How to Stand Out from the Crowd: The Signature Offer Secret for HR Consultants

You think you need to sell HR. But that's a complete misunderstanding.

And that one simple, but common misunderstanding is silently wrecking your marketing, crushing your sales, and making you feel like you're shouting into the void on LinkedIn.

So in this episode of Marketing Made Easy for HR Consultants, I’m pulling back the curtain on the biggest marketing mistake I see every solo HR consultant making.

So if you've ever said things like:
 ❌ “I help SMEs with all their HR needs”
❌ “We do everything from contracts to culture”
❌ “We’re like an outsourced HR department”

…then this episode will shift your perspective completely — and show you why this exact approach is making it impossible to stand out, charge high fees, or get consistent leads.

In this episode, you’ll discover:
✅ Why selling "HR" puts you in a race to the bottom — even if you’re the best at what you do.
✅ What McDonald's, Rolex, and Chanel 5 can teach you about selling your HR  consultancy services.
✅ The real reason your content isn’t generating leads — and what to do instead.
✅ How to reposition your services so clients see you as essential (not a nice-to-have).
✅ The 3-step fix: niche, target market, and offer — and how to make it all work.
✅ The quickest way to become a category of one — even if you're just starting out.

So if you're tired of being seen as just another HR consultant — and you want to be the go-to expert in your space and get all the leads and clients you need with ease — this is the episode that shows you how.

Hit play now.

Timestamps:

00:00 – Why most HR consultants struggle to sell their services.
01:00 – The costly impact of saying 'I do HR' in sales conversations.
02:00 – How vague HR messaging confuses potential clients.
03:00 – Why buyers don’t search for ‘HR support’ – they search for outcomes.
04:00 – The danger of assuming clients understand what you do.
05:00 – What to say instead of 'I help SMEs with their HR needs'.
06:00 – Using pain points to frame your HR offer in a compelling way.
07:00 – Example: shifting from 'HR help' to 'reducing absence-related costs'.
08:00 – Real sales story: how outcome-focused messaging won the client.
09:00 – Why marketing feels hard when your message is too generic.
10:00 – The role of specificity in converting leads to clients.
11:00 – What buyers want: results, not responsibilities.
12:00 – Case study: transforming HR messaging to land bigger contracts.
13:00 – The ‘I don’t know what you do’ problem and how to fix it.
14:00 – Turning your service into a product clients are already searching for.
15:00 – Avoiding the 'menu of services' trap in your website and proposals.
16:00 – Messaging audit: how to spot weak, invisible offers on your site.
17:00 – 3 messaging tweaks to boost response from emails and LinkedIn.
18:00 – Creating a sales message that positions you as a business partner.
19:00 – How to test your new HR offer and message this week.
20:00 – Final takeaway: ditch 'HR' and sell the transformation, not the task.

Want My Help to Build Your £70K+ HR Consultancy?

1️⃣ Grab a copy of my book – The Complete Guide to Building a £70K HR Consultancy – and discover how to get every lead and client you need.

2️⃣ Apply to Join The Fastlane Formula – so we can work together 1-to-1 to get you earning £70K+ faster (and easier) than going it alone.

