A little Q&A today.
“How do you go about creating results without doing the writing? I want to hear your take on this.
I feel like with some of the clients I’ve consulted with in the past it’s more about steering them in the right direction. And being that person that gives them the second opinion they’re looking for before they execute an idea. Instead of having to be a marketing genius.
I feel like I psych myself out because I think I have to know every answer to any possible problem in order to consult.”
I love this question for a number of reasons. First of all it’s from a really talented marketer and copywriter colleague of mine. And so I know where this is coming from. He wants to move into doing more consulting and less writing similar to the path that I’ve taken in my career.
The other part of this is because he’s really right and he doesn’t know it yet.
I’ve been watching the series on Netflix called “7 Days Out.” If you’re not familiar with the series it goes a week before a major event — the Kentucky Derby, a NASA space mission, a fashion show — and shows you what it takes to ramp up to this event. It’s fascinating, and what’s fascinating about it is the pursuit of excellence. That’s what I see in this show.
One episode in particular is about the reopening of a wildly popular and successful restaurant in New York called Eleven Madison Park. There’s one character in this show — Co-owner Will Guidara. He is obsessed. He kind of drives everyone crazy with how obsessed he is about every detail of the restaurant. There’s one scene that illustrates how he looks at things.
He sits down at the table to test out the dining experience. Suddenly he says, “All of these tables need to be rotated… Both of my feet are touching the base of the table.”
And the staff get to work, rotating each table so that the base lands between the average customer’s feet.
The attention to the most minute details amazes me. Of everyone on the staff… Will is the only one who’s entire job is being intentional. About everything.
So, to go back to this question that I got this week. My role as a consultant is to help clients be intentional.
One consulting client that I work with now is a really, really smart marketer. He has a very successful business and he’s very well-connected to Facebook ads experts and email experts and video experts. He reaches out to me a lot with tactics.
“Such and such guru did it this way.” “Oh I was talking to so-and-so the other day they recommended we do this.”
There’s no shortage of ideas out there and especially with entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are usually not lacking in ideas to test for marketing. What my role is as the consultant is to say, “OK what is our intention here?”
How is this going to flow into the big picture? We could do this type of video but what does it do? How does it fit into the customer journey?
An example of this is last Friday. I had a meeting with this client. We’re mapping out a course launch. I said, “You know, let’s step back. Let’s stop talking about this course and let’s talk about how this course fits into your whole ‘universe.’ How does this course fit with this other course? Where do you want customers to be before the course? Where do you want them to be after?”
The course we were talking about was a mid-tier course. He also has a low level introductory course and a high-end mastermind. And then there’s some live events. And so how does this whole customer journey work together?
My role as the consultant is not to be an expert in all these tactics. He has people for that. My job is to say, “Cool. We can execute these tactics, but what is the larger picture? What’s the intention?”
That way, each step is intentionally thought out. At Eleven Madison Park, when the customer sits back in their chair, when they put their feet down, when they pick up their fork, what might they do when they receive their food, when they ask the server a question… Every moment of the customer journey is planned out.
That’s what the role of the consultant is. Being intentional is a really, really valuable and rare skill these days and people will pay a lot for it.
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