You Need To Find A Way To Enjoy Promoting Yourself
What should you do if you find the idea of promoting yourself cringeworthy? Well, fortunately, there's a better approach. But first we need to change the mindset of promotion.
Hi, I’m Rich. Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share systems and frameworks for scaling your consulting practice from $0 to $1m+ in revenue.
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Do You Find Promoting Yourself Cringeworthy?
Many people feel they have extensive expertise and a good methodology, but they would rather rip their eyeballs out than promote themselves in a ‘cringeworthy’ way on LinkedIn.
This is a common dilemma faced by my coaching clients.
Sometimes, they try to outsource it, acquire a list of leads, or automate the process somehow. Often, they hope to get lucky or find a larger organisation that will give them work.
These are bad ideas.
We need to tackle this problem at two levels: the mindset and then the practice.
The Mindset Of Promotion
The first challenge is that you can’t separate the consultancy from the promotion.
As I wrote two years ago, you’re not becoming a consultant, you’re starting a business.
A business needs customers, and you must promote yourself to get customers.
No promotion = no business.
You can’t sign up to be a consultant without realising you must devote most of your time (in the beginning) to promoting yourself. The key challenge in solo consulting isn’t doing the work, it’s getting it. If getting the work was easy, far more people would be consultants.
Being able to promote yourself and attract clients is a good test of whether you would be a good consultant or not. Everyone can give advice that works in theory. But you learn so much from being in the weeds of positioning, marketing in the modern era, and how to do B2B sales.
It’s like people who want to start a tech company without being technical. It’s not impossible, but if you can’t solve that problem, you aren’t suited to starting a company.
This promotion barrier separates the good consultants from those who work better within organisations. If you’re unwilling to promote yourself, don’t become a consultant.
Promotion Doesn’t Need To Be Cringeworthy
Promotion isn’t cringeworthy; you’re probably just seeing cringeworthy promotion.
You’re probably seeing the promotion of others which has been optimised for social feeds and does well on LinkedIn. You know the type:
Begin with a big hook, add a video/graphic, make a grand statement that someone will strongly agree/disagree with…
And there’s nothing essentially wrong with that; I do it myself. There’s even a skill to optimising content to interest your audience.
But it’s also exhausting, and when everyone follows the same playbook, it can feel like you’re shouting into a noisy marketplace.
It’s also worth noting that LinkedIn is really not the best platform for attracting clients.
The buyers of five-figure projects don’t hire people based on LinkedIn posts. They hire people whom they trust. The things that build trust are often the opposite of the things that attract attention.
You don’t need to join the thought leadership race to attract clients.
Compare what most people do with how we sign the world’s top firms as clients.
Every single thing you do to promote your business should be to increase the level of trust and respect you have from the people you want to work with.
Sending out direct messages looking for work or pretending you have ‘a rare open consultancy slot to fill’ doesn’t do that.
The only thing that does that is:
Offering unique value people can’t get from anywhere else.
Showing up consistently over time and providing value.
Proving you can help prospective clients tackle the challenges they face.
Honestly, everyone is so busy shouting opinions at each other, that there’s an incredible opportunity to take a different path to attracting great clients. Simply sharing great research will set you apart from most people.
Run Marketing Campaigns Instead
Instead of considering it as ‘promoting yourself’, think of it as running a marketing campaign.
(See this course we created for
on promoting yourself.)You don’t need to create hundreds of articles or videos. Sometimes, just a handful of evergreen items you promote and update once or twice a year is better than an endless river of content. Combine that with some solid testimonials and case studies, and you’re good to go.
You can also avoid the content game altogether and follow one of the other five common ways of attracting clients.
Here’s The Secret: Research Calls
The single best thing you can do before diving into promoting yourself is to undertake dozens of research calls with the kinds of people you want to work with.
Identify the people you want to work with, set up calls with them, ask them what challenges they’re facing, how they are overcoming them, and what they can’t overcome.
This will not only help you grow your network but also naturally lead to opportunities for unique content, account-based marketing, networking, event topics, and more.
If you want to stand out from the crowd, you have to research to uncover the real challenges your clients are facing and build your entire strategy around that.
If you don’t do a couple of research calls every week, you’re missing out on the best opportunity to set yourself apart.
You Should Enjoy The Promotion Part
The promotion part is the most enjoyable part of my work.
You get to be creative and create things that are helpful to people.
A good 50% or more of your time should be spent on the promotion side of your work. And it is a lot of work. You can see the typical list of things I do to promote my consultancy at any given time - are any of them cringeworthy?
But if you have the right mindset, understand the goal is to help people, and tackle it with integrity, you will find promotion becomes something you enjoy doing, rather than dread.
Good luck!
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It’s easy to say than done.
Even when I can see that may be the right path to follow,
there are a set of skills that need to be developed that are very hard to go through.
The good is that it is possible.