Transcript

00:00 Hello there and welcome back to another episode of Marketing Made Easy for HR Consultants with me, Nick Poninski. Today's episode is going to be a doozy.
00:10 It is the number one mistake that HR consultants make and it is killing their business. What is that mistake? They're selling HR and you know why that's a problem and I, I laugh when I say it because I realize the, uh, the, the statement that I'm making.
00:28 You're like, wait, wait, I know I'm selling HR. What else am I supposed to sell? Here's why that's a problem.
00:35 You know, you're selling HR. You think you're selling HR and that undermines everything that you do because people don't buy HR.
00:45 People aren't buying HR, but you're trying to sell it. It'd be, it'd be like an airline or a holiday company.
00:56 It'd be like a holiday company trying to sell a hotel room or an air flight. Holiday companies don't sell hotels or airplanes, right?
01:08 They sell destinations. They sell happy times at the beach. They sell smiling families, uhm, people enjoying meals. They sell an end result.
01:20 If they tried to sell you by showing you what the airplane looks like, or the, the, the hotel room or something, you, you'd never, you'd never be interested.
01:31 You'd be like, I do not care. This is not, this is not what I'm interested in. So, when people, When people hear, you know, that you're selling HR, they, they switch off, right?
01:41 Because they're over here. If you've ever heard me talk loud in person, I'm holding up my left hand. You're over here.
01:48 They've got left hand side, left, left fingers up in the air. They're over here. They've got problems in their lives.
01:54 And now I'm holding up my right hand, holding my right finger and waving it. And they want to be over here where they've got more pleasure in their lives, more dreams.
02:02 And there's a massive gap between that world, right? And to get from this world to that world, there's a bridge.
02:08 You can get them from that place to that place. Now that bridge is hate joy, right? But nobody buys the bridge.
02:16 No one's interested in the bridge. What people are interested in is the hate, the painful world that they're in over here on the left hand side.
02:24 And the dream world that they want to be over here on the right hand side. And those are the only two things that they care about.
02:31 How they get there is irrelevant. That's not what you need to sell. You need to stop selling hate joy. You need to stop selling the bridge.
02:39 You need to talk to the market. You need about the pain that they're in, the mistakes that they're making, the myths that they believe over here on the left side.
02:45 And you need to talk to them about the right hand side. The dreams that they want to, uh, the dream world that they want to live in.
02:53 I'll go into that in a little bit more detail, but hopefully you'll hopefully, that makes sense. Hopefully, you can see, using that real world example of, uhm, uh, the, the, uh, the holiday company, they're not selling the hotel, they're not selling the airplane, they're selling destinations, they're
03:11 selling happy times. They're selling, selling smiling families, they're selling, you know, uhm, yeah, luxuriousness, whatever it is that they're selling, right?
03:21 So, I'll come back and say this, the other reason, so, and I'll explain it in a little bit more detail, the other reason that they're selling is it's a problem to sell HR.
03:30 People have preconceived beliefs, ideas about what HR is. Those beliefs are not in your control, uhm, so, it's, it's a big problem for you to turn up and say, I do HR.
03:44 When people hear HR, what they hear is admin, they hear reactive, they hear low value, they hear optional, they hear cost center.
03:53 It's a commodity, it's a problem. They're not interested in any of that stuff, right? So you need to stop trying to sell it.
04:02 What you need to sell is what you actually deliver, which is a workforce that turns up and does its job and makes that business owner profitable.
04:13 Makes them, yeah, it makes their workforce more productive. Somebody turns up to work and does the job that they're being paid for.
04:20 That's all the business owner cares about, and that's what you deliver. So stop talking about HR because no business owner cares about it.
04:29 They don't care about, uhm, tribunals. They don't care about disciplinary meetings. They don't care about contracts and handbooks. All they care about is that the person that they're paying turns up to work, does a good job so that that business owner doesn't have to think about that.
04:46 That's what you are selling, to be clear, what I'm saying is, you're selling an end result. You're either selling a world that that business owner wants to live in, where they don't have people problems, or you're talking to them.
05:01 about the fact that they have people problems, and they need a resolution to that, right? So let's, I, you know, I've given you the, uhm, the airplane, uhm, the holiday agent as an example.
05:12 Let me give you a couple more examples. McDonald's, when you see their adverts, they don't talk about people about burgers.
