Oscar Wilde has a quote I like: “Don’t use big words. They mean so little.” But most consulting firms don’t follow Wilde’s advice. They love big words. They want to revolutionize stuff. They want to supercharge growth. But guess what these big words and phrases mean for buyers? Nothing. They are vague. They are disconnected…
Articles
Three Marketing Bottlenecks That Keep Consulting Firms Stuck (And Their Symptoms)
Three marketing bottlenecks keep consulting firms stuck at a certain revenue level: These problems keep the business from growing to its next stage. Some businesses just have one. Some others might have all three to a certain degree. They have different symptoms: 1. Wrong Positioning You create the wrong value and/or for the wrong clients.…
How Buying Triggers Make Your Marketing Matter to Buyers
What leads your clients to look for a solution like yours? What makes them realize they have a problem? The answers to these questions matter. Because when you know your clients’ buying triggers, you can: Think about the buying triggers in our lives. Like becoming a parent. Your life changes when you learn you’ll become…
How Clear Positioning Creates a Natural “Flow State” Inside Your Firm
Having clarity around your consulting firm’s positioning has a hidden upside. We usually talk about how it helps you win clients. It raises your perceived value. It makes buyers choose you over others. But it also changes things inside the business. You know what they say. Constraints breed creativity. A blank page is scary because…
Pull Marketing: Why Most Consulting Content Fails To Drive Sales (And How To Do It Right)
We’ve talked about why most push marketing tactics fail and how to do it right. Today, let’s focus on pull. Here’s why most organic content doesn’t deliver results and how to fix it to attract clients: The Soviet Union had a shortage of nails during Lenin’s government. To increase production, Soviet officials started setting quotas…
The How Chain: A Simple Questioning Method to Reveal Your Consulting Firm’s Onlyness
You might have seen it on the news. On Monday, there was a blackout in Spain (where I live) for 12 hours. No electricity. No phone line. No traffic lights, no metros, no trains. Some people got stuck in elevators for hours. Some others couldn’t buy food since they didn’t have cash. Total chaos. When…
Why Serving Multiple Client Types Kills Growth (And How To Choose The Ideal One)
In 2012, Hubspot was bleeding customers. They spent a lot of resources on customer acquisition. But customers didn’t stick around and churned out after a few months. So their customer lifetime value was low. That meant they couldn’t increase marketing budgets further and hire a bigger team to scale. Hubspot’s executive team realized they had…
14 Questions to Audit Your Homepage Messaging (Before It Silently Kills Sales)
You know this as a buyer. When you plan to buy a B2B service, you go to that brand’s website. You read the homepage. You try to understand what they do, how they do it, and how they are different. And based on what you see, you form an opinion and make a decision: to…
Why Buyers Are Becoming Immune To “Push” Marketing (And How To Do It Right)
You know about this. Marketing tactics fall into two categories: push and pull. “Push” tactics are interruptions. They interrupt a potential buyer and ask for an action. Meanwhile, “pull” tactics are the opposite. You make buyers come to you by offering them content they might be interested in. There is an inherent problem with push…
Brand Ideology: Why Your Consulting Firm Needs An Ideology To Stand Out (And How To Develop One)
Think about it. How come some brands have passionate believers like political parties? People even do irrational stuff for some brands. Like getting into a line at 5 a.m. to buy products or defending it against negative comments online as if somebody cursed their mother. It’s almost like some brands become part of customers’ identities.…
