Before You Start A Consulting Business

How to Get Clients Online with Dallas McMillan

BEFORE YOU START A CONSULTING BUSINESS CHECK THESE 3 THINGS

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5 Projects to Boost Your Sales of 5

Hi, it's Dallas McMillan here. Today I want to talk to you about validating your business model. In the five projects we've built out five fundamental marketing projects that you need to take your online coaching, consulting or professional services business to six or seven figures. Before we do that, it's critical that we first validate our idea, that we make sure that we know who we're going to sell something to, what we're going to sell them, and that we're going to be able to deliver that profitably and easily, and grow a worthwhile business. If we can't achieve it, there's no point in going and building websites and sales funnels and all that online marketing work if you can't actually make a sale at the end of it. You want to validate the business model before you go and build the marketing for it. Now there's three steps to validating a business model and launching a product to market. The first thing is to validate your market. That is, is there a market to sell this to? There's no point trying to sell something to a market that doesn't exist, and there's no point trying to build a product for a market that doesn't exist, or a market that doesn't want to buy with what you're trying to sell them. Next you need to validate your message. You need to have a message that people are responding to, and they're saying, "Yes, I want that thing. Tell me more." If they aren't responding to that, then you'll never go to the next step, which is the product. Once people are saying, "Yes, I want it. I'm willing to buy," then you need to have a product that you can deliver that gets the results that will build a sustainable business and make your clients happy. We need to validate all of these before we go and build out the five projects. Otherwise, it could be in vain or taking us in the wrong direction. The cost of not doing this is that you actually go down the wrong path and you spend a year, or two years, or more, barking up the wrong tree, trying to do something that people don't want. The cost of that can be literally millions of dollars. That's the difference between coming up with an awesome idea that the market loves and can't get enough of, and you have to quickly bring on more team in order to build a valuable business, versus one where you're trying to sell something that no one is interested in, or they don't want or don't need, or that doesn't work. Let's have a look specifically at how we do this when we're building a high-‐value professional services business. First of all, we need high-‐value buyers or high-‐value clients, people who are prepared to pay us ... my general benchmark is that you want $5,000 upward for any sort of one on one consulting or coaching services where you're delivering specialist, expert outcomes that no one else can provide. You should be doing that. If you're not doing that, you're in a commodity race, and it's a race to the bottom. Make sure you've got something that's unique and valuable, and that you can find people who are willing to buy it. Then, when we find these people we're going to present them with a high-‐value offer. We're going to say, "Hey, I can help you solve that problem you've got," or "I can help you get that outcome that you want, and here's my offer for you. I will do this for you. I will get you from A to B, and I will charge you this much." That's the offer. The offer is the deal. It's the result that they're going to get by working with you. Then, if they buy, if they say, "Yes, I'm interested," then you've got to actually deliver the product and deliver the outcome. The product is the way you've packaged your services or other resources in a way that will deliver the result that you promised in the offer. The buyer is the person with the problem that needs solving. The offer is the promise of solving that problem in exchange for a fee. That's the deal. The product is the mechanism for delivering the result.


Let's take a bit of a closer look at how we validate. The first thing is we need to find high-‐value clients. I said earlier that this step is market validation. It's important to remember that a market is where buyers and sellers come together. That is to say, you need to be able to access these buyers in a group. Unless have got buyers and sellers in a group, you don't really have a market. Your high-‐value client needs to be a type of person that you can predictably find. For example, that could be something like engineering firms with 10 employees or more, and a revenue of $2 million a year or more. That might be your market. You can know that type of client, but unless you can find a way to access them in a group, such as a trade convention, or perhaps they're all in a LinkedIn group, or a Facebook group, or you can target them with an advertising channel, then you don't really have a market that you can build a business on. If you're only finding these clients accidentally, you can't grow a business. Just be really clear you need a predictable way to find these people. Then secondly, you need to test your offer. You need to present to them as a group or present to them one on one and say, "I've got this thing. I can help you solve this problem or to get this result. Would you be interested in learning more?" This might be running an ad. It might be posting a message in a LinkedIn or Facebook group. It might be sending emails to a list of people you've already done business with who are in this market, or it might be putting up a stand at a trade show. It's some way of testing your offer and saying, "Are you interested in this thing? If you are, come and talk to me. Then when you talk to me, say, "Well this is the offer. Here's the product. Here's what it's going to do for you. Here's what it's going to cost you. If you're interested in moving ahead we can." The offer is offering them to get the result and to use your product for a fee. Then finally, your product needs to deliver that result. We need to test out this product. With coaching and consulting, your product is your expertise. It's your services. You should start with an offer that you know will work that you've done before. We generally look for something that you've done for three clients before and got great results. You've got some case studies and you're starting to develop a process for it that you're going to more quickly be able to turn into a product. It needs to be something that's highly valuable. In terms of figures, if you want to sell something for $5,000, you basically need to be solving a $50,000 problem. That's something that people will be happy to pay. If you are able to reduce waste or to help people overcome a personal problem that's going to be very expensive, or whatever the result is, the results they need to get from it need to dramatically outweigh what they're going to spend with you. It needs to reliably. Again, we need to test before we build anything. Generally, as a coach or consultant, you can do this by doing a one on one programme or running a small beta group, and doing a test run with a small group coaching programme, sometimes doing something like a challenge where people come in for a week and try a mini version of what you're trying to sell, and then you can expand from there. They're all great ways to validate the core idea without doing the full-‐blown version. We want to have proven that these high-‐value clients are prepared to take up our high-‐value offer, and that our high-‐value product can deliver the result that will make them happy to have done so. Once we've done that, we can start building the five projects, which then let us market our product at scale. We validate, we make sure it works, and then we build out the five projects so that we can scale this idea up and deliver to many people.


