Yesterday, I talked about the power of “arbitrary goals“. I thought I’d expand on it a bit more to make it practical. Your goals could be at least one of two things: outcome or input-focused. Examples of outcome-focused goals include revenue targets, profit, number of clients, number of leads, or even selling a new service …
The profound difference between management and leadership
“There is a profound difference between management and leadership, and both are important. To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction is crucial”. — Warren Bennis In his 1989 book “On Becoming a Leader, …
Life gets easier with a process
The longer I do consulting, the easier things get. It’s not because I’m smarter than I was yesterday. As Alan Weiss says, “I’m constantly surprised by how stupid I was two weeks ago.” The reason things get easier is because I’ve been able to systemize the work I do—both for myself and my clients. Some …
Doing a few things slowly but effectively
One of the core things I help my clients with is turning their marketing into a system instead a series of sporadic activities. It might include 20-30% recurring tasks and the rest of their time working on miscellaneous projects. In most cases, I tell them to start slowly. Everything will feel difficult and take longer …
The importance of good onboarding
When a new client commits to working with you, how you onboard them is critical to how your engagement will go. It sets the tone for everything to follow. Once the deal is approved, your job is to sweep them off their feet and guide them swiftly into your process. How you get signatures, gather …
Two ways to build demand in a new consulting business or niche
What do you do when you’re new to consulting and nobody seems to want what you’re selling yet? Here are two ideas to consider: 1. Make sure demand exists already for the category of thing you sell in the market you sell it to There’s no point in trying to sell ice to a penguin. …
You don’t own the right to social media distribution—build your list
Here’s a tweet from a reporter today on Facebook’s platform outage: Source at Facebook: “it’s mayhem over here, all internal systems are down too.” Tells me employees are communicating amongst each other by text and by Outlook email. — Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) October 4, 2021 Notice how staff are resorting to email and text messages? …
Defining the perfect examples
Your job as an advisor is not to do all the tasks for your clients. Your job is to know which tasks to do and then to create, find, or describe a perfect way of doing them when the time is right. Once you get into “perfect example creation mode”, the rest of your work …
Want access to my Methodology?
As a consultant, your Methodology can become your business’ most valuable asset. It’s the key to creating leverage around your expertise. But for that to be the case, you need to have the discipline to continually make tweaks and adjustments. For most marketing professionals, your “Methodology” begins with you making it up as you go …
Introducing the new Mindshare Pro membership program
Today, I made some changes to Mindshare—a professional development community for marketing consultants, strategists, and fractional CMOs. The group is focused on helping you package and sell your expertise—not just execution—and to turn your ideas into leveraged products and services like advisory retainers, mentorship programs, memberships, subscriptions, group coaching, info products, workshops, training, and more. In …