Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator
Kevin C. Whelan
It’s scary to commit to a niche. Doing so inherently means excluding most of the world with your marketing.
In some ways, it goes against all survival instincts. And that’s why so few people do it.
It’s also why so many marketing consultants struggle to build a real businesses with healthy margins and ample time freedom.
You can survive without a niche, but you will create a lot greater leverage, profit, and impact with one.
There’s a lot of talk about brand vs. performance marketing.
In my view, all marketing is performance marketing. If brand helps you increase performance, it’s a good tool to use.
If you’re not concerned with nor able to track performance, you’re not doing marketing.
You’re doing art.
The late Zig Ziglar—a renowned author, motivational speaker, and salesman—had many valuable lessons about sales.
One of his lessons that still stands out to me was to be a “co-buyer” with your prospects during the sales process.
That means sitting on their side of the table. To think about all the angles from their perspective. And ultimately, to help them make a purchase only if it’s right for them.
When you act as a co-buyer, it shows prospects you’re already acting in their best interest, not yours. And that’s what a fiduciary advisor does.
Your clients feel this intention when you genuinely have it. It sets a precedent of trust that lasts throughout the entire engagement.
Be your clients biggest advocate—before, during, and after the sale.
That’s the kind of advisor you want to be.
You don’t need a big audience. You don’t need to do mass marketing. You don’t need to reach out to a million people.
Advisory work is not a numbers game, it’s a game of individual relationships.
All you need is ten clients. Or five. Or three. Or twenty. Ideally, they’re people you like working with.
When you think in terms of reaching people one-by-one, making real connections, and adding real value each time, growing your business is a lot less daunting.
Sure, find the golden geese. Put your ideas out there and distribute them far and wide. Eventually you may decide to scale things up.
But for now, think small. Think singular.
Think individual people. Think making one connection at a time and leave people better off than they were before.
Think about helping one client achieve one specific outcome. Think about one new email subscriber or one new connection on LinkedIn.
Think about one ideal target market and see if you can build a business around their unique needs.
When you think small, big things happen.
Being able to sell advisory services is usually a product of doing execution work for a long time.
You’ve done it so long that it no longer makes sense for you to use your hands. You’ll be too expensive.
Which means your value is in knowing what and how things should be done, and then facilitating the execution with your clients.
If you’re struggling to fill your roster with advisory clients, go back to the basics. Put in the reps doing execution work. Phase into advisory services.
Sell grunt work until you can sell your head instead.
P.S. I talk a lot about phasing into advisory work. Join the Mindshare Community to listen to a private podcast episode where I talk about this and similar topics.
What is the best way to build a business model for your advisory business?
Start with a specific target market in mind.
See what they really want and need. Understand their situation better than anybody. Get specific with your content.
Then work backwards from the outcome to create your distinct products and services.
If you can do it at multiple price-points, even better. Multiple levels of their time and effort? Perfect. Multiple speeds of implementation? Ideal.
Maybe you offer 1:1 consulting, or group coaching, or live training, a course, a book, a membership—maybe you offer all of those things.
Or none of them. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is you can solve the problem they’re seeking to solve in a profitable manner for you and them in terms of time, effort, and money.
Give people multiple options around price, speed, and effort—ensuring it’s also worthwhile for you—and you have the basis for a good business model.
But remember to begin with the target market.
One of the hardest parts of consulting without a niche is needing to reinvent the wheel with every new client.
The broad stokes of your work will be similar from industry to industry, but all of the details and nuances will be different.
The places your clients’ buyers spend time, where they search, their specific buying motivations—all the good stuff will need to be learned from scratch. And learning is expensive.
It’s fun to work on new challenges, but it also costs a lot in terms of time and energy.
Working in a niche is like having all the answers to the test before you write it.
It’s not just good for the client, it’s good for you, too.
My core value proposition to help marketing consultants build and run a profitable advisory practice.
My coaching, membership, training, community, and even this email list are designed to help you do just that.
In other words, it’s all unified. One universal promise. All touch-points designed to help you do the same thing.
Sure, there’s lots of nuance in what I offer. I talk about creating leverage, specialization, designing your business model, marketing—all the tools you need to increase the success and profitability of your marketing practice.
Sometimes, I even talk about mindset, or soft skills, or even unrelated topics entirely. We’re not all logical and one-dimensional.
The point is, with everything I do, my goal and promise is to help you achieve that single outcome. That’s my universal value proposition.
Do you have a universal value proposition? Hit reply and let me know.
I’m not actually against the term ‘Fractional CMO’. I just don’t love it.
You may or may not recall, but there’s been a lot of terms for what we as marketing experts do—especially since the digital era.
Digital strategists, e-marketing specialists, growth hackers… the list goes on and on.
As one new term rises, another inevitably takes its place, making the former one look outdated.
‘Fractional CMO’ feels a little like one of those terms to me.
But here’s the thing: the fractional CMO positioning works right now. People get it when you say, “I’m like hiring a part time chief marketing officer”.
And that’s important when you only have a minute to explain what the hell you even do.
There’s another reason I don’t love the term:
It positions you like an employee. And employees are in many ways to take orders.
Not really, but kind of. As a fractional CMO, there’s the expectation that you’re hired to do what the client wants.
And while that’s true to some degree, I’d argue you’re hired to get a result a client wants, not to do what they want you to do.
Because what they want to do is often not entirely the thing they should do to get the result they really want.
Above all else that you’re a consultant.
You’re paid for your expertise, not to take orders and execute them.
And because even ‘consultants’ are sometimes used as a fancy term for a freelancer who executes hard things, I prefer the term ‘advisor’.
It’s timeless and says what it is you do: you sell advice.
So I’m not saying don’t position yourself as a fractional CMO. I just don’t want my content and positioning to use that term too much because it reminds me of all the other buzzwords that came before it.
It works today, so use it if you want. You can always change it later.
Just know the risks and constraints of fractional CMO positioning.
Imagine you only had ten units of client time per month.
Every 1:1 client you worked with was one unit, every group coaching cohort was another, your memberships were another, and maybe even the products you sell were another.
Once they were sold out, you could not take on any more work.
How would your business look in terms of focus and profitability?
Would you feel more or less organized? More financially secure or less? Limited or empowered?
I view my advisory business this way and it has many benefits:
When you think of your business as having limited units of available inventory, it forces you to get clear on how the parts work together.
It allows you to design a business you want and an experience clients love.
When you think of it as “I’ll sell as much as I can until I can’t sell anymore”, your business will tend to lack focus and may end up running you.
That’s what works for me as a solo advisor.
What works for you?