Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator
Kevin C. Whelan
“Fish at your feet first.”
I quote this sentence a lot, yet I can’t find a reference for it.
I think I spun it off in my head from the original quote, “fish where the fish are”.
Why fish at your feet first? Because that’s where you’re standing.
There’s no point in casting deep into the ocean looking for new opportunities if you haven’t looked immediately around you first.
There’s a good chance you’ll find plenty of fish nearby if you look.
How confident are you in the quality of work you deliver for your clients?
Would you be willing to let other marketing professionals audit your work? Would it stand up to a reasonable degree of scrutiny if you did?
Which parts would you be inclined to try to brush under the rug? What parts feel vague to you?
As an advisor, you don’t need to know everything. Nobody does. But you do need to be a voracious learner and curious about all areas of marketing.
You’re paid for your expertise, after all. You need to have a wide range of knowledge and skills to do your job well at the strategic level.
There are two things I do constantly to help compensate for areas I’m less skilled at:
Nobody’s marketing is perfect. But you should feel confident letting anybody audit your client work.
Find your blind spots and compensate them in one or both of the ways above.
You’ll be glad you did.
If I didn’t write every day, I’d probably write a LOT less frequently. The deadline keeps me going—even when I don’t feel like writing.
And if I wrote less frequently, I’d probably come up with fewer interesting ideas. Not that all my posts are hits. They’re not. That’s not the point.
The point of writing daily is to force yourself to think about and clarify your ideas. You then use those ideas in your education and advisory work, which is where you capture their value.
It also lets people see how you think—which is the very thing you get paid for. In some ways, it’s a sample of what it’s like to work with you.
You don’t need to write daily, but the more you write and publish, the clearer your thinking will be and the more ideas you’ll have.
As an advisor, those ideas are where your value comes from.
Write to capture that value.
Your first idea is rarely the one that endures.
When starting something new, whether it is a project, business, or offering, expect things to evolve.
Give your idea the room it needs to adapt to feedback. Expect to find dead ends along the way. Learn as you go.
If you stick with it long enough and evolve with customer demand, you will succeed.
Remember that all new things start small and a little bit crappy. And they usually take more time and iteration than you may expect.
Think longterm.
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If you have difficulty selling advisory services, or if clients stop listening to your advice during your engagements, it might be due to one of the three things I talk about in this episode.
Give it a listen and share with a friend who might benefit!
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Imagine your business could only grow by word of mouth.
Every new client had to be referred by someone who worked with you.
What would you do? Would you ask your current and past clients for referrals? Would you offer an incentive?
I don’t know the answer here, but I’d probably start by asking my clients if they knew 1-3 people who might benefit from my services, and if so, whether they would be make warm introductions.
Naturally, I’d also try to over-deliver on my services, but I already try to do that anyway.
What else would you try? What works for you already?
Hit reply if you have any good ideas. I’ll share them with the readers.
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It can be tempting to ignore all or parts of your core process with a new client. I call this your Methodology.
You might find yourself jumping into an engagement head first, reacting to demands and/or responding to tactical projects already in motion.
Things may be under tight timelines and the client feels like they know what they need to do, they just need a little guidance.
But the problem is, when you skip some or all of your core process, things quickly begin to fall apart.
Instead of deciding what to do, you’re reacting to things the client wants you to do.
Instead of diagnosing the real problems and developing a strategic plan, you’re working within the parameters of their thinking, not yours.
But you’re hired to be the expert and you’ve been doing this a long time. Which means you need to be true to the process that has gotten results time and time again.
In this episode, I talk about the three big reasons why you should have a formal process and stick to it during all of your client engagements.
Every time I skip some or all of it, I always regret it. At very least, I prefer to check the boxes so I know no stone is unturned.
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Most people won’t buy from you today.
It doesn’t matter if you have perfect a message, offer, and audience. If they’re not ready now, they won’t buy today.
But they might buy someday.
Which means to win the business of most people, you have to have two things:
Getting clear on your target market and offering things they actually want is your first and most important job.
You have to know what problem you’re solving and they need to know that’s what you do.
As for the second part, that’s where content marketing excels. The value you share over time gives you permission to stay in front of them.
No value, no attention.
So if you want to grow your advisory business, there’s almost no better way to do it than content marketing done consistently for a long, long time.
Build relationships and keep showing up.
A lot of content is ignored because it wasn’t written with anyone in particular in mind.
And because of that, it feels general. It lacks “crunch”. So nobody even notices it.
The more clear and specific your intended recipient, the better your content will be.
Pick somebody in your mind and write to them. Pretend your post is intended just for them.
The specificity of your focus will bring out the topic, structure, and nuance needed to make it interesting.
Last week, I bought a 100-foot Ethernet cable and ran it directly to my office from my router on another floor.
My WiFi had been randomly dropping out during Zoom calls and it was long past annoying.
I previously called my internet provider and the best answer they had was to replace my router in case it was broken, or pay a monthly fee plus setup to install additional boxes on all floors.
I was ready to spend the money but then I realized something simple: I could just run a wire into my office myself.
I always knew I could do this, but it still for some reason took me weeks to actually consider doing it.
The lessons here are threefold:
Get that thing done. You know what it is. You’ll feel great when you do.