Table of Content
Introduction:
Why Become a Trusted Advisor is Your #1 Task
Stack 1 — Build Your Strategic Signal
Lay the foundation so you stand out from the noise.
- Step 1: Lock-in Strategic Focus
- Step 2: Clarify Your “Authority Signal”
- Step 3: Turn Discovery Conversations into Opportunities
Stack 2 — Launch & Distribute with Precision
Get in front of the right audience, consistently.
- Step 4: Craft Your Narrative Bank & Conversation Starters
- Step 5: Stack Content Like a System
- Step 6: Channel & Distribution Strategy
- Step 7: Design a Lead Magnet That Works
Stack 3 — Become the Buyer’s Trusted Guide
Turn attention into adoption and long-term trust.
- Step 8: Build Your Inbound Engine
- Step 9: Crush Your Biggest Competitor (Indecision)
Conclusion
Treat Building Trust as a Practice (the how is the WHY)
Introduction: Why Become a Trusted Advisor is Your #1 Task
“40% to 60% of potential deals are lost not to a competitor, but to customer indecision.”
~ Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, Authors of THE JOLT EFFECT
“In a world drowning in noise, the leaders that win aren’t the loudest, they’re the clearest. Your job is to educate, guide, and build trust with the people who matter most, so they choose you when it counts.”
Your biggest competition is your customer’s indecision.
With information fatigue, the person who helps their audience cut through the noise wins.
That’s why your number one goal is to become your audience’s trusted advisor, guiding them through a sea of information overload.
That’s what this book is about.
Being the trusted advisor is the ultimate outcome. A systematic approach to educate your audience is the way you get there.
The leaders that win aren’t the ones that know the most or have the best product. They just happen to be in front of the right audience when that audience has a problem to solve.
They build trust over time, and it turns into opportunities.
That’s why business leaders need to stop treating visibility and trust as side projects, and start running them like core business functions.
It’s why I wrote this book for you.
I’ve had to learn this the hard way over the last 10 years of building my business, publishing four books, becoming an award-winning author, and helping tech companies with effective go-to-market strategies in fast-evolving markets.
That’s combined with what I learned the decade before that as an application engineer in industrial automation, along with the management skills I picked up at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
I went from engineer to entrepreneur to strategist to author to advisor. My journey hasn’t been linear. I had to learn to build trust by stringing my path together and building trust along the way.
I’ve condensed two decades of learning so you can avoid common mistakes on your path to get in front of the eager audience that needs your story.
That needs YOU.
Here’s the cost of being the best-kept secret:
You’ve done the work.
You’ve built the expertise.
You’ve invented the solution.
But you’re still getting overlooked.
This is the story of a lot of people.
Great work hidden under noise.
What’s the result?
Lack of motivation.
Just coasting in life.
Feeling like a victim.
Slow business growth.
This is the real cost of being the best-kept secret in your sphere of the world.
While the mediocre just coast on by.
Over time, you lose your agency to act. You ask: “What is the point anyway?”
You fall into a vicious cycle, where you don’t act, you forgo growth, you keep coasting, and wonder why you keep getting overlooked with no options out.
I’ve found that there are one of three reasons this happens.
Option #1:
You don’t see the value in being noticed.
You are totally fine with doing the work, getting overlooked, and having limited options. So when you build, you don’t show your work.
Option #2:
You see the value in getting noticed for your hard work.
You want to continue building your expertise and package it to attract more opportunities (more business, job promotion, career switch).
However, you are limited by something.
Some say: “I don’t want to self-promote.” “I don’t want to be too salesy.” The reality is that you are limited by perfection, mainly because you are caged by your high-level of expertise. You are such an expert that you think your expertise has to be perfect before you talk about it, or that people will just notice it.
Perfection is a symptom of resistance. Other symptoms include overthinking, falling for distractions. So you never start.
Option #3:
You see the value in getting noticed for your hard work. You’ve overcome the resistance a few times but you can’t find the focus to do it consistently.
I’ve experienced all three phases over the last twelve years. I want to save you 12 years of mistakes in 49 minutes of reading (7 minutes a day in a week).
This book is applicable to people that are in Option#2 and #3.
If you are in option #1, this will not be helpful. You can stop reading if you’d like. You are better off spending time asking why you don’t want to get acknowledged for your work to create options to do more significant work. However, if you are purely content with life, without fear of losing your current options – well that’s the ultimate goal, ain’t it? I want to learn from you.
For options #2 and #3.
Please read on:
The reality is that options and opportunities don’t just appear.
They are available, but beyond a veil of resistance.
You need to understand what resistance looks like, then chip away at it to reveal options and opportunities.
This requires consistent action.
Consistent action requires a system.
All you need is a full system that helps you focus to consistently overcome resistance, get clarity, and attract opportunities.
Become a trusted advisor:
Be the one your audience trusts in times when they need advice so they come to you when they need to make a decision.
I remember early in my career, I got a call from my manager as I was about to leave the office on a Friday afternoon.
He said: “Hey Nifemi. One of your colleagues will not be able to make a client trip, so you have to go down to Saskatchewan, Canada, next week. Please buy your ticket.”
“Damn.” I whispered to myself.
“Sure.” I said out loud, with a smile on my face.
I bought my ticket. On Monday, I was walking off a freezing tarmac, heading down into a potassium chloride mine, one mile underground.
Didn’t say a single word.
I had no choice.
I had to go.
As an engineer, I did my work, heads down.
I was told what to do.
No options.
Zero opinions.
No autonomy.
I later quit that job and went on my entrepreneurial journey. It’s not so rosy on the entrepreneurial side either. There was no manager to keep me accountable and offer me a steady flow of work. I had to learn to manage myself and hunt down new work. Through the process, I learned the importance of building, packaging, and sharing your ideas and expertise to attract the right audience and opportunities.
It’s the same practice that has allowed me to publish four books, build an audience, while building my business.
I have developed a system for it.
When you learn how to overcome resistance and build a system that supports your goals, you’ll show up to build authority and the right audience will always be at your doorstep, giving you the options to architect the life you want.
Here’s how to read this book:
There are 3 stacks.
- Stack 1: Lays the foundation so you can begin standing out.
- Stack 2: Gives the tactics on how to create and distribute your signal effectively.
