Inbound Success, Thoughtfully Built

What happens when you build a consulting business almost entirely through inbound leads? In this episode, Susan Tatum talks with Kelli Schutrop, a fractional sales and marketing executive who’s done just that - fueled by years of consistent thought leadership. Kelli shares her real-world approach to building credibility, driving referrals, and showing up with purpose, offering practical insights for consultants who want to grow without cold pitches.

Notes from the Show

• Thought leadership isn’t fluff. Kelli defines it simply: be the person your ideal clients think of when they need help—because you’ve been consistently educating and showing up for them.
  

• You don’t need to become someone else to sell. Stay in expert mode and treat sales conversations like helpful chats at a business happy hour.
  

• Start with clarity. Before you create content, tighten your positioning and optimize your LinkedIn profile through the eyes of your ideal client.
  

• Simple systems work. Kelli committed to posting twice a week and showing up with content that’s insightful, credible, or relatable.
  

• Don’t skip the market validation. Talk to people before investing heavily in websites or branding - your offer will likely evolve.
  

Quotes: “If you are the best at what you do but nobody knows it, you’re not going to get the call—period.”

– Kelli Schutrop

“When I think about posting on LinkedIn, I filter everything through three words: insightful, credible, and relatable.”

– Kelli Schutrop

What’s Inside:

• What is Thought Leadership?

• How to use your expertise to teach others.

• Auditing your LinkedIn and attracting ideal clients. 

• Getting active in your audience’s communities.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Kelli Schutrop | LinkedIn

Thoughtful Resound

Email

Transcribed by AI Susan Tatum 0:37

Hey everybody, welcome back to stop the noise, and today I'm talking with Kelli Schutrop, who is a fractional sales and marketing executive, and she's the founder of thoughtful resound. Kelly's built her consulting business almost entirely through inbound leads and referrals, and which was fueled by seven years of consistent thought leadership before that. And she's an expert on thought leadership. So that's I'm really looking forward to getting into a discussion with you, Kelly, on how thought leadership works and how you did it, and what you would do differently now. And thank you so much for being here. Welcome.

Kelli Schutrop 1:15

Thank you, Susan. You know all of us have different styles of what's authentic to us, and I'm really happy to be able to share what's worked for me and what I've seen work for other people, too.

Susan Tatum 1:25

Authenticity, that's a word that that we hear a lot, isn't it? And, you know, that's a whole another. I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole, because that's a whole another series of questions that are things we could talk about that. Well, I mean, let's just jump in and, you know, I let's just jump in and talk about you have a solid business as a fractional sales and marketing executive that is, and your clients are coming completely through inbound or referrals. So can you walk us through that? Tell us what you did to build up to that over the years?

Kelli Schutrop 2:00

Yes, absolutely. So I'll first give the snapshot of what I'm doing right this moment, just to fill in some of the blanks on that, and then talk about how I got here. So right now, I am a purposeful solopreneur, like you mentioned, fractional sales and marketing executive. So I work primarily with B2B professional service firms. I've got a few companies that are outliers to that, but really heavily in that, you know, small to medium sized business, B2B professional service space. And I work with a number of select retainer clients ongoing, and then I have some advisory clients, and I also do speaking and projects all around how those companies can generate more revenue, either by turning their experts or sales people into thought leaders themselves, and how we can pivot the sales model to become more inbound, and also on the marketing side, evaluating what they're doing and determining what else they need to be doing that they haven't done in the past. So that's what I'm doing right now. And I've worked with 17 companies, if we include sister companies that have been brought in by different organizations, 17 different brands within the last year and a half, and all of them have come inbound. So that's the snapshot, Susan looks like you might have a question before I kind of battle.

Susan Tatum 3:17

I was just gonna say, I mean, that's gotta be nirvana for most of us, right? That you would have people just coming these great clients coming to you and lining up to work with you. I have a feeling that it just didn't just happen without a bit of work on your part, though

