Marketing Consultants

I received 49 email newsletters today. That’s just my main email. I opened 10 of them.

It’s interesting to observe my inbox for a minute. What did I open? Why did I open it? What action did I take? What influenced me?

I think we’d all publish better content if we observed our newsletter consumption habits more often to see what engages us.

We’d be more aware of things like frequency, depth, conciseness, uniqueness, overwhelm, subject lines, hooks, clutter, white space, design—and the plethora of other factors that go into someone’s experience of our emails.

I don’t have any concrete lessons or tips for you today. It’s just fun to look back and observe. To see what compels me. Maybe it will inform my own writing.

I personally like simple emails like this one. A letter to a friend. An idea you can take while on the go. It aligns with my business strategy which is based on intimacy.

I also like to go deep on a subject when the ideas are well-articulated by the author. Ideally via audio, but also via long-form writing.

Almost always, I like things that are highly specific to what’s on my mind right now. Things aligned with my specific goals at this moment. Or new ideas that add-on to my thought process nicely.

Have you done something like this lately? What did you notice?

—kevin

A few weeks ago, I sold my Assault AirBike.

It’s the kind of exercise bike they use in CrossFit and military training. It’s a beast of a bike that probably would have lasted a lifetime.

But I wasn’t using it. I had another bike that was better suited for my needs, and I wanted to buy a treadmill for under my desk (best decision ever, by the way). Couldn’t justify having it anymore.

So I put it up for sale online and it sold within a day or two.

Another quick story like this…

My dad recently moved to a new house and had a ton of moving boxes left over.

Rather than throwing them away for recycling, he decided to offer them for free to his local community group on Facebook.

Several people responded right away expressing interest in the boxes. They were gone that same night.

The takeaway: there’s either demand for what you’re offering or there isn’t.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with changing up your positioning, your offers, or your marketing plan until you find what works best.

After all, change is the only constant in business!

As long as you’re not switching your core positioning every six months, you should be fine to experiment with your business and follow what works.

Whether it’s your marketing, your offer, or your product mix—nothing is a permanent fixture. Keep iterating on what you’re doing until your offers start to sell like hotcakes. Or AirBikes. Or.. free moving boxes.

Don’t stop until you’re clearly selling what people actually want. You’ll know it when you find it.

—kevin

The other day, I stumbled across an interesting micro-advisory service by Arvid Khal.

I have recorded ~15 Twitter teardown videos so far, and it has been an absolute blast.

The feedback I have gotten has been equally positive: getting an honest and constructive perspective on your Twitter profile seems to be massively appreciated.

I could do this all day long! https://t.co/HoxWbIE3rg pic.twitter.com/mdWf02Svf5

— Arvid Kahl (@arvidkahl) June 5, 2023

Arvid helps indie bootstrappers (software folks) build a profitable business.

He also has a course on how to grow your Twitter following.

Which leads perfectly into his offer: he’ll do a teardown of your Twitter profile (interactions, posting, etc.) for a price you choose.

He even throws in his course with it. Or, at least that’s how I’m seeing it in light of his recent offer on Twitter.

A couple takeaways:

1. Selling advice doesn’t need to be an in-depth service. Sometimes, it can be thrown onto a Gumroad page paired with content you already have to sweeten the deal.
2. It pays to teach what you know. You can then sell those pieces of training as a standalone product and/or bundle it with your advisory services.

The key to selling any kind of advice in a repeatable way is to sell it through the lens of something specific that you’re uniquely credible at solving.

Either a specific outcome (horizontal specialization) or something a little broader for a specific target market (vertical specialization). Or even both combined, if it makes sense.

So what are you uniquely good at?

What’s your sub-specific expertise that you can package up into a mini course or use to create an advisory option?

—kevin

I recently recorded a podcast with Billy Broas, a copywriter, advisor, and educator who built a business around his proprietary messaging framework, The Five Lightbulbs.

In this episode, Billy and I unpack the Five Lightbulbs and go deep into how his business works, how he gets clients, and a lot more.

We discuss things like:

• Why having a proprietary framework like the Five Lightbulbs is key to selling advice
• How he leveraged his IP into courses, books, and other more leveraged ways
• How he evolved his business from doing to advising and now teaching
• Selling custom services with some productization on the back end
• Why he focuses on the evergreen fundamentals of marketing and not just the “new thing”
• How products get better by empathizing with and better understanding the customer
• Why we should systemize and codify our expertise that outlives you
• How teaching other audiences—i.e. industry software companies—leads to more business (Golden Goose Strategy)
• How teaching courses and programs can lead to consulting engagements with students
• How writing simple emails on a single topic under your own name works well as a format for email newsletters
• How to fold the Five Lightbulbs framework into your emails and other marketing materials

If you want to go deeper on Billy’s framework, Mindshare members will find a one-hour training in the member’s area.