- Stack 3: Put it all together so you have a cohesive content strategy that positions you and your business as the trusted advisor that your customers choose when it matters.
Stack 1 — Build Your Strategic Signal
Lay the foundation so you stand out from the noise.
- Step 1: Lock-in Strategic Focus
- Step 2: Clarify Your “Authority Signal”
- Step 3: Turn Discovery Conversations into Opportunities
Step 1: Lock In Strategic Focus
Purpose: Decide where to play, what to ignore, and how to stay disciplined in fast-changing markets.
- Define the 1–3 biggest growth bets worth your time right now.
- Get clear on who you’re speaking to and why they should care.
- Avoid chasing shiny objects that dilute your impact.
- Outcome: Every GTM activity points toward the same strategic end goal.
I speak to a lot of founders and leaders at AI and Data companies.
The space is moving so quickly. There’s a new change every 2 months. By the time you’re reading this the tools might already be stale.
Even the founders, developers, and technical leads at AI startups have these same issues, wondering whether they’re taking the right bets and using their time effectively.
There’s just too much noise out there.
Creation overload has flooded communication channels and left us with more questions than answers. Building a practice of taking the right bets is a competitive advantage on its own.
Get 30 Days of Clarity in 30 minutes
Clarity + Agency = New intelligence.
I came across an interesting book called Active Inference by Karl Friston, a British neuroscientist. Although, there isn’t a consensus out there about how we define “human intelligence,” Friston uses nature’s design in his logic. The author’s argument is that real intelligence is the ability to minimize the surprise of their sensory observations.
If everything in the future does not surprise you, every thing you predict comes to pass. Your current expectations match future reality. Isn’t that the type of intelligence we all want?
I’ll pay for that type of clarity.
We might not be able to minimize that to zero but I have a framework that can help you reduce it from where you are now.
It’s a 3-step framework of clarity, choice, and commitment.
It will give you clarity, direction, and keep you motivated in a committed amount of time.
This section of the book is a working session, so grab a cup of coffee or tea, and we’ll do this together.
Whip out your favorite writing device (Google docs, apple notes). This is geared towards anyone starting a business or growing one.
Copy and paste the questions below, and answer each one.
Here it is:
1. Clarity (get your map)
If you don’t know your end goal, you’ll never get to it.
The goal here is to lock in what matters the most right now. This exercise really boils down to two things:
- Where you are now, and
- where you want to go.
Everything else, are just questions to clarify these two points.
There are three versions of these set of questions for people that:
- Growing a business (with existing customers)
- Starting a business (pre-customer)
- Seeking a new job
Choose the version that best suits you and answer the following questions to set up your strategic intent map.
Growing a business version:
Primary Target Segment (10 min)
(Identify where they want to go and what “success” looks like.)
- What’s the one result that will make the next 12 months a success?
- Who are your top 3 most valuable customers now?
- What do they have in common (industry, triggers, budget signals)?
- What makes them want to act now rather than later?
- Where do they already spend money to fix that pain?
- What pain is most urgent for them?
Opportunity Areas (10 min)
- Where are you currently winning faster/larger?
- What segments have the biggest deal size or LTV?
- If you doubled down on one thing for 6 months, where would you see the fastest revenue lift?
- Which gaps match your strengths?
Pain – Promise – Proof (10 min)
- Pain: Urgent, costly problem:
- Promise: Specific transformation you can claim:
- Proof: Evidence (stories, data, testimonials)
Starting a business version:
Primary Target Segment (10 min)
(Identify where they want to go and what “success” looks like.)
- What’s the one result that will make the next 12 months a success?
- Who most urgently feels the problem you solve? (role, industry, environment)
- What events or conditions would make them feel this pain acutely?
- Who has both the budget and agency to act on the problem?
- Where are they already looking for solutions? (conferences, communities, tools)
Opportunity Areas (10 min)
- Which segments are actively spending money in related areas?
- Who has the shortest path to adopting your solution?
- Which market gaps are underserved by current competitors?
Pain – Promise – Proof (10 min)
- Pain: What problem do they complain about most in public forums, surveys, or interviews?
- Promise: What transformation would feel like a win from their perspective?
- Proof: What analogs or case examples (from other markets) show it’s solvable and valuable?
2. Choice (decide the route)
It’s not only what you choose to do, it’s also what you choose not to do.
You build momentum from clarity by making tough choices and sticking to them.
There’s always going to be noise and a wide variety of opportunities tugging at your arm as you go down this journey. You have to define growth bets worth your time. When you make a choice, every time you take action on that choice, you remind yourself why it’s worthwhile.
The name of the game is avoiding shiny objects that dilute your impact.
Here’s how to pick a small number of strategic bets.
- List all opportunities (at least 5) you could chase from your opportunity area (e.g. reach out to network form introduction to 10 companies.)
- Rank each opportunity across the BET metric: Benefit, Ease, and Trust
- Benefit: Overall value or payoff if successful
- Ease: Simplicity of execution given current resources
- Trust: Confidence in expected outcome
- Multiply the value in each row for benefit, ease, and trust to get the BET score.
- Choose the 3 highest BET scores.
- Execute on them in the next 3 months.
3. Commitment (start driving)
Now you have to commit your bets, but not to GitHub, to real life.
Translate focus into immediate action
- Milestone: For each bet, what is the first milestone? (30 days, 60, 90 days)
- Accountability: Who is accountable?
- If you are on your own: who’s keeping you accountable.
- No-go List: what are the “no-go” rules (what you won’t do)?
Use this list to be clear on what the day-to-day actions need to be over the next four weeks.
Go on a strategic journey with your map
You can print your map out and paste it on your wall as a reminder.
Now you have the following:
- Strategic intent
- Top 3 bets
- First milestones
- Accountability
- No-go list
After executing in 30 days, reassess where you land. Did your expectation match reality? Double down or make more new bets.
It’s simple.
Stick to the script, start taking action.
Step 2: Clarify Your Authority Signal
Purpose: Define the visible proof that you’re worth listening to.
- Pinpoint your unique expertise & credibility markers
- Align your authority signal with your focused market segment
- Outcome: People know why you’re worth listening to in seconds.
Don’t try to be better.
Just be different.
Prep for calls.
