Marketing Consultants

A friendly reminder in case you were interested.

Today at 11:00 am EST, I’m hosting a 90-minute deep-dive workshop on how to package, price, and sell custom consulting services.

The workshop will cover things like:

1. What to do on your website to get prospects to inquire
2. How to uncover the real problem within the problem
3. Uncovering the cost and value of the challenge at hand
4. How to create mutually profitable and compelling options
5. How to make a business case for your prices
6. How to dramatically increase your proposal acceptance rates
7. What to do when clients push back on price
8. When to turn your custom services into productized services
9. My experience with what clients value most in a proposal
10. Bonus: Get the proposal template I use today to successfully sell my consulting services

There will be a Q&A session at the end and a full recording will be provided within 48 hours of the event.

Interested in participating?

The investment for this first version of the workshop is $79—which is barely a blip against what you will gain from improving all your future consulting proposals.

​CLICK HERE TO REGISTER​

Take a look at the photo above. What do you see?

I see a wall of sameness.

But that sameness has a purpose! It tells you these books belong to a genre. In this case, the genre is fantasy fiction.

And that’s a good thing! If you want people to quickly identify your book as fantasy fiction, you design it to look like other books in that genre.

However, looking like everyone else in your genre is a double-edged sword.

It is true that if we look like everyone else, people will recognize us when they see us. And that’s a good thing.

The problem is, looking like your peers makes it super hard to stand out. When you look at these books, you really have to squint your eyes to distinguish one book from the next.

It feels safe to look like everyone else in your genre. But it comes with a trade-off: differentiation.

So how do you safely show you belong to a genre while also standing out? That’s the line you need to tow carefully.

If you stand out too much, people mistake you for something else entirely. But if you blend in too much, people don’t think to buy from you without a lot of thought.

At the end of the day, people decide based on the differences, not the similarities between things.

How you tow that line is up to you.

—kw

P.S. If you look closely you’ll notice one book is different. It’s on the bottom row in the middle. It has a red circle on it. It’s a Lord of the Rings book—one of the best-selling books in its genre. Coincidence?

P.P.S. This Wednesday at 11 am EST, I’m hosting a live workshop: How to Package, Price, and Sell Custom Consulting Engagements. It will be 90 minutes including Q&A, with a full recording made available to those who register. Get into this if you plan on doing any custom work this year—it will be worth it. Full details and to register: https://kevin.me/ccs/

It’s easy to believe that as advisors, we get paid to have all the answers.

We feel like to add value, we need to be able to tell people what to do.

What if instead, our value came from things like:

• Asking good questions
• Having good taste
• Running ideas through your filters
• Pattern matching against your experience
• Creating visions to consider
• Clarifying ideas that aren’t well-considered
• Being an encourager of good ideas
• Wrestling with options
• Looking at things from different perspectives
• Playing devil’s advocate
• Pushing people out of their comfort zone

As technicians, we like knowing the best tool or tactic to use for any situation. As creatives, we like envisioning new ideas and potential futures.

But as advisors, what if we didn’t feel like we needed to have all answers, and instead helped our clients explore options until the answers became a little more obvious?

Your value isn’t having all the answers. Your value comes from helping your clients make good decisions.

There are a lot of ways to get a result. The key is helping your clients choose the right way for them.

Listen to this episode or subscribe via your podcast player.

—kw

P.S. REGISTER FOR THE UPCOMING WORKSHOP
Next week (January 25 at 11:00 am EST) I’m hosting a live 90-minute workshop (with the recording made available) on how to package, price, and sell custom consulting services. We’ll go deep on creating custom proposals that convert, so don’t miss this one.

REGISTER NOW

One of the most important skills to have as a consultant is your ability to sell custom engagements.

While productizing your services is a path you may eventually take, if you don’t sell custom for a while first, there’s a good chance your productized services will miss their true potential.

Selling custom before productizing allows you to get clear on:

1. Customer segments—who actually buys what from you?
2. Problems—what are the real challenges you’re solving and how do prospects describe them?
3. Goals—what are your prospects trying to accomplish and why?
4. Features—what needs to be included to get results and what do people value most?
5. Timelines—how long should your engagements be to get results?
6. Value—how much value do you actually help generate for clients?
7. Price—how much should you charge for your engagements?
8. Objections—what common objections do I need to overcome?
9. Questions—what questions do people ask when considering my services?

