Why your marketing isn’t working (and the one ask to make this week)

Leah Neaderthal 0:02

I had a call this week with a consultant, and it was like the third or fourth call like this in the past few weeks, and she said something that I've started to hear more and more. It's some version of I'm working too hard in my marketing for it not to be working. She'd been having coffees and calls with people she knew, she'd been posting on LinkedIn a few times a week. She had a newsletter, she'd taken a course on offers, she was doing, you know, all the things, and it just wasn't translating into actual clients reaching out. And if you've ever felt some version of that, like you're doing all the things and you're frustrated that it's not landing, then this episode is for you. Because today we're going to talk about what's actually going on when you're doing the work and it's not paying off, and what to actually do about it. So, let's get into it. Welcome to Smart Gets Paid with me, Leah Neaderthal. I help women run more profitable consulting businesses, getting more of the clients you want and getting paid way more for your work without sacrificing your time. But I've never been a salesperson. My background is in corporate marketing, and when I started my own consulting business, I learned pretty quickly that it's about 1000 times harder to sell your own stuff than it is to sell someone else's. So, I taught myself how to do it. I turned it into a methodology, and now I teach that proven methodology to my clients. So, whether your consulting contracts are $10,000 $100,000 or more. If you want more clients you love, more work you love, and they get paid more than you ever thought possible, then you're in the right place. Let's do it together. Thanks for tuning in. And don't forget to rate, review, and share. Hey there, Leah here, and thanks for tuning in. I hope you're having a great week, making some good progress in your business, and taking some time for you. So that woman who's doing all the things, and she's frustrated that it's not paying off, she's not alone. Because in my conversations with women consultants, I find that women fall into one of two groups. There are the women who aren't doing that much marketing for their consulting business, and they know it, and they'll come to me and say, you know, I know I need to be doing more. And then there's the other group of women, women who are doing a lot of marketing or putting themselves out there, and it's just not working, or it's not working the way they want, you know, maybe clients aren't coming to them, or clients, maybe are coming to them, but they're not the right clients, maybe they're too small, and what they say to me, the words they use, is some version of I'm working too hard for it not to be working, and it can be really frustrating, because I mean, it's one thing to know that you're not doing enough, I mean that makes sense, right? I mean, consider, you know, another arena, right. Let's say that you want to get into shape, but you sort of like eat like crap, you spend all your time on the couch, you don't move or exercise, and then it's like, yeah, you know, you can probably imagine that you're not going to get in shape, right, like that tracks, but it's so much more frustrating when you are eating well, you are working out, you're getting the protein, you're doing all the things, and you're still not getting into shape the way you want. That's so much more frustrating. And I mean, I know, I mean, I have been there, and that's where a lot of women consultants find themselves in their business, doing the things, putting in the work, and looking around, being like, why isn't this working? And so today, that's what I want to talk about. What's actually going on when you're doing a lot of things and it's not working, because if that's you, I promise you, you're not crazy, and you're not alone, and you don't need to add more to your plate. All right, so in this episode, you're going to hear what's actually going on when you're doing the work and it's not paying off.

Leah Neaderthal 3:38

You're going to hear the one thing you absolutely should not do, even though probably every coach will tell you to do it. You're going to hear the three shifts that actually move the needle, and you're going to learn the one specific ask that you can make this week. Now, before I get into it, I want to talk about who this episode is really for, and this topic can help women consultants across the entire life cycle of your business, but it's going to land differently depending on where you are. So, if you're in what we call the messy middle, you've been running your business for at least a couple years, you've already gotten your first wave of clients from your network, and the things that worked in year one probably aren't landing the same way anymore. You're doing a lot of marketing, but it's not translating to clients the way it used to, and if that's you, then this episode is going to help you course correct. You don't have to start over, you've already built something real. We're just going to find where the pieces can work harder, and if you're earlier in your business, or if you're not really doing that much to put yourself out there, this episode is for you too, but in a different way. What you're going to get in this episode is some foreshadowing, kind of like the ghost of Christmas Future. It's a preview of what can happen when marketing gets built piece by piece, without the pieces being designed to work together. And listen, I mean, the women who find themselves in that place, like that's you, then you didn't do anything wrong, you were smart and capable and hard working, and you did all. Things that you were told to do, the thing no one tells you along the way is that all those pieces have to actually fit together. So, if you're hearing this early on, you have an advantage. You get to do this the right way from the start, and if you're in the messy middle, you'll see where you can start to get things tighter and working harder. And I want to start first by telling you what not to do, because what most women do when something isn't working is they try to do more or try to add more, and they think, okay, well, so if what I'm doing isn't getting me clients, that I must not be doing enough. Let me add a Substack, let me take another course on LinkedIn, or I'm gonna fix my offers, and I just want to tell you right now, don't do that. Don't add something new. You're probably already doing enough. And I got to tell you, there's no like secret marketing tactic out there, or treasure trove of marketing tactics, that if you just landed on it, it would suddenly make everything work. That's just not how this works. And really, you know, of course, you would think I should add something new, because every coach out there wants to convince you that their thing is the thing, right? The LinkedIn coach will tell you that LinkedIn is the answer, the pricing guru will tell you that Offers is the answer, like the AI guru, blah blah blah, on and on and on, and it makes sense that they would, right, that's what they sell. So what happens is you end up stacking them, you add another tactic, or you work on this one thing, because you think, well, maybe this will be the missing piece, but the reason it's not working isn't because you haven't found the right tactic, the reason is something else entirely, and that's what we're going to get into next, and as we get into it, I just want to set some expectations, because I think a lot of women, when their marketing isn't working, what they're really saying is, you know, it's not working enough, or as fast as I want it to, or I'm just not getting that positive feedback that this is actually, you know, doing what it needs to do, and whether they say so or not, what I hear is that you want everything you do to, like, give you something back right to get a result from everything, and that's just not realistic, and that's not really what we're aiming for.