I was once on an intro call with a mentor, telling her my journey leading up to a career pivot that I needed advice on. At the end of my introduction, she said: “As an engineer, who grew up in Nigeria…”
My mind trailed as she spoke. I was surprised.
“That’s all she picked up in my lengthy 10-minute monologue.” I thought to myself.
When I asked why she focused on that, she said: “Well, you told your journey linearly and I anchored to the first thing you said.”
I learned an important lesson that day. It might be tempting to tell people your entire story, leading to where you are now.
Stop. Reverse it.
Start Refining Your Signal
Start with where you are and then tell your story.
Always begin with how you want to be remembered.
And where you are now is the tip of the iceberg, supported by a stack of skills, unique experiences, and one-of-a-kind story.
A lot of businesses are solving similar problems – helping people save money, make money, save time, be more productive, feel safe, gain nutrients, get healthy, have energy, feel connected, be creative, find purpose.
You just have to define how the way you solve it is unique.
Identify the overlap between your expertise, your market’s pain, and what makes your perspective unique.
Spend some time refining this but don’t overthink it.
Positioning is what sets you apart.
This can be your unique story, expertise, or philosophy. Most people struggle at this stage, yet it’s the most powerful place to set yourself apart.
What I’ve found that works for me is what I call a “skill stack.”
List 3-4 things you’ve a skill in or that you’ve experienced and stack them up. That’s your positioning.
Your experience stack gives you a unique perspective and a differentiated place to stand on.
You will improve it through feedback when you start talking to your audience.
Start somewhere.
Always be refining.
Use Signal to Prep for Audience Convos (Calls):
Most of the opportunities that have come my way have been finalized on a phone call or in-person.
I’ve closed business deals on zoom calls, accepted job offers on phone calls, accepted board positions on calls.
If you are going to solve problems for people, you are going to have to talk to them to understand how you can help. But it’s hard to get on calls with people that don’t know you, except you get a referral.
So you have to create a system that attracts people to get on an introductory call with you.
You do this with a content attraction funnel.
Step 3: Turn Discovery Into Opportunities
Purpose: Transform every conversation, research effort, or customer chat into potential growth.
- Develop a structured discovery process
- Capture insights to identify messaging gaps and opportunity triggers
- Outcome: Every conversation has the potential to move the business forward.
“Your ego is my opportunity.” ~ Unknown
I wrote this book because I learned about building a business online the hard way.
I spent over a year building an app. Just to launch it and no one showed up.
With no money left in my bank account, I started again with just email and Skype, sending hundreds of outreach emails that led to my first deal.
That’s when I learned the power of discovery calls and talking to customers.
Most people don’t talk, waiting for permission to be picked.
However, we are in a permissionless economy where you can just do it.
Most opportunities—jobs, business, partnerships—happen through conversations, and while the internet lets you talk to anyone, it has also flooded inboxes with strangers.
To increase your chances, you have to widen and deepen your network of people who trust you, engaging with those you can create value for to better attract opportunities.
Leverage Your Curiosity to Create Opportunities That Chase You Down (don’t sell, just discover)
I wish people understood this about the Internet: You post online to talk to people offline.
The curious mind usually gets rewarded.
I was on a call with the hiring manager of a company and she kept saying, through the interview “your resume is very impressive.”
I smiled. “Thank you.”
In the back of my mind, I asked: “wait what resume? I never sent one. I got introduced to you by someone in my network.”
At the last round of the series of interviews, the founder of the company, a big name in the AI space, said: “Nifemi, from your resume, you have built a lot of impressive skills.”
“Thanks. But again, what resume?”
I never sent one out. I was amused through the entire process, asking: “Am I really going to get this job without a resume?”
Two weeks later, I got an offer. I later found out they were looking at my LinkedIn profile.
I happen to post every single day on LinkedIn.
My LinkedIn profile was my resume.
The definition of resume has changed and that includes sharing value online to build trust so you can get in conversations to create opportunities.
The moral of the story is:
Whether you’re trying to close a business deal, get hired for a new job, finalize a board advisory role, start a new partnership, get investment for your business, or hire someone for your foundation, you will do this either through a phone call, video session, or in-person conversation.
Humans do business with humans.
And people are more likely to get on a call with people they trust.
So you build your surface area for trust by expanding your network.
When you do get on the calls, it’s about staying in a state of discovery.
It helps you understand market pain points, connect your solution to it, and start capturing opportunity right away.
Having Effective Discovery Conversations
But most people usually get nervous about talking to strangers or having sales calls, but it’s not so hard.
You just have to reframe your mind and be curious, empathetic, and a good listener.
An Approach to discovery conversations that I know works
- Create a list of contacts in your target audience.
- Get introduced (either through a warm referral or a cold email)
- Ask for a 15-minute call (low investment)
- On the discovery call, ask these five questions:
- 1. What’s your current situation in your business?
- 2. What are your main challenges?
- 3. How is it impacting your business (and you)?
- 4. If you could wave a wand and get an ideal solution, what would it be?
- 5. What benefit will this solution bring to your business (and you)?
- Have as many of these calls as possible until you start hearing the same challenges and ideal solution.
- Pay attention and be as helpful as possible.
- Once you have done 10 of these calls, you’ll begin to notice trends
- Ask for budget constraints (or how much its costing them to not solve the problem)
- Understand their decision-making process, and who else is involved in the decision.
- Start crafting your offer to match their ideal solution.
- Put a price on it.
- Ask for the sale.
Land your first client.
It is literally that simple.
Use insights from discovery to strengthen your authority signal
Revisit your positioning and “authority signal” in step 1.
The feedback will help you strengthen your position.
Use your experience with your first couple of clients and the discovery calls you have to build educational content (blog posts, social posts, and case studies) that attracts more people to get on a call with you.
For those that shy away from sales, remember that someone is saying: “Your ego is my opportunity.”
If you don’t want to deal with rejection, it’s an opportunity for another more hungry entrepreneur to create and grab value that you could be providing.
Start getting comfortable with rejection.
Stack 2 — Launch & Distribute with Precision
Get in front of the right audience, consistently.
- Step 4: Craft Your Narrative Bank & Conversation Starters
- Step 5: Stack Content Like a System
- Step 6: Channel & Distribution Strategy
- Step 7: Design a Lead Magnet That Works
Step 4: Build Conversation Starters
Purpose: Build an arsenal of human-centered stories that speak directly to your audience’s pains.