Kelli Schutrop 3:31

very true, did not so. So let me rewind and share a little bit about my background and what I believe set me up well for this. But also I want to share, if somebody isn't in the spot where they have taken these steps over the years, what they can do now. So I studied public relations and marketing in school. I went the advertising agency route, and then I found myself in the staffing and executive recruitment industry, and I started building marketing from the ground up for a few different brands. And so when I was wearing my marketing hat for the first half of my career. A lot of my LinkedIn presence was focused on my accomplishments, my skill set right, essentially a lively resume so that other people could see, wow. Kelly knows how to do this and this. Then about halfway through my career, I pivoted into consultative selling for a boutique digital marketing agency, and so I had the unique pleasure and challenge within my career, not only of building marketing from the ground up for small businesses, but also then building sales from the ground up. So a lot of the skill sets that you need when you step into your own consultancy, I was starting to learn throughout my career, and so when I made the pivot from primarily marketing into primarily selling, I realized I have to show up differently on LinkedIn, because people don't care so much if I just say I'm good at sales, that's not relevant to them. What's relevant to them is does what my company offers help them accomplish what they want to do. So. So years ago, I pivoted my LinkedIn to be fully geared toward the ideal audience that I wanted to attract, which at that time was executive search, consulting, staffing firms across the country and not in my city, because our sister company was that type of a firm, and we competed with just about everyone. So I needed to build a presence nationally among people that I didn't know yet. So given that I came from marketing, I didn't really want to cold call, and I think this is where kind of the storyline probably picks up with everyone listening. You know, that thought of like cold calling and just saying, Hey, I do this. Do you want to hire me? Or even tapping into your network? Might feel a little bit cringy or inauthentic, or whatever word you want to use, just uncomfortable in general. I knew that I didn't want to be viewed as a commodity. I also knew that nobody knew the brand, because it had just launched. It's brand new in the market, and no one knew what we did. So I started two different routes. One, we started posting ads on LinkedIn and attracting some initial conversations. What we found is that they weren't the right types of companies. They didn't have big enough budgets. They weren't very educated around their needs and the solve coming into it. So they were really challenging sales conversations, because they came in just like all right, tell me the pipe dream of what I want to accomplish, and give me the exact number and the exact time frame, and some of that is not as easy to predict. So so I need to take a step me to excuse me, should take a step back and say, What process do we guide these leads through to teach them? Well, these are the stages to success within digital marketing, for the example that I had. And so instead of relying just on inbound or excuse me, paid ads, I started creating thought leadership myself. I realized, and this is where everybody listening can probably relate. I had expertise in the thing that I was trying to sell. I was a digital marketer within the executive search, consulting staffing space, and I had built marketing from the ground up, and had experienced really great results so that I could speak to and essentially look at LinkedIn as a training platform for other people. So instead of looking at it like, how do I sell to you. I looked at it like, how do I educate you so that you are better off after you've seen content that I create so tangibly, I hosted fireside chats so I would reach out to current clients, referral partners, prospective clients, and essentially, kind of do what a podcast is, but in a one off and say, I'd love to talk to you about XYZ and record it and just share it with the world. What do you think? And over time, that developed into me hosting panel, virtual discussions, where we I'd pick a topic and be strategic about the people that I hosted. And those people could be prospects, it could be clients, but that was the type of content I started pushing out on LinkedIn, in addition. And this is going back, trying to think, when I started doing that, probably 2018, so years ago, started hopping on camera every single week for two to three minutes and just breaking down a topic that I was hearing clients experience. I brought a colleague on with me who was the head of one of the digital marketing departments, and so she and I together would just kind of banter and riff back and forth. And the intent was they could get this information. They being prospects, they could get this information in a blog, but if they can see our faces as we talk about it, they're going to be more familiar with us. So the combination of creating content posting consistently, I made a commitment, I'm gonna post twice a week on LinkedIn, no matter what. And some people do a whole lot more. Some people do a whole lot less, but for me, that's what I wanted to do, because I wanted every piece of content to have purpose behind it and not feel fluffy. And I started putting my name in the hat for conference speaking and hosting webinars with associations that were serving the industry I wanted to get in front of. So I basically just got active in the communities where my audience spent time. And what happened is I was able to pivot our revenue model to be 95% inbound. So of the revenue that I closed, which was over 4 million over the course of a number of years, about four years, brought in multiple clients, and they were finding us, and they were coming in highly educated like Kelly, I know what I need. You're on the top of the short list. You know, I'm evaluating partners for this, but like, you're the one who's been teaching me what I need to do. So obviously we're gonna talk. And so when I launched my own business, I adopted that mindset into it, of giving knowledge away, sharing insights, but I'd also built a really strong network over the years, and like engaged with other people on LinkedIn and supported what they were doing, and commented on their posts and reacted to their content. And so when I went to launch my own business, I created a list of people that I thought it would be awkward if they saw that I launched this without having known it before, and I did not view them as a prospect list at all. I purely viewed it as like these are people who are friends in the industry, and I want to tell them. What I didn't expect would happen is that a number of the people who I told FYI This is coming down the pipe, you're going to see it in the next couple of weeks. Wanted to give you a heads up. Said I would love to have a conversation with you. And those are some of my earliest and now. Now, a year and a half later still, my clients and other clients that have come in from seeing content on LinkedIn or being referred by someone else that I've worked with, and it's been a really cool snowball effect.