05:18 Sometimes they do, obviously. But most of the time, they're not talking about burgers. Most of the time, when you see their adverts, they're saying, I'm loving it.
05:26 They're showing you videos of people enjoying happiness. They are selling, McDonald's is basically built around the idea of happiness. That's what they're trying to sell you.
05:37 If you look at, you know, the, the happy meal that they sell to children, there's like step one, let's target them as young as possible.
05:45 We sell happiness, right? So they get the children, they sell in them happy meals. It makes eating so much easier.
05:52 If you've got a toddler or a child, you can know how much effort eating can be. McDonald's resolves that situation.
05:59 They are selling a solution. They are selling happiness. When they're talking to you, they're also selling happiness. You know they show you at work and it's boring and then all of a sudden you have a McDonald's and it feels amazing.
06:11 Right? So, McDonald's are selling happiness. Rolex, they're not selling watches. You know, when you look at their adverts, they're selling status.
06:20 Right? So, not everyone can afford it. Rolex, that's absolutely fine. Rolex are selling status. They're not selling watches. McDonald's, burgers, right?
06:30 That's the bridge. That's your HR. Rolex, they're selling watches. You know, the watches that they're selling. That's the bridge. That's the bridge.
06:37 That's your HR. They're not selling that. They're selling status. They're selling that dream world over here on the right-hand side.
06:44 Chanel No. 5, right? Perfume. They aren't selling a fragrance. That would be the bridge, right? They've got Payoneer over here, left-hand side.
06:53 They want to be in this dream world on the right-hand side. Chanel No. 5, get you there. It's going to get you there.
06:58 And it's going to get you there with that perfume. But they aren't talking about the perfume, right? That, again, would be your HR world.
07:05 They're selling sex. They're selling desire. That's over here on the right-hand side. So, again, they're not selling perfume. That's not what they're talking to you about.
07:13 So, you need to sell the solution, the end result. You need to talk to your audience about the pain that they're in and about the dream world that they want to live in.
07:23 So, selling the thing Thank you. Yeah, it's a difficult thing. Nobody wants to buy the thing. What they want to buy is the end result.
07:31 Now, you don't need, you might be listening to me say, you know, saying all this, listening along and say, well, that's all well and good, Nick, but I don't have a billion pounds to invest in adverts.
07:40 You don't need that. You need a million pounds to do this, to tap into this. You don't even need a brand.
07:45 All you need to do, three simple things, right? Pick a niche, pick a target market, pick a niche. So for me, that's easy.
07:54 I help HR consultants build a business at Incentive. That's an end result. I talk to them about giving them, you know, pipeline playbook.
08:02 I give you five leads a week or your money back. Fastlane formula. I get you to 70k or you get your money back, right?
08:08 These are end results. And because I know these end results, I know what the pain looks like. I know that it looks like feast or famine.
08:16 I know that it looks like having to go networking. I know that it looks like slashing your fees, right? And there's all sorts of other stuff.
08:23 And then I know about your mistakes and the myths that you believe, right? So, you know, thinking that you work with fastlane.
08:29 I'm thinking that you're selling HR. How very matter of me to talk about this. But these are the things that I understand because I know you as my target market.
08:38 I can speak to you specifically. You could do the same thing for your target market. And then you need to solve these specific.
08:45 Painful problems. You know that your audience have, right? So you can say that you can sell HR to anybody in the world, right?
08:54 Great. And that makes things extremely difficult, right? But if you know, I've gone through this example before. If you're the HR.
09:01 Our consultant who works with garages, you know, with mechanics, then, you know, that their beliefs about HR, their mistakes, the myths that they believe, you know, that the HR problems that they experience are a little bit different to, let's say an accountancy job.
09:17 Accountancy firm, right? Accountancy firm, you know, both will be worried about, uhm, staff leaving and whatnot, but it's a different world.
09:24 Plus, equally, uhm, there'll be different, uh, messages that you can share, uhm, you know, because I can talk about tribunals, I can talk about contracts, I can talk about, I talk about policies, and that sparks a little Mormon in your brain, right?
09:37 And you can do the same when it comes to garages or accountants or whatever. You can drop in words that make sense to them, so their brains can latch onto it.
09:46 So, yeah, that's the benefit of a network. But let's move past that. Let's, let's talk more about this, uhm, the idea of getting away from selling KTI.
