marketing

Create a client referral engine for your solo consulting business.

Create a Client Referral Engine

So many solo consultants rely on referrals, but don’t have a system in place to generate them consistently. (Can you imagine how silly a consultant would have to be to run his business this way?!?) If you’d like to learn … Read More

Positioning Pyramid

The Simple Sales and Marketing Audit for Solo Consultants

The vast majority of solo consultants I encounter want more leads, and they invest a lot of time, money, and energy to get those leads, usually with disappointing results. They go through the “Cycle of Doom” (see below), or so … Read More

Ring, ring, your “ideal” client is calling

What do you feel? Excitement? Dread? So much of figuring out your Ideal client profile comes down to this question, because we have a natural tendency to want to broaden the circle to encompass as many people as possible. But … Read More

Cask-strength positioning for consultants

Cask-strength positioning for solo consultants

AI is all the rage (and what can I say, I find it very helpful), but for many consultants, AI is just making difficult work more streamlined, instead of transforming the nature of the work. What can transform your business** … Read More

Don't use AI to be less human

Authenticity is the currency

A lot of folks in marketing overuse the term “authenticity”, like it’s some kind of commodity you can fake, and thereby increase sales. But authenticity is precious, which is why so many people are trying to fake it. This goes … Read More

Complexity is the enemy

When we’re deep into our field, we sometimes get so deep that clients and prospects have trouble understanding. Think of a doctor describing an operation to another doctor, rather than to the patient. This is the curse of expertise. But there’s another form of … Read More

Do you own your own business, or does it own you?

Most of us start our own business because we want more freedom, more control, more spaciousness to pursue our purpose. Sometimes, though, it seems like the business starts owning us– even more than the corporate jobs we left. It’s hard … Read More

easy vs hard

The Olympics, Degree-of-difficulty, and Sales

USA and France played 2 amazing basketball games this weekend– the men’s final on Saturday and the women’s on Sunday, As a basketball fan, it’s great to see the games get competitive, with amazing players from all over the world.My … Read More

The Olympics are the wrong inspiration

This weekend I finally got a chance to watch some of the Paris Olympics. (Amazing drama, especially in the men’s 100m dash.) While I enjoyed watching and listening to some of the expert commentary, I realized that it’s easy to … Read More

Sales and marketing automation vs. organization

There are lots of tools for sales and marketing automation, some quite powerful and effective, in the appropriate situation. But all of these tools will fail if you need to have real relationships and you try to “outsource” your side … Read More