Marketing Consultants

As a consultant, your Methodology can become your business’ most valuable asset. It’s the key to creating leverage around your expertise.

But for that to be the case, you need to have the discipline to continually make tweaks and adjustments.

For most marketing professionals, your “Methodology” begins with you making it up as you go along. 

You’re basically winging it with every client.

But eventually, you spot patterns. You follow a similar process with each client. You see the world in a certain way.

You reach a point where you decide to formalize parts of it into a system. You begin to document your onboarding process, or standard strategy process, or deep-dive discovery project process.

If you’re like me, you’ll eventually put all your great ideas into a Google Doc, Trello board, or Notion template.

It’s messy at first, but it’s a start.

Regardless of the stage you’re at, it’s crucial you start to bring order to the chaos.

Write down your processes and make them better over time. Start simple, make it better.

Or, save years and get access to my Methodology

If you’re a marketing consultant and you want access to my Consulting Methodology, I’m making it available to Mindshare Pro for just $99/mo., including access to ongoing updates, improvements, and support.

This isn’t some flimsy resource. It’s a hefty package of templates, workflows, and processes that make up most of my Consulting Methodology. It’s taken me years to create and refine.

Like all things, it’s a work in progress, but it’s absolutely packed with value.

It will not only help you run your consulting business better, it will also shape the way you package and deliver your own expertise. 

What’s included

The list of what you get currently includes:

1. Advisory Proposal Template (Google Docs)
2. 114-Question Client Discovery Questionnaire (Google Docs)
3. Onboarding Process + Kick-Off Email (Google Docs)
4. Client Organization Workflow + Templates (Google Drive/Docs)
5. Client KPI Dashboard (Google Sheets)
6. Consulting Revenue Tracker (Google Sheets)
7. Marketing Playbook Template with 120+ action items (Trello Board)
8. Client Operating System Template (Trello Board)
9. Swipe File Sample Template (Airtable)
10. Research Template (Airtable) – Coming Soon
11. Access to the Mindshare Community
12. Unlimited Asynchronous Q&A
13. More templates and content not included in this list

The best part is, you can copy it all and use it right away—making it your own in a tiny fraction of the time (years) it took me to create it myself.

Plus, you’ll get access to updates for everything included as long as you’re a Mindshare Pro member.

Or, you can immediately cancel and keep everything in their current state. No pressure to stick around.

But I promise you one thing: all of these items won’t be included with this membership forever. 

In fact, I’d be surprised if I included all of this with new Pro memberships next month. But we’ll see.

Sign up for a Mindshare Pro membership while I’m still practically giving it away. 

One of the best ways to convey a lot of information quickly is by giving your ideas a name.

Naming your ideas allows you to explain things once (or twice) and have people forever remember the concept when you talk about it again. 

I call this, “naming and claiming your ideas“. See what I did there?

When used in a consulting engagement, it allows you to transfer a concept with your clients once instead of explaining the idea over and over.

It becomes something everyone can use in conversation later on in just a few words. They begin to speak the same language.

When you speak the same language, you create better team collaboration because people are ultimately thinking and acting in alignment. There’s less room for ambiguity.

One example of this I have used in the past is the idea of “Priming the Pump“.

Essentially, Priming the Pump means teasing out new products or services early, then gradually increasing the frequency and sharing more details of the coming launch as it approaches.

By the time the new release happens, people excitedly buy right away because anticipation has grown over a long period of time.

Anticipation allows people to consider buying long before a product or service is available. By the time it launches, they’ve already made a decision in their minds. It’s a pre-sell strategy.

We now use this term regularly with one of my clients. It’s part of the team’s vernacular and it has become a go-to approach to selling new products.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the benefits to you personally to name and claim your ideas.

Stay tuned.

Do you try to measure everything you do in marketing with a number?

Chances are, if you read books like Traction, you or your clients will try to find numbers that correspond with every channel and tactic you perform.

And rightfully so! It’s a noble pursuit.

It’s good to try to attach a key performance indicator to every major activity you do. At least to give you a general sense of what’s working.

But here’s the thing: you can’t quantify everything you do in marketing with numbers.

It’s no different than trying to put a score on your friendship or marriage. Marketing is more like relationships than mathematics. 

Sure, there will be a downstream effect on the culmination of all your activities in the near or long-term.

But sometimes, results may take years—decades even—to come to fruition.