When you jump right to productizing, you inherently make a lot of assumptions about all of the above.

Your services may seem great “on paper” but they can easily miss the mark in several subtle or major ways.

When you miss the mark on any of the above, it will almost always cost you money. And that’s money you can never get back.

On Wednesday, January 25, I’m going to be doing a workshop on how to sell custom consulting services.

The workshop will cover things like:

1. The counter-intuitive ways to get prospects to reach out to you
2. How to uncover the real problem, the value of solving it, and the costs of inaction
3. How to create compelling options that are profitable for everyone
4. How to make a business case for your prices
5. How to dramatically increase your proposal acceptance rates
6. What to do when clients want to negotiate with you on price
7. When to turn your custom services into productized services
8. My experience with what clients value most in a proposal (and what they don’t)
9. Bonus: The proposal template I use today to successfully sell my consulting services

If you join live, there will be a Q&A session at the end.

Interested in participating?

The price for this workshop is $79 and includes a full recording within 48 hours after the event.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

(Note: Mindshare members get this workshop and past workshops free.)

Hope to see you there!

—k

It was reported in 2019 that Netflix bought the worldwide rights to show all Seinfeld episodes for $500 million with a five-year term.

Think about that for a minute: they recorded 180 episodes over 9 years. To this day—25 years later—they can still command half a billion dollars for their rights over a five-year period.

And when those five years are up, they can do it all over again.

You’re probably not going to create Seinfeld-level digital assets worth billions of dollars over their lifetime.

But you can still create small knowledge products based on the stuff you say and do every day that produces some level of income over the years to come.

Creating intellectual property assets is a mindset.

Most of us learned it the wrong way from our parents: an honest day’s work for honest pay. But that’s a limiting paradigm in today’s age—especially for consultants.

The truth is, you do still need to work hard. But getting paid doesn’t require you to continue showing up to produce and sell real value with your expertise.

Think of your journey to create IP assets as a long-term investment.

A small product here, a larger course there. Over time, it will add up.

Start small and build your asset empire one tool or lesson at a time.

—kw

Marketing yourself as an advisor is tricky.

Sure, you can create case studies and highlight things you accomplished. You can point to websites you helped redesign or copy you helped write.

But so much of what we do is intangible.

How do we explain the internal transformations we helped create? How do we showcase the knowledge the client now has after working with you?

It’s hard to showcase your expertise when so much of what we do is intangible. But there are ways to do this outside of writing another article or Twitter thread.

A super effective way is to do “teardowns” of established businesses in your niche.

Maybe you record a video of Stripe’s new website design. Or Slack’s positioning. Or the checkout flow of some well-known ecommerce brand. Or the blog content of a really well-done fintech website.

Or, maybe you evaluate all the touchpoints across multiple channels—showing the breadth of your expertise and the areas you focus on during your consulting gigs.

A lot of times, people don’t know what consultants can actually do for them.

By showcasing the positives (with some room for improvement perhaps) of established companies in your space, it shows people how you think.

It’s your chance to teach your ideal clients how you approach businesses like theirs. They can learn things to apply themselves (or hire you to help).

Case studies are pretty boring, even if someone is thinking about hiring you.

They’re not bad, they’re just not great lead-gen content.

Why not do a teardown instead (leaving out the criticism) to showcase your knowledge instead?

You could even do a teardown of your own clients’ marketing and share that—at least it makes case studies a little more interesting!

A well-educated client has high-fidelity glasses on. They suddenly see the details and thought process that goes into things.

And that makes them want the same for their own business. They will also be more likely to believe you can help them do it.

If you can create a lightbulb moment for your clients, you’re in pretty good shape.

Show, don’t tell.

—kw

It’s easy for people to tell you to raise your prices. Or to “niche down”.

You hear it all the time. And in certain contexts, it’s good advice.

But what if you have no clients? Or what if you’re surviving gig to gig?

I have a saying that goes like this: get busy, then get picky.

If you need the money, keep your prices reasonable. Not cheap, not expensive… just something that feels reasonable for the work you’re doing.

Sure, it’s a subjective way to look at things. But your buyers are making semi-subjective decisions, too.

It goes the same way with “niching down”.

Imagine you were dropped into the wild and had to survive with a limited set of tools and skills. And let’s pretend you wanted to be a vegetarian. Chances are, you wouldn’t make it very long.

You’d have a much better chance of surviving if you thought of yourself as an omnivore willing to eat any calories you could find.