Leah Neaderthal 7:08

What we're aiming for in this is to get every piece of marketing you are doing working harder than it is right now, but it's still always going to be the case that not everyone needs you right now, or they're still making the business case for bringing on support, so they're sort of working on this outside of your view, and it's always going to be the case that some people may just be following along to get smarter or learn something. Right, there's just never going to be a situation in which everything you do yields a result 100% of the time, but like, could we get things 20% better, 20% more effective across every touch point, because when you do that across the whole marketing system, everything changes, all right. So, with that as the frame, let's talk about what to actually do, and there are three things. Thing number one, your marketing needs to be part of a system. So, here's what's actually going on. The reason that what you're doing isn't working is probably not because any one tactic is bad, it's because what you're doing isn't part of a system. And here's what I mean by that. Getting consulting clients when your clients are bb, so businesses or organizations is not like selling a $30 product. The sales cycle in B2B is long. It can take anywhere from three to 18 months, from the moment that a potential client first reaches out to the moment that they sign a contract, and that's just the timeframe where you know about them, where they're actually in a sales process. Before that, they're googling solutions, they're reading your stuff, they're learning what you're about, they're deciding that their team needs to solve this problem, and they're getting their leadership on board, or figuring out budget, like all of those things, right? And that process can take months, sometimes even years, and usually only after all of that do they reach out, right? Then the actual sales process starts, that's when the three to 18 months begins. So here's why that's important in a world where getting a consulting client takes that long, there's no universe in which one tactic gets you a client. Like posting on LinkedIn alone is not going to do it. Sending a newsletter alone isn't going to do it. Having more coffee meetings or fixing your offers alone is not going to do it. There's just too much that happens in the journey for any one thing to be the thing, so what has to happen instead is that your business development has to be a system, the pieces have to work together. So, for example, your messaging on LinkedIn has to match your painkiller statement, which has to match how you're talking about your work in catch-up calls or sales conversations, which has to match the problem you're talking about in your newsletter, which has to match what you're putting in proposals, which has to match how you've priced the work, like all of it has to be aligned, right. And when it's not, here's what happens: you learned how to do LinkedIn from one expert, and you learned how to think about your ideal client from a day. For an expert, and you read a book about how to price your work from another expert, and you watched a YouTube video about how to do something else from somebody else, right? They each probably gave you good advice, but they were all speaking a slightly different language, and so what happens a lot is that you end up building a machine where the cogs are like slightly different sizes, they're made of different materials, and they don't quite fit together. Things kind of work, and they kind of don't, and you can't figure out why. And this is why, in the academy, we create a marketing system, right, and a sales system. And even before that, we start with something called building blocks, because before we get anywhere near a marketing system, we have to get the foundation right. We figure out who your best clients actually are. We craft your painkiller statement, which is the way you talk about your work, so it works in a sales context, not just a sort of nice brand context.