Results may look like increased revenue or profits. Or more successful product launches. Or a big break that resembles an overnight success.

But that doesn’t mean you can quantify everything you do in numbers today. Sometimes, you have to depend on how certain things feel when you do them.

Measurement is important, but it’s not to be confused with pure reality.

You need both.

Business is a game of supply and demand.

You should always be focusing on creating demand for your products and services. Without demand, you’re out of business.

Ideally, your supply should never fully cover the demand side, either. You should want to have a waiting list to work with you. Your products should be somewhat limited—especially at the high end.

Keeping your demand higher than your supply allows you to continue charging a premium. It’s one of the reasons I like operating under my own name and not as an agency or consultancy. I get to keep myself scarce. I am scarce.

But scarcity doesn’t create value in and of itself. Demand does. Scarcity is simply a lever that allows you to charge a premium on the demand you create.

Focus on demand and keep yourself scarce enough to charge a premium for your work.

Here’s your Sunday thought experiment.

If you had to design your business in such a way that:

1. You genuinely enjoyed and were interested in the market you serve
2. You actually liked producing, selling and delivering the things you offer
3. You could make a heck of a lot money doing it

How would your business differ?

There’s a lot to be said about genuinely liking what you do and who you do it for. In fact, I’m not sure you can be successful as a consultant long-term without it.

But your business model should also be designed to make you financially secure, if not wealthy. It should be built into the plan from the beginning without forcing you to work impossible hours.

So if one of these three items are missing, what can you do to tighten up the loose ends?

Would you need to scrap everything and start again, or can you make changes today that would bring these ideas together?

We’re all busy.

It’s why I try to keep these messages short.

But there’s also another way to share content that busy professionals can easily consume, and that is with audio.

Most of us work during the day then get pulled in all directions after work. There’s hardly time to read let alone retain anything.

My eyes barely work by the time I hit the pillow, which means even books aren’t ideal. Maybe you can relate.

Audio book and podcasts, on the other hand, I consume all the time. On walks with my dog, car trips, while doing the dishes—whenever I have free time. It helps that I have AirPods in my pocket wherever I go.

If you’re optimizing content for search engines, length and depth is still the way to go.

But if you’re truly optimizing for consumption, write shorter blog posts and/or add an audio recording to your long-form blog posts.

You can even create a quick podcast feed if you create enough audio. I might do one for this blog one day. It’s never been easier.

Too much amazing content is created but not consumed because our free time in front of a computer is scarce.

Don’t let that be yours.

One thing I noticed about my clients is that several have fractional CFOs to oversee their finances.

My hunch is that people who hire fractional CFOs and other fractional leaders also hire marketing advisors and fractional CMOs. Or at least, they would be more open to it if given the option.

Chances are, they see fractional leadership as a flexible alternative to hiring someone full time (whom they can’t likely afford yet anyway). It’s a logical extension of the same idea.

If you notice this same pattern, try speaking to your clients’ fractional CFO/executives and tell them you’re open to working with more clients like the one you both serve, and to keep you in mind if any of their clients need marketing support.

If appropriate, offer to refer/recommend them to your clients who also seem to be struggling with their financials.

This is the kind of patterns you want to watch for among your clients so you can optimize how you attract new opportunities.

If your clients don’t have fractional leadership, it’s a good idea to connect with other fractional executives in general and build relationships that could lead to referrals down the line.

What standard do you want to operate at?

This is a question I ask most of my clients early in our engagement. The answers vary and it informs how we work together.

I have a tendency towards getting things done, then making them better over time.

In most cases, “80% perfect” is enough to get great outcomes reasonably quickly. We can perfect things later once you get some results in the door.

But for others, their standards for what they ship to the world are set much higher. Say, 95%+ or nothing.

Maybe these companies have a brand and reputation that depends on the utmost quality in all things. After all, Rolex would never put out an 80% perfect marketing campaign, right?

Chances are, though, your clients aren’t Rolex. They’re a small to medium-sized business with much to accomplish.

The real thing you need to decide together is whether it’s strategy or fear creating those perfectionist tendencies. 

It’s usually the latter.

The trade-off to aiming for 95% perfection is time and money. Most small businesses have neither luxury to waste.

If your clients expecting 95% and you’re aiming to deliver 80% to get results reasonably quickly, both of you will end up frustrated.

Ask the question so you’re playing the same game.