Susan Tatum 10:10

Imagine I have a I wrote down about seven questions. The first one, I think, for the listeners, in case there, how do you define the difference between marketing and sales?

Kelli Schutrop 10:22

That's a good question. When you are your own consultant, like you are your own entity, I call it being a purposeful solopreneur. Maybe you're growing an agency. Whatever your model is, there's a huge blend among it. Typically, marketing is, what is your presence? You know, actually, if we break it down, marketing, to me, has three purposes. One is building your visibility and credibility. Two is to generate leads, and three is to enable sales. So you think about like a capabilities deck or just case studies, things that you're doing to move sales along. Sales, of course, breaks out into a lot of different realms, but essentially, the purpose is generating revenue. So these two have to be in sync in a consulting desk, people ideally have to know who you are, and you also have to be good at getting into a conversation with someone who says, I know who you are, or I got referred to you, or maybe you've reached out to me and I don't know you, but I'm seeing information on your website or your LinkedIn that feels credible. You have to then be able to translate it to a narrative of how your background can help them accomplish what they need to accomplish. So that's tangibly like, what the proposal looks like, what your statement of work looks like, you know, what's the process you're going to take them through, and what does it cost? And so there's, there's a lot of interwoven connection between people knowing who you are, and then you essentially turning them into a client.

Susan Tatum 11:39

the way that I think of it in much simpler, more, I guess, practical terms, is that Mark marketing is one to many, and then sales is one to one, and you were talking about what you're trying to achieve with those things. But to your point about it being a blend is I saw recently a report, I think it was from hinge marketing research that was making the case for with professional services, that is all business development now that falls under that umbrella, and you've got sales and marketing and sales enablement and all of that stuff there too. So just to clarify that you also mentioned consultative sales that you got into that what again, for the listeners, tell us what that means.

Kelli Schutrop 12:22

Yeah, the way that I would define consultative sales is it isn't a it's not a transactional sales process. It is about developing the relationship and educating them along the way. So for example, if you sell a widget or a tool or a product, and somebody can view the demo all on their own, whether they talk to a sales rep or not and decide I want to spend money on this. It's a good sales process, or can be a very good sales process, but it's not consultative in nature. However, if what you are offering is a higher ticket item and it involves expertise to execute, then I would define it as more of a consultative sales process. The ideal is that when you get in a conversation with a prospect that you have the mindset of, I want them to come out of this conversation better off in their knowledge of how to solve their problem, whether they work with me or someone else, or solve it in house. I want to genuinely help teach them, you know, and obviously, you know, you could compare it to you can see it something on social about someone teaching you how to get fit, you still have to do the work in the gym, or you can bring them along and have them be your personal trainer, right? There's different ways to execute whatever the thing is, whatever you're offering. And what I've found is, if you have a consultative selling process, they view you as a partner in trying to figure out how they solve it, and it takes away that ick feeling from a lot of people who don't come from a sales background, of feeling like they're just selling, like I had the hardest time moving from marketing into selling, not wanting to have the word sales in my title for years, because I didn't want people to think Kelly's just getting on the phone with me because she wants my money, because I would rather not have them hire my company than have that thought. I would rather leave them in a better place and have them work with someone else. And I think that mindset shines through, because people sense that you are actually just trying to help them. And so I think, to me, when I've talked to other consultants and fractional executives, one of the biggest challenges is, how do I take the knowledge and my subject matter expertise that I've developed over years, and package it in a way that a different company wants to buy it. And you kind of have to, like, take that step back and think, what are the phases like, how do you make it simple for someone to understand? Yes, you want to get from point A to point B. These are the four steps that it requires. And this is what that costs, and this is what my involvement is in it. And like those are the things that I think really help, not only to develop your proposals and your statements of work and to help close business, but also that becomes your educational pillars when you talk in because you're now helping them see, oh, that's the process. And the reality is, if they're going to hire someone to do it, there's a reason. It's because they don't have time or bandwidth, you know, they don't bandwidth. They don't have skill set to do it. And so if you are the one out of all of your competitors teaching them it, you're going to be on the top of that short list to be considered to be the one to implement it,

Susan Tatum 15:12

you know, to a point that you made there. Kelly, and I think that this is important enough to emphasize again, is that we are experts, and we have ik at something, we have a tendency to feel like we have to go in sales mode. I see this over and over again. I don't know where that comes from, but then we start being very inauthentic, or we don't want to post on LinkedIn, because we think we have to act like this salesy person, you know, and just and be a very different person. Nobody wants that, including buyers.

Kelli Schutrop 15:42

Yeah, right, right.

