This episode, the Founder of NxtStep Consulting Sean Boyce talks about different effective content strategies, the challenge of pricing high-ticket services, and how to know how much to charge your clients.
Sean Boyce has run his consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years but found he wasn’t able to grow his network effectively and efficiently through in-person marketing or lead generation services. To solve this Sean founded Podcast Chef, a full-service podcast management platform that helped him grow his network while making awesome content at the same time. Seeing the effectiveness of podcasting at reaching new people, Sean opened it up to others, helping people to start a podcast and delegating the management from post-production to booking guests. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Consulting Trap:
- How big the target market in your niche should be.
- How to know how much to charge your clients.
- Why you should focus on the problem and not the solution.
- How to help your prospects understand what they need.
- Why you need to say no to some revenue opportunities.
- The challenge of pricing high-ticket services.
- Understanding forms of non-financial investment.
- Different effective content strategies.
- The power of podcasting.
Resources:
Connecting with Sean Boyce:
Connecting with the host:
Quotables:
- 1:05 – “People have heard the concept of I need to nice or I need to specialize, I need to get into a vertical which makes sense to some folks in theory others that are a little earlier fear that if they get too specialized they’re going to eliminate a wide target market that’s probably the biggest misconception about that as a strategy that’s just not how that works, more than likely and we see this a lot in the product space, stuff that I do is you’re trying to be all things to all people but that really means nothing to anyone as in they can’t figure out who you are what you do so you got to be specialized.”
- 3:45 – “We all come at this like we’re experts in our fields which we are and we want to talk inside the domain of our expertise we want to talk about the product service that we sell we want to talk about the way we create those miraculous transformations but we don’t start those conversations early enough we don’t start them with like hey how much does your problem hurt right now and what are you willing to pay to just make that go away and not a little bit but completely go away.”
- 5:54 – “We like to get into what is the solution that we’re going to bring to market and we focus too much effort there if you focus on the problem first, and that’s why people say fall in love with the problem, everything moves forward from there if you start at any other step before that you’re going to have to come back and do it anyway so you might as well start with the problem.”
- 23:23 – “People value things they spend more for and that’s not a license to just rip off customers that’s a level of commitment that they’re making to the project because it’s easy to walk away from something that you don’t have any kind of a commitment to, this is another element where a lot of coaches and business coaches they charge for their services and that holds you accountable to the program, whatever it is, customized program for you in order to make progress that if for whatever reason the going gets tough it’s a lot easier to quit if you’re not held accountable and you haven’t made some level of commitment to that project also.”
- 29:57 – “A lot of us have figured out, some of us the hard way myself included that the spray and pray approach to content marketing doesn’t work avoid that at all costs because you’re just floundering and that’s what it feels like because your changing topics all the time and stuff’s getting an inconsistent level of traction and eventually you get frustrated and quit.”
- 33:20 – “You see folks out there and they’re like content is king but that phrase flattens mountains that is not accurate, content is king but it’s the right content in the right place at the right time in front of the right person and then and only then is content king.”
- 37:25 – “One strategy that I’ve found to be the most effective in terms of not getting lost in these content traps is when you’re thinking about what you’re producing or what you want to write about think about it from the perspective if you were writing it for a specific person, have that person in mind and think through the context of where that person gets stuck, the problems they have as you’re talking about how to work through them and how to solve them.”