- Create a bank of relevant, audience-specific stories
- Use proven narrative frameworks for maximum clarity and emotional pull
- Outcome: You always have high-impact messages ready to deploy
Stories and relatable experiences are how you become a trusted advisor.
These are not just marketing soundbites. They’re proof that you understand the challenges your buyers face and can guide them through the noise.
When I wrote my first blog, I had one goal – rank high for search terms related to my business in 2016.
I hardly got an organic lead that came to my website and converted into business.
At the same time, I had started writing a fictional story on the weekends. Eventually, I decided to take it seriously but realized I didn’t know how to publish a book. So I joined a writing class that taught me the exact steps. I ended up writing another book and published it as my first book.
I continued on the publishing path.
Publishing four books, music, and more online content. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to why I kept publishing. I mean, book sales are just so-so.
I do enjoy the process of ordering my thoughts but why write a book? Then it started happening. People would request for me to join their podcast, others were open to mentoring me. I met one of my main mentors randomly at a coffee shop because he was also writing a book when I was about to publish mine.
Over the years, it’s become apparent.
Publishing is just an opportunity to start a conversation.
It can make your life more interesting.
Don’t Wait for Opportunities:
Statistics show that most people will spend 60-70% of their research online before talking to a salesperson at a company.
If you build up a content bank, so that people constantly see what you’re talking about, you go from cold to warm leads. When you provide educational content that helps them solve their problems, they begin to see you as a “trusted advisor” guiding their decision-making process.
So instead of reaching out to a small number of people at the exact time you need to, hoping they need your services or product, attract conversations before you need to have them.
Fan the conversation flame with your content so you can spark one at any time.
Always increase your opportunities to say hello to people that you can help.
Create Opportunities From Everyday Experiences (Narrative Banks + Structure)
“Writing a book is five minutes of inspiration and one year of slug. Part of the reason I do it is to have interesting conversations with people like you. Part of the reason I do it is because I want other people to talk about it. The book is a signal that says it’s a document that demands to be rejected, absorbed, or discussed.“
~ Seth Godin
Seth Godin is an American author, marketing-expert, and entrepreneur. This man has written 21 best-selling books, but who’s counting.
As he said a book is just another signal – saying there is this compiled document of a perspective.
This perspective attracts people to start conversations.
Now you don’t have to write a book to create your “perspective signal.”
You can document in different ways – compilation of blog posts, albums, newsletters. These are all content libraries.
Start the practice of sharing your expertise to build up your conversation starters.
Here’s how:
1. Start Building a Narrative Bank
Be a content documentor.
Not a content creator.
Most people don’t know what to write about. Most times they freeze or beg ChatGPT to give them something sensible.
I learned a little trick about never running out of ideas to write about from a writing class by Tim Denning, one of the most prolific writers and entrepreneurs on Medium, LinkedIn, and Subastack.
He said: “Old idea + your insight = new idea.”
I hadn’t heard anything like that before so I was a bit skeptical. I later found this same idea in a book called “How to Take Smart Notes.“ Then I found a similar idea about logging personal stories and insights in the book, “Storyworthy.“
The moral of the story is that great storytellers are not necessarily original. They are just great transformers. They take what’s already there, add their take on it, and present a unique perspective.
So your main task is to log your daily experiences with short notes.
Deposit these notes daily to build your narrative capital.
In my phone, I have thousands of notes from daily observations, books, and videos.
I use them to write these newsletters and LinkedIn posts.
Extract powerful, authentic stories from your experience that demonstrate credibility and insight. With this approach it does not feel like self-promotion. You’re just sharing what you know.
Be observant and take notes.
Build your narrative capital.
2. Master Magnetic Message Structure
Transform your narrative capital into persuasive stories.
And use the 80/20 rule of storytelling to Hook, deliver, and convert.
When I finished my first book, I felt accomplished. I pat myself on the back. My publisher on the other hand, had moved on, tagging me in multiple slack channels, introducing me to book cover designers and editors.
We spent an entire month on the cover design.
When people say “don’t judge a book by its cover.” That’s a myth in content land. Most judge by the cover, the first sentence, emails by the subject.
From writing multiple books, I’ve learned that if you don’t get the audience interested at first look, you lose them.
Use structure to practice messages that stick and demand action.
When you write online whether that’s an email, post, or newsletter, you want to get attention before you get them to read anything else.
You have about 3 seconds to do this.
That’s why content creators on YouTube spend hours on the first 5 seconds of their video, title, and thumbnail.
Same with writing. Here’s one structure to use.
It’s the hook, deliver, convert format.
- Hook: A summary that’s beneficial to the audience.
- Story: A personal story or experience that triggered the content you’re sharing.
- Insight: Deliver the main thing (moral of the story or benefit to the audience) you learned.
- Call-to-action: What you want the audience to do afterwards. (e.g. reply, book a call).
Learn the repeatable framework to write attractive content that hooks, delivers, and converts.
Use it in your posts, emails, and case studies across the buyer’s journey.
Conversations are how you create opportunities:
You want to be top of people’s minds when they are ready to have high-value conversations.
It’s easy to have these conversations when people know you. Increase your visibility by consistently creating conversation starters in the form of a valuable content library.
But how do you do this strategically and consistently?
Step 5: Stack Content Like a System
Purpose: Ensure your messaging is consistent, scalable, and repeatable.
- Develop repeatable formats that turn your narrative bank into consistent output.
- Batch and repurpose content for multiple channels.
- Build a rhythm so your audience expects and values your content.
- Outcome: Always-on presence without burning out, scrambling for ideas.
As of April 2025, 74.2% of new web pages contained AI-generated content.
Since 2022, over 15 billion images have been created using text-to-image AI tools (it took humans 149 years to generate the same amount of images with photography).
Most AI models are trained on public data, scraped from the Internet.
There’s a premium on private data. Data that’s recently created or in private knowledge bases. A portion of that “private data” is the information stuck in your head. Your personal experiences and stories.
AI does not have access to that (yet).
In the age of AI, your story is even more important. If you don’t speak from a place of personal experience you’ll sound like everyone else.
But creating seems like extra work. Don’t you already have enough to do in a day?
However, all you need is a system to make it easy to get to.
Writing and creating is easy and fun when you have a system.
