Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Consultants

Should you sell upfront stategy, audit, and roadmapping or start with an advisory retainer?

Last week, I answered a question from a member of the Mindshare community.

I’ve decided to make this episode public as a sample of the private podcast I publish for members only every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

This was the main part of the question:

I have Strategy (Audit + Roadmap) as a front offer, and then advisory later. Based on your experience, are you trying to close everyone for recurring advisory service right away? Just wondering how are you closing the deal for 6 months right away.

In this episode, I talk about why I generally jump into advisory retainers right away, why clients tend to ask for that anyway, and why it’s in their best interest to do so for 99% of cases.

I also talk about how to remove risk so clients can “try before they buy” (using guarantees) and generally how I sell it in a sales conversation.

Listen in and let me know if you do anything differently!

Click here to listen to this episode >

Directionally accurate

You don’t have to know where you’re going. You don’t even have to know how to get there. You just need to be directionally accurate. 

Move in the directions of your goals and intuition, watch for feedback, and iterate until you get there.

It’s not business travel, it’s a road trip.

8 books every marketing consultant should read

Books are an extraordinary way to level up your business game.

You may not immediately see the benefits of reading them, but I know for a fact they impact the work I do and the way I see the world.

Here are a few that have made a big impact for me. If you’re a consultant of any kind, these are definitely worth reading.

1. Value-Based Fees by Alan Weiss

This was a game changer when I got into consulting and started doing value-based fees for custom engagements. I’ve since switched more to productized services, but this one still sits as one of the most impactful books in terms selling and pricing based on value.

Great for newer and veteran consultants.

2. Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

This one really clarified the need to put yourself into a “category of one”, as I call it. Great for positioning yourself or your clients to make you the obvious choice for your best clients.

3. Trade-Off by Kevin Maney

This one is more about seeing business in a way that explains why some businesses succeed and some never take off. It talks about going to the edges of either convenience (i.e. ease of getting a result) or fidelity (the total experience of working with you).

I can’t see the world the same way after this book.

4. Essentialism by Greg McKeown

I read this maybe once or twice a year. Well, I listen to the audiobook, but same idea. It gets you focused on doing only the essential things that make the biggest impact in your business.

If you feel out of control or like you’re doing too much, read this one.

5. The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz

This one is a story about a pumpkin grower. In order to grow award-winning pumpkins, you need to be prepared to cut loose the ones that will never be your prize pumpkin in order to allocate resources to the ones who can be.

The business analogy will help you focus your work and your clients.

6. The Passion Economy by Adam Davidson

This book is about those who create niche businesses around their passions that result in massive success. It’s about creating remarkable businesses around the work you love doing.

I just read it and was blown away, especially by the first half. Don’t sleep on this one!

7. Getting Naked by Patrick Lencioni

This book taught me a lot about taking a service-oriented approach to consulting. It’s definitely one to pick up and read next time you need some inspiration. It’s told in a story format, so the lessons are super easy to digest.

8. The Practice by Seth Godin

This book really resonated with me. It’s the latest from Seth Godin, and definitely one of my faves by him.

The book inspires you to create work regardless of the outcome. To do it for those who resonate with it and being okay with most people not liking it. To try things, even without a guarantee it will work. And so much more.

I listened to it twice, bought the hard cover, then bought two more as a gift. That should tell you enough.

And that’s the list! I’m sure there are many more. These are just a few books that come to mind without looking at my bookshelf or Audible app.

If you haven’t read some of these, I highly recommend them.

What are your game-changers that everyone must read?

Everything you encounter is a content idea

When you’re a consultant, almost anything you encounter is a potential content idea.

Teach someone something in a consulting project? Teach it on your blog.

Learn something new while you were working? Put it on social media.

Make a mistake somewhere? Share the lesson.

Run into some good marketing? Use it as an example.

Someone ask you a thought provoking question? Answer it for the public.

See something random on your desk? Tie it into a lesson in a unique way.

There are content ideas everywhere. Keep your eyes peeled and a notebook ready, and you’ll never run out of ideas.

If you’re completely stumped, it’s because you’re not looking hard enough.

Strategy, systems, processes, and results

In order to get consistent and predictable results from your marketing, you need to have a system.

Of course, your system should be based on a strategy. But as important as your strategy is, it’s the systems that produce results consistently over time.

Without a system, you have haphazard activities and inconsistent results.

Processes, on the other hand, become the instruction manual for the system. They’re the step-by-step breakdown of each part of the system.

These might seem mundane at first blush, but they’re critical.

You can get a rocket to space with a good system, but only if you follow the individual processes within it.

As a marketing advisor, I break things down into four core parts: strategy, systems, processes, and results.

Results (or lack thereof) should be analyzed at one or more of those four levels using quantifiable data.

When things go wrong, the focus should be turned towards fixing the part of the system that didn’t work. Like the Wright brothers when they built the airplane, they kept iterating on the system until it worked.

