Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Consultants

A list of ways to sell your head—not just your hands

There are a wide range of ways to sell your expertise without actually doing execution work for your clients.

And the great thing is, a lot of this is accessible to people who are just starting out. It’s not just for the most seasoned veterans out there.

We can all teach something, right?

Below is an incomplete list ways you can sell your expertise separate from your execution.

My goal is to help get you thinking about what’s possible for you.

1. Consulting/Coaching/Mentorship

  1. Retainers
  2. Project
  3. Single calls
  4. Private
  5. Group

2. Knowledge products

  1. Books
  2. Online Courses
  3. eBooks
  4. Audio courses

3. Live Training

  1. Workshops
  2. Cohort-based courses
  3. Webinars
  4. Seminars
  5. Conferences
  6. Speaking
  7. Individual training
  8. Corporate training
  9. Group training
  10. Lunch and learns

4. Memberships

  1. Content
  2. Community
  3. Coaching
  4. Hybrid

5. Masterminds

  1. In-person
  2. Online

6. Content subscriptions

  1. Paid newsletters
  2. Paid podcasts
  3. Physical newsletters
  4. Private podcast subscriptions
  5. Limited content series

7. Templates

  1. Checklists
  2. Creative
  3. Administrative
  4. Swipe File

You can mix any of these together or sell them separately to create an unlimited variety of products and services.

You don’t have to sell your expertise 1:1. The options are endless.

The more you can get your ideas out of your head, ideally within a framework or process (or multiple) you can own, the easier it will be to sell your knowledge independently of your hands.

It’s easier than you think to expand your offers. It might be more lucrative, too.

Start small, see what feels right for you.

Make the call

Sometimes, the best option is to kick the can down the road on a big decision. New information comes around and we’re glad we waited.

Other times, we just need to make a decision and run with it. The sooner we make a decision, the sooner we’ll have new information to work with.

If you’re going to kick the can, just don’t do it forever. It’s too easy to do that.

Make a call and adjust as you go.

Pricing based on how you feel

There are a lot of ways to price your work.

The one that will probably net you the most money in the long run is value pricing.

Value pricing means capturing a percent of the value you help create.

The problem with value pricing is it involves a more nuanced conversation. You have to be patient, ask good questions, estimate your costs, and be able to calculate potential ROI situations to find the right price.

It’s an advanced method but one to try out as you get further along with your career.

Until then, keep it in the back of your mind and use it to inform the direction of your prices.

Another way to price, one more common to a lot of us, is based on how we feel about our prices.

Feeling out your prices may seem like the wrong way to do it, but I think it deserves more credit.

The longer we do our work, the more conversations we have. The more conversations we have—and the more work we do—the more patterns we see.

Over time, our ability to feel out a good price becomes honed in.

The market gives you feedback, you see how long things take, you factor in the typical value of each result you produce, and eventually, your prices become obvious.

If you’re not sure where to price, pick something that feels right. Add a little to it so it makes you at least a little excited to do the work.

That’s your price. At least for now.

Have more conversations. See what results you get. Adjust accordingly.

Feeling out your prices may leave some on the table in the short-run, but it’s not a bad strategy if you keep evolving over time.

Pricing is as much about how you and your buyer feels as it is any logical metric based on estimated value.

“What if my marketing budget doesn’t allow me to implement your advice?”

Mindshare member, Sean, had an interesting objection while selling his advisory services.

This is a common question when selling advisory work, so it’s worth unpacking this and other follow-up questions Sean had.

“What if my marketing budget doesn’t allow me to implement your advice?”

In this episode, I talk about:

  • How to answer this question succinctly in your FAQs or sales conversations
  • The difference between cash flow/budget adherence and long-term ROI
  • Breaking out a spreadsheet to show potential cash flow scenarios
  • Comparing their other options, like agency, in-house employee, and DIY
  • Business model and pricing questions around advisory vs. managed advisory services

At the end of the day, your job is to get an ROI for your clients in a cash-sustainable manner.

If budgets are strict, your job is to work within their constraints.

But it’s also worth noting that sometimes, the ROI pays dividends over a longer time horizon.

The better you can prove a business case, the easier it will be to sell.

Listen to this episode for a more in-depth response.

What to watch for (and manage) in a new engagement

When you start a new engagement, two things are usually true:

  1. The client is excited about the future and you represent the key to their success. Hopes are at their highest.
  2. The client is equally nervous it won’t work, and are looking for any signs they made the wrong choice in hiring you.

