s where I was before I transitioned to advisory work. I offered too many services, charged too little, and worked too hard for a 30% take-home margin. Not ideal.

Luckily, there are things you can do to reduce the stress of execution work while increasing your overall profitability.

I learned these lessons the hard way. And if I were to go back to doing execution work, I’d use many of these ideas as soon as possible.

So let’s get into it…

1. Offer fewer services

It sounds counter-intuitive, but offering fewer services can actually make your business a LOT healthier.

Instead of offering web design, SEO, PPC, and social media—pick one or two complimentary services and stick to that.

When you do the same things repeatedly, your work gets easier. Sure, there’s complexity. But as you do things repeatedly, it becomes less taxing each time.

Over time, your ability to produce actual results becomes more predictable.

People refer you because of how dialled in and organized your workflow is—not to mention how good the results are.

You start to enjoy the work more. It feels more effortless when you are streamlined.

You’re actually building expertise with your craft, which is a rare commodity—even in a world full of marketers.

And that expertise is what allows you to charge a premium for your work—which leads to more profit—and the cycle continues.

2. Sub-contract your work

When you offer fewer services, you can dial in your process to the point where you can train less expensive people to do the actual execution work.

Your work becomes formulaic, which means you don’t need to hire the most expensive people you can find to do the work.

You can hire someone less senior to follow your process and get the same outcomes for you—leaving more profit margin for you!

When you offer too many services, you never really create a refined process because there’s just too much to do.

Better to focus on doing fewer things, build your expertise, and document your process until it becomes second nature.

That’s the core of how you create leverage around your expertise.

3. Productize your services

Productizing lets you take your processes to another level.

You can design your entire methodology from start to finish, ironing out the issues as you go.

As you do this, you’ll create more predictable results with a predictable amount of work at a predictable profit margin.

The client gets the result they want with less complexity and an overall smoother experience. You get built-in profitability and less stress overall.

Everyone wins.

You can still sell custom alongside your productized services. But you’re also refining your core offerings and the process that goes with it until you no longer need to sell custom if you don’t want to (or charge a premium when you do).

4. Hire a project manager

Once you get established, you will eventually want to let the trains run without your direct intervention.

Hiring a project manager to keep projects on track and correspond with clients can free up a ton of mental bandwidth.

With your available time, you are now free to focus on improving your process, the client experience, and finding more clients.

Your job now is to market and work on the business—not just in it.

5. Niche down

Similar to the other steps, when you work with a smaller segment of clients—a niche—you get to make your process even more dialled in and efficient.

Your results become even better and more predictable than simply being a horizontal expert at your craft.

One caveat: I wouldn’t rush to niching down until it’s clear you have a competitive advantage in that niche.

You can niche down too soon, which can be limiting. Better to simply seek more clients who resemble your current best clients.

If you find the best work and results come from working with B2B SaaS companies, aim your marketing at them.

Go where they hang out. Create an audience page for them. Create case studies to support your expertise.

Eventually, you can go all-in if it seems like it’s working for you.

6. Sell your process

It may be counter-intuitive, but selling your process to your peers/”competitors” or even to people in your target market can unlock huge amounts of revenue.

By selling your process as a course, book, templates, or other knowledge product, you can sell your expertise for almost pure profit from people you otherwise may not have been able to generate revenue from.

You can also sell mentoring and coaching, which is a highly rewarding model.

7. Become a “producer”/interim/fractional CMO

This one is a middle ground between freelancing and agency work.

The gist of this one is to essentially be a part-time marketing manager.

You charge a fixed fee, from $3,000 to $10,000+ per month and in exchange, you do things like:

• Creating a strategy and plan
• Managing budgets
• Hiring people to do the execution work
• Writing briefs
• Managing projects
• Quality assurance
• Reporting and analytics
• And basically being the point person for any new project or activity your client needs

This particular model comes with a lot of caveats and warnings as it can itself become like a full-time job with a part-time salary. I’ve written about it extensively.