The important thing is to plan what you're going to do before you actually build all the marketing. Because it can take you months or years to get all this marketing running perfectly. If the market, the offer, or the product are wrong, then it's going to cost you money, but more than anything it's the opportunity cost. Let's take a closer look. Step one: Find high-‐value clients. It's a group of people with a specific problem. Step two: Test your offer. The offer is that you'll solve a problem and give them a specific outcome. You need to be having conversations with these people and saying, "Hey, have you got this problem? Is that a big problem? Is that something you'd like to fix now? Is that something you're willing to invest in? Look, here's what I can do for you. Here's my offer. I've got a system. I've got a process. I've got a product that will fix that problem. It's going to take this long. It's going to cost you this much. If you're ready to move ahead, this is how it will work." Then thirdly, you need to test the product. At first, your product is probably going to look like just a normal service delivery, but over time you want to refine that product, to standardise it into a productized service, or an online product, or an information product, something that you can deliver in a much more leveraged way than your normal services. This can help you improve the reliability, the speed, the certainty, the efficiency, and the user experience so that the product is superior to the service. That way, even though it costs you less to deliver, you can actually charge more for it because the experience and the result that you're delivering is equivalent and hopefully superior. Then once you've validated, once you've got those right, then you can build out the five projects. Of course we'll need some of these in place to do that testing. You've probably already got them. You've probably already got some sort of website. You've probably got some existing customers you can talk to and markets that you can access, whether it's on social media or going to a trade show. Basically, the trick to this is actually getting in front of live customers with heartbeats and credit cards, and making that offer before you build the thing. If you can do that and if you're too scared to do that, then you're crazy to build the five projects. When I coach clients, when you do my programmes, that's part of what we do, is that we validate before we build. Or we build the minimum viable version of it. We have the basic website, our best guess at what we think they need. We have a system for getting conversations with clients. We set up our LinkedIn profile. We use LinkedIn a lot for this so that we look right on the page when they check us out. Then we have a sales presentation which is a sales conversation at first. Then we have the product. We have the product documented to some degree. That's just representing what you're planning to do, what you've done before in your business. Over time, you're increasingly standardising and streamlining it to make it more productized and less like a bespoke, boutique service. I hope that helps you get clear about what you need to do before you start building out your five projects. Now, if this interests you and you haven't yet got the five projects guide, then go to highvaluesales.com/5-‐projects. You can download the workbook where I take you through the five projects. Also, there is a free online workshop which shows you how to implement the five projects in your business. I hope this has given you some clarity about what you need to get in place before you build the five projects. As I said, if you would like help implementing the five projects in your business and getting this


guidance before you start building your marketing for 2017, I'd like to invite you to have a chat with me about how to implement this type of marketing in your business, how to make it happen quickly, how to make sure you've got your message, your market, and your product right before you go and spend ages marketing. Remember, the big expense here, the big risk, the big cost is that you spend six or 12 months of your life pursuing a dead end rather than pursuing the right thing, which could bring you in hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars in revenue. That opportunity cost of making a bad decision is critical. Investing this time upfront, getting really clear about your market, your message, and the product before you start building a website, before you try to learn how to use marketing technology, before you build a sales funnel, it's just critical. It's a mistake that almost every aspiring entrepreneur makes, is to try to build the thing before they know someone will buy it. If you want help, if you want to be certain that you're going down the right path, and save yourself months or years of your life, and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted money and missed income, then book a call with me, highvaluesales.com/apply. Remember, if you haven't already downloaded the five projects workbook and attended the webinar, then you should do that first: highvaluesales.com/5-‐projects. If you haven't seen it already, you're going to really love it. It will change how you think about marketing. It really is a must-‐watch if you're planning to build a success coaching or consulting business in 2017. Thanks. I'm Dallas McMillan from Influential. Great talking to you. I'll see you on the webinar or on a strategy call. https://highvaluesales.com/5-projects/ Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31nhovA9wn0 See more High Ticket Sales Funnels http://howtogetclientsonline.com/ https://digitalinfluence.com.au/before-‐you-‐start-‐a-‐consulting-‐business/

Before You Start A Consulting Business

Marketing

Transcript of Before You Start A Consulting Business