Selling Your Experience and Knowledge

[randomperson00]

I’d love to hear from those who had some success or failure in any approach to selling their experience and knowledge. It could be creating courses, books, building a community, etc...

How did you get over that initial hurdle of having no influence in the social sphere of your field, to becoming seen as an expert? How did you display your approach to customer value? Did you validate it beforehand?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Rabby]

The quickest way to be seen as an expert in a subject is to educate people about that subject. If you're naturally drawn to speaking, presenting, or writing, that's not too hard to do.

Personally I started by learning a subject really well (reading contracts, reading analysis, comparing contracts and forms, reading articles, books, etc., and working with the subject professionally). Then I helped other people working in the same profession do better. It surprisingly doesn't take much to know more about something than almost everyone... most people work with things they know very little about... think about how much of your computer's inner workings you understand, for example.

Beyond that, ditch any desire to impress people with your knowledge. The plainer and easier you can say something, the better. If you make it sound hard or complicated or nuanced, you'll slow yourself down. You'll you fail to bring people up to your level of understanding. And if you can't explain it to an elementary school student, it's likely likely that you don't understand your subject as well as you think you do.

Pretend everyone - employees, bosses, judges, juries, auditors - needs to hear it in words an elementary school kid can understand. No need to add difficulty to something. They'll understand better. And you'll be the one who made them understand. And in their eyes, that makes you the expert.