The better you are aware of these two contradictory but normal emotions, the better you can manage expectations both ways.

And it’s so important that you do.

Tough love

To be a trusted advisor, you need to be willing to give tough love.

I mean that in two parts: tough and love.

Sometimes, your feedback will be tough.

Your clients may even resent you for a minute. It’s not easy to hear tough feedback, but your job is to speak the truth in service of their goals.

More often, though, you need to dole out the love.

Provide encouragement, build confidence, and lift up your clients. Sprinkle that stuff on liberally—we all need to build on our successes.

Most of us get very little positive feedback as it is, so we’re not even aware of the things we do well.

It’s your job to be their champion and advocate—just be sure to do it with kindness and tact.

You can’t help your clients without giving both the tough and the love.

The five buyer types

I listened to a great 2Bobs episode recently (a podcast by David C. Baker and Blair Enns) and I highly recommend checking it out.

They broke down the five buyer types (Convenience, Relationship, Price, Value, and Poker Player) and how to sell to each one in your proposals. It’s an interesting take.

Give it a listen— think you’ll get a lot of value out of it.

How does your brain work?

There’s a good chance you’re super strong in some areas and mediocre or worse in most others.

You can usually tell because you LOVE doing some kinds of work and procrastinate and feel exhausted after doing other things.

Another way to tell what you’re naturally skilled at or interested in is by paying attention to the content you like to consume.

Do you like learning step-by-step processes or do you prefer the learn big ideas that shift how you work more broadly?

It might indicate where your sweet spot is—either as a tactician, strategist, or somewhere in between.

The more you can tap into your natural gifts—and remove what you’re not meant to do—the more successful you will be and the better you will feel.

Be ruthless.

Three core ways to monetize your expertise

There are at least three core ways to monetize your expertise.

  1. You can do the work for your clients. Think, done-for-you services.
  2. You can lead the work for your clients. Think strategic advisory services.
  3. Or, you can teach your expertise instead. Think knowledge products or training.

In the beginning, you typically start out by doing the work for your clients.

It’s how you develop your skills and expertise. You can’t skip it.

But eventually, you’ll get busy. There are only so many hours in the day. So, you either turn away business or you begin to move into a leadership role.

You begin to sell strategy and oversee the execution instead of being the one to actually do it.

This may look like hiring sub-contractors or employees and leading their efforts. Or, like me, maybe you prefer to stay small and do advisory work.

These are leadership roles and they can pay a lot.

Eventually, you may want to package your hard-earned expertise into knowledge products or group coaching, training, or workshops.

You are separating your earning from your effort when you sell your expertise independently of your time.

This can be extremely lucrative if you do it well. It scales, but it’s not easy.

You can do one, many, or all of these at the same time.

The choice is yours to make—have fun with it!

How narrowly should you niche when starting out as a consultant?

A Mindshare community member had a great question about how narrow to go with your niche when just starting out as a new consultant.

Here’s the gist of his question:

I’m currently in-house at what would probably be classed as a B2B manufacturer.

The plan is to step into strategy/advisory within the next 6 months.

So with my current experience, I see it as an easy step to niche further into B2B – helping B2B manufacturers grow by transforming their marketing.

However, the company I work for is actually a manufacturer/service provider in the fire safety space. As a result a lot of my experience is how to target, position, market etc to a pretty specific ICP.

So my options would/could be:

1) General B2B
2) Manufacturers
3) Fire Safety & Security companies (B2B focussed but not all will be manufacturers)

Some of my thoughts on 3 come of the back of going to a big fire safety expo recently—there are a lot of companies with bad websites/branding spending a lot of money on their marketing!

I’m just concerned I could narrow myself too much.

As always, any thoughts are greatly received.

This is a great question that I answered in the community but wanted to give greater nuance to with a long-form audio recording.

The question really is: how niche do you go when leaving a job and starting a consulting practice?

In this episode, I talk about factors like:

  • The amount of runway you have
  • The size of the market
  • Access to the target market in your network
  • What things you’re credible at
  • The benefits of staying broader at first
  • Alignment of your niche with your genuine interests
  • And general strategies for transitioning out of a job and into consulting with less risk

If you’re thinking of making the leap from employment to consulting and aren’t sure how niche to go, this episode is for you.

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