Create Authentic Content That Resonates with Your Audience When You Have Only 15 Minutes a Day
Share authentic content consistently with only 15 minutes a day.
Before I had a system, I’d write whenever I felt like it.
Some days I’d write a lot, most days – nothing. I struggled to stay consistent with my blog for my first business.
Until I started an AIS system – meaning “A**-In-Seat”
That’s where you set a timer, disconnect from the internet, and write until the timer goes off.
I’ve been doing it for more than five years. Now, it’s a little more intuitive. I don’t set a timer, I just write early in the morning, for at least 15 minutes, while my phone is still on airplane mode.
This system has helped me publish four books and be consistent with this newsletter.
You fall to the base of your systems.
You need a content assembly line to consistently create, package, and share your valuable expertise.
Here’s my exact playbook on how to create authentic stories to share your expertise with only 15 minutes a day, every week.
1. Choose (Monday)
This is the easiest but perhaps the most important part of the process.
Make a decision. If you don’t, you will not write. I spend about ten intentional minutes thinking about what I’m going to write about for the week.
Then I write down an idea or a topic.
You can go through your narrative bank for notes and ideas.
Write down at least a full sentence on your topic. A lot of people overlook this step but it’s crucial because when you make this commitment, your brain starts to do this interesting thing, noticing concepts around the topic.
Your idea begins to germinate.
2. Plan (Tuesday)
Based on your topic, lay out a structure.
First start with the audience in mind. Ask these three questions:
- How do you want them to feel? (e.g. happy, introspective, inspired)
- What do you want them to do? (e.g. reply, click, share)
- What’s the one line you want them to remember? (if they only remembered one line from what you wrote, what would it be?)
Always start with the end goal in mind to orient you.
Then use this structure to create a scaffold for what you want to write.
- Story: A human story that relates or leads to your topic.
- Big problem: The one big problem you want to help the audience solve.
- Perspective: Your perspective on the problem.
- How to overcome: The overall approach to solving the problem.
- Benefits: The benefit to the audience of solving the problem.
- How to do it: The actionable steps to solve the problem. In each step you can use the magnetic message structure here.
- Final takeaway: A summary of what you’ve shared.
The section on “How to do it” is where you share actionable steps on what you want to teach. If you are struggling with this, choose to write a listicle.
People love lists. They are easy to follow:
- 3 ways to make bread
- 5 steps to convert B2B deals
- 7 steps to gain control of your life
- 9 systems to live a more intentional life.
Think about something you can teach in steps.
Make sure you write an answer (at least one sentence) for each section in your plan. You might be tempted to begin writing once you get into the flow a bit. Don’t. Stick to the system.
Leave your plan for the day and let the topic germinate further.
3. Draft (Wednesday)
This happens to be my most intimidating day – it’s usually the longest.
Go through each section of the outline and expand your thoughts. Use the magnetic message structure, shared in step 4. Be sure to infuse a story and some rhythm in your writing.
Use the 1/3/1 rhythm formula.
You might not have noticed, I just did it here. Look at the three paragraphs above. I started with one sentence, then three in the next paragraph, then one sentence after that.
This makes your writing visually dynamic.
You don’t want to write like this.
Where every line is the same.
You begin to sound repetitive.
And it can get quite boring.
So don’t make it all the same. Switch it up. The more you do this, the more natural it becomes as you write articles, emails, memos.
Here are some other writing rhythms to keep in mind.
- 1/3/1
- 1/3/2/1
- 1/4/3/1
With writing, do one task at a time. Don’t draft and edit. Leave the edits for another day.
Create freely on this day.
Draft like a child.
Edit like an engineer.
4. Edit (Thursday)
Write for yourself.
Edit for your audience.
If you had a full-stack publishing house, you’ll have the creative writer, the rigid editor, and the money-calculating publisher. Today, the creator, business owner, and entrepreneur are all-three. Think about building a media business to gain attention, attract conversations, and build trust.
Edit with the audience in mind.
Revisit the answers in your original plan. As you read through the writing, ask “how is this helpful for the audience?” The creative writer from the day before might have gone off track. That’s fine, we want their creativity to flourish.
But “new day, new you.” With your editor hat on, cut as much as you can.
Strengthen the title.
Tighten up the hooks.
Make the take-aways clearer.
5. Publish (Friday)
Do the final read.
Choose a strong title and publish it on your platform of choice. I schedule mine with KIT. You want to nurture a relationship with the audience you have direct contact with by email or phone.
Hit publish.
6. Rest (Saturday)
Take a day off.
Do something else.
Go live your life.
Read stuff.
Recharge.
Rest is part of the creative process.
7. Schedule (Monday)
Take your entire writing and chop it up into small social media posts.
This is what I do. I take the same magnetic message structure, find about 5 takeaways and write them up to share on LinkedIn.
Since you’ve already spent the time researching, writing, and editing through the week, you’ve already done the heavy lifting. Now you just have to make it match the social media platform you’re focused on.
Schedule your posts in an app like Taplio for the week and you’re done.
Tip: The goal of posting on social media is to attract your audience to a place you can stay in contact with people (your newsletter), so you can eventually have convos with them.
System on Repeat
This system takes 15 minutes every morning.
I find consistency hard without a system.
Start yours. Then repeat and refine it.
For instance, you might get suggestions from your audience on what to write about. You could use AI to unearth topics to write about, use it for research, even create prompts that change your entire writing into LinkedIn posts.
The main point is that you do the living, experiencing, processing, and creating.
Now you have a system to create, how do you get it to the right people?
Step 6: Channel & Distribution Strategy
Purpose: Be in the right room so you don’t have to spread yourself thin by being in every room.
- Match the right message to the right channel for maximum impact.
- Implement a “minimum effective distribution plan” to focus on fewer, better channels.
- Outcome: Your content consistently reaches the right people, not just anyone.
“Choose channels not just for reach, but for the quality of conversations they enable. Trusted advisors aren’t everywhere. They’re in the right rooms.”
Distribution is an afterthought for a lot of business builders.
Here’s the real reason: People like to geek out on projects and hate social rejection.
The combination of the two is a numbing drug of constantly being in your own bubble.
That’s why you need three things:
- minimum viable product (MVP)
- minimum viable audience (MVA)
- minimum viable distribution (MVD)
Most people only focus on 1.