Susan Tatum 15:43

And if we just stay in expert mode and remember, by definition, as consultants, we're problem solvers, and the problem solving starts at the beginning, at the first conversation. You may not be the answer, but you can help them solve the problem by recommending somebody else, or send them off in another direction or whatever, and we just don't ever have to go into some sort of salesy, icky mode, right?

Kelli Schutrop 16:07

Well, and I always think about it like if I were at a conference just learning hanging out, I'm not trying to sell anyone anything, right? Like I'm attending, and let's say I go to an after conference happy hour, and someone just starts asking me questions about the expertise that I have. Not Kelly, I hear you're an expert on XYZ. Teach me how to do this like, but just more casually, like, Hey, I'm trying to figure out XYZ. Have you explored that before? And maybe we don't even know each other, but I would imagine anybody here listening, if somebody asks you questions about your wheelhouse, you get a little excited, you get passionate? You get lit up, right? If you can think about your sales process like that, it takes away the inauthenticity or the I'm just trying to sell you. And it can also be hard if you're in a spot where you're like, this isn't working from a revenue standpoint yet. And I'm really hungry to get this to close like you have to balance that professional poised I know my value tone with also knowing that maybe your first number of clients you're not going to charge as much as you do later, because you're working to get your foot in the door and build your portfolio of clients as you go. So yeah, I just like to think about it like if I were at a business happy hour, how would I answer this question if there's no pressure at all?

Susan Tatum 17:25

Okay? Yeah,

Kelli Schutrop 17:26

it helps me a lot.

Susan Tatum 17:27

And conduct the call the same way that you would need be chatting at happy hour.

Kelli Schutrop 17:29

You're just trying to be helpful. And you know, if you think about any time any of us have bought something like a robust service, whatever it is, like, let's say you needed a new CPA, or you need whatever, something that's not like a quick oil change transaction, like something where you need to rely on their expertise. If I got on a call with two different people, and one just tried to pitch and sell me the whole time. I mean, there's kind of three ways. Right on one side of the spectrum, they're just trying to pitch and sell you, and you're like, Okay, I get it. I get it. You want my business. On the other side, they get too heady, and they make it really difficult for you to just understand, what does it cost and what do we do next? Like that also doesn't work to me. The in the middle is like, this person is being helpful. They're laying it out very simply. These are the three or four steps, and obviously there's a ton of details with each of them, but like, at a high level, these are the three or four steps, and this is what the engagement would look like, and this is what we would anticipate on the other side, like, that's what we all want in the sales process,

Susan Tatum 18:22

that comes under the category of making it easy for them to buy, doesn't it?

Kelli Schutrop 18:28

Yeah, yeah.

Susan Tatum 18:29

And we, I do see a tendency to get too involved in talking about our process and our solution and, you know, but beyond, if they want more details that they'll ask, I think, but it's they just want the problem solved basically,

Kelli Schutrop 18:41

right, right, right. And I think a lot of it also depends on if you already know the buyer, not in terms of like personally, but in terms of how they make decisions. That's something that helped me a lot, because I went from reporting to a certain type of person to selling to that type of person to now they are also my audience and beyond with my current business. So I've, I've had a lot of time, like hundreds of conversations over the years with people that are my ideal audience to know how their mind works and what's overwhelming to them and what isn't enough information to them. And I would say that is a consideration, that if you're new in your consulting business, and you are selling into a buyer that you've never needed to sell into before, there's going to be a learning curve, because you may not know what gets them excited versus what do they drone out and if you're like, you know what? I have had a lot of selling just untraditionally, because it was internal, right? I had to prove the value of what my department did or what my team did to other internal stakeholders. Maybe that's what you think about it like, how did you, quote, sell the value of what your team was doing to other stakeholders? That's essentially the same thing you're doing now. It's just you're talking to the person that has budget authority, and they have the problem immediately, and then you can provide a narrative around how to help them.

Susan Tatum 19:57

So when you were talking about what you did. When you were working for the firm that did the recruiting or marketing, or was it stuff?

Kelli Schutrop 20:06

When I was selling, it was a digital marketing agency, okay, sold into the staff history.

Susan Tatum 20:11

So you were, you were full time doing because it sounded like everything you were doing was fabulous, and it was a full time job.

Kelli Schutrop 20:19

It was a full time, yes, yes,

Susan Tatum 20:23

it was when you but you didn't have to turn around and then deliver what you would solve. There were people

Kelli Schutrop 20:27

I did not true. So I went from wearing a marketing hat and not having any sales role, you know, doing all delivery and strategy and things, to then being in sales, and there was a delivery team offering the services, right? So there was a once the client signed, of course, there was a handoff and a discovery and all the things, but I was not responsible for implementing I was responsible to go find more new clients.