But if you want to earn six figures with just a couple of clients, this is your best approach to take if you manage scope and expectations properly.

Eventually, your goal would be to transition to advisory capacities as soon as possible by leveraging your systems, processes, templates, and Rolodex gained from the producer role.

By removing the managed part of the service, you free up a lot more bandwidth to create even more profit per effort.

And that’s it!

Simple in theory, but takes discipline and time to do right.

Got a question or other idea to add to this list? Hit reply and let me know.

—kw

P.S. Want help growing your marketing freelance or consulting business? Check out the coaching membership for training, community, and advice.

There are nearly unlimited ways to package your expertise.

You can do 1:1 consulting, coaching, training, courses, memberships—you name it!

You can even combine them, sell multiple concurrently, or begin with one thing and transition into the next.

There’s really no single best way to sell your expertise. But there are a few things to consider when designing your next offering.

Questions to consider:

1. What can I offer that will actually be able to achieve the desired result?

If there is no objective, there is no engagement.

How do you know what to offer if you don’t know where you’re going?

The times I’ve had the best results were when my clients knew exactly what they wanted to accomplish and brought me along to help them do it.

On the flip side, the times when I’ve had the least success are times when the client didn’t know exactly what they wanted to accomplish. We learn the hard way sometimes (speaking about myself).

Clarity of goals creates clarity of scope—and with that, a much better chance of success.

2. How much can my target market afford to spend?

This one is tricky because it can be easy to fall into the trap that your target market “has no money”. Or “has so much of it” that it should be “easy” to sell to them.

That said, it does help to estimate based on the potential value you help them create—at least in general terms.

Starting with the price and working backwards from there can be a great way to determine what you can offer.

3. What can I offer that will be mutually profitable for me and my clients?

Related to the point above, ask yourself what you can sell that is profitable for you and your clients in terms of both time and energy expenditure and based on your own profit targets.

It might be easy enough to sell a $10k/month consulting package but if it takes all of your time to deliver, is it worthwhile for you?

Only you can decide…

4. How does my target market prefer to engage with me?

Some CEOs are extremely busy and don’t want to read your book or take your course.

They want you to do it for them. Or to advise on and lead the process.

Knowing what your ideal clients prefer—and what they don’t want—will make it a lot easier to shape your offerings around them.

You’ll only know by selling custom engagements and trying out new offers until you see that resonates.

5. How do I prefer to work—and what constraints do I use to accomplish that?

This point is underrated. Doing work that isn’t in your zone of genius or that drains you of energy is a recipe for failure in the long term.

You don’t have to love every part of what you do. We’re paid to be uncomfortable and do hard things.

But it’s worth considering what style of work suits you best so you can at least factor that in and optimize for those kinds of offerings.

In closing…

There are a lot of other questions, but these are big ones for me when it comes to designing my offerings.

What do you consider most when designing yours?

—k

Someone the other day joked on Twitter with me that advising was more like being a cheerleader than a builder.

I chuckled and then disagreed.

Good advisors don’t just bring encouragement and access to your brain for advice. We do that, too, but that’s not all we do.

Good advisors typically have a long history of building. Of doing execution work for years—decades in some cases.

Eventually, they graduate from that part. They stop laying every brick by hand and start leading instead.

The good ones use their expertise to deliver templates, examples, resources, referral partners, and even an operating system for how things can get done the “right” way.

Like a therapist—you wouldn’t expect them to go out and solve your interpersonal challenges for you, right? That’s not their role.

Sure, it can feel like you’re showing up naked sometimes when you have nothing but your ideas. But even if that were the case and you didn’t have all the assets and materials, it doesn’t matter.

What matters is whether you can successfully transport your clients to the place they want to go.

The reality is, we’re in the transformation business. The only difference between advisors and “builders” is that our role in the building is not based on using our hands. Anyone can be hired to do the hands work if the blueprint is drawn out effectively.

Our job is to help our clients get a result in the best way we know how. That’s it.

(And sometimes, that might even include a little cheerleading if it’s required.)