Audiences, markets, and attention keep shifting. You have to fly a tight iterative loop of product development and market validation.
Designing a minimum viable distribution plan gets your MVP to your MVA.
This is how you refine product-market fit.
Choose channels not just for reach, but for the quality of conversations they enable.
Trusted advisors aren’t everywhere. They’re in the right rooms.
Design Your Minimum Viable Distribution (MVD) Plan
In 2021, I got into NFTs and crypto art projects.
I attended three yearly conferences, and interacted with the community on Twitter/X. I met a lot of entrepreneurs and artists in the space. My X feed was filled with flashing posts of drugged-out cats with lasers shooting out of their eyes, and I loved it.
I started my own crypto project to crowdfund my 4th book. It was successful.
I posted about my book crypto project on LinkedIn. I got no love.
In my mind I was like “Hey guys, this… entrepreneurship on the blockchain. Business and innovation.” Yada Yada Yada.
Silence! The LinkedIn wanderers gave me the side eye.
A few months later I began posting about my writing journey and business leadership on the white and blue app. The reactions flooded in.
Same thing, different language.
Every channel has its audience, culture, and language.
Once you understand that different channels have their unique culture, you’ll know how to leverage this to reach your audience where they hang out.
You’ll have a targeted approach that keeps you focused enough to gain traction for the business, even with limited resources.
Here’s how to match the right message to the right channel for maximum impact.
1. The are only two main channels:
Real life and digital life.
Don’t overcomplicate things. These are the two main channels to focus on. Video calls are sort of a hybrid of these two but as stated earlier, nothing beats real high-value conversations with humans.
Remember: the goal of your digital life is to drive real-life conversations.
2. Real-life presence:
This is the highest-leverage activity you can do.
Be literally in front of the people you want to talk to.
You can build trust a lot faster in-person. You pick up on body language without internet glitches. If you were to choose one activity to do today, find the top three conferences for your business and go to them.
In my first business, I was amazed that my clients – executives at global enterprises – would fly across the ocean just to have a 45-minute meeting. I thought this was just a unique vetting style of emerging markets. But it is now becoming more important across the globe, when people don’t know if they are interacting with a properly fine-tuned AI agent online.
But not all in-person events are built equally.
The level of intimacy ranges from one-on-ones to private events to conferences.
Here are a few tips I’ve learned:
- At a conference, try to be a speaker on a stage. It’s better than handing out a thousand business cards.
- Go to private events away from the conference.
- Contact speakers ahead of the conference to request a one-on-one.
- Make sure you have a follow up plan so it’s easy to stay in touch.
Real life channels are the best to build deep trust.
The only problem with them is that you are only ONE person. It doesn’t scale. That’s where the digital channel comes in.
3. The Digital-life scale
Talk online to get offline.
Digital scales what real life doesn’t.
It’s not a replacement but a funnel to the real-life channel. To choose the highest leverage for your digital strategy, look at output and effort.
What’s the most output you can get from the minimal use of your resources?
The two levers here are:
- picking the right platform (output), and
- choosing the most repeatable format (inputs).
3. The “right” platform:
LinkedIn, Reddit, X, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Youtube, Discord.
Where should I post?
I hear this all the time. Ideally, you should be everywhere, practically you should start with one focus. Start with the channel that most likely has your audience. Then go understand the culture of the platform.
For instance, if you are:
- focusing on a B2B business, your best bet is LinkedIn.
- into Blockchain, X for education, Discord for community.
- B2C and lifestyle business, TikTok, Instagram.
- connect with fellow clear thinkers, Substack might be the way to go.
- buying old businesses to flip, then you might want to be on Facebook.
When I started, I chose LinkedIn because my business targeted executives at tech and engineering companies.
Again, you might be tempted to be in all places at once.
Start with one. Focus on getting good at it.
I have been posting consistently on LinkedIn since 2019 and I am still learning everyday, because the culture and algorithm on each platform changes often.
If you have the resources, then repurpose on the other platforms.
Never forget, the goal is not to stay on these channels, it’s to drive real-life conservations.
4. What’s your go-to format
There are three formats online: written, audio, video.
Choose the one that you and your team can get to consistently. For instance, as a one-man band, I choose writing because that’s my most practiced form of communication. If you are more comfortable speaking, choose an audio format like a podcast.
Bigger teams can do a combination of all three formats. It all depends on your resources.
Choose a format that you can stick to on a weekly cadence and plan to stick to it for a year.
5. Build a partnership ecosystem:
The fastest way to grow your audience is by borrowing.
No, not financial capital in the form of money from a bank. I’m talking about social capital in the form of borrowing other people’s audiences. Partner and collaborate to increase the impact of your distribution effort.
There are two main partnerships to prioritize:
- Similar sized businesses in your industry or companies that value what you value.
- What they need: Support
- Larger businesses with audiences that already have the audience you are looking for.
- What they need: Value-add
You know the type of support you need, give it to others on the same path. Grow together.
On the other side of the spectrum, guess what these businesses that have a bigger audience want? They want content to add value to their audiences.
Here’s how you can leverage those opportunities:
- Find gaps in their content and pitch to create it with them (e.g. a guest post, a niche course with a course creator, a unique episode with a podcast host).
- On social, be the first to reply to their posts with something insightful. This boosts their engagement and also puts you in front of their audience.
Go create a list of 50 partners (25 similar, 25 bigger) in your ecosystem in real and digital life.
Start engaging.
Your 12-month (MVD) execution:
By the end of this you should have a minimum distribution plan as follows:
- 3 top events for the year
- 1 focused platform
- 1 dedicated media format
- A list of partners to collaborate with in your ecosystem.
You have a content creation and distribution plan.
Now all you have to do is stick to the process and convert relationships you are renting on social media to relationships you own.
Step 7: Design a Lead Magnet That Works
Purpose: Capture your audience’s attention and turn it into an owned relationship.
- Package your expertise into a valuable, specific resource your audience actually wants.
- Tie it directly to the problems you solve and the services you offer.
- Ensure it opens the door to further engagement, not just downloads.
- Outcome: A constant stream of warm, relevant leads.
“I’m going to give him an offer he can’t refuse.”
~ Don Corleone.
“Your LinkedIn has been restricted.”