Susan Tatum 20:51

So now that you're doing your own thing, you're in the same boat as the rest of us.

Kelli Schutrop 20:58

Yeah,

Susan Tatum 20:59

you're the newer seller, right? So given that, given that detail and the fact that now we're in 2025 and things are quite a bit different than they were. And you say 2017 2018 something like that.

Kelli Schutrop 21:13

Yes, that's when I first started selling. Yep And yep.

Susan Tatum 21:19

So what would you know? What would you do if you were starting a business now and you hadn't taken that, you hadn't already built that following and all that trust and visibility that you had. What steps would you take now?

Kelli Schutrop 21:32

Sure, all right, so I love this question. It's a good mental exercise. I know it's a place that a lot of people I talk to are in right now. So there's a few things that I would do. One I would first look at my LinkedIn profile through the lens of my ideal audience, my cover photo, my profile picture, my tagline, the about section, any description under my pastorals, absolutely everything. I would look at it and say, if someone I want to have hire me sees this, does it build to the case that I'm the right person for that job, to be that consultant, to be that fractional executive? So that's the very first thing I would do. In order to even do that, you have to take that step back and say, What am I good at? What do I want to sell? Right? Like you have to start thinking about your positioning before you can start posting content on social in general, because that's the roadblocks that a lot of people hit, is, I know I need to be active, but I don't even know what to talk about. So I would say first, actually, even before the LinkedIn audit phase, go back and say, what are the things I'm good at? Who could benefit from this, who has the ability to buy this service, and how do I want to package it? Right? Do I want to have fractional clients. Do I want to offer advisory services? Do I want to do projects? Do I want to do, speaking like, what are my puzzle pieces that are going to make up the revenue I want to make? And also, how many hours a week do I want to bill? That's a whole other animal that I don't think a lot of people think about. You know, we come out of w2 jobs where we work 40 plus hours a week, and it's just everything is a juggle, but you have one main manager, you will have different stakeholders internally, but everything kind of goes toward one primary purpose, with a lot of projects that you're juggling throughout. So I've seen a lot of people, and myself included, say, Oh, well, I could bill 40 hours a week? Well, no, it's a terrible idea. Unless you want to work 60 hours a week or more. I got really good advice early on from someone that said, if you want to work full time, 40 hours a week, do not bill more than 20 hours a week. I was like, what? There's no way that seems silly. But as I started totaling up, networking calls, sales calls, posting on LinkedIn, invoicing, anything that isn't physically client time, you have to find space for that. And so I started assembling what I'd call, kind of like my puzzle pieces of this is the amount of money I want to make. This is the amount of hours I have to allocate toward client billable work. What types of services do I want to provide? And then I shifted it, and I would recommend everyone do this shift to look at your LinkedIn profile and start talking about, why are you an expert at this? What results has it driven in the past? What would it accomplish if somebody hired you and then take the onus on of at minimum, posting once a week, and when I think about posting content on LinkedIn, I've adopted the mantra I thought of this years ago, of, like, I just need, like, a filter of the type of content I post on LinkedIn, and I landed on three words, insightful, credible and relatable. Every post I make on LinkedIn hits one or more of those categories. If it's insightful, I'm teaching someone something. If it's credible, it's impressing someone. If it's relatable, they're just seeing me as a human and relating to me in that way and that I filter it through that if I'm doing a reshare, if I'm doing original content, whatever it is and so I would say, like, take the onus on yourself to, no matter what, post at least once a week something that requires your brain power and your effort, and then start sharing insights on the things that. Your ideal clients have challenges with and right now, in 2025 vertical videos that are under 60 seconds are performing the best, and they do not need to be

Susan Tatum 25:09

what's a vertical video?

Kelli Schutrop 25:10

just a video on your cell phone. So you've got your selfie and you're holding it up and you're taking a video. Video, in general, has started to take over more landscape in the algorithm, you know, on LinkedIn, because they're competing against all of the other video based platforms like YouTube and Instagram and Tiktok, where consumers are just spending time. And so they're starting to prioritize video, but now it's specifically shorter content that is vertical, and it does not have to be fancy and polished. It literally can be. You sit here and say, All right, I'm gonna make sure my lighting is good, that I look decent on camera. You know, when I set up my like portrait mode or whatever cinematic mode on my iPhone, or just any phones, video and talk for 60 seconds or less about a challenge that clients are having. It doesn't mean there's not play long form content. There still is. But if you're trying to go for low hanging fruit. I would start there, and then the last thing that I would add is, if you are posting this content but you are not connected to the people you want to sell to, to a degree, it's going to go a bit into a void. So I would make an action plan to start connecting actively on LinkedIn with prospects. You can use tools like dripify and Sales Navigator to automate that process, where you basically search a list of this title within this company, and it gives you the list, and you upload it into dripify, which is 100 bucks a month to month same with sales now, and it will connect with these people behind the scenes, like 100 people a week, which is LinkedIn current maximum that you can do. And then you can just start building your network there, and from there, people can start seeing the content you're doing. Or there's a help bomb strategy we could talk about, but there's a lot there already

Susan Tatum 26:51

Well, So there'sone thing that I don't hear you saying, Kelly, and that is reaching out and having conversations and talking to people.

