A firm’s experts are often an untapped resource full of amazing marketing potential. In fact, your experts can provide exactly what risk-averse buyers need to move forward with confidence.
We explained how this works in a recent newsletter published on LinkedIn:
“In many, and maybe most, cases, buyers need to experience the expertise they are about to invest thousands of dollars in. But how do they get this critical exposure? This is where all those experts come in. They write the blog posts, put on the webinars, deliver the speeches and conduct the free consultations or demos that give potential buyers a taste of your firm’s expertise. Some prospects become so impressed with your expertise that they come back to sample it again and again.”
Many of those prospects ultimately become clients—the kind that respect your expertise and advice.
Today, I want to expand on that article and explain why building a firm of multiple thought leaders—individuals we call Visible Experts®—is the key to abiding success.
Imagine, for a moment, a world in which you have not one, not two, but a dozen or more Visible Experts on your team. What would that mean?
For one thing, it would mean you have many more opportunities to connect with prospects in a personal way. Each time one of your experts gives a speech, publishes a blog post or delivers a webinar, they are influencing the way a reader or listener thinks about a problem. If a single Visible Expert can reach, say, 1,000 people a year, ten of them could reach 10,000.
The math is not only easy, it’s exciting! If even only a fraction of a percent of those people become clients in a given year, that adds up to a lot of revenue—and, in most professional services industries, substantial potential add-on revenue as you grow the relationship.
Another implication of a broad thought leadership program is its value as a recruiting tool. Most firms talk about career growth in a conventional way: mentoring, training, and so on. But if you have a formal Visible Expert or thought leadership program, you set your firm up as something truly special: a place where experts are trained and positioned to become high-profile industry leaders. The kind that clients and peers look up to.
Now, you may worry that stars like these are ripe for poaching by other firms. Or if they become too successful, they may want to peel off and start their own businesses. True. Both of these things could happen.
But consider the alternative. Suppose you decide to hide your best talent. You include no names or bios on your website. No photos. No email addresses. As far as the public knows, they don’t exist.
Try as you might to eliminate poaching, your experts still have LinkedIn profiles—you can’t keep your people from maintaining those. And if they are on LinkedIn, head hunters will find them.
In addition, if you’ve created a stifling, closed culture, your best people are eventually going to leave for firms where they have more freedom and can build their personal reputations. You are likely to lose great people faster than you can replace them. Talk about unintended consequences!
When you implement a firm-wide Visible Expert program, however, you actively, enthusiastically support your experts’ career-building ambitions. By embracing these ambitions you actually incentivize your best people to stay. That doesn’t mean all of them will, of course. A few may be seduced by bigger money at larger firms. Or, wanting to make their own mark on the world, a particularly bright star may exit your constellation to establish one of their own. But nothing you do was going to stop those departures, anyway.
An organization-wide thought leadership program not only instills loyalty, it establishes a reliable and durable source of new business opportunities. By creating channels for buyers to experience your expertise first-hand, you elevate your firm above the rest that rely on unproven marketing messages, personal charisma and the reach of their business development teams to drive new opportunities. And through the halo effect, as the reputation of your Visible Experts rises, your firm’s prospects improve at the same time.
The sooner you realize that expertise is marketing, the sooner your firm will prosper.
