Lessons for Entrepreneurial Experts

Recently I shared my biggest learning going from the owner of a shaved ice business where I sold a beautiful, delicious product my customers could hold, taste, and see...

…to owning a consulting business where I sell what I know.

And how recognizing that distinction changed absolutely everything when it came to growing my business.

Since then I’ve learned that being an expert in something doesn’t help you grow your business on its own. There is being an expert, and there is showing people that you’re an expert.

This week I want to dig deeper into what that actually means.

First, what are the similarities in selling and marketing a product/service based business vs an expertise-based business?

This will be quick, because I just want to list the principles I think apply to all categories—whether they be product, service, or expertise-oriented—to get them out of the way:

Positioning first. If you can’t easily tell someone what you do and who you do it for, your sales and marketing won’t work.
Word of mouth beats everything else. If you create a great experience, people who buy from you will turn into repeat customers and also tell the people they know about it. We all want that, of course.
Relationships > transactions. Whether you’re a software company with 10k customers or a consultant with 10 at a time, the relationships we build with people lead to our success.
Business development never ends. Product/service-based companies never reach a point where they’re “finished” with sales and marketing because they have enough customers and enough revenue. Neither do experts.

Now, what are the differences in selling and marketing a product/service based business vs an expertise-based business?

Here are 3:

Sell what you know, not what you do.
Sell yourself, not your company.
Demonstrate your proven process in sales conversations.

Sell what you know, not what you do.

I remember one of my very first consulting clients, and one exchange in particular that eventually became a huge watershed moment for me.

We were sitting across a table and I was interviewing him about everything he “wanted” to include in his new employee training curriculum. We got to one area where I asked him a question and he just sat back, crossed his arms, and said, “I don’t know Elizabeth, you’re the expert. You tell me.”

I was so used to asking my customers what they wanted at the window of my food truck, that I didn’t realize the same behavior was now very much working against me.

That moment started my shift from “you tell me what you want” to “I’ll listen to what you want…but I’ll also tell you what you should want.”

If you don’t know more than your clients do about something, then you’re in the wrong business. Please stop calling yourself a consultant because you’re really giving the rest of us a bad name.

But if you do know more than your clients do about something…then you need to humbly start acting like it. You need to start selling what you know, not what you do.

It starts by shifting your mindset from thinking of yourself as a service provider to thinking of yourself as an expert. How does that change things?

Both service providers and experts are valuable, of course. And some companies sell both. But selling services and selling expertise are just not the same thing.

If you want to implement SalesForce for your 5k-person team, you want to find the best service provider who can help you do that. But who decided that SalesForce was the platform you needed to implement? The expert.

When you drop off clothes at the dry cleaner, you want to be able to say this stain needs to be removed, this needs to be starched, etc. Finding someone who gets it right is important. But when your content strategy isn’t working, you want a strategist who can give you your homework.

Those service providers following orders? That’s making your life a lot easier. You get to buy your time back and work on other things. But the content strategist, or the tax accountant, or the LEAN consultant? They’re making your life harder in the short run, but it’s transforming your business into something better than it was before.

Sell yourself, not your company

Second—sell yourself, not your company.

This is where I really went wrong in the beginning. It took me a long time to change the way I thought about this because I was so used to marketing a product, and that’s the way it works in a product/service company. You talk about the thing, about the company brand, and those things are bigger than “you.” You might say “we,” but you never say “I.”

**But when people are looking for an expert, they don’t want to work with a company they know and trust. They want to work with a person they know and trust.**

So what do you do if you’re building a consulting business bigger than yourself? This is where I got stuck.

If what you want is a highly profitable, cash flowing solo consulting business, then it’s pretty black and white: You need to be showing people what you know by sharing your personal insights out in the world somewhere.

I don’t know if for you that place is LinkedIn, an email newsletter, speaking engagements, free webinars, Instagram, Facebook, real books, or all of the above. I just know you need to do it.

Not under your company name…under your name.

But you might want to grow a team that’s bigger than yourself. So it’s tempting to believe that in order to do that, the sales and marketing can’t be about you.

You’re either A) building a lifestyle business that’s dependent on you and your personality or B) building a company brand that’s not.

I used to think of this as binary, too, but it’s not. We can have both, and we should have both.

Let’s say you have 5 or 25 or 50 other experts working with clients. Every single one of them should be demonstrating their personal expertise out in the world somewhere.

Whether they’re writing newsletters, or posts on LinkedIn, or posting videos to TikTok or YouTube, or doing speaking engagements…your business can still be relying on personal expertise to sell and to market the problems you solve.

Just not yours alone.

Next week I’ll get into tenet #3, which is demonstrate your proven process in sales conversations. Until then…

Recap

Sell what you know, not what you do. Shift your mindset from an order taker who takes direction, to an expert guide that gives direction. How does that change things?
Sell yourself, not your company. Show your prospects you’re an expert by showing them your personal insights. Don’t hide the very thing that makes you unique behind a company brand.
Demonstrate your proven process in sales conversations. Coming soon!

Resources

Two experts who have been hugely influential for me in learning how to sell my expertise are David C. Baker and Kait LeDonne. You should read everything they write.

Let’s Talk

Are you an expert who doesn’t quite know what your proven process is yet? You do it, but you’re not crystal clear on what it is. You’ve had lots of clients, you get great results consistently…you’re just not sure how. You want to hire and replicate yourself, or you want to be able to better articulate how you do what you do.

Let’s talk, because you are my favorite type of client. I love working with entrepreneurial experts who want to uncover their unique intellectual capital.

You can reach me on this platform through a DM, or at elizabeth at untangleyourbiz dot com.

From Shaved Ice to Selling Expertise, Part 2/3