Marketing Consultants

There are three general ways you can grow your business: nurturing, prospecting, and mining.

1. Nurturing

You won’t sell anything without first developing and nurturing your audience and relationships.

Nurturing efforts include:

• Giving value in the form of educational content or freebies
• Checking in personally to see how people are doing
• Sending a card or a gift to people you value most
• Promoting people’s content or work out of good will
• Or any other number of relationship-enhancing activities

The more you invest in your relationships, the more you’ll get out of them.

Give, give, give before you ask anybody for anything.

2. Mining

Usually, the best place to drum up new business is by tapping into your existing audience and relationships to see if there are any ready buyers.

You can do that by:

• Asking for referrals and introductions
• Promoting something you are offering
• Reaching out to past clients to check in
• Contacting past leads to re-open a discussion

Of course, “mining” should be done in the most contributory way possible, hence leading with nurturing.

You never want to deplete your relationships—only present valuable offers to the right people at the right time.

Give people an offer they like, but avoid the hard sell.

3. Prospecting

The third approach is seeking to build new relationships by gaining exposure to new audiences in your target market.

You can do that by:

• Guesting on podcasts
• Speaking at or attending events
• Contributing to online communities
• Advertising and sponsorships
• Joint venture projects and promotions
• Cold outreach and range of other lead gen activities

Prospecting is a lot easier if you have pre-nurtured relationships with colleagues and others in your industry.

You also want to be prepared to give something in return for access to other people’s audiences, such as offering them exposure to your audience (i.e. invite them onto a podcast first).

Choosing your tactic

If you find yourself constantly prospecting, it might be time to focus on nurturing for a while.

Or, if you find yourself constantly mining, it’s definitely time to switch up your tactics or you risk depleting people’s good will.

Ask yourself this: for the next three months, do I need to be mining or prospecting most?

You should always be nurturing. So the question becomes where to spend your effort next to grow your business.

Have you ever spoken to a new client or prospect and realized how obvious the solutions are to you? I bet it happens a lot.

It’s not because you’re some magic marketing genius necessarily—though you probably are that, too.

The reason is largely due to your vantage point as an outside observer.

Your pattern matching and expertise combined with this outside perspective makes things a lot simpler to see for what they are.

That’s in part because there’s less emotion involved. There are no sunk costs or political baggage to content with. There are fewer (or different) limiting beliefs about their situation to be constrained by.

It’s almost impossible to see your own situation objectively. You’ve largely solved (or decided to ignore) the obvious challenges already. It’s the less obvious things that will help you the most.

And it’s precisely for this reason why an outside coach or advisor can help you so much, too.

So consider this your friendly reminder to do yourself a favour and hire a coach next year.

It might be just a call. It might be more involved. But even small doses of outside perspective can have a major impact.

—kw

P.S. My prices are going up almost across the board in 2022.

I’m fully booked for 1:1 coaching and consulting until then, but you can still sign up for Mindshare Pro (which won’t change) and the Mastermind Program.

If you’re interested in 1:1 coaching or consulting, reach out soon to secure the existing pricing.

A great way to determine the value of an engagement is to reverse the desired outcome and ask what would happen if the project failed.

What would the immediate and longterm implications be? What pain would they feel?

What would the sunk costs vs. the potential gains be? And what is the delta between those two points?

As a consultant, your job is to capture the potential upside of your clients’ situation while also mitigating the downside risks.

They’re two sides of the same coin.

The value potential of an engagement is the total span between utter failure and total success. 

That’s the conversation you should be having when discussing the value of your services—especially when price is a factor.

You don’t succeed by answering questions better than anyone else.

Sometimes, you succeed by asking better questions than anyone else.

Ask better questions, get better answers.

Get better answers, get better results.

To be successful in your engagements, your clients need to trust you. You can’t do your job without it.

But the other side of the equation is that you need to trust your clients, too.

After all, you’ll be working closely for a long time.

It begins in the sales conversation.

Do you trust your prospect to do business with integrity? To pay you on time? To be respectful when things inevitably get difficult?

If you feel stressed, or intimidated, or like your can’t be yourself, or that you’re being treated like a subordinate—if for any reason you feel wary or distrustful of your prospect—don’t ignore it.

Often, there is a good reason for that feeling. Pay close attention.

If it doesn’t feel right during the sales process, it’s probably wise to turn down the business.

Only accept clients you trust.

Some things don’t change in marketing. Human psychology and inherent human drives may be one of them.

But some things—technology in particular—are always changing. And it seems the pace of change is accelerating.

New technologies like crypto/web3 are exploding in popularity and will soon become inseparable from the internet as we know it.

But even the less sensational technologies we work with every day are also constantly evolving.

Our phones, computers, ad platforms, search engines, social media, email, programming languages—nothing is ever static.

As marketers, we need to stay in tune with these evolutions of technology. We need to continually adapt to and adopt these new changes to keep doing our jobs effectively.

You may not like change. It might feel like you’ve figured things out already. Or the new thing is just a fad.

You may not want to embrace new things like TikTok, crypto, or the metaverse.

But if you want to remain relevant for the next decade and beyond, it’s important to remain open-minded about these changes and embrace the learning process—even if it feels uncomfortable.

Some things don’t change, but most things do.

Keep learning, friends.

There are a lot of ways to find clients as a consultant.

But I don’t know a better way than creating content consistently over time.

You may find it works even better if you create lots of it. Daily, even. Especially when you’re starting.

And I’m not talking about a few daily tweets or a social media post. I mean content with substance.

A blog, video, podcast—something with a little meat to it.

Sure, fewer high-quality posts may also work. There’s always a market for quality if you can truly pull it off.

But there’s nothing like good old fashioned elbow grease to help you reach escape velocity.

Create content. Lots of it. Webinars, videos, blog posts, it doesn’t matter. 

Eventually, luck will find you.

Yesterday, I talked about the power of “arbitrary goals“. I thought I’d expand on it a bit more to make it practical.

Your goals could be at least one of two things: outcome or input-focused. 

Examples of outcome-focused goals include revenue targets, profit, number of clients, number of leads, or even selling a new service at least once.

Examples of input-focused goals include writing one blog post per month, recording one podcast episode per week, reaching out to one person each day, or any number of other activities.

Another term for these goals might be leading and lagging indicators.

By setting goals for leading indicators, such as the activities you control, you should achieve some level of lagging indicators as a result.

And that’s how you want to think about your marketing, too. Inputs and outputs. Like a machine or an ecosystem.

Figure out what inputs you need to make to achieve a specific result. If something doesn’t work, try new inputs or change the variables until something works.

When you set targets for both inputs and outputs, it forces you to look at your marketing as a system of parts that make up a whole.

You can still manage the strategy, direction, and creative execution of those parts, but having targets forces you to behave in a way most likely to get a desired result.

Because at the end of the day, it’s the results that matter most.