That’s the message I got a few years ago after a few attempts to log in. All I got was a blank white screen. My sister had texted me asking “are you still on LinkedIn? I can’t find you.”
As I stared down my restricted social cell, I kept telling myself “don’t panic” because LinkedIn had been my main marketing channel. I had spent the last year prior to that using it to tell people about my author’s journey, and I was about to announce my new book in a week.
But no access.
That’s when I understood the importance of direct access to your audience.
Create an Offer That work So You Can Build Mindshare and Own Access to Your Audience
If you don’t own direct access to people, you will not be able to consistently attract high-value conversations that lead to opportunities.
As a trusted advisor, you have to nurture relationships and you do this by having contact information to stay in touch.
Writing online is just a means to an end.
The goal is to convert social audiences into accessible contacts. You do it like the Godfather: “you give them an offer they can’t refuse.”
Create something valuable that would let people give you their contact information.
You’ll have a list that you own and nurture, put you in front of the right audience, and increase your chances of having the right conversations and creating serendipity.
Here’s how to go about your lead magnet creation.
1. Plan your lead magnet:
What does a lead magnet look like?
It is a tangible thing that your audience receives to help them solve a problem and gain a benefit. It could be a PDF document, a checklist, a webinar, an email course, a whitepaper.
The person you want to stay in touch with gives you their email address in exchange for the valuable thing (lead magnet) you created.
So how do you create a valuable lead magnet? Start by thinking about the audience you want to attract, then put it in this content pillar incubator and answer these following questions:
CONTENT PILLAR INCUBATOR:
- What “big problem” am I solving in the world?
- How can I solve that problem as quickly as possible for someone?
- What would be “step 1” to solving this problem?
- Why does someone need this solution NOW?
- What is the story nobody else is telling about this problem?
- How could I solve this person’s problem in a way that would BLOW THEIR MIND?
Write your answer to these questions to orient you on what to build and share.
This is exactly what I did when I started creating this free ebook here to help people live a more creative life.
Start with a plan
2. Write your lead magnet:
Flesh out each section of your lead magnet.
If you are starting from scratch, that’s fine. Use notes from your narrative bank and the magnetic messaging structure in step 3 & 4 to plot out ideas. When in doubt, write out what you’re going to help your audience with in a list and them in actionable steps.
If you already write a newsletter, or post online, or your company has documentation that your customers and employees find useful, you can easily repurpose that into a free document or webinar.
For instance, I’m going to turn these series of emails into a lead magnet (coming soon).
Follow the content creation assembly system in step 5 to Plan – Draft – Edit – Publish, with only 15 minutes a day.
3. Distribute your lead magnet:
Once you have your lead magnet, you want to create a landing page for it.
This is the important interface, where people will provide their email address to get your enticing offer. A lot of companies spend millions to drive people to these pages and continuously tweak it to maximize conversion.
But don’t overcomplicate this when you start. Keep it simple.
Here’s what your landing page should have:
- Title: Main State the benefit (e.g. Increase your business revenue in 30 days)
- Subtitle: Explaining how to get the benefit (e.g. with a 7-step system that allows you to find clients, talk to them, and start working with them.)
- Image: (Optional)
- Fields:
- Name
- Email Address
- Submit Button
That’s it.
Whenever you share content, place your lead magnet in your comments for posts that do well. Place it on your bio. Share it in other people’s newsletters.
This is the one interface you will now use to attract and stay in contact with people.
Now you have your audience’s contact details, you can consistently nurture the relationship, and have the ability to drive discovery conversations that lead to high-value opportunities at the drop of a dime.
Live Rent-Free & Build Mindshare:
Attention is a limited resource.
Be at the top of people’s minds when they think about the best way to solve a particular problem. When you build a lead magnet, you offer something in exchange to have the opportunity to build mindshare and tap into that valuable limited attention that people have.
You have a process to create from a clear signal, the distribution path, and how to turn strangers to contacts.
Now, it’s time to turn this into a self-sustained fine-tuned engine that drives your goals.
Stack 3 — Become the Buyer’s Trusted Guide
Turn attention into adoption and long-term trust.
- Step 8. Build Your Inbound Engine
- Step 9. Become Your Buyer’s Trusted Advisor to Beat Indecision
Step 8: Build Your Inbound Engine
Purpose: Create a self-sustaining go-to-market ecosystem.
- Integrate content, lead magnets, and distribution into a measurable feedback loop
- Use partnerships and targeted campaigns for added reach
- Turn passive awareness into active conversations.
- Outcome: Your market starts coming to you
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
~ Mike Tyson
It’s alright to plan and have a strategy, but you don’t know whether it works until you start executing. Trusted advisors take action.
I once worked with one of the top educators in the AI & machine learning space.
I had to get him to the stage at a developer event in San Francisco. A journey that should take half a minute, ended up taking almost ten minutes.
Why?
With every step, he got stopped by developers, engineers, and founders who thanked him, asked questions, took selfies with him. For years, he has shared his knowledge and inspired a lot of people to get into data science, data engineering, and AI/ML. Over the last year of working with him, every Wednesday, he and his editorial team publish a weekly newsletter to millions of subscribers.
It’s been fascinating to see their process. He chooses a topic, writes a draft, they edit together, choose graphics, then publish.
With more resources, he has built a team of writers, video editors, and AI education partners. This engine continues to help him build trust.
Create Your Inbound Content Engine So You Can Consistently Feed Yourself with Opportunities
You can do the same with the resources you have.
Once you start with the principles, the tools might vary but the process is the same.
Building an inbound you will have a systematic approach to educate, attract, and convert people. You become a trusted advisor that creates, converts, and captures opportunities.
1. Define your goal and audience
Start with the end in mind.
What do you want to achieve and for who? A lot of times, most people just start creating content online. After a few hits and misses, they give up. Because they weren’t really clear on what they wanted to achieve to start out with.
Get clear on your goals.
Start with a 3-month goal.
Are you prioritizing the growth of your list? Want to nurture relationships? Trying to figure out the topic you enjoy creating around?
Create a clear measurable goal. Without this, you would be able to do the last step (measure and optimize).
2. Understand the buyer’s journey
Get clear on who you want to target.
When I started out, I created content for people who wanted to write books. Then it changed to people who wanted to start businesses. It changed again to people who wanted to grow an audience. I’ve now refined a segment for people growing an audience in the technical spaces.