09:58 I do want to say that the longer that you keep selling HR, the longer you'll stay stuck on, you know, that hamster wheel.
10:05 Competing with every other HR consultant out there, fighting to justify your value, really struggling to get clients and leads. And yeah, ultimately, having most of the content that you create, just be ignored because that's the reality.
10:20 You're trying to sell something that no one's trying to buy, so people will ignore it. People will click by your, uh, post about employee tribunals.
10:29 Costing them 30 grand because that's not something that's real to them. That's not a problem that they're experiencing. Equally, you know, when someone leaves their employment and getting a replacement takes them three months or whatever to get up to speed, so they lose all that productivity.
10:45 Again, that's not really enough for them. These are nice statistics. They're, you know, they are alarming and they'll probably grab hold of a little bit of attention, but unless you can put that into their world, unless you can speak with authority along the lines of, hey, you're employed in a local 
11:00 garage, you know, uhm, you need a guy turning up to work and not making mistakes, right? Because if he makes mistakes and that car goes out and it breaks down or it crashes in someone, you're on the line.
11:12 That's an issue. You see how that's a bit more specific, a bit more of what the, the, uh, mechanic, his local garage, he's more worried about that.
11:23 So what I I go. On to the next bit and talk to you about how to solve this problem. If you're sick of the same old results, if you're sick of lead generation, that doesn't work, if you're sick of creating content that gets crickets, if you're sick of having to go to networking meetings and, and just 
11:40 hoping and praying that somebody says, Hey, I need a HR consultant. If you actually want to build a consultancy that stands out from the crowd, that earns 70k or more in the next 12 months, and you get a pipeline of perfect fit, high paying clients, ready and willing to invest in your services, then 
11:58 apply to join the Fast Lane Formula on my website, because I will put my arm around your shoulder, I will roll my sleeves up, I will get down into the dirt with you and I'll help you build a business that attracts take exactly what you're doing and we will change you into a solution that your clients
12:15 can't live without.
12:17 being said, you know that this isn't just about pitching. These podcasts, they're not about pitching all the time. They are about sharing real value.
12:25 So hopefully, you've got a copy of my book. If you haven't, don't worry, you can listen along anyway. So the first thing that you need to do, as we've talked about it, have a target audience, have a niche, have somebody in mind whose problems that you can solve.
12:38 Next, create a signature offer. Something that you understand solves the problems that you're, your problems. Your audience is going through.
12:49 Solve that problem So again, for me, I've got the fast lane formula. I've got the pipeline playbook and I've got the book to, you know, quarterback all of that.
12:58 And obviously this podcast, these, these, but the book and the podcast, they are content pieces that surround my offers and make sure that you understand well, what they're worth, why, why you should be getting involved in them, but ignore that your signature offer.
13:12 What are your signature offer? You can have two, you can have three, but ideally you'll have one. And that solves your audience's biggest problems entirely.
13:22 There's loads of advantages to having a signature offer, like, well, uhm, because they're high value, you get a lot of money rather than selling them for an hour of your time, right?
13:32 But if you can create a signature offer, it has a name. It's something that you and only you can offer.
13:37 That puts you into an audience of one rather than selling HR services. You know, you now sell, I don't know, let's say the Behavidance package for better behavior.
13:46 Or the Back to Work Accelerator for reducing sick leave. Or the Sticky Staff System for retaining top talent. You know, whatever it is that your audience is struggling with, create a signature offer, name it appropriately, slap it in all over your branding and your marketing paraphernalia and get it 
14:05 in front of your audience. Now, with that signature offer, there should be a clear outcome. What is it, in one sentence, that that signature offer does for your audience?
14:17 And make a bold statement. Make bold promise. You know, most of the time, business owners have no idea about HR.
14:23 They're not really interested and they don't really understand anything about tribunals or any of the powers that you've got because of employment law or ACAS or, you know, paying people, uhm, you know, what do they call them, uh, termination fees where you get them to sign, uhm, one second, I'm going
14:40 to have to press pause. I'm going to have to Google agreement. I got there eventually. A settlement agreement. I should know because I've signed one in my time.