—kw

P.S. If you’re looking for some website inspiration, my friend Tsavo updated his top 38 consultant websites list and included me on it. It is worth a look if you’re looking to improve areas of your website.

One of the (many) problems with hosting your newsletter or blog on platforms like Substack is the inherently undifferentiated user experience.

When I see an email from Substack, or land on an article someone shared, there’s no feeling that comes from having an original design.

It feels—to me at least—like I’m reading content churned out by a machine, not a craftsperson.

My eyes glaze over.

I remember Ben Thomson of Stratechery saying that he wanted his blog to have a distinct typeface so people would feel like they had been there before if they came across his ideas more than once.

People often need to see your website a few times before they commit to subscribing to your newsletter. You want them to feel familiar with you when they do. You want to stand out.

Platforms like Substack will try to commoditize you. To package you into a neat box with limited formatting designed to fit their platform and VC-backed objectives.

They don’t want you to be overly differentiated because it’s not good for business. They want you to help build their brand and keep eyeballs on their platform.

It’s the same with LinkedIn, Medium, and many others. They’re aggregators of attention. That’s how they grow.

Whether you take that as a cynical view or not, there’s truth to it.

I’d rather publish on my own platform (ideally an independent one) and treat other platforms as syndicators.

I’d rather craft my identity one pixel at a time than force my ideas to fit into a box of someone else’s design.

When people come across my content, I want them to notice if they’ve been here before.

You may get distribution on a platform like Substack. But it will be hard to stand out—or leave an impression—when all you have is a restricted set of visual (and other) rules to conform to.

Build on your own platform. Distribute wherever you like, though.

—kw

A friendly reminder in case you were interested.

Today at 11:00 am EST, I’m hosting a 90-minute deep-dive workshop on how to package, price, and sell custom consulting services.

The workshop will cover things like:

1. What to do on your website to get prospects to inquire
2. How to uncover the real problem within the problem
3. Uncovering the cost and value of the challenge at hand
4. How to create mutually profitable and compelling options
5. How to make a business case for your prices
6. How to dramatically increase your proposal acceptance rates
7. What to do when clients push back on price
8. When to turn your custom services into productized services
9. My experience with what clients value most in a proposal
10. Bonus: Get the proposal template I use today to successfully sell my consulting services

There will be a Q&A session at the end and a full recording will be provided within 48 hours of the event.

Interested in participating?

The investment for this first version of the workshop is $79—which is barely a blip against what you will gain from improving all your future consulting proposals.

​CLICK HERE TO REGISTER​

Take a look at the photo above. What do you see?

I see a wall of sameness.

But that sameness has a purpose! It tells you these books belong to a genre. In this case, the genre is fantasy fiction.

And that’s a good thing! If you want people to quickly identify your book as fantasy fiction, you design it to look like other books in that genre.

However, looking like everyone else in your genre is a double-edged sword.

It is true that if we look like everyone else, people will recognize us when they see us. And that’s a good thing.

The problem is, looking like your peers makes it super hard to stand out. When you look at these books, you really have to squint your eyes to distinguish one book from the next.

It feels safe to look like everyone else in your genre. But it comes with a trade-off: differentiation.

So how do you safely show you belong to a genre while also standing out? That’s the line you need to tow carefully.

If you stand out too much, people mistake you for something else entirely. But if you blend in too much, people don’t think to buy from you without a lot of thought.

At the end of the day, people decide based on the differences, not the similarities between things.

How you tow that line is up to you.

—kw

P.S. If you look closely you’ll notice one book is different. It’s on the bottom row in the middle. It has a red circle on it. It’s a Lord of the Rings book—one of the best-selling books in its genre. Coincidence?

P.P.S. This Wednesday at 11 am EST, I’m hosting a live workshop: How to Package, Price, and Sell Custom Consulting Engagements. It will be 90 minutes including Q&A, with a full recording made available to those who register. Get into this if you plan on doing any custom work this year—it will be worth it. Full details and to register: https://kevin.me/ccs/

It’s easy to believe that as advisors, we get paid to have all the answers.