Only after you built a sustainable way to capture high-nutrient food would it make sense to consider “specializing” in finding certain kinds of foods.

The key thing here is survival.

You need to earn a base amount of revenue to keep you in the game. It’s important to earn enough to stave off the hunger that causes desperation.

If you need to build a base of lower-paying but steady clients (not low-paying clients, but lower than your ideal), then do it.

But don’t try to be the cheapest—that’s a race you can’t win. Aim for reasonable if you’re in this situation.

Keep marketing yourself like hell so you have a steady flow of leads to give you back your leverage and bargaining power.

Slowly raise your rates as your opportunities begin to exceed your supply. Slowly begin to specialize as you notice opportunities for easier and more fruitful work.

There’s no point in being the bravest vegetarian in the wild. Get your bases covered. Become sustainable. Then worry about increasing prices and specialization.

—kw

P.S. On Friday, I’m closing the membership option again until the summer. It gives you four months free over the monthly plan.

If you’ve been on the fence about joining, now is the best time to get in. You get access to my monthly workshops for free, twice-monthly coaching calls, a private Slack community, and more.

Join with this link or click to learn more.

As marketing professionals, it’s super easy to talk yourself out of publishing your ideas.

We should be experts at content creation, right? We must produce only the most perfectly polished content for it to be worth sharing.

Thing is, your clients don’t care about perfection. They have an inner dialogue going on in their head, and frankly, it’s not about you.

The best way to get going is to get out of your own way and just produce—even when that inner critic shows up. Especially then.

It’s not your job to judge your own work. It’s not for you anyway.

Your job instead is to join the conversation already happening in the minds of your ideal clients.

You do that by listening. By writing down questions you’re asked and answering them in your content. By agreeing to show up and repeat yourself if you have to.

Your content is not about you. It’s about your clients and prospects. It’s about helping people.

Turn your thoughts outward and ignore the inner voice holding you back. It’s not helping you or the people you seek to serve.

You and I both know you won’t be in this business for long if you don’t start publishing a little more. Start today.

If you’re stuck and need help growing your freelance or consulting practice, hit reply and let’s get you on the right path.

—kw

My brother-in-law is a die-hard Argentina fan in the World Cup.

And this year, Argentina had an amazing run—winning the cup earlier today over France.

Every time they got into overtime, I’d send him a text to see how he was holding up. It was fun to hear how tense he was when things got close.

And it got me thinking…

When you become known for something, people reach out about it. They send you things and make inquiries.

It’s the same with your business. When you become known in a niche for solving a particular kind of problem, opportunities and information around that particular thing begins to flow to you.

It all begins with a simple flag in the sand. You do X for Y kinds of people. You start telling people about it. People begin to associate you with that thing.

From there, the world conspires to bring relevant things to you. Slowly at first, but more and more over time.

I’ve always thought marketing was a little bit magic. But it also just makes sense when you think about it.

Whether I’m selling productized services or custom engagements, the answer to how long my sales process will take is simple:

I allow as long as it takes to ensure we’re a good fit.

Before I work with anyone, I want to feel them out. I want to know exactly what they expect to get out of the engagement. I want to know that they’ve tried, what success looks like, and how they’ll measure that success at the end of the day.

I also want to get aligned on a potential vision for the future. I might do some light coaching or make suggestions in the form of a question to see how coachable they are and whether we can get excited about a rough vision for the future.

I don’t try to solve their problems. I’m explicit about the fact that I can’t prescribe solutions until I diagnose.

But I do throw some thinking out there to see if it resonates. To show I understand their situation as well or potentially even better than they do in some ways.

One thing is for sure, I don’t rush the sale. I want to slow things down. I don’t get overly invested until I know both me and the client are sure this is a good fit.

Sometimes, this takes one or two phone calls. Other times, it might take a call or two (or three) separated by weeks or even months before the engagement begins.

That’s why I never understand people who try to qualify a lead in 15 minutes or limit discussions to a single call. There are too many factors to get right.

The main thing is to make sure I’m taking on clients who are a good fit and are bought into working with me.

The last thing you want to do is rush a sale and not get the important details right from the start.

—k

P.S. I’m going into detail on my sales process during my workshop tomorrow on How to Design Highly Profitable Productized Advisory Services. This is your last chance to register for the live or recorded version, if you’re interested.

REGISTER HERE →