14:49 So, yes, most business owners don't know about all these tricks. So you can make a bold promise, right, about getting rid of, uh, I don't know, for, uhm, getting rid of problem employees, whatever it is, right?
15:02 And you know what tools you have in your armory. Most business owners don't know about it, don't wanna, don't wanna hear about it.
15:09 But these tools in your armory, they enable you to be able to make a bold promise. a bold say that you can get people back to work, uh, within four weeks or whatever it is, uhm, of their sick leave.
15:22 Or, you know, you can get them, uhm, you can change the culture so that productivity goes through the roof. I'm boring myself when I say that.
15:29 That's not what you wanna hear. I say, but the point is that you can make a bold promise. I would have to spend time working with you, thinking about it to come out with a bold promise.
15:39 But for me, you know, I thought about my offers nice and clearly. That's why I'm able to make bold offers.
15:45 So my signature offer, Playbook. Clear outcome, get your five leads, get your five leads a week. Bold promise, owe your money back.
15:52 Simple, simple, simple. Same with the Fastlane formula. Again, it's a product that only I own. Nobody else runs that. Clear outcome, get you to 70k. Bold promise, in under 12 months, owe your money back.
16:06 Simple. So what can your signature offers be? as I say, loads of benefits for having a signature offer. You'll see them all in my book if you go and grab a copy, but ultimately, you're in an audience of one.
16:18 You're no longer competing with other HR consultants. You are solving a problem that your audience has, and it's in its entirety, you get paid the big bucks.
16:28 Very simple. And this changes everything. So you will go from selling HR to actually problem-solving. People stop seeing you as optional.
16:38 saying, oh, she's talking about employment contracts again. They don't care about employment contracts. You'll be talking about all the positive outcomes and all the, you know, that people get through working with you.
16:50 And you'll talk about all the negative things that they will get rid of by working with you. And this means that you become essential.
16:57 Clients don't question your price. You stop chasing leads. They come to you all because you are no longer selling HR.
17:06 So don't make content about HR. Talk about what your audience care about. So make content about staff showing up and doing their job.
17:15 That is the number one problem that you solve. Don't undersell it. Talk about managers not burning out. Talk about teams hitting targets.
17:23 I know that we don't have a golden link between HR and employee performance. But in reality, you know, if you, uhm, we all know that without HR, then staff don't perform as well as they could do, right?
17:36 So even though there's no proof for it, you can infer a lot of proof. We all know it exists. And a business owner, you know, well, he doesn't really care about whether or not you can actually prove it.
17:47 All he cares about is the fact that he knows that he has staff who are not performing to the best of their attention, uh, potential, and he knows that he needs some help with that.
17:56 And if you can be in front of him saying, I can do that. I do that for you. I've got the behavior evidence package.
18:01 Yeah, click over here. This is why it helps you. And then you talk about, you know, why it's so good, what the outcomes are of the behavior evidence package.
18:11 So as I say, clients don't care about brief, they don't care about Care about contracts. They don't care about tribunals.
18:17 They care about business performance, employee performance. So talk to them about this stuff. Create content for them about this stuff.
18:26 Create content that solves their problems. As I said earlier. If you want my help with this, if you wanted to build a consultancy, a HR consultancy that earns 70k or more, that has clients coming to you, it makes your peers jealous while they get ignored on LinkedIn and you're winning all the awards,
18:45 then apply to join the faculty. Because we'll build your signature offer, we'll clarify your niche, we'll make you the go-to HR expert.
18:54 And that means you'll have a pipeline of perfect fit, high-paying clients queuing up to work with you. whether you get in touch or not, please, please, please take this away with you. You're not selling HR.
19:06 They're not buying HR. Right? You need to sell their end result. Whatever it is. Happy business owner. Top performing employees.
19:16 No issues. Everyone's happy. That's what you're selling. You are selling peace of mind. You're selling, ah, top performing employees. You're selling low absence.
19:26 You're selling no disciplinary issues. And if you can put that into a signature offer with a thank fancy name on it, then a business owner will know that you, and only you, offer that, and they will say, hell yeah, I need that.
19:39 I need the behaviourance package, or whatever it is that you come up with. Either way, hopefully this podcast has been really useful for you.
19:48 Thank you for listening along, and as ever, get marketing, because without marketing, there's no sales, and without sales, there's no business.
19:56 So get marketing.