Marketing Consultants

If you’re going to sell advice for a living, it needs to be aligned with the interests of your clients—even if it goes against your own immediate interests.

I call this the fiduciary standard.

And it’s not always easy to do. It involves leaving real money on the table.

But in doing so, it also opens the door to earning a lot MORE money (for you and your clients) through long-term and repeat engagements.

Here are some ways I’ve left money on the table to stay aligned with my clients’ interests:

• I’ve helped my clients hire an in-house manager to replace me
• Advised clients to move to lower tiers of service or cancelling altogether
• Offered to let clients pause or cancel early if they weren’t getting value
• Stopped marking up other’s time while clients were on retainer with me
• Said hard things the client needed to hear at the risk of being fired for it
• Proactively reduced my prices when clients when it made sense to do so
• Turned away prospects when I wasn’t sure I could help them
• Referred clients to trusted partners without taking referral fees
• Turned down affiliate commissions on software I recommend
• Went above and beyond the scope in order to get an outcome we expected

…and a range of other things that seem to cost me money in the short run, but also ensure I’m conflict-free and acting in their interests above my own at all times.

To sell advice with full integrity, you need to remove as much back-end incentive as possible and focus entirely on serving the needs of your clients above all else.

Otherwise, what you’re doing is consultative sales. And clients put their guards up around that.

Clients may not know enough to value your stance as a fiduciary advisor going into the relationship, but they start to appreciate it as they see it in action.

If you want to sell advice and keep your clients engaged for a long period, be their advocate—even if it comes at a short-term personal cost. 

It always pays off in the long run to do things this way.

Your goal as a consultant is to make your work easier and more effective—both for your sake and your clients’.

The best way to do that is to organize your ideas into a framework. I call it your “Methodology”.

Every time you have a new idea or approach to your work, you write it down and put it into whatever system you use to organize your Methodology.

I use Trello for this. But you can use anything.

I create a column for each stage of my Methodology and place cards and some notes with every new idea I have.

Every time I improve my way of doing things, learn something new, or generally want to remember something important, it goes into my Methodology. 

Over time, this becomes your consulting dashboard. The place you reference as you run your engagements to ensure consistency and nothing gets missed.

Later, this can become the source of your course materials or training process. It becomes an asset to your business.

So if you’re not actively keeping tabs on your ideas and organizing them into some kind of hierarchy, I highly recommend you start the process.

I like Trello because it’s easy to use on the fly, and I can duplicate my Methodology board with every new client engagement, making it transportable as a starting point across all my engagements.

At first, your Methodology will be messy and disorganized. Eventually, you’ll make it clearer and more efficient to the point where it becomes the backbone of your business. The key thing is you begin.

If you’re interested in seeing how I do this for my own consulting work, hit reply for more info.

I read the book, Zag, by Marty Neumeier today. It’s a short one, but it reinforced many views I hold around positioning and differentiation.

His main point was that we should seek to be radically different than our competition to the point of being the only one of your kind in your market.

One of the other things that caught my attention was this quote:

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.“

I tend to skew fairly logical in my approach to things. And yet, I also know that we buy and behave based on how we feel.

It reminded me that our job as marketers is to create a feeling—not try to win by logic.

It’s how people feel that becomes our brand, not the positioning and messaging we put around us.

When we optimize for making people feel a certain way with our words and behaviour, we end up producing a brand that commands a premium, creates loyalty, and makes the alternatives seem like knock-offs by comparison.

So, in case you needed it, this is your gentle reminder to focus on creating a feeling in everything you do.

Create content that speaks to the heart instead of the head. Write copy that feels personal. Take a tone of encouragement and try to inspire people with your marketing style.

The brand stuff will follow as just one of many benefits. It also just feels better to do marketing this way, too.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” – Ernest Hemingway.

When you’re not sure what to write about—be it a blog post, social media post, or any other form of content—pick a topic and start with the truest sentence you know about it.

Don’t overthink it, just start and go from there.

The rest of the piece will follow.

“The medium is the message”, as Marshall McLuhan used to say.

When you publish your writing daily, it demonstrates to the world you’re a professional.

Hacks never write daily—at least not for long.

The simple act of publishing daily—regardless of the content you produce—shows the world you’re committed to your craft. You can bet on people like that.

It also provides a sample of your thinking, which makes it easier for people to know whether they will like what you sell or not.

All of these things build trust and familiarity. These are your key assets as a consultant.

If you’re curious, try it for a while. Send a daily dispatch. It’s not always easy, but it is rewarding.

Just remember to keep it short and simple.

You don’t have to serve a niche to succeed in an expertise-driven business like consulting. But having one is a force multiplier.

Below are three examples to explain what I mean.

1. Serving a niche makes your marketing easier and more resonant with an intended audience, which attracts more opportunities to you.

You can show up where your ideal audience is with a message that speaks their language. It’s more likely to “click” and create interest.

2. Your work becomes more streamlined and repeatable, creating higher margins and better results.

When you’re not reinventing the wheel every time, you get reuse your thinking and materials, making it easier to get results.

Efficiency + effectiveness = more profit.

3. It also allows you to create more leverage around your expertise with one-to-many offerings, education products, partnerships, and even equity opportunities.

It’s much easier to leverage your expertise when it’s specific and rare.

General expertise doesn’t sell.

In closing

You can, of course, have a solid consulting business without niching. There are many out there.

But if you decide to go deep serving a niche, your chances of building something interesting and lucrative goes way up.

One of the big risks of positioning yourself as a fractional CMO is, if you’re not careful, you’ll be treated like a part-time employee.

The signs of this include:

1. Becoming an order-taker instead of a sounding board
2. Being asked for deliverables and execution work instead of advice
3. Being expected to manage and drive projects forward
4. Getting invited to staff events and team retreats

However you position yourself, your primary job is to be a guide. To sell access to your brain, not your hands.

Unless you decide otherwise, your job is not to become a part-time employee, freelancer, or project manager. Execution work is a slippery slope and it must be managed judiciously if you want to avoid setting irreversible expectations.

You can choose to manage projects or do light execution work if you want. And sometimes, that’s a great way to get started as an advisor.

But if you do, you’re not being paid for your head. You’re being paid for your hands. Your advice will be a bonus.

And bonus features usually don’t command the highest premiums.

If you could claim one thing you currently do professionally that you’re the best in the world at, what would it be?

Most likely, it would be something small and specific. It’s a big world, after all.

Try to make it believable.

And sure, maybe someone out there is actually better at it than you are, but let’s assume they’re not positioned in a way that would make it obvious to anyone else.

Your unique skill could be a combination of two things, like SEO for poodle breeders, or web design for eye surgeons.

Or it could be something oddly specific, like a subsect of your existing services. Go as narrow as you need to to make the claim credible in your head.

Is there anything you could you claim as “yours”, such that you’re the best or only choice, and therefore any other option is the lesser alternative?

And if you played in this area, could it be the start of better positioning for you?

I bet it would.