Marketing Consultants

You probably won’t accomplish anything significant in the next three months (unless you started long ago).

You may not even get much done over the next six months.

But you can get a lot done over the next five years. Look back over the last five years to see how far you’ve come.

If you’re going to start something new—whether it be entering a new niche or launching an unproven service—take a five-year plus horizon.

If it’s still worth pursuing, begin the process today—even if it’s in a small way.

You may still end up somewhere else in five years, but you’ll be glad you took action either way.

Consultants have a hard job sometimes.

Our main job is to help create change. And change is rarely easy nor embraced by all—especially those who didn’t initiate them.

During the course of your work, emotions will occasionally get stirred up.

Things will be delayed or become more expensive than anticipated. Somebody—maybe you or maybe someone else—will make a mistake.

People will disagree. Things will get stressful.

And when they do, the best thing you can do is trust your intuition and call out the emotions in the room.

You do this with tact, of course. You do this in a way that helps air the bottled emotions to allow everyone to address them head on.

If you can’t address the emotions in the room, your work will be a lot more difficult. You can’t do your job without this skill.

Don’t be scared to call out the emotions in the room. But don’t get sucked into them, either. Knowing this is part of your job allows you to stay detached from them.

It’s all part of the process.

Nobody is born with expertise.

It has to be earned through years of hard-won experience and self-directed education.

The experience part comes with time, but the amount of self-education we do is entirely within our control.

You could take most of your revenue as profit each year, relying on the experience gained through your client work.

Or, you can take some of that profit and reinvest it back into your education about your craft and the business of delivering it.

I don’t know how to succeed on experience alone. But I do know that I personally invest in my knowledge like my business depends on it… because it does. And my bottom line thanks me for it.

There are a lot of things you can cheap out on in your business. Your education isn’t one of them.

If you won’t invest in your education, the market won’t invest in you. Your experience alone is not going to cut it.

Be an voracious learner.

When is the last time someone asked you what you really wanted in your business?

I’m guessing it’s been a long time. Or maybe never.

Even your friends or loved ones—no matter how much they care about you—will rarely look you in the eye and ask you what your dream business looks like.

And if they did, what would you even say?

Luckily, with some introspection, you can begin this process yourself.

Ask yourself the following:

1. If you could accomplish any outcome in your business, what would it be?
2. Why does it matter to you personally?
3. What would your daily life look like?
4. How much would you need to earn?
5. What kind of people would you work with?
6. How would you feel every day in your work?

Now, what would it feel like if you failed to even try, let alone achieve it?

The first step to achieving anything is to get clear on what you want to accomplish most.

As they say, a problem well-articulated is a problem half-solved.

And as obvious as it sounds, the next step is putting your vision into action with even the smallest of steps.

It could be an outline, or a draft, or an email to someone to get a ball rolling. It doesn’t matter as long as you do at least one tiny thing.

When you have unclear goals, you usually feel like you’re not making progress. You lose motivation. You procrastinate. You feel burned out or stressed.

You can’t win if you don’t know what winning really looks like for you. And winning looks different for everybody.

Instead of wandering through the fog towards a vague goal, spend five minutes right now thinking about a day in the life of your ideal business.

Give that gift to yourself going into the weekend. A little imagination and the smallest of actions can go a long way.

If you need help achieving your professional goals this year and next, hit reply and let’s talk.

If you want to do advisory work, you need mutual trust with your clients.

The trust has to go both ways.

If a client doesn’t trust you, you’ll end up trying to convince them of everything and nothing will get done.

If you don’t trust the client, take that as a serious red flag and protect yourself accordingly.

Advisory work is not a low-touch business. You’re almost partnering with your clients if you do it right.

If trust on either side is in question, either address it head on with the client or move on to greener pastures.

It’s not worth the stress you’ll face nor the unhappy endings.

The CEO of a company is the person most responsible for the long-term value creation in a business.

They should not only be bought-in to your strategic marketing plan, they should be involved in creating it.

Briefing them on what you think they should do won’t work.

To get the best results, you need their knowledge, intuition, and experience infused into the plan you create.

No amount of expertise or discovery on your end will compensate for this.

If they’re not involved in the strategic planning process, they won’t understand the thinking behind it.

And that means they won’t be able to make the often hard but necessary trade-offs and investments to make it work.