We feel like to add value, we need to be able to tell people what to do.

What if instead, our value came from things like:

• Asking good questions
• Having good taste
• Running ideas through your filters
• Pattern matching against your experience
• Creating visions to consider
• Clarifying ideas that aren’t well-considered
• Being an encourager of good ideas
• Wrestling with options
• Looking at things from different perspectives
• Playing devil’s advocate
• Pushing people out of their comfort zone

As technicians, we like knowing the best tool or tactic to use for any situation. As creatives, we like envisioning new ideas and potential futures.

But as advisors, what if we didn’t feel like we needed to have all answers, and instead helped our clients explore options until the answers became a little more obvious?

Your value isn’t having all the answers. Your value comes from helping your clients make good decisions.

There are a lot of ways to get a result. The key is helping your clients choose the right way for them.

Listen to this episode or subscribe via your podcast player.

—kw

P.S. REGISTER FOR THE UPCOMING WORKSHOP
Next week (January 25 at 11:00 am EST) I’m hosting a live 90-minute workshop (with the recording made available) on how to package, price, and sell custom consulting services. We’ll go deep on creating custom proposals that convert, so don’t miss this one.

REGISTER NOW

One of the most important skills to have as a consultant is your ability to sell custom engagements.

While productizing your services is a path you may eventually take, if you don’t sell custom for a while first, there’s a good chance your productized services will miss their true potential.

Selling custom before productizing allows you to get clear on:

1. Customer segments—who actually buys what from you?
2. Problems—what are the real challenges you’re solving and how do prospects describe them?
3. Goals—what are your prospects trying to accomplish and why?
4. Features—what needs to be included to get results and what do people value most?
5. Timelines—how long should your engagements be to get results?
6. Value—how much value do you actually help generate for clients?
7. Price—how much should you charge for your engagements?
8. Objections—what common objections do I need to overcome?
9. Questions—what questions do people ask when considering my services?

When you jump right to productizing, you inherently make a lot of assumptions about all of the above.

Your services may seem great “on paper” but they can easily miss the mark in several subtle or major ways.

When you miss the mark on any of the above, it will almost always cost you money. And that’s money you can never get back.

On Wednesday, January 25, I’m going to be doing a workshop on how to sell custom consulting services.

The workshop will cover things like:

1. The counter-intuitive ways to get prospects to reach out to you
2. How to uncover the real problem, the value of solving it, and the costs of inaction
3. How to create compelling options that are profitable for everyone
4. How to make a business case for your prices
5. How to dramatically increase your proposal acceptance rates
6. What to do when clients want to negotiate with you on price
7. When to turn your custom services into productized services
8. My experience with what clients value most in a proposal (and what they don’t)
9. Bonus: The proposal template I use today to successfully sell my consulting services

If you join live, there will be a Q&A session at the end.

Interested in participating?

The price for this workshop is $79 and includes a full recording within 48 hours after the event.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

(Note: Mindshare members get this workshop and past workshops free.)

Hope to see you there!

—k

It was reported in 2019 that Netflix bought the worldwide rights to show all Seinfeld episodes for $500 million with a five-year term.

Think about that for a minute: they recorded 180 episodes over 9 years. To this day—25 years later—they can still command half a billion dollars for their rights over a five-year period.

And when those five years are up, they can do it all over again.

You’re probably not going to create Seinfeld-level digital assets worth billions of dollars over their lifetime.

But you can still create small knowledge products based on the stuff you say and do every day that produces some level of income over the years to come.

Creating intellectual property assets is a mindset.

Most of us learned it the wrong way from our parents: an honest day’s work for honest pay. But that’s a limiting paradigm in today’s age—especially for consultants.

The truth is, you do still need to work hard. But getting paid doesn’t require you to continue showing up to produce and sell real value with your expertise.

Think of your journey to create IP assets as a long-term investment.

A small product here, a larger course there. Over time, it will add up.

Start small and build your asset empire one tool or lesson at a time.

—kw