Marketing Consultants

“Muggsy” Bogues was the shortest player ever to play in the NBA.

At 5’3″, he played 14 seasons, defying the massive odds stacked against him his entire career.

What was his secret? He turned his differences into his strengths.

Instead of trying to compete by playing the way everyone else does, Muggsy forced them to adapt to his unique style.

Instead of competing up high, he played down low. Being so low to the ground relative to the other players—who averaged 6’7″—he was able to steal balls so regularly that even the best dribblers became nervous around him.

His size allowed him to play a fast and nimble style of basketball that made it tough for the taller players to compete against him.

Sometimes, your differences can feel like your limitations. In his case, his size was his weakness until he learned how to turn it into his advantage.

But his size was also his differentiator. And differentiators can be your advantage—if you lean into them.

 

This is your Friday preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a Mindshare Community membership. Sign up for a free 7-day trial to improve the way you run your marketing consulting business.

The focus of my work is to help you package, sell, and create leverage around your marketing expertise (not your hands).

In this episode, I break down my 5-part framework for how this all works. It’s the latest version of my thinking and it’s always a work in progress.

The high-level points include:

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

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be fleshing this out in more detail.

In the meantime, if you’re stuck on any part of this process, join the Mindshare Community to ask as many questions as you want, or hit reply to this email if you’re reading this via email.

Click here to listen if you’re reading this on RSS or email.

Have a great weekend!

—kw

If you’re not sure what to niche your consulting practice on, it’s probably best to start broad and tighten as you go.

I went from helping “anyone” most of my career, to B2B, then to B2B services companies, and then finally, to coworking spaces. 

You can succeed by picking a niche from the beginning, but it takes longer to get your first clients than it does working with “anyone” who needs your services.

Survival is the game if you’re new to consulting and need to earn money to keep the lights on.

On the other hand, if you know who you want to help, you have credibility and experience helping them, and you have a long enough runway to get the idea off the ground, it’s far easier to build a real business by choosing a niche first.

It just takes more time.

Very occasionally, a prospect will come along who doesn’t fit into one of my two niches (coworking spaces or marketing consultants).

Despite being booked solid the past year and a half, I will occasionally take on work outside of my areas of specialization—especially if I think I can help.

But I do have some standards about who I’ll let in.

The big ones are:

1. Am I interested in this project?
2. Do I connect with the person I’m speaking to?
3. Do they have a reasonable budget?
4. Do they have a niche/are they differentiated enough?

This fourth one is a big one.

If they’re in a niche or have a distinct differentiator, I’ll consider the project.

If not, I’ll check to see if they’re open to finding a tighter position to help them stand out to the right people.

One of the hardest things to do as a marketing consultant is helping those who are not sufficiently focused or differentiated.

Marketing to a sea of generalities is a recipe for disaster—and I don’t want to be on that ship when it hits the shore.

If the prospect’s business is interesting, I connect with them personally to a degree, it pays well, and they currently are or are willing to make hard choices to become a “Category of One”, then I’ll consider them.

Otherwise, there’s no good reason to do so—especially when I’m busy.

And thankfully, I’m always pretty busy. 🙂

Dieter Rams was a renowned industrial designer and academic who designed physical mass-produced goods like electronics, furniture, and more.

He coined the phrase, “Less, but better” which was the essence of one of my favourite books, Essentialism. A must-read if you haven’t before.

In an effort to solidify his principles for the global design community, he came up with 10 design principles that could almost entirely be interchanged with marketing principles.

As you read them, replace the word “design” with the word “marketing” in your head to see what I mean.

1. Good design is innovative. The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
2. Good design makes a product useful. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
3. Good design is aesthetic. The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
4. Good design makes a product understandable. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
5. Good design is unobtrusive. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
6. Good design is honest. It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
7. Good design is long-lasting. It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.
9. Good design is environmental-friendly. Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
10. Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

The other day I wrote some of my own consulting principles down. They’re drafted already, but this reminds me I need to publish them.

More soon.

[Source]

I love this ad.

I don’t know about you, but as a buyer of quality, not price, this Instagram ad caught my attention right away.

I don’t know anything about Atoms, but they’ve now positioned themselves in my mind as quality.

$129 isn’t a massive amount of money, but the message was received nonetheless.

What do you think?

If you’re not excited about your newest project, you’re either doing the wrong kind of work, working with the wrong kind of people, or you’re not charging enough.

Either way, you need to fix it.

You can’t do great work if you’re not at least a little bit excited about what you’re working on. And even if you manage to pull it off, you won’t be able to sustain it over the long haul.