You can also grab his new course which is in pre-sale mode at 50% off the future full price.

Listen here or subscribe via your podcast player.

—kw

Find Billy Online:

• Billy’s Website
• Billy’s Twitter

Books Mentioned:

• Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith
• Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz
• Authors like:
  • Gary Halbert
  • Victor Schwabb
  • Joe Sugarman
  • Claude Hopkins

My entry to marketing consulting work began with two fractional CMO gigs. I think I charged $3,500 and $4,000/month respectively.

My intent was to advise on and manage my clients’ marketing. The reality looked much more like actual production work.

I was an order-taker, not really a trusted advisor. There’s a big difference.

Instead of outsourcing everything and being a manager, I just outsourced the big stuff and did a lot of execution work myself. Things like setting up software, doing surveys, email campaigns, briefs, proofs-of-concept, website tweaks, reporting, and more.

Sound familiar?

On top of that, clients dumped every idea they had onto my plate because they saw me as an employee-shaped figure.

It was also a fixed-fee engagement with flexible scope—what did I expect?

And that’s all fine if you want to make a “quick” six figures but don’t care about things like key client risk, scaling, or enjoyment considerations.

These gigs consumed almost all of my time and mental bandwidth. I knew I had to change what I was doing and how I sold my services. It wasn’t a sustainable model.

That’s what led me to focus more on advisory work and accepting FCMO gigs for only very particular kinds of clients.

I also set specific guardrails to ensure my gigs didn’t take over my business. I learned how to manage scope to prevent things from going sideways on day one.

On Wednesday, I’m going to share the lessons that I wish I knew back then about how to package and run a fractional CMO engagement—without it becoming a full-time job shoehorned into a part-time engagement.

If you are curious about doing fractional marketing leadership work as a step on the journey to other more leveraged consulting offerings, you’ll want to consider joining the membership for access to this and much more, or sign up for the single training.

It’s under $100 for either option, which is a good deal when you consider the value of saving yourself from even one of the mistakes I made and the upside of closing one good-fit CMO client.

You won’t get training like this anywhere else. These are 100% my own ideas and have been battle-tested since 2017.

Full details: https://kevin.me/right-way/

• Become a member ($99/mo.)
• Buy the single training + recording ($97)

Hope to see you inside!

—kw

On Wednesday, May 24th at 11am EST, I’m hosting a 90-minute workshop for Mindshare members on how to package and deliver fractional CMO services.

This is a big one because I get asked a LOT of questions about this and have a TON of nuanced thoughts about how and when to do it successfully.

I’ve been doing it since 2017 to varying degrees, so I have picked up a ton of first-hand experience to share that you won’t hear elsewhere.

I’ll talk about things like:

• How to harness growing demand for fractional CMO services
• How to define what fractional CMO will mean to you and your business
• How to know whether to offer fractional CMO services at all
• The risks and benefits of offering fractional CMO services
• The differences between interim vs. fractional CMO—and which to use/when
• Alternative forms of fractional marketing leadership roles
• How to price fractional CMO services in relation to your other services
• How to manage and deliver your work without becoming a pseudo-employee
• How to transition agency or freelance clients into fractional CMO clients
• How to transition fractional CMO services into advisory clients later on

And questions like:

• Should you take an email address under your clients’ domain?
• Should you attend client events and work parties?
• Should you put your client list on LinkedIn under your Experience?
• Should you bill by the hour, day, week, or month?

And a lot more!

Want to attend?

There are two ways you can join this workshop:

1. Become a member ($99/mo.)
2. Buy a single pass ($97)

Hope to see you there!

—kw

This post is part of my 5-day free crash course on how to transition from execution to advisory work. (You can enroll in the full email sequence by subscribing here).

It’s all about the case for advisory services: why they’re uniquely valuable independent of hands work and deliverables.

Let’s get into it…

***

There are at least four core ways to package and deliver your expertise through the advisory model:

1. Advising
2. Consulting
3. Mentoring
4. Coaching

In all cases, you’re selling access to your expertise.

It’s distinct from execution work as there are no/minimal deliverables required unless you choose to include them.

Your ability to sell advice separately from execution comes down to your ability to get real business results without using your hands.

Doing that is a lot easier if you bring the right tools for the job, including:

1. A documented methodology that ensures you do things rigorously
2. Supporting training or instructions people can follow to implement your ideas
3. A network of people you can introduce to your clients if they need help implementing
4. A swipe file with examples of various strategies and tactics being used
5. Templates people can use right away—things like a KPI sheet, marketing strategy, planning document, etc.
6. A repeatable system your clients can use to keep going what you implement after you’re gone

Your value comes not from doing the task-work, but from knowing precisely what needs to be done, how to do it, and who to help make it happen if outside support is needed.

In other words—you’re like a results concierge. A fixer. A facilitator, of sorts.

You know what do to, which questions to ask, and how to systematically remove roadblocks that come up.

You bring the tools, resources, and experience to get the job done.

In theory, it costs your clients the same or less than hiring a unicorn full-service agency that can do it all for them.

The problem is, those agencies don’t even exist. They’re usually strong in a few core areas and weak in the rest—but still willing to sell it.

And if they did exist, they’d be blindingly expensive—even for non-expensive work.

Unlike an agency, you are deconstructing the ingredients and devising a tailored mix of channels, tactics, and specialists to do the implementation.

You’re like a nutritionist. Or a general contractor. Or an architect. Or a project foreman (foreperson?).

Not everyone is responsible for hammering the nails.

Your advice is impartial because you’re not getting paid for the execution.

It allows you to be more nimble about how you solve problems. You’re solution-agnostic. And that’s good for your clients.

Most importantly, you’re a leader, not a manager.

I won’t lie to you—selling advisory services is a tough nut to crack for the first time. Mostly because people don’t know how.

A lot of people start with managed advisory services—like fractional or interim CMO work—before phasing into pure advisory work over time.

Or they do a form of consulting which is advisory plus some form of deliverables.

Others sell single strategy calls or outcome-specific sprints for a while to test out their processes.

All ways are valid. The secret is having specific expertise in a given domain—and an ability to create value with what and who you know.

There’s a lot of value in getting clarity and guidance from a trusted advisor.

It might feel like a reach now, but you can be that advisor.

—kw

P.S. In case you missed it, you can auto-enroll in the free 5-day email course on how to go from selling execution work to advising, teaching, and training by subscribing here.

On today’s Mindshare group coaching call, we talked about selling our process and templates to our peers.

A lot of folks on the call noticed that a meaningful part of their audience has become other marketers like them.

It’s gotten to the point that for some, many of their newsletter and social media followers are other marketers doing similar things.

It got us thinking about all the ways you can package your expertise in such a way that your peers become your customers.

It might seem strange to sell your hard-earned templates, workflows, and methods to your peers. But the reality is, it will likely have zero impact on your business from a competitive standpoint.

It can, however, have a sizeable impact on your bottom line if you do it right. Or, at least a small bump initially that grows over time.

There’s huge demand from independent professionals to level up their skills and the way they do business. You’d be surprised how valuable your “sawdust” really is.

To get into the weeds of that conversation and unlock hours of training, community, and group call recordings on building a profitable marketing practice, become a member.

I recently revamped the sales page so you’ll be able to see a lot clearer what’s inside.

—kw

P.S. Do you already sell to your peers? Hit reply and let me know what’s working for you.

I wrote the other day about how execution limits your earning potential as a solo marketer.

Does that mean you shouldn’t do any execution? That’s definitely not what I’m saying.

Execution work can be highly profitable if done correctly.

I still do some strategic execution work for certain clients. I also sub-contract website development work for a few clients I don’t formally advise—an echo of my former web design agency days.

To give you an example, I just sold a done-with-you wireframing project last month to a client I don’t advise for $6,500.

We meet once a week for 8 weeks to work through a number of core website templates—my hands doing the wireframing while they direct on what they’re trying to say and sell.

You can do some mental math to see why this type of execution is worth doing. But it gets even more profitable with the next step.

The client is then going to write copy and create a final design mockup themselves. When they’re done, I will have my go-to developer build the changes—making a decent margin on his time.

But that’s not the only kind of execution work I do.

Every advisory client I work with comes with some degree of done-with-you execution on our scheduled strategy calls (more on this idea later).

Sometimes it’s writing copy, sometimes it’s jumping on customer research interviews. Sometimes it’s mocking up an ad concept in Photoshop (don’t judge, old habits die hard).

My hands are never too far from the mouse and keyboard, even as an advisor.

The important thing is, any execution work I do is generally highly strategic, done with the client—or largely sub-contracted to someone else when it makes sense.

I never sub-contract work in an advisory relationship, however. I don’t want to create a conflict of incentives where I recommend we work with someone and then mark up their time.

In those cases, it’s a straight referral with no markup.

If you follow my Advisory Model, the goal is to avoid is getting stuck grinding out tasks and deliverables on an ongoing basis.

It’s just not that profitable to do things that way forever. And it’s a lot of work!

Better to either become an agency, sub-contract the long tail execution work, or advise on and/or manage the process.

That’s just how I see it, of course.

—k