When you’re good at what you do, it’s only a matter of time before you get busy. It’s slow at first, but then it happens all at once. It turns out, having an effective product or service is great for business. Who knew? But with that increased demand for your services, you’ll eventually run into …
Your clients are paying for your worldview
Your clients are paying for your worldview. Sure, they want your technical analysis. They want your methodology. They may even want you to make some decisions for them. But at the end of the day, the main reason they chose you is for your worldview—not just your skills. Which means as an advisor, it’s your …
Why it’s important to like who you serve
To be a great consultant, you need to develop your Methodology. To develop your Methodology, you need to specialize. To specialize, you need to actually like the people you serve. Why? Because it takes a long time to build a Methodology that makes you sufficiently unique and sought-after. It also takes a long time to …
Why small is an advantage for consultants
One of the advantages of being a consultant is you get to stay small if you want to. That might not seem like an advantage, but it is. Why is it an advantage? When you keep your business small, you can work with a few number of great clients, do great work, and make a …
The benefits of being a niche consultant
For a lot of consultants, picking a niche is hard. Good positioning hurts. On the one hand, you can see the benefits of being a sought-after specialist. But the other hand, it feels like you’re saying no to so much opportunity. It feels like being a generalist will broaden your appeal, but it doesn’t. I …
The nuance to selling a “system”
As marketing practitioners, we often lean towards selling our process. It’s the way we approach our client work, so it feels important for us to talk about it. But if you’ve bought anything lately and encountered someone selling their approach to the way they work, you’ll quickly realize how little you care about it. What …
Sell the destination, not the journey
People who want to go to a destination—let’s say Hawaii—value the experience of Hawaii. They don’t really care how they get there as long as it’s on an airplane and doesn’t cost more than it should. The means of travel is therefore a commodity. Your job as a consultant is to know what destination your …
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 …
The hard thing about marketing consulting
Being a marketing consultant is not easy. There are endless layers—from strategic to tactical, creative to technical, and everything in between. But the hardest part is not any one of those things. The hard part is the unpredictable nature of it all. As marketers, we work hard to specialize, create frameworks, apply methodologies, and continually …
Be generous with what you know
You might think it’s worth saving some of your secret sauce for your paid products or 1:1 consulting. That if you shared just some of your best tips, people would be keen to buy the rest. But here’s the thing. It doesn’t work that way. When people buy consulting from you, they don’t just want …