A lot of people run marketing program without any of the four parts I mentioned in place. That’s why their results are so inconsistent.

If you want to get consistent, repeatable results from your marketing, try breaking down your efforts into those four parts.

Treat it like an object outside of any one individual. Everything is documented and set to a specific timeline of events. It’s a machine you constantly tweak and improve.

Build the system, set it to a schedule that works for you, tweak it as much as needed, and document it along the way.

What if you couldn’t use your hands?

Imagine for a moment that you couldn’t use your hands.

You could no longer write, code, design, or whatever it is you do for money.

Do you think you could figure out a way to guide someone towards a solution in exchange for a small fee?

Do you think you could introduce your clients to people who could be your “hands” and then verbally guide the strategic direction of the project?

Could you get a result using the help of other people and the expertise you’ve gained over your years spent “doing the thing”?

My guess is you could. If you really had to, you could.

So why not try it? Why not add an advisory service to your website?

Or if you have one already, why not completely remove the hands work that sneaks into all your engagements?

Selling your expertise is a choice. It also requires a degree of confidence that your ideas are worth something.

If you lack confidence in the value you can create with your expertise, go take some courses. Learn everything you can. Research. Put in the reps. Meet people. Hire a coach.

All of these things will help accelerate your skills, results, and therefore your confidence.

An advisor’s job is to facilitate outcomes. That’s it.

Your ability to get those outcomes is a product of learning, networking, researching, and applying your knowledge to different situations.

Good advisors learn and research constantly so that they don’t have to use their hands.

What’s stopping you?

How to sell advisory services and scale your expertise

You won’t sell advisory services right out of the gate.

Chances are, you’ll be neck deep in the trenches for a long time before people want to start buying just your brain.

But if you are interested in selling advisory services, a good way to start is to simply offer it in addition to everything else you do.

You may not sell any, but at least you give people an option to DIY with the help of your experience.

And once you start selling your expertise as a standalone entity, separate from your hands, that’s when things change forever.

At that point, you’ll want to keep doing it. You’ll then want to formalize your expertise into a methodology to create structure and produce results consistently.

Do that for a while, and you’ll want to start packaging your knowledge and selling it at scale. That’s the magic of selling your expertise—it does scale when you create a process that works.

It happens slowly at first. You’ll be in the trenches a long time before people want to buy just your ideas.

But when it does happen, it gives your business an opportunity to take off (without turning into an agency).

At least, that’s how I’ve seen it work for me and others in the Mindshare community.

If you’re interested in this idea, I’ve written on it in more detail here.

If you don’t know what to write, start writing

One of the beautiful things about writing daily (or producing any kind of content daily) is that it forces you to find things to talk about.

It can be hard to come up with new ideas every day. I’ve shared ideas on this before, such as writing for one real person, keeping a list of topics to write about, doing research on what your target market wants to consume, etc.

But one of the best ways to come up with an idea is just start writing.

You might begin with a random idea that doesn’t flow right. You might start again on the same page. Then a third time, you find yourself writing about something that just clicks.

Suddenly, your writing flows. The ideas make sense.

And there you have it, you have created a topic by writing until something finally clicked. You weren’t short of ideas, you just didn’t have momentum.

So, if you’re stuck on what to write about, there’s no excuse if you haven’t sat down and just tried writing.

Try one of the other tips above, sure. But writing begets more writing.

The ideas will come if you’re in motion.

The disproportionate upsides and downsides

Something in your business isn’t working. It’s small.

Maybe it’s a service you offer, or a client you work with, or an idea that isn’t taking off. And it’s causing disproportionate downside for you.

Maybe the downside is stress, or high time commitment with minimal reward, or nobody is buying. Whatever it is, it’s worth noticing and dealing with.

The flip side is also true.

Smaller parts of your business are working extraordinarily well.

Maybe it’s the type of clients you work with or a service you offer that you love selling and delivering.

And compared to everything else, it brings disproportionate returns. Whatever it is, it’s worth noticing and doubling down on. 

Of course, this is the 80/20 principal at play. 

The more you remove the 20% of things causing 80% of the downside, the more you free up your time and energy to do more productive things.

The more you do the few things that are causing disproportionate benefit, the more your business will grow and the happier you’ll be.

You know this already. I’m just here to remind you to actually evaluate any part of your business for this pattern and act on it.

The thing about numbers

Most of business and marketing can be reduced down to numbers.

It might be number of blog posts you published, number of leads you got, total revenue, cost per acquisition, or a whole range of other metrics.

You can then use statistics and analysis to make assumptions or give you an indication of directional success.

Running a business requires a combination of numbers and some degree of subjectivity and gut instinct.

But if you really want to improve your situation, the best way is to break things down into numbers.

Could be dollars, hours, inputs, profit, or even subjective things like quality score.

Our gut instinct is important, but it’s even better when you have numbers.

And without numbers, you’ll always be surprised. Usually, not in a good way.

Track, measure, and improve those numbers.