Marketing Consultants

Bad-fit clients will drain your energy and focus away from your good ones. And that’s not good for business.

The minute you take on clients with red flags, you run a high risk of this happening. Once you see one red flag, there’s usually many.

The red flags may look like a sales process where they treat you like a subordinate, or them saying they’ve churned through several consultants before you, or any number of other examples.

Whatever they are—and there are many to watch for—it’s important you pay attention to them.

The most critical part of your selection criteria should be your relationship with the prospect.

How do you feel during the sales process? Do you sense a connection? Will you get along with them? Is there a relatively high degree of mutual trust?

You don’t need to become best friends, but establishing a positive connection is the foundation to a successful engagement.

Once that’s covered, only then should you analyze their goals and see if you’re a fit.

Choose your clients wisely—including the ones already on your roster.

Picking a niche or area of specialization is terrifying for many. It was for me the first time I “made the leap”.

You feel like you’ll quickly get bored of doing the same thing day in and day out. But what actually happens is the opposite.

Your work becomes more like art.

Each client you work with, each new detail you add to your methodology, each new process you perfect becomes like an additional brush stroke on your path toward mastery.

And the opposite is also true.

Once a situation comes along that breaks the mold of your expertise, you don’t really enjoy it like you once did. It’s not the fresh challenge you once enjoyed.

Instead, you see the imposter in yourself that you once were. The amateur willing to learn on the clients’ dime.

To be clear, I’m not saying all those who don’t specialize are amateurs learning on the dimes of their clients. There are plenty of highly talented generalists who do great work.

It just feels like that internally for you after being a specialist for a long time.

Once you specialize, it’s hard to go back.

 

 

Every day, your skills as a consultant get sharper. You learn new things with every project and your expertise compounds.

The benefit of these first-hand experiences is that you have them at your disposal forever. Your knowledge becomes an asset to you.

But the real value comes when you can take that expertise and package it up into your own intellectual property.

You can then take your IP and repackage it into courses, memberships, subscriptions, and training. You can even teach your ideas as part of your education-based marketing strategy.

As you teach what you know, it further reinforces your knowledge and tells you where you have gaps to fill.

The assets you produce, whether blog posts, webinars, or training modules, can be referenced during your consulting engagements, making it easier and more efficient to get your points across.

And so the cycle repeats. Your consulting work helps develop your intellectual property which makes your consulting more effective again.

Iron sharpens iron. You need the two parts to really create compounding benefits in your business.

You’ll be in business a long time.

People you spoke to months or years ago will come back around to do business with or refer you.

Past clients will re-hire you. Your reputation will precede you. You’ll have ups and downs.

So regardless of the particular situation you’re in or decisions you’re facing, keep the longterm perspective. Even when things are hard or emotions are high. Especially then.

Be good to people. Own your mistakes. Wrap up engagements professionally. Go the extra mile. Be generous. Do the right thing.

Play the long game and you’ll be in this game a long time.

Marketing should be a little hard. It should be a little inconvenient. It should feel like work—even if you enjoy it.

If it doesn’t, you’re probably not doing enough of it. You’ll see that reflected in your income and opportunity flow.

You need to spend more time on your marketing than you think. A minimum of one third of your time should be devoted to it.

It doesn’t stop when you’re successful, either. It never stops.

It’s not easy but there’s no way around it. Keep at it until it hurts a little.

A few people have asked me why I often use the term “advisor” instead of “consultant” (the more common term).

I do it because a lot of freelancers and agency professionals call themselves consultants, but they really do consultative execution work.

And that’s totally fine by me! I often use both terms interchangeably.

But when I use the term “advisor”, I do it to specify people who sell advice—not execution with advice. 

Both terms work. And “advisor” can be confused with other things, too. No word comes without baggage.

I just prefer the more nuanced term because it better reflects the type of work I help people sell: advisory work.

The more precise your words, the more precisely your meaning can be conveyed.

The five core parts the Mindshare Framework are:

1. Niche/Specialization
2. Credibility
3. Methodology
4. Business Model
5. Marketing

Credibility is not considered as much as it should be. And yet, there’s a reason I put it number two in my framework. It’s that important.

Credibility for a consultant means being seen as capable of achieving the outcomes you promise.

It means people trust you and there’s demonstrated proof of your successful track record.

And one of the best forms of proof are case studies. Case studies literally tell the stories of your success.

Case studies can be easy to put off because they feel daunting. But they don’t have to be.

Here’s how I use my standard consulting templates to make the process easier when the time comes.

1. The client onboarding questionnaire

When I start with new clients, I send a long questionnaire in Google Docs.

It not only helps me diagnose their situation and get a running start, it also allows me to see the before and after transformation when things wrap up.

The questionnaire asks things like financial performance, marketing KPIs, challenges, goals/outcomes, history, and so much more.

Having this to reference back to gives me a clear view on where we started, what we did, and the results we created without having to rely on memory or digging up old emails.

2. The KPI Document

This is one of the most important documents I use in my consulting engagements. I call it, “the place where results can’t hide”.

It tracks all of the revenue, lead and acquisition numbers, marketing expenses, and even channel-specific performance in one place.

Because of he unambiguous nature of all the numbers, it makes it super easy to see the transformation and quantify it.

3. The Call Notes Document

I take notes in Google Docs during most of my consulting calls. It’s organized by date and gives a full record of what we spoke about and when.

This is valuable to me and my clients in countless ways. But it also makes it a lot easier to check on what happened and create a case study based on all the tactical things we accomplished.

It’s essentially a storyline covering the broad strokes.

4. The Playbook

The Playbook is my Trello board with over 120 items I like to cover during my consulting engagements.

It’s essentially a checklist on steroids. It’s my “infrastructure” list. It includes all the things I like to build/consider/do during my engagements.

There are Trello cards for each idea, with processes, sub-checklists, links to free and paid training, articles, and third-party resources on the subject.

I then mark each one as “completed” as they get done, making it easy to visually see at a glance what got done along the way.

Want these templates?

These are just a few of the tools and processes I use to make my marketing consulting work—including case studies—easier.

If you want access to all these templates, content, training, and much more, consider joining Mindshare Pro.

It’s all included in your membership and you can cancel any time.

See what it’s all about: https://howtoselladvice.com/membership.