The moral of the story is that your audience will evolve but you have to start with an audience in mind.
Once you define your audience, then you go through the stages of the buyer’s journey.
There are three main stages:
- awareness (when they realize they have a problem)
- consideration (when they consider the different solutions)
- conversion (when they choose your solution).
Brainstorm and research ideas around each stage to share your expertise.
3. Content strategy: topic, content type, and calendar
I recently got off a call with a machine learning researcher and author.
A friend who is a machine learning researcher and author told me one of his biggest challenges was: “Finding the right topic to write about.”
When I pressed further, he said he wanted to “create digestible visuals around topics he’s interested in that will resonate with the audience, but also be timely.”
Choosing the right topic is a skill at the intersection of:
- creator’s interest,
- audience challenges,
- and timeliness (trends, news).
Hitting those three, all the time, is a challenge that a lot of top creators have.
That’s why the consistency and volume helps cut through the noise.
Use a content calendar to keep you accountable.
Map out your 3-month plan and then go granular with a weekly plan on how to execute it.
An easy tip is to have a monthly theme around a content pillar (2-4 topics that would provide the most value to your audience).
Focus on creating long-form pieces of content that you can later chop up into smaller pieces for distribution.
4. Content creation (value-focused, well written, clear CTAs)
Get to the task.
But it does not have to be a painful process. You can build this with just 15 minutes a day. You remember that top AI expert I talked about, earlier. He reserves time on the weekend to write down ideas, and shares them with the team on Mondays saying: “I’m not sure if there’s anything in here but here’s a topic we can work through.” Then they get multiple email responses on Wednesday when they publish on how helpful their publication is.
You are not going to get it perfect until you start.
Then you start and realize that perfection is a myth.
Follow the weekly content assembly system to plan, draft, edit, and publish.
5. Distribute, distribute, distribute (Repurpose)
I’ve posted every single day on LinkedIn for a year and a half now. It has driven 200k+ views.
I hardly have any viral posts. What I have is consistency.
People show up in my DMs. We chat, get on zoom calls, and sometimes work on opportunities together. The way I stay consistent is with my content creation engine, which allows me to repurpose my weekly newsletter into short LinkedIn posts.
Post every, single, day!
Don’t forget, the goal of posting online is to get in front of and stay in touch with your audience.
6. Measure and optimize: quantity is quality
When you start, it’s a volume game.
Quantity over quality. Because the data you get from quantity informs you on what your audience thinks is quality. You think you know what quality is. You don’t. At least, not what your audience thinks.
So stop overthinking it.
Your audience will vote on what is important to them. So you want to use the initial momentum and content velocity to get feedback. After 3-months, revisit your goals. Gauge your performance. How many replies and clicks did you get in your newsletter? How many reactions did you get in your LinkedIn posts?
A good measuring stick for your posts is to measure the median reactions and impressions and then use that as your new benchmark for the next three months. Double down on what performed better than median.
Keep sharing value, measuring results, and optimizing the engine.
7. Conversations are about listening:
This book started out with how great opportunities happen through conversations.
Posting online is a conversation. Talking to someone on the phone. The main task here is to practice listening to your audience. What are their pressing challenges? Where are they on the journey? Use this to create more topics to write about.
Once you get into this virtuous loop, you will constantly be able to provide value to your evolving audience.
Step 9: Become Your Buyer’s Trusted Advisor
Purpose: Guide prospects through uncertainty so they choose you.
- Understand how to position yourself as the guide, not just a vendor.
- Learn to address indecision as your biggest competitor.
- Act as the “buying agent” helping customers navigate complexity
- Outcome: Higher close rates and stronger long-term relationships.
Everything we’ve done so far has been building toward this. Now, here’s how you make it air tight.
The best entrepreneurs and sales people fill their pipeline with decisive leads.
Because they know their biggest competition is not another person or company offering similar services: It is inaction, fueled by the fear of making a mistake.
The faster you get your customer to make a decision, the better you’ll be.
Crush Your Biggest Competition (Indecision)
There’s a lot of market noise out there. With the rapid rate of advancement and content creation, it is hard to know what to pay attention to.
People need signals and guidance.
A tastemaker. Someone to guide them through the vast evolving space.
Your biggest point of leverage is to become a trusted advisor. This starts with curiosity, follows up with empathy, and ends up as a practice. To become a trust advisor, you have to continue to nurture trust for your customers.
Have the best interest of your customer at heart. Become trusted and your buyer’s advisor.
3 Steps to become your buyer’s trusted advisor:
Let me take you back a bit to my business after finishing at Stanford business school. After 100+ emails sent, 20 discovery calls, 14 proposals sent, I finally landed my first deal.
I did a little dance then I realized I had to get to work.
My first client was a US-based automotive company expanding into emerging markets. I helped them source and vet distribution partners. When the client came across from Germany to meet with these partners, we drove from partner to partner, spending a good amount of time in the typical Lagos traffic. While we stalled, between vehicles I asked my client: “You’ve done this a lot, traveling to different countries to build partnerships. What’s the one most important thing you do first?”
Without thinking about it, he responded: “it’s about finding a trusted business partner. All I need is one. A guide I can trust. Everything is easy after that.”
When you’re helping your buyers navigate a complex market landscape, you need to become a trusted partner. This might even involve sending your prospect to “your competition” if you think it’s in their best interest.
You become the go-to person to help them overcome your biggest competition “failure to make a decision” and if you have the right solution, at the right time, your sale just got a lot easier.
Here’s how to become your buyer’s advisor and trusted partner.
1. Understand the importance of this process.
Each person, including you, goes through three typical stages in the buying process:
- Gain Trust: The buyer only does transactions to solve their problems with people they trust.
- Receive promise: They expect to receive the promise that was made from getting into the transaction.
- Become Advocate: They tell their friends and colleagues about the promise, outcome, and transformation they received.
If you become a trust advisor, you will gain advocates.
Once you have advocates, talking about you and your solution, the job of building trust becomes a lot easier with each advocate you gain.
The ultimate goal is to optimize advocacy that reinforces trust and turning this into a virtuous cycle.
So look at the cycle and all you have to do is:
- Build trust
- Over-deliver on your promise
- Create a vