***How to Position Yourself as an Expert

So you meet someone at a networking event, talk about what you do, know they could be helped by what you offer, follow up with them several times, and they still don’t become a client. Why is that?

There’s something that must be present in every conversation with a potential client. In fact it’s part of our six stages of the Heartselling ™ system we teach at Thrive Academy. If you don’t open the conversation in the right way, people are not going to want to move forward with you – even if what you have to offer is a perfect match for what they are looking for.

What is the missing ingredient? It’s called “positioning.” It is the position you occupy in a person’s mind when you start a conversation with them, and that stays with them whenever they think of you. Do they see you as someone they want to work with, with expertise and authority to offer?

How do you gain that position in a potential client’s mind?

We’ve seen many of our $10,000 Month Club Members take off in their business big-time by changing this one thing when they meet new people.

When they used just one of the tips we’re about to share with you on how to position yourself as an expert, people started responding to them differently. They got more respect, more clients and more referrals.

There are about 15 different ways you can position yourself as an expert which we teach in our Client Attraction Mastery Program. Let’s look at three of these that you can put into place immediately to make a huge difference for you.

Tip # 1: Share a client success story

When you are having a conversation with someone and you share about what you do, talk about a time when one of your clients got a great result from working with you, a before-and-after story about a positive experience they had or a change they made. This is a really powerful way to plant a seed that you are an expert and authority in what you do, and that you give proven results.
You don’t want it to sound “salesy” or like you’re name-dropping, but rather make it conversational by simply sharing your joy and satisfaction of seeing a client succeed.

Tip # 2: Past accomplishments mean present credibility

In our work, we see something with our students that often gets overlooked. People come to us who want help as they shift into another career. They typically want to leave behind what they did previously. But what they don’t realize is that by leaving out their past they may be losing credibility and expertise that they could be sharing.

Here’s a perfect example: When Vinca Heart came to us she was a coach, doing alright and wanting to do better. After our work together, her business shot up to six figures ove ight and not long after, seven figures. How? Some of this came from shifting how she positioned herself.

Vinca happened to be instrumental in helping the Berlin wall come down in Germany. Phenomenal, right? She also was a well-known concert pianist in Germany.

In her new profession she never shared these extraordinary accomplishments because they seemed unrelated to her coaching. But here’s a question for you: Do you think somebody who was in an underground political movement instrumental in bringing down the Berlin wall could coach you to get past your obstacles? You bet she could!

Once she started including her story in her conversations and in her marketing, her position as an expert sky-rocketed.

Now most of us have not helped to bring down the Berlin Wall, but if you look at your own past, you’ll be surprised at what you’ll find that can make a huge difference in the way people see you. Maybe you were valedictorian, fast-tracked through big promotions in a past career, worked through tough challenges by conquering your fears, helped someone in a life-changing way – whatever it may be.
It’s amazing what you’ll find and how people will respond to you!

Tip # 3: Create a signature system

Here’s something you can do to instantly boost how often people see you as an expert, whether you’re just getting started in your business or have been doing this for years. It is to be the creator of something.

Do you have a process or system you’ve developed to take your clients through step-by-step to get the outcomes you offer them? A special way you have with them that’s uniquely yours? Give it a name and say you are the creator of whatever the system is.

As an example, we’d like to share our story with you. We didn’t start out as the world’s leading authorities in Holistic Business Training, teaching coaches and holistic practitioners how to market their business and get more clients. We started out just a couple of steps ahead of our clients teaching what we knew worked. We began to discover some elements that were present in every conversation. So I (Sharla) took my love of the Five Elements of Chinese Medicine and we transposed them into our system of how to turn potential clients into paying clients.

This became our Heartselling™ system. Over these ten years it has grown to a huge body of work, and we have led our Client Attraction Summit over 70 times with great results for our students. But in the beginning it was just the 5 Elements of Heartselling™ that we made up. Because we were the creators of this system, it gave us tons of credibility…and that grew our business exponentially.

How will YOU position yourself as an expert?

With these tips you can position yourself well, and when you do you’ll find potential clients leaning in and wanting to work with you, because in their mind you’re the expert. You become somebody who’s different from the rest, and somebody who can help them.

Positioning can change everything for you…

To get you started, ask yourself these questions:

1. Which client success stories can you share that will have people see you as an
expert who gets results?

2. If you’re new to the work you’re doing, what can you bring in from your past
that can give you a high level of positioning?

3. What can you be the “Creator of?” (Even if you don’t have ways to position
yourself as an expert using the first two tips, there IS something YOU can
be the “creator of.”)