Marketing Consultants

In a down market, businesses need to work harder to maintain and grow profitability.

Companies will be more price sensitive than usual, but there’s always demand for people who can create value in surplus of their costs.

As a consultant, this is your opportunity. The next lead that comes along, get clear on what their business goals really are.

Figure out how they will measure success against those goals. Don’t let them be vague or ambiguous.

Using those metrics, do some napkin math with them to roughly estimate the value of achieving those metrics.

Once you’re clear on the goals and how you’d measure success, your job now is to create three options to help them get there.

You could do one or two, but three options creates a nice range to choose from. Anchor all of your offers against the value of their goals. Make each a clear win for both of you.

Assuming you can help them make meaningful headway toward those goals, there should be plenty of value in the relationship for both of you to capture.

This is the essence of value-based fees. This is what it means to be a co-buyer with your client.

Goals, measurement, value, price, and scope.

—k

H/T to Alan Weiss for his teachings on this.

You may be a rock star when it comes to marketing your clients’ business.

But when it comes to your own, it might be an entirely different story. And you know what? That doesn’t make you a bad marketer.

It’s incredibly hard to market yourself—especially if you don’t have a system to follow.

In this episode, I break down the three core pillars to attracting more clients:

Advisory work isn’t your golden ticket to financial freedom. It’s called advisory work after all.

The truth is, it’s really hard to sell your head independent of your hands. It takes years to build up the skills needed to lead people to an outcome without being the one with your hands on the keyboard.

Luckily, though, it’s more of a spectrum than a binary transformation.

If you’re a freelancer, you can sub-contract the less strategic parts of your work to other people. You can hire people to perform the basic functions of your job while you handle strategy, vision, and account management.

Eventually, you build up processes, templates, and examples that others can follow. These are gold for advisory work down the line. They also make great knowledge products you can sell along the way.

You can turn your work into an agency model, if you want. You become a leader of the operations, not the one doing day-to-day execution.

But if, like me, you prefer to stay solo, you can begin to do what I call managed advisory work, which most people associate with terms like interim/fractional CXO in various capacities.

This model will force you to create even more templates, trainings, and bring examples to make execution more and more streamlined. It will also help you build up your Rolodex of people who specialize in various kinds of execution work.

You become good at managing vs. doing the execution work. You’re still responsible for the outcome, it’s just your hands aren’t doing all the things anymore.

Eventually, you remove the management part. It’s important, but a lot more people can manage things if you empower them with the right tools and strategies.

That’s when you become a pure advisor. Your job is about facilitating outcomes and directing how best to allocate budgets, measure outcomes, and get results in any way you can.

All the while, you’ve been building up your arsenal of tools, people, and training to bring to your engagements. You became an educator from the moment you involved other people in the execution.

And if you keep with it long enough, your work becomes largely about teaching others. You do training, create knowledge products, and share templates, processes, and examples for how to do things.

The road won’t be easy and it certainly won’t be overnight. It’s something you build towards slowly and with conscious effort, day by day.

The more you take your expertise, package it up, and sell it separately from your hands, the more you’ll potentially earn and the more discretionary time you’ll have back.

So where are you on this journey? Are you stuck or do you have clarity?

Reply and let me know—I’d love to hear how you’re progressing on the journey toward a leveraged expertise business.

—k

The more you publish your ideas, the more likely you are to repeat yourself. And that’s okay.

Because you know what? Most ideas don’t sink in with your audience the first time they hear them.

Like our favourite bands, we fall in love with a song and we want to keep listening to it over and over. And when that song gets tired, we want to hear another song by them just like it.

(It’s why people get mad when bands “sell out” by changing their style).

Better to have a few big ideas and reinforce them many times from many angles than to share a million ideas that aren’t worth repeating.

So keep sharing your big ideas—the world needs to hear them.

Again, and again.

What if the way to get your emails read and subscribers to stay subscribed was to lower the bar a little?

Not in terms of quality, necessarily. But in terms of format or type.

Instead of trying to write a grand theory of mathematics every time you publish, what if we treated email more like social media?

What if we aimed for a simple, concise, interesting, and/or fun piece of content?

Something light and consumable. Not overthought. Not pre-judged. Just something you found interesting or valuable.

Would you be able to be consistent with your publishing habits? Would your readers prefer it? Would it keep you interested?

I think yes. But there’s nuance, as with all things.

So give this a listen. See if it resonates with your headspace.

See if it helps you overcome that mental block stopping you from sharing your ideas with your subscribers.

And while you’re at it, subscribe to Mindshare Radio via your podcast player to get more ideas like this (and interviews coming soon).

—k

A while back, I stopped writing daily after 548 consecutive posts.

I was about to have my second child and knew my energy and bandwidth would be limited for a while.

Opportunities didn’t immediately dry up—though they would have if I neglected writing long enough.

But I realized my expertise felt less sharp. In a way, it felt like my expertise had rusted a little.

It’s just like the other week when my wife took our second car to an appointment. The car sounded like it was struggling for a bit. We hadn’t driven it in a couple of months and no surprise, it was sluggish.

The reality is, you don’t lose your expertise by not writing. You do lose the sharp edge, however. If your ideas stay in your head, they remain vague and slightly blurry.

The more you teach what you know, the sharper your ideas get, the stronger your thinking muscle gets, and the more people will be attracted to your ideas in general.

Even if nobody consumes your ideas, the very act of sharing your ideas and teaching what you know will make your expertise sharper.

And that alone is valuable.

I’m a big fan of companies who define and share their guiding principles and/or create manifestos explaining their core beliefs about their work.

Whenever I see a good example of one, I swipe it for later. I hope to make one of my own some day—it’s not only good for marketing, it’s good for creating clarity around what matters.

37 Signals is a great example. As far as I know, they’ve had 37 principles since the company was founded, though it looks like some have changed over the years.

Check out their current version here: https://37signals.com

And the originals: https://1999.37signals.com

If you could summarize your core principles or create a manifesto showcasing your core beliefs, what would it say?

Feel free to reply if even one idea comes to mind that you’d like to share.

—k

As a teenager, I played a lot of sports.

On occasion, I’d get called up to the older teams to fill a slot on their roster.

I played rugby and hockey—and both sports were full contact. Frankly, they were ​intense for someone not used to the pace and size of the older players.

The first few games were intimidating. But you know what happened? I adapted.

I learned to keep up. And it made me a better player.

When I went back to my own age group, I brought skills and urgency that didn’t exist at my usual level.

I became better simply because I got out of my comfort zone. I was forced to play at a higher level to “survive”.

It’s the same in business. When you try new things, it can be intimidating at first.

Maybe you’re trying to get a speaking gig or write a book. Maybe you’re going into a new niche and you have no idea if it will work. Maybe you’re guesting on your first podcast or doing a webinar for the first time.

You may get knocked around a bit in the process. That’s to be expected. But you’ll also adapt.

Either way, you’ll be better for it

—k

The word profitable is a funny thing. Most of us initially think of it in terms of a financial return on investment.

But to me, the word profitable means worthwhile; sustainable. And that may or may not include a financial ROI.

Merriam Webster defines it as, “yielding advantageous returns or results.”

Oxford Dictionary has a definition that includes, “beneficial; useful.” They also have a financial definition, “(of a business or activity) yielding profit or financial gain.”

The thing to keep in mind is that profitable is not always remunerative.

For some, a profitable outcome of your engagement may be a happier staff, more organized way of doing things, or an easier life in general. ​

Those activities need to be worthwhile. They need to benefit the company more than the opportunity costs.

For others, it’s about measurable financial ROI.​ Either way, it needs to be a profitable situation.

Business leaders make this calculation in their heads constantly. Everything is a trade-off of either time or other limited resources with the goal of creating the most profitable outcomes for their business.

Which brings me to my point…

It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. If you want your work to be sustainable, it needs to be profitable for you and your clients.

Your free content needs to yield a greater return on your recipient’s time than not consuming it. Otherwise, people won’t consume it for long.

Your services need to yield a greater return on time, energy, and financial investment—otherwise, your business is operating at a net negative in terms of mutual profitability.

If the work you’re doing isn’t profitable for both parties, it’s not sustainable.

And if it’s not sustainable, it’s only a matter of time before it ends

—k

P.S. Are deadlines and deliverables getting you down?

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