Marketing Consultants

Drake and Kanye launched new albums on the same day yesterday.

For all intents and purposes, it was a massive success for both of them. And while I respect and appreciate both of their music, I’m not really a fan of either.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Their music is not for me.

No matter how good your work is, most people won’t resonate with it. And that’s the way it should be. Embrace it.

Instead of trying to please everyone, pick a small group of people who do resonate with your work and over-deliver for them. 

Ignore everyone else.

Last weekend, my wife bought a bike from a store that had an interesting differentiation strategy.

Their main difference was that they offered free lifetime tune-ups for any bikes sold from their stores.

Apparently no other bike store did that. Service revenue can add up, so it’s no surprise others weren’t giving it away.

I like this approach for a few reasons.

1. It brings people back

As long as someone in your family owns a bike from that store, you’ll always be going there for tune-ups, accessories, repairs, or even new bikes when the time comes.

2. It adds a lot of value for low marginal cost

It costs very little to tune up the bikes when you already have the staff and overhead to cover it. And yet, it creates a lot of value for the customer.

3. My favourite: it closes the deal

A good differentiator helps you win more deals. This one closes deals for bikes that range from $500 to $5,000+. That’s no small prize.

As a consultant, your vertical or horizontal positioning is one of the best differentiators you have. The less interchangeable you are, the more likely you are to stand out and win deals.

There are other ways to differentiate as well, such as price and location, but those aren’t ones you want to compete on if you can avoid it.

Regardless of which approach you take, without a differentiation strategy, you’ll never be as successful as you could be.

I bought a fridge on Sunday. The experience reminded me why advice and execution are best sold separately.

The salesperson at the store tried to convince me to buy an LG—even though the reviews on the entire Internet said it wasn’t a good refrigerator.

Even the reviews on their own site were something like 2.5/5 on well over 3,000 reviews.

She told me not to worry about the reviews,  “People only give negative comments most of the time”, she said.

Granted, I almost believed her. Maybe the refrigerator was fine. Maybe only people with bad experiences leave reviews on things like this.

She seemed sure.

But I also remembered the people who tried to repair my old refrigerator telling me not to buy Samsung, LG, and a few others. They said buy brands like Whirlpool, Maytag, General Electric, etc.

So who do I trust?

The repairmen had no horse in the race. No incentive for me to buy one over the other. They just knew which fridges reliably broke down and had class actions against them for faulty parts.

I trusted their advice most. So I bought a Maytag. The reviews were also 4.4/5 on their own website and were consistent across the Internet.

So here’s the thing…

I’m going to go on a limb here, but I think that salesperson was incentivized to sell (or get rid of) the LGs they had.

My feeling is she gets paid more to sell an LG over a Maytag, even if it was a cheaper product.

And even if that’s not true, it doesn’t matter. We are taught to be skeptical of salespeople when we’re not sure.

It reminds me about why I believe advice and execution should be sold separately.

I personally believe it’s a better buying experience largely because of the reduced conflict of incentives and therefore creating a higher level of trust.

If you want to sell advice, be the fiduciary.

You’re a marketing advisor, but your clients and prospects say they want you to do execution work. What do you do?

This is a common situation I hear from others.

It’s likely because they don’t yet see the value in having solely your expertise applied to their situation. If they did, you wouldn’t need you to manage projects and perform tasks. 

Luckily, you can change that.

It’s often a sign either you’re not specialized enough OR not seen as credible enough (the top two factors in my Mindshare Framework). The two are heavily related and interdependent.

The less you specialize, the more your clients will want you as a pair of hands to make up for a perceived lack of value in what your brain offers alone.

They won’t believe you have enough value to contribute profitably on top of the cost of execution. Whether that’s true or not is a different question, and one that should be addressed with value conversations.

The first box to check is to see whether you’re niched down enough to be uniquely qualified to solve your client or prospect’s problems.

Your brain becomes far more valuable when you are seen as one of only a few people who can actually solve their problems.

Then, if you can, find ways to bring in execution partners who can implement your strategies while creating a business case that is a win for everyone.

This isn’t theory, I do exactly this every day. It just takes a combination of good positioning, credibility, and some practice communicating the net value of your expertise—even with execution sold separately.

I need a new head shot. The one I have is from about five or six years ago. And frankly, a lot has changed since then.

I plan to reach out to an old friend who does great photography and was giving away free head shots during the early stages of the pandemic.

He lives about 45 minutes away from me, but I’m more than happy to travel to see him and pay full rate if he’ll shoot my photos.

Why? Because the effort he put into marketing himself almost a year ago has stuck with me. 

I also like his photos, so that helps a bunch, too.

But I wouldn’t have known he even does head shots had he not done the free giveaway campaign a while back.

Whether you’re marketing your business or your clients’, it’s critical to remember that even if you connect with the right people using the right message, it may still take months or even years before they purchase.

Most people give up long before the marketing has the intended result—even if the seed was correctly planted in the first place.

Real marketing is a long-term game for long-term-minded people. It’s a good reminder for you or your clients—whoever needs to hear it.

You don’t need to have all the answers.

You should have some, but you’ll never have them all.

You just need to be willing to put the cards on the table and sort through them until the answers are obvious.

When you’ve been doing this a while, the answers usually become obvious if you’re willing to acknowledge the truths in front of you.

It takes guts to be an advisor, but you know more than you think.

Keep showing up.

When it comes to pricing, being in the middle is a dangerous place to be.

Not only does it mean you’re not the most convenient option (i.e., the cheapest), you’re also probably not the best option either.

When you price in the middle, you don’t appeal to the price shoppers nor the value shoppers. You’re stuck in the middle.

But at the same time, you still put yourself in competition with both groups, yet you don’t have a leg to stand on in terms of what they care about.

When people badly want a result, they almost always pay for the more expensive options available.

The more important something is, the less likely people are to take a chance on the cheap option. Price is a signal of quality.

When people feel like your category of solution is a commodity, they’ll go for the less expensive options. After all, they’re interchangeable, right?

You don’t want those clients.

Price things on the high or low end depending on the situation, but avoid pricing in the middle.

It’s a trap.

The other day I wrote about the importance of facing hard truths, both when being honest with your clients about their business and in being receptive to feedback about your own.

I since discovered this quote by Henry David Thoreau and it felt relevant to the point.

For a truth to be heard, it must be spoken with kindness. Truth is kind only when it is spoken through your heart with sincerity. You should know that when a message you convey to another person is not understood by him, at least one of the following things is true: what you have said is not true, or you have conveyed it without kindness.

It’s a great reminder that all truths—all advisory work for that matter—should be delivered with kindness (and empathy) if we wish for our advice to land.

Especially when dealing with hard truths.

 

Your job as an advisor is not to do all the tasks for your clients.

Your job is to know which tasks to do and then to create, find, or describe a perfect way of doing them when the time is right.

Once you get into “perfect example creation mode”, the rest of your work gets a lot easier.

Add those perfect examples to your Methodology—either in your Swipe File or your Playbook—and turn your expertise into a valuable asset in the process.

And if you want access to my full Methodology, including my 120+ item Marketing Playbook, Client Operating System, Swipe Files, and Templates, join Mindshare Pro or stay tuned for a product coming soon.