It seems we have a deficit in the area of Marketing Consulting.  Not all, but an awful lot of the Marketing Consultants I’ve spoken to over the past 3 or 4 months are experiencing cash flow chaos.  Yes, you could blame it on the economy, or the time of year.  That doesn’t help matters though.  We need to take responsibility and do something about it.  Nobody deserves to work hard and get nowhere.

Over the past (almost) 20 years running Marketing Consulting businesses, I’ve learned that when we want to ramp up business, we need to go out and find clients who need strategic help.  Why?  Because the biggest challenge business owners have, according to our research conducted mid 2015, is they don’t know where to start with marketing. They simply don’t know what works for their industry, which is second nature to Marketing Consultants.

The second reason is, business owners are willing to pay good money for excellent strategic help. It’s not something they can do themselves and often lack in their own teams, so they value the extra value you can bring as an experienced outsider (so long as you bring it!).

Thirdly, strategic assistance takes a lot less time than tactical implementation.  So in essence you can be rewarded more and use less time to deliver high value strategic assistance to your clients.

And last but definitely not least… Helping clients with their marketing strategies generally leads to them asking “can you help us implement this please?”

It all makes complete sense.

All you Marketing Consultants should be jumping for joy!  This is exactly what you do – right?!  So if you’re experiencing cash flow chaos, here’s what we suggest:

1. Put together a really strong Marketing Strategy Session as a product.  If you want access to ours… here it is.
2. Start approaching the right prospects in the right way.
3. Have a conversation with them that allows you to identify their biggest, most urgent challenges and gives them exceptional value (on the spot).  Done right, this builds their trust in you and establishes your credibility.
4. If you’ve given enough value and asked the right questions in step 3, then you won’t need to sell, you’ll simply need to close – that is, tidy up the details such as price, payment method and date for the meeting. Music to the ears of the Marketing Consultant who hates to sell!!
5. Wow your new client with your pre-meeting process as well as your strategic guidance during a high powered strategy session.
6. Deliver a high value useful Strategy Meeting document in a timely manner.
7. Agree the next steps (which we’ve found generally leads to another engagement with the client for ongoing work).

We know it sounds simple, yet many of the consultants we have talked to recently aren’t doing it.  So we decided to share our process and templates to make it easy to get out there and start helping business owners. If you’d like a copy… head this way.

Go forth and prosper while helping others do the same!