There are two important skills you need to master as an advisor:
- Getting business results for your clients
- Being able to market yourself well
So which is more important to your long-term success as a consultant?
The truth is, you won’t succeed on the merits of your expertise alone.
People are not lining up to give their business to the smartest consultants on their merits alone. They need to discover them first.
And that means, you need to invest considerable time into marketing yourself if you want to see the fruits of success.
Marketing yourself should be a little hard—at least until you have momentum. It takes work, there’s no ways around that.
But here’s the thing: you won’t be able to market yourself well if you don’t also have deep expertise at what you do.
The same way having expertise alone won’t solve your client attraction problems, neither will good marketing.
You can’t do good marketing as a consultant without some level of true expertise at your craft.
That’s because much of marketing as a consultant is sharing what you know with the world for free. If what you know isn’t valuable enough, it won’t attract many buyers.
So the answer to succeeding as a marketing isn’t one or the other. It takes true expertise and a lot of marketing to be successful.
There is no fast-tracking true expertise nor the good marketing that stems from it.
Keep putting in the work and good things will happen.