Leah Neaderthal 10:53

We help you get your services dialed in and using value-based pricing, all using the frameworks that work together, so that everything is speaking the same language, and then we can use that to build the marketing system, and then we build the sales process on top of that, and it's all working together. For example, you know the way the sales conversation works, it essentially creates a fill in the blank for the proposal, so that by the time you're out there posting on LinkedIn or sending a newsletter or whatever, all of the pieces are connected and they reinforce each other, and that is when the marketing starts working. And just like one quick aside, while we're on this, a lot of the marketing advice floating around out there is actually made for B2C, not B2B, it's for selling courses or programs or coaching to one person buying one thing with their credit card, and those tactics won't work for B2B, no matter how good they are, or how confident the person teaching them sounds, because selling B2B means selling to a person who has to talk to their stakeholders, run it up the chain, get the budget approved, sometimes go through procurement, it's like an entirely different process, so if you've been following marketing advice that's actually built for B2C, and then wondering why that's not working for your B2B consulting business, that might be why. So that's thing one. If your marketing isn't working, it's probably because what you're doing isn't part of a system. The fix isn't more tactics, it's making sure the pieces work together. Learn the next two shifts. Right after this thing, number two is look across the whole journey and optimize each piece. Okay, so once you understand that this has to be a system, the next thing is to actually look at the system from end to end, because most women, when they're trying to figure out why their marketing isn't working, they look at one piece, like they're looking at their newsletter or LinkedIn, or their offers, or whatever, and they try to optimize that one thing in a vacuum, but you really have to look at the whole client journey. So, let me walk you through what I mean. Let's say somebody finds you on LinkedIn, maybe they see a post of yours, or maybe somebody tags them in something that you wrote, so that's the first moment. It could be any first moment, but what happens next? Do they go to your profile? Like, when they get there, is your profile actually doing the work? Like, is it clear what you do and the value you provide, and what they should do next? So, let's say it is right. Then they click through, maybe they download something, or they sign up for your newsletter. Then what happens? Do they get a welcome email? What does that welcome email say? What emails do they get after that? How are you helping them learn about what you do in, for example, a nurture sequence? And then they start to get your newsletter. Is what you're saying in your newsletter consistent with what they saw on LinkedIn? Is it leading them anywhere, or are you sending out newsletters, and they're just like nodding along and not doing anything? And let's say something in the newsletter actually does land, right? And then they reach out, maybe they book a call, or they reply, or whatever. What happens on that call? Do you have a real discovery process that moves the ball forward? Are you helping them get clarity about what they actually need, or are you doing what most people do, which is trying to sound smart and hope they like you enough to move forward, and are you talking about price early on, so they know they can afford you, or are you waiting till you send a proposal and hoping it's a fit, and on and on and on through the rest of the sales process, through following up, helping your main contact sell you in, and then getting a yes.

Leah Neaderthal 14:22

Every single one of those moments is a place where someone either moves forward or drops off, and most women are putting all their energy into the beginning of that journey, only like trying to get more eyeballs on LinkedIn when they actually might be losing people at the proposal stage, or the follow-up stage, or when somebody gets onto their newsletter and never takes any action, but again, we're not trying to get every single person from start to finish, that's just not realistic, but, like I said, if you can get, for example, 20% more people to move from each stage to the next, the math changes really fast, right, more. Newsletter sign-ups, more calls booked, more proposals that turn into a yes. And if you're running a consulting business, you don't need like 1000 clients, you need maybe six to 10 a year, based on how you work. You don't need 100% conversion, you just need to be say 20% better at each handoff, and that's what starts to compound. So, thing two is look at the whole journey, not just one piece of it. Find out where people are dropping off, fix that, and then move on to the next thing, and fix that, and on and on and on until all the pieces work as hard as they need to. All right, thing three, make more asks, and this might be the biggest one. So here's what I mean. Most women consultants spend almost all of their time giving, giving advice, giving insights, giving frameworks, giving away the thinking behind their work, and they're doing it on LinkedIn and in their newsletter and their content, like everywhere, give, give, give, give, give, right? And they almost never ask, they rarely, if ever, actually invite someone to take a real action and raise their hand to work with them, and if they do ask, it's usually something really soft, like at the bottom of your newsletter, saying, like, if you ever want to chat about this, feel free to reach out, that is not an ask. Think about the woman I told you at the top of this episode, you know, a few LinkedIn posts a week, a newsletter with her point of view, a lot of giving, and if I asked her how many real asks she made in the past year, like real invitations to take a next step with her, my guess would be very close to zero, and it's not because she's bad at business, it's because nobody told her that that was what was missing, and here's why that matters when you're doing all of that giving with no asking, what you're really doing is showing up a lot, you know, putting out smart, valuable, thoughtful content, and then hoping that people like you enough to take it upon themselves to reach out to you and ask to work with you. That's just not how it works. I mean, we'd like it to be. It's just not. I mean, clients are busy, they have full inboxes, right? They have a million things on their plate at work, and then they have their whole life outside of that. And so, even if they love your content and they think you're brilliant, the odds that they're going to stop what they're doing and proactively reach out to you to start a conversation are just really, really low. Instead, you have to invite them in, and there's a rule of thumb that floats around in marketing circles, and it says that you give three times more than you ask, right? Give, give, give, ask. For every three things you give, you can make one ask, right? You get it. And, honestly, you could probably stretch that further, you know, five to one more than that, but the more you give, the more you earn the right to ask, but somewhere in there you have to ask, and most of the women I talked to are at zero asks, like give, give, give, forever, and never, never ask, and I know what this is like, because I spent the first several years of my business doing this, I would put out so much content, I was teaching people in my newsletter, and I was doing all the things, and never actually inviting people to work with me, like never making an ask. So, here's something you can start doing right away.

Leah Neaderthal 18:10

Now, in the academy, we teach a specific marketing technique called the shoulder tap, and it's all about making asks in a warm, intentional way. It's a key part of the marketing system we teach, but you don't have to wait for something like that to start making asks. You can start right now in what you're already doing, like in your newsletter or on LinkedIn. So, here's the how to pick something that you've been writing about, you know, like a problem that you help your clients solve, or an outcome you help them get to, and in your next newsletter or your next LinkedIn post, after you've given your insights, add a real invitation, not quote unquote feel free to reach out. The way we do this in the academy is to put the outcome front and center, and then have a clear next step. So, something like this. This is sort of like a fill in the blank, okay? If you're whoever your ideal client is, and you're trying to, whatever the outcome is, I'd love to talk, reply back to this email with the word, some word that sort of matches what you're trying to do with them, and I'll send you a link to book an intro call. So, an example of this from one of my clients is, if you're an early stage tech founder and you want to uncover who your best customers are, so you can focus your marketing. Reply back to this email with the word customers, and I'll send you a link to book an intro call. Now, here's why that specific construction matters. All right, first, it puts the outcomes first. If you want, you know, this outcome that I can help you get, that's the first thing people read, and that's really what clients want, and we invite them to reply back with a word that's relevant. Now, that's important. You know, people might say to me, "You know, I do have a CTA, I tell people to click my Calendly link, and the problem with that is the second that they click that link, they leave your email and they go to a new browser tab. Right, they might totally have all the intentions to book a call, and they might be looking through your times and days that are available, and then they get an email from a client, or their kid yells from another room, or they start a meeting, and they leave that tab, or close their browser, or whatever, and then they never come back, and you have no idea that they were ever interested, so when you ask them to reply with a word, you stay part of the conversation. They reply, and now you have a thread going, right? You can write back to their little keyword and say, 'Great, here's the link, you know, let me know what works for you. And if they don't book in a few days, you can always follow up, because now you're part of the conversation instead of hoping that they remember to book a call, right? So, thing three is make more asks and give people a path that you can actually see and follow up on, not a link into the void. So, those are the three things to do if you're doing too much in your marketing for it not to be working. Number one, make sure it's part of a system number two, look across the whole journey and optimize each stage, and number three make more asks. And if you take nothing else away from this episode, here is what I want you to do this week in your newsletter or your next LinkedIn post. Make an ask, a real one, not feel free to reach out, I mean a real invitation with a specific person in mind and a specific way to get back to you, that's one thing you can do this week, and you can even do it today. And then, more broadly, if you're in this situation, I want to give you some things to think about. Look at what you're already doing, and instead of asking what should I add, ask where are people dropping off. Look at where the gaps are, and look at where you're losing people between steps. That's where the real work is. And I just want to end on this.

Leah Neaderthal 21:48

If you're in the place where your marketing isn't working the way you want, the good news is you're not starting from scratch. You already have so much to work with. You are showing up, you're doing the work, you already have the habit of putting yourself out there, and that is huge. That's actually the hardest part. Most people never even get to where you are. So, if you've gotten this far with things not quite working the way you want them to, imagine how far you can get when you start to close some of these gaps, when the pieces of your marketing are working together, and when you're optimizing the whole journey instead of just the top of it, and when you're actually making asks, that's when it starts to click, and that's when it starts to get really fun. So that's what I've got for you today. Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to share this with another woman consultant who might benefit from it, and I'll see you next time.

Leah Neaderthal 22:35

Bye.

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