The Recognized Authority Podcast Trailer

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Hello, and welcome to marketing for consultants. This is the podcast that helps independent consultants and experts to get more clients without having to beg for referrals or make soul destroying cold calls.

So this is the podcast for you if you’re an independent consultant or subject matter expert, and you don’t want to do marketing in a sleazy way. You don’t like the sales and marketing tactics that you see, you don’t like receiving all these stupid LinkedIn messages trying to get you to “hop on a call” or be sold or spammed. You don’t want to do that. You want to do marketing and sales in an ethical way, in a way that is easy that feels good to do. That’s what we’re about on this podcast!

I’m going to have some great guests on – experts, both from the marketing field, and simply some successful consultants who are gonna come on and talk about their stories.

And I have some really great episodes already recorded, I’m going to play a couple of clips from some of those, and I’m going to let you see what the plan is for the first few months of the podcast so you get a flavour of what’s going to be upcoming.

So the first thing I’m going to do is I just want to go over to a clip from Jonathan Stark. And Jonathan is one of the people who I have been following online for a long time, I’m just going to play a short clip of the discussion that we had:

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But here’s the thing, “marketing” is bad word for a lot of people. It’s like used car salesman, slimy, pushy, persuasive, you need to cut – that’s bad marketing!

The good marketing, you don’t notice. You don’t think it’s marketing. Starbucks is marketing to you, like the design of their store is marketing. Showing up in the marketplace is marketing.

So if you come at it, with a posture of service, like trying to help the people in your market, which is really hard if you haven’t picked a very specific market, because everybody needs different things, and they talk about their needs in different ways. But if you if you show up and help people you like, get what they want. That’s marketing.

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And this is why I love to, to work with people like Jonathan, why I want to talk to people like that here on the podcast. So there’s another person who I’ve been a huge fan of I’ve been following her story online. And that is Sara Dunn. Sara has been talking about how she has specialised her business how she has niched down or niche down and she has a really inspiring story.

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And so all of my work, I felt like came from really hustling, going to networking meetings and getting in front of people so that they would know and trust me. Even though I was doing all of that kind of work. And it felt really hard to me. I still felt like people didn’t really understand that I was actually knowledgeable in digital marketing. So

there was one particular instance that really was the turning point, I was talking to someone that I knew through a networking group, he had a jewellery store. And we talked about making a website for his business. I was really excited about the project, I gave him a proposal.

And I checked in with him a week later. And he said, you know, thank you so much for this proposal, but my niece is taking a web design class in college, so she’s just gonna do it for us. And I realised at that moment, I was so frustrated. And I said,

I haven’t differentiated myself. Having done this for six years now, versus someone who has taken one three credit course in college, this person perceives that we basically know the same amount about this topic, and I said, this is a problem. And to me, I eventually realised the problem was I was too much of a generalist and

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Somebody else who I’ve been following for a long time is Louis Grenier and Louis is a, an inspiring marketer. He has a podcast called everyone hates marketers, which is fighting marketing bullshit. And that’s what I love about Louis, he is a no bullshit kind of guy. We had a great conversation about how to stand out how to radically differentiate yourself. I think you’re really gonna find that one useful if you’re thinking about how to position yourself, and how to position your firm and your business against a lot of your competitors who all look the same. How do you stand out like that? So here’s some from Louis,

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creating something that a few people would absolutely love. Using your customers using your market and using the category that you’re in the what is being done to your advantage to do something that is genuinely different. So you can’t create something that is radically different. You can’t have a radically different marketing without radically different products, right? That’s the first that’s kind of the key ingredients. I didn’t want to become this guy who would help companies to radically differentiate, but just a message.

But no, you need both. You need a good product that a few people love. And the marketing that goes with it, right, you can’t have one or the other, just impossible. Like the good old four Ps of Marketing, include product includes price includes promotion includes place. That’s what I mean, right? So you can see I get fired up, and I talk fast, and please get me but this is it. This is the way if you want to launch anything now, with the clutter that is online. The only way if you want to have some sort of decent chance to be noticed is to be radically different. And then once you are And once everything works fine, it’s not as important that at the start is very much important. So if you’re solo consultants, it’s critical.

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Another person who I’m really looking forward to having on is Heather Steele. And Heather is somebody who I have massive admiration for, because of the amount of the amount of work that she gets done the amount of things that she ships online, and the the sheer quality of what she’s putting out there. And all of this while she has a kid with pretty extreme special needs, as she talks about on the podcast, and I just have massive admiration for what Heather does. So here’s a short clip from our conversation.

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A couple of years into the journey, we started to see that things were different with Travis. He wasn’t sleeping well, he wasn’t speaking, we had a lot of aggression issues. And so added into the already complicated startup world, finding out that we had a child with severe autism, these severe aggression tendencies is put me in a position where the few hours a day that we have help, or we have a centre that we can send him to he goes for three hours a day right now. That’s my work time. Yes. So over the years, I’ve kind of learned how to break what I have to do down into pieces that will fit into either 10 minutes here and there is I can sit down at the computer when he’s home, or, you know, this three hour window when he’s actually away and in someone else’s care.

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How do you stay focused? Are you some sort of ninja kind of project manager,

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I wish that I could have like the ability to really just sit down and focus when I need to, it’s really more about discipline for me. So one thing that I do is I have a literal list, and I update this list. Often, it’s a notes document on my phone of desk activities and phone activities. So that when I am literally following my kid around the house to make sure he’s not breaking anything or to play with him or push him on a swing or watch him jump on the trampoline, I can take my phone out and do really productive work from my boss.

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And that’s Heather. And as you can see, that’s why I have such great admiration for Heather and and what she does. So another guest that I’m going to have on is Douglas Squirrel. And Douglas has a software consulting business. And he very casually explains to me on the podcast, how he has grown that business to $1 million in annual revenue. I think you’re really gonna enjoy that.

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Yep, so I keep I keep doubling my prices. And that keeps working out well. And and what I built that on is the very spectacular work that I’ve done for clients and spectaculars use a word I use intentionally. It is it is a spectacle. It’s the sort of thing that people want to go and tell their friends about. So taking a team that is completely delivering, you know, has been delayed on a single project for a year. And within a month, they’re delivering new value every day. That’s the sort of thing I do again and again, and people want to tell that story. If I had simply taken a team that was kind of not performing great, and I made them poor perform 10% better, that might be very valuable, then that might make the company excited about what I did and want me to come back and help another team. But it wouldn’t make them go down the pub and say, Hey, I have this person and my team is suddenly so much better. Yeah, this guy squirrel, you got to talk to him. So it’s that element that’s important.

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So that’s what you’re going to get on marketing for consultants. This is the podcast that helps independent consultants and experts to get more clients without having to beg for referrals or make soul destroying cold calls. Stay tuned. Leave a comment below. Let me know anybody you think would make For a great guest, we’re looking for b2b marketing specialists. And we are looking for successful independent consultants who will tell us their story. And I’m really looking forward to speaking with all of these inspiring, and really successful people who are happy to come on and share their story.

So thanks for listening, or Thanks for watching. If you’re checking this out on YouTube, please do leave a comment below. I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on the internet’s at what strategy on Twitter you can find me at Alastair McDermott on LinkedIn. And I would love to connect with all of you and hear your suggestions, your feedback, your criticism, and anything that you you think can make this better. So thanks for tuning in.