Fix the underlying issue if you want to make room for a better business.

When you first sign a client, there’s a pretty good chance they will second guess their decision. At least for a moment.

After all, your services aren’t cheap. And everyone knows there are no guarantees when it comes to marketing.

And yet, demonstrating they made the right decision is not only important, it sets the tone for the rest of the engagement.

Get it wrong, and your new clients will be second-guessing you and themselves the entire engagement. Get it right, and you’re well on the way to building a trusting and successful relationship.

The first step is onboarding. You want clients to feel like can relax and be lead through your system. You should have a system, by the way. A good onboarding will show them you do.

The onboarding process begins with the kick-off email. It’s the one you send after they say they’d like to go forward with you.

The kick-off email should be prompt. You don’t want clients saying yes to working with you, only to have you respond a day or two later with next steps.

It should also be thorough. It should tell them what to expect, what the next steps are, what they need to do, and when things will start moving.

If you get this process right, you’re well on your way to creating a great longterm relationship. If you don’t, you’ll be playing catch-up and “prove it” the entire time.

If you want to swipe my process for onboarding clients, sign up for the Mindshare Community. I share everything from my kick-off email script to the other eight core templates I use to run my advisory engagements.

This is your Friday preview episode of the private podcast that comes with a Mindshare Community membership. Sign up for a free 7-day trial to level up the way you run your marketing consulting business.

A member of the Mindshare community is interested in exploring group coaching and mentorship for in-house marketing managers. I really like the idea.

He’s curious how I did it for my coworking consultancy, and whether I had examples of people doing it in other places.

Here’s the original heart of the questions:

Originally I had in mind £250/mo per person. When I started reflecting and working towards the program creation I realised that individualised or tailored help is totally not viable (checking they defined audiences or ICP correctly, giving advice on their tech stack etc’).

So then I began exploring what others are doing and what does that look like. I remembered you run one so was wondering about the format. Is it the same weekly or variable and what do you do when individual groups members begin to ask questions regarding their own marketing strategy / challenges. Don’t want to play fractional CMO on demand support for 50-100 marketers.

Re: “higher-touch, small-group models or something low-touch, large group?”
I was reflecting on whether it’s easier to start with low-cost/touch large group and then upsell a subset into group coaching.

On Propeller do you cap the number of people re group coaching calls? Is the format of the bi-weekly assignments personalised or the same to all group coaching clients?

In this episode, I talk about:

1. The benefits of leading with a niche
2. Doing 1:1 consulting before going to group
3. Creating and refining your methodology before trying to teach it
4. Consider doing training content inside the group coaching program
5. The different business models I’ve seen work
6. How to design it based on your conversations, not plucking it out of thin air and trying to sell it to people
7. How to actually validate and sell the idea once you have it formalized

If you can get people interested in your day-to-day conversations, it will go a long way towards creating something people actually want.

And if you’re an email subscriber or RSS reader, click here to listen.

—k

One of my favourite strategy books is Trade-Off by Kevin Maney.

In it, he talks about how all companies are in either the convenience or fidelity business.

The best ones go to the edges of either one. The ones who fail are stuck in the middle—neither convenient nor high-fidelity.

Convenience, as he describes, is ultimately the ease in which a customer can get a desired result.

That includes things like price, location, barriers to entry, etc. Think Planet Fitness, McDonalds, or your local convenience store.

Fidelity, on the other hand, is the total experience of something.

That includes things like aura, identity, and total enjoyment. Think rock concerts vs. MP3s, or theatres vs. home movies (remember those?).

With fidelity, price is not a factor. All that matters is the total experience of a thing.

You might wonder whether the consulting business is convenience or fidelity.

I wasn’t initially sure myself.

On the one hand, you help facilitate results for your clients, making it easier and faster to get an outcome.

But on the other hand, the experience of working with a consultant who genuinely transforms your business is one to behold. If you’ve ever experienced it from the client side, it’s magic.

So which one is consulting? 

If you guessed that it’s the fidelity business, you are correct.

Consulting services are neither cheap nor easy to consume. It’s not convenient because you’re still navigating the rough turns and there are no guarantees.

But if you do it right, it’s akin to taking a helicopter over NYC during rush hour. The experience of having a trusted guide navigate you through the choppy waters far exceeds the cost of doing so—if you can afford it.

So when you’re building your advisory business, remember that you’re not in the convenience business, you’re in the experience business.

And in the experience business, cost is not a factor. All that matters is the total experience (which includes results).

Create the experience people want through the transformations you create and you’ll be able to charge whatever you like.