Kelli Schutrop 26:59

Yeah, no, that's a good point. I've been focusing more on LinkedIn. I would say, create your short list of people that you already know in your network that could be clients first, that should be low hanging fruit, and just tell them I'm starting something new. I would love to just talk shop with you and bounce a couple things by you. But also creating an actual prospect list that you don't know can be very helpful and that pursues more of like, the classic outbound approach.

Susan Tatum 27:21

You know, one of the things that I see and with the consultant, because I talk to more than 100 consultants every year, and what I see is there's a lot of money that's spent up front in, you know, I've got to have a website, I've got to have this, I've got to have that. And they do all of this before they even talk to the market, so nine times out of 10 people end up not doing exactly what they thought they were gonna do,

Kelli Schutrop 27:48

sure

Susan Tatum 27:49

so they end up having to trash the expensive website that they invested

Kelli Schutrop 27:54

Well, it brings up a really good point. Susan, you know, within my career, I had gone from managing marketing in house to consultative selling. And there was another step in between. I was very active on LinkedIn, and I got recruited to create a few LinkedIn learning courses, and the company that produced those, I started networking with the right size, cool approach for how they were helping create digital learning consultancy programs for large global tech companies, I joined them in house to lead sales and marketing, and I realized that not every company led through that thought leadership approach to sales, some approached it more through the classic outbound and then I started doing soul searching, and that was actually the origin of how I started thoughtful resound. I had conversations with a couple mentors, and just said, I really enjoy leading marketing, but I also really enjoy sales, but I don't want to only cold call to companies that don't have any idea who I am. Like that doesn't fit me very well, and I don't think it. I'm not seeing success with that. And so I had two mentors separately say, Well, if you ever considered going out on your own and teaching people what you've done successfully in the past, I would be interested in a conversation. And that was a really big almost like a market proof of, Oh, interesting. There's a need for this, and it isn't going to be a fit for every company, but it's going to be a fit for the companies that are the right companies for it, and and it was just really interesting, and one of those companies has been my client since the beginning, and the other has been just a constant, great sounding board of you know, advice as things come up. And so I do think it's incredibly important to have conversations with the market to find out, is this a viable need

Susan Tatum 29:43

a validation,

Kelli Schutrop 29:44

yeah, and my original positioning was all around thought leadership activation and talking about how you can take your sales team and your key executives within your company, put thought leadership behind them, and that drives revenue. What I didn't anticipate is that most of my clients say yes. But. You're really good at marketing, can you come in as our fractional CMO? And that's where a lot of my partnerships start, and then when we get a strong foundation with that, whether over the course of the next six months, or very quickly after, I always ask questions about the pipeline, because everybody in marketing always wants more leads. But sometimes that isn't actually the problem. Sometimes the problem is things that are leaking down the funnel, and so we have to talk about that. And then I pivot more into consulting the sales team and how they can be better at selling. And I would imagine, like, maybe I'm I would imagine I'm not the only one of like, like, you said, you know where you start it pivots, because you kind of sense what the market needs as you go. And

Susan Tatum 30:38

yeah, yes, that's one of the examples that I see a lot, and another one is that we know what they need, what the client needs. We know it's going to solve their problem, but that often is not what they're they're willing to buy they want. So it's going to take some little shift of just to give you example, one of the one of my clients a couple of years ago, was doing organizational development in the manufacturing industry, and he could see where the problems were, and this was, this is what they needed. They don't want to they didn't want to buy that. They wanted by training. He didn't want to do training because that brought him in as a more of a vendor than a strategic person. Then he realized they were willing to put money down on that, so he was able to get into the companies doing that, and then move into the more strategic.

