You've already read about my face-palm worthy experience trying to pitch a "proven process" so I won't bore you with that again. If you missed it, you can read about it in The Lure of the Trademarked Acronym.
TLDR; your clients don't care about your "proven process". They care about your thining. More specifically, they care about how you apply your thinking to their context.
If you've been in consulting or in your chosen industry long enough, you undoubtedly have one or more core ideas about why things are the way they, and what people can and should do about it. These core ideas make up your thesis, your POV on the market. When communicated effectively, this POV reframes your clients most pernicious problem and makes them think "huh, never thought about it that way before." Once you have them thinking, the association of you and your POV are lodged in their minds, and is what we marketers call "mental availability".
Today I want to walk you through how to develop and use your POV to land more of your ideal clients.
Step 1: Find the Critical Insight
Your POV must be unique. If you are repeating what other thought leaders in the industry are saying, then you aren't going to get the needed result. If your POV is simply the best practice, it isn't really a POV. You need to find a critical insight - an uncomfortable truth or an unspoken problem in your industry, or the quiet part that everyone is afraid to say out loud.
There are several places where you can generally find these critical insights:
- Through your ongoing delivery work. You should have an ongoing process for analyzing your client conversations, logging key insights or trends, synthesizing insights from QBRs, etc.
- Through your ongoing sales and business development. You should have a system to log key insights or trends you identify from these conversations: key skepticisms or objections, common problems and pain points, common feelings or reactions, etc.
- Through your ongoing client retention and churn management work. You should have a process for synthesizing information from post-mortems when a client leaves, logging service expansion requests
- Through your ongoing thought leadership. The channel here doesn't matter as much, but the key is focusing on engagement and feedback.
- Through formal research. This is the most obvious one, but also the most resource intensive. I recommend starting with the others and then layering in formal research to validate your hypothesis.
Step 2: Test It on a Small Scale
Some of the activities in this step are derivatives of how you generate the initial key insight, but in general this is all about having the courage to put your ideas out there in the public sphere and being open to feedback. You have to be willing to be proven wrong, to change your mind, and to deal with haters. For that matter, the more arguments you get, and the more haters you get, the more likely you are to be on the right track. You can't build your POV around a vanilla idea that doesn't generate some pushback. Not saying you need to be overly provocative just for the sake of it, but you should be looking to stir the pot a little bit.
Here are several ways to test your ideas:
- Share your insight in 1:1 conversations. This can be in sales conversations, or more general networking conversations. Definitely don't get overzealous in sales conversations, but if you aren't willing to potentially lose a deal by testing your thesis, you likely don't have enough conviction in it in the first place, so this is a good litmus test.
- Put it out in a LinkedIn or Reddit post. Reddit especially is prone to haters, but it is also a great way to gather feedback from people who themselves aren't afraid of being wrong because their identity is hidden behind their handle. LinkedIn, of course, is an easy way to get in front of your exact audience, and gather feedback from specific people. I recommend sending the post directly to people who's feedback you want. They are more likely to leave a thoughtful comment, which will seed more robust and productive conversation, which is the type of engagement that is more likely to give the type of feedback you need.
In all of these cases, pay close attention to reactions (written, verbal, and non-verbal): do people lean in, push back, or shrug?
Remember, the right POV makes people say: “Huh, I never thought about it that way.”
Step 3: Validate How Painful This Is
You will always find people who are happy to engage in public debate (or a keyboard war). But that doesn't necessarily mean that you have found your key insight just yet. The right insight will poke your ideal clients where it hurts. It will help them think differently about their core problem, and will get some of them to take action to learn more or invest in solving it. This is where you need to put your money here your mouth is, so to speak.
This is where you more concretely invest time and resources into fleshing out the idea and bringing it to life via a more comprehensive educational format or a service offering:
- Create a webinar (or webinar series) that goes deep into the key insight, and what it means to your ICP.
- Create a course (in-person, virtual, format really doesn't matter) that helps your ideal clients think through how to address a core problem and pain point they have.
- Create an assessment (free or paid) that helps diagnose a hidden root cause to a core problem via your key insight.
Doing this gets you outside of just looking at engagement as a primary metric and seeing whether your core insight gets you into a deep-rooted, gnarly problem that your ideal clients are willing to spend time and resources to solve.
Step 4: Develop Core IP
This is where the rubber really meets the road. Once you have put things out there, validated it in-market, gotten feedback across a few interconnected insights and concepts, it's time to build your core intellectual property in the form of a signature methodology, related frameworks, models and assets. Whatever you created in the previous step, will likely remain as a core asset, but the key here is to synthesize and visualize the bigger picture in a way that makes it easy for your ideal clients to consume and understand.
Think of this from both an internal and external perspective. What you develop here should be able to be used in your internal training, to get everyone aligned and speaking the same language, and it should be able to be used externally to allow your people to evangelize this IP in the market.
This makes your POV tangible - something clients can “hold” and apply.
Step 5: Beat the Drum
This is where things come full circle. This is where you take the various IP assets and consistently keep them in front of your ideal clients through recurring events and other derivative content in your key channels. You want to consistently be looking for feedback and market changes that push you to optimize and potentially pivot.
Consistency is the secret weapon at this step. Your POV will be implanted in the minds of your ideal clients, but then you need to do the hard work of keeping it there to ensure the connection between the insight and your firm's brand remains intact, and that recall is there when they are ready to buy.
Your entire go-to-market should now revolve around having your people evangelize this IP in the appropriate ecosystems, and then having systems in place to start sales conversations when the time is right, and convert those to clients.
It might seem like overkill, but you need to realize that just because you've said it before, doesn't mean that everyone who you wanted to hear or see it did. And even if they did, they may not have registered it. And even if they did, they will likely forget unless you remind them. When you get sick of hearing yourself talk about it, your ideal clients is likely just starting to notice.
Step 6: Optimize the IP
The IP optimization loop is never ending. As you beat the drum, and continue delivering on the promised value of your IP through your services, you will inevitably find ways to improve your thinking and how you talk about your thinking. Make sure you are continuing to gather feedback from both delivery (what works in client engagements) and the market (what earns attention).
Evolve the language, tweak the visuals, optimize and the process, but keep the core insight intact, unless a major shift happens in the market that either invalidates it, or brings another key insight to the forefront. Your POV isn't static. It evolves and compounds over time.
Some Final Considerations
Developing your POV is key to building a successful, profitable boutique firm. This is a resource intensive process, and needs to be treated as a key initiative with executive sponsorship and involvement. This isn't something you just delegate to your marketing department, consultant, or agency and call it a day. It isn't something you can fake. It can't be shallow, and needs real substance.
Not doing this critical work will likely have your firm stuck selling hours, struggling to maintain target margins, and working with less than ideal clients.
Firms that choose to invest in this work will create leverage, authority, and pricing power. Without a POV, you are a commodity. With one, you're magnetic for your ideal clients.
