This is Part 2 in a series on becoming a Visible Expert. Well cover why your firm should consider developing these high profile experts, how to do it and the strategy behind it.

 

Having a Visible ExpertSM on a professional services firm’s team is pure gold. As they speak, write articles, grant interviews or publish books, they attract potential clients, teaming partners and top job candidates.

In the first post in this series, Becoming a Visible Expert, we defined what separates these high profile experts from their peers and offered an overview of the benefits of becoming one. In this installment we’ll cover the foundation of the process — a Visible Expert Assessment.

So how do you become or help create a Visible Expert? The first step is to conduct a comprehensive assessment. Assessing your status as a Visible Expert involves looking at three key areas:

  • Visibility within the target audience
  • Areas of demonstrable expertise
  • Level of influence or impact on the audience

Within each of these areas there are both subjective indicators, such as people’s opinions about your level of expertise, and objective indicators, such as the number of speaking engagement requests or the number of new client referrals.

Let’s look at how one might assess each of these in turn.

1. Start by defining the target audience of interest. Be sure you understand the target audience that you want to influence. Typically these audiences include:

  • Potential clients within certain industries
  • Key influencers such as journalists, bloggers, opinion leaders and the like
  • Other professionals who may be referral sources or potential hires

An important point here is that the broader the audience, the greater the effort required to achieve Visible Expert status. The issue is focus.

For example, let’s say you are a business valuation expert who wants to specialize in working with government contractors. You need to understand your visibility within the government contracting community — and not within the general business community or among other business valuation experts (unless they are in a position to provide referrals).

2. Assess current visibility. Where are you starting now? You can either ask your target audience to name firms they can think of in your sphere of expertise (unaided recall) or ask them to rate firms from a carefully designed list. These are direct assessments.

There are also indirect assessments, such as Google search results, citation indexes, Twitter followers, and the like. The rapid growth of social media has made this sort of measurement easier.

But beware. The measure must be reflective of visibility within the target audience and not other unrelated audiences. Measure what you are trying to improve.

3. Assess current expertise. What are the areas of expertise that you want to be known for? Is it a broad area such as IT consulting or a narrow specialty such as financial systems for higher education?

It’s important to note that sometimes these areas of expertise can relate directly to a service offering from your firm (for example, software development). At other times, they can be broader issues that are relevant to your firm’s services but have wider implications.

Choosing the best target topics is a matter of strategy. But at this point it is just necessary to see what you are currently known for.

4. Assess level of influence. What is the result of your current level of visibility and expertise? How is your influence felt within the marketplace? How is it impacting your firm?

Here again you can look at direct evidence by getting an influence rating from members of your target audiences. You can also check indirect sources, such as social media shares or inbound links.

Another approach to assessing influence is to identify new business referrals, partnering inquiries, speaking requests, press citations and the like.

In some ways, the assessment of influence iprovides a “bottom-line” indicator of your visibility and expertise. It’s where thought leadership and professional eminence translate into new business and firm growth.

5. Assess the competitive environment. Who else of interest is influencing the marketplace? Here you are identifying other Visible Experts and trying to get an understanding of their visibility, expertise and impact.

This allows you to develop a rough competitive strength analysis that will be very helpful as you take the next step toward becoming a Visible Expert. That step is developing a strategy, and it will be the topic of our next installment.

Note: Visible Expert is a service mark of Hinge Strategy LLC

Lee