Kelli Schutrop 31:27

right? Yeah, sometimes it takes meeting the client where they're at with the need that they have and the budget that they're able to invest, and other times it's being willing to walk away and say, there isn't a solve to your problem other than this, and it's fine if it's not on the radar. I want to quote someone that I really enjoy following on LinkedIn. She's a great person. Her name is Jen Allen Knuth, and Knuth spelled K, N, U, T, H, if you're looking her up. So Jen Allen Knuth, she does sales kickoffs for large scale SaaS companies and beyond. She was formally sales trained, then pivoted into marketing, and just a very real person on LinkedIn, and she talks a lot about the cost of inaction versus return on investment. And a lot of us focus on ROI type conversations and sales. You know, if you do XYZ and spend this, you will experience XYZ results. Sometimes you have to figure out, and this is to quote Jen like, sometimes you have to figure out, is the problem even big enough to them, or the one person you're talking to within the company who's jazzed with you about this, is it their biggest problem? But it's not anybody else's, so it's not going to gain traction. So sometimes it's focusing on the cost of inaction. You know, if you don't invest in this with me or someone else or internally, if you don't do XYZ, where will you be in a year? Where will you be in down years? Is that a plausible option for your company? Because if it isn't, that's something to consider, right? So it's more of that, like, what happens if you don't change anything? And some companies with challenges are in a spot where if they don't change anything. It doesn't matter that much. So it's not worth uphill battle try to convince them. And for other companies, it's a huge deal if they don't accomplish the output, and it'll just kind of reframe it to them of like, wow, I actually do need to prioritize this more, and I think that positions you more as a trusted expert, that you're having those pointed, challenging conversations with them, and again, holding loosely to whether they partner with you or not, positions you as a trusted source to them.

Susan Tatum 33:27

So is that a question or an area that you would advise exploring early on with a prospect is what happens if you don't do this?

Kelli Schutrop 33:35

I would Yes, and I would also ask the question, because I know that your listeners on this podcast cover quite a span of different specializations and expertise areas. I would say, when you are in a conversation with what we would call your champion, the person who's gung ho about this, if that's the owner of the company, you're probably fine, because they're going to be the head that turns the body, so to speak, if they are not the owner of the company. I think it's very important to ask, is this challenge that you and I are agreeing is a challenge for the organization that needs to be solved? Is this something that anyone else in the company cares about, especially the people who have budget to make the call on this? Because if this is your shiny object and my shiny object, raise it that way, right? Nobody else's. It's almost tiring within a big corporation, everybody's team needs head count, but there's only so much budget. So how do you make the business case for that? And so in that world, it's more about equipping your champion to have those internal sales conversations about why it's important, or to come back to you and say, Man, I wish this wasn't what I was saying, but it's only important to me. It's not important anyone else like this. This isn't a priority this year. Then at least, you know, and you could be in touch with them, but then you're not banking on it from a revenue standpoint to close within the next month, or whatever that might look like. Or in a purposeful solopreneur model, we've only got so much bandwidth. It, right? Like, if you are selling for an agency model, it's as many clients as you can bring on you can staff up to support, right? But if it's only you that, that's where sometimes I have to navigate, essentially, getting people to say, Yes, I'm interested, or no, I'm not, because I can't reserve time for everybody, right? Like, it may be a future partnership, but right now, I've only got so much capacity in the next three months to bring on a client, and it's okay if it's not the right fit. And there's ways to delicately have that conversation. But if you've got irons in the fire everywhere, and you don't know what will go that can be kind of a stressful, exciting, but stressful spot to be

Susan Tatum 35:33

well, and also taking up a lot of valuable time. If you're not, if you're not disqualifying quickly,

Kelli Schutrop 35:41

yeah, I think that

Susan Tatum 35:42

the hard way. I think,

Kelli Schutrop 35:43

yeah, I have too. I'm sure everybody here has, and especially when you're growing something and you don't have that comfort from a revenue standpoint yet, you know you're not making the money. So yet, it's really hard to close out the deal. Say this one isn't going anywhere, or it could, but it's only going to if it comes back on its own like that. Can be really hard, but it's honestly one of the best things you can do for your emotions in the sales process to, just like, mentally put it on a different shelf and say that's not one that's going to close now, because it'll free up mental capacity to focus on net new conversations.

Susan Tatum 36:17

Well, I think it that's a good support for the argument that we all need to be spending the right amount of time on business development and so that we've got options and we don't feel any of that desperation taking things that we shouldn't be taking, or just coming off as being too pushy.

Kelli Schutrop 36:32

Yeah, well, and it's the world that all salespeople are in, right? Like the world of sales is filled with very high highs, and also can be very low, lows. And one of the best pieces of advice I got from a an individual that I worked with. His name is Steve yakesh. He led there is leading the executive search division of a the Twin Cities, largest search and staffing firm, search and consulting firm, excuse me. And when I stepped into sales, I didn't have a formal sales manager. I reported to a president who's his background was finance, and so I met with Steve weekly, and it was just so helpful for me to hear him say, you're gonna have high highs and you're gonna have low lows and sales. Try not to, like, ride them. Try to ride somewhere in the middle, like, celebrate your wins. But also, when you hit something where you get five no's in a row, you just gotta keep moving. You just gotta keep rolling. And it was very helpful advice.