The CEO should be your best friend. Once a plan is decided on, it’s their job is to champion the ideas internally and remove the inevitable roadblocks.

Nobody else can do that for you in the company. Not their team, not their marketing manager. Only the CEO.

If you can’t get them involved in the strategic planning process and bought-in to the outcome, the project will flounder and then fail.

It’s your job to say that, too.

When a new client commits to working with you, how you onboard them is critical to how your engagement will go.

It sets the tone for everything to follow.

Once the deal is approved, your job is to sweep them off their feet and guide them swiftly into your process.

How you get signatures, gather information, send invoices, request payment, share documents and resources—it all has to feel like a well-oiled machine.

After all, buyer’s remorse is a real thing.

Clients are most acutely aware of the details (or lack thereof) right after committing to a big purchase like your consulting services.

And if you’re winging it or disorganized, they’ll immediately regret their decision. And rightfully so.

And that’s not how you want your new clients to feel—ever.

Your job is to show your clients you’ve done this before and they can relax. That they’re in good hands and can trust you to guide the way.

And the only way you can do that well is with a good onboarding process backed by a thorough delivery methodology.

If you get this part wrong, the rest of the engagement is on thin ice.

P.S. If you need help with your onboarding systems, join Mindshare Pro for only $100/mo.

You’ll get access to my entire suite of marketing advisory templates, workflows, and methodologies you can use right away, plus some additional live coaching calls, and more coming soon.

Yesterday, I shared two ways to build demand for your services in a new consulting business or niche.

One idea I shared was to give away as much value as you can for free.

A reader, friend, and fellow consultant, Andrew, made an excellent point that deserves clarification.

He said:

On your second point, it may be helpful to add some more detail: give away as much value as you can for free in public.

In my view, you should never be doing customer specific, private work for free (beyond a short consultation call, which is really part of the sales process).

This is a great point and was what I had in mind but didn’t articulate.

Your free content should be generally applicable to people consuming it. It might be any number of formats ranging from blog posts to entire free mini courses.

But if people want your advice applied to their specific situation, they either need pay you for it or you can do it in another way that benefits you.

Here are three examples of those other ways:

1. Record a coaching call and turning it into a podcast episode. People will see how you thing and it de-risks hiring you.
2. Sharing your responses in a community so others get value from it, too (for the same reasons as above).
3. Do your first one or two engagements free in exchange for feedback, case studies, and testimonials. Only do this if you need to really iron out your delivery and/or prove your credibility.

Free resources are there to attract your ideal buyers and show them value. If you do it right, some percentage of them will want your expertise applied to their situation.

That’s what you’re paid for. If you work for free, you’ll be out of business and nobody will appreciate it anyway.

Hope this clarifies an important distinction.

What do you do when you’re new to consulting and nobody seems to want what you’re selling yet?

Here are two ideas to consider:

1. Make sure demand exists already for the category of thing you sell in the market you sell it to

There’s no point in trying to sell ice to a penguin.

If nobody wants it, check to make sure demand for that thing already exists in the market you’re trying to sell it to.

Do some research.

Ideally, you want see your ideal clients buying similar things from other people. It means there’s a market.

Or, you’ll overhear people’s pains and problems either directly or via online communities where they hang out.

If you can’t point to existing demand in the market, there might not be enough of it.

Validate it with research if you can, then move to the next point.

2. Give away as much value as you can for free

One of the best ways to gain interest in your consulting services—especially in the beginning—is to give away as much as you can for free.

Since you’re in the business of selling your expertise, it makes sense you’ll be finding ways to share it free in various formats to give people immense value up front.

Whether you do daily writing, email newsletters, videos, webinars, or social media posts, your goal is simply to be useful and over-deliver on the free stuff.

Once people are hanging around your ecosystem and getting an abundance of value for free, it will be a lot easier to sell something.

If you can get both of these right, you’ll be in a good place to sell whatever you want.

If you aren’t there yet, these ideas are what I’d start first.

It doesn’t matter what you sell, if it’s not mutually profitable for you and your clients, you’re not running a sustainable business.

The better you understand and can articulate the value you create, the more successful your business will be.

People don’t buy products and services for the sake it. They buy it for the value they get out of it.

Make sure what you do is profitable for you and your clients.

If you can demonstrate it, you have a sound business.