Susan Tatum 37:21

It's hard to do, but yeah, you, if you keep going, the highs will come back, or you'll bring to those Well,

Kelli Schutrop 37:28

right.

Susan Tatum 37:29

I have bad news. We are over time, and I still have things to talk about. So thank you.

Kelli Schutrop 37:36

Got a couple more minutes. If you had any last minute questions that you think we should dive into?

Susan Tatum 37:41

Well, I want to be sure that we that we cover the concept of thought leadership from your standpoint well enough. So, because I see it woven through everything that you've been doing, it's a really good example of it so, and I think probably everybody on this call has heard or on the that will be listening to the podcast has had heard at some point about the importance of thought leadership, but what are we talking about when we say that?

Kelli Schutrop 38:06

Yeah, it is one of those nebulous terms. So when I say thought leadership, I mean when your prospective client has a need for what you do, that they think of you because you are the one showing up, talking about it and educating them about it. So having thought leadership looks like posting content on LinkedIn, speaking at industry associations, just basically helping people know that you're good at this. Because if you come from a corporate environment, you know how much relationship building, and like relational equity you need to build in order to be seen as the right person for the promotion, right? It's no different in the world of selling your own services. If you are the best at what you do, but nobody knows it, you are not going to get the call period. So in the same way, you have to show up and share success stories and talk about challenges someone who's a really good one to follow on. This is Amy volas, V, O, L, A, S. She is an executive recruiter that focuses on hiring the first sales person for growing companies, especially in the SaaS space, the tech space. And she is really good at showing up consistently with video content and, you know, text based content on LinkedIn and sharing stories about what not to do and what to do. And it's one of those things where her name pops up in LinkedIn chats all the time, or LinkedIn comments where someone will say, I'm looking for my head of sales, and I'll be like, Oh, see, Amy Volas, it might not even be someone that knows her personally, but they've just been kind of seeing her name pop up, and that's all she talks about. And so I think it's important to think about thought leadership, just as like, how do you help people know what you are good at? And if you are not talking about it, and no one else is talking about it, your clients, your future clients, are not [inaudible]

Susan Tatum 39:54

yeah, well, underlying in there, isn't there the idea that it's valuable, content that you need to be sharing, that you're not just some generic thing that comes along is you're are sharing insights. I think that was one of your three things was,

Kelli Schutrop 40:11

yeah, can't just be spit out of chatGPT that anybody anywhere could say, and it's just really bland and vanilla. What I would encourage you to post is, if your ideal client, or to say, okay, Susan, cut it straight. You know, shoot it straight. Like, what do you actually think I need to focus on to fix my problem? What would you answer on a phone call? Like, you don't have three hours to break it down for them. You have minute and a half Max without it being awkwardly too long to tell them. All right, Joe, you're asking me. I'm gonna tell you need to do XYZ, like that's the kind of content that scrolling around on LinkedIn, if he comes across is going to go, Oh, wow. Susan, gets it

Susan Tatum 40:49

Thank you again for being here and the folks that want to follow up with you outside of this podcast. How is the best way to do that?

Kelli Schutrop 40:58

Yeah, LinkedIn is where I spend the majority of my time. So I would say, connect with me on LinkedIn. Mention that you heard Susan and my conversation here, and be happy to chat.

Susan Tatum 41:08

Okay, so for those that are listening, we're going to put, we'll put those connections in the show notes. But for those that are listening, can you spell your name? Because last name is and Kelli is with a with an i,

Kelli Schutrop 41:20

it's true, yes. So my name is spelled Kelli, K, E, L, L, I, and Schutrop is S, C, H, U, T, R, O, P, Schutrop, I was telling Susan, before we started recording that I married in I think at this point, 13 years ago, and I'm still trying to pronounce it right. So as long as you can spell it on LinkedIn, you can find me

Susan Tatum 41:39

All right. Well, thanks again. That was so much wonderful information that you shared, and I know I got a lot out of it, and I hope that all the listeners did as well. I'm sure they did.

Kelli Schutrop 41:49

Thank you for having me. Susan, this was a really fun conversation, and for everybody listening, it's always one step at a time. I know I'm sharing a lot of the highlights, but it is not always smooth and perfect, right? There's a lot of like learning as you go and curve balls that come on the scene, but it's always one step at a time.

Susan Tatum 42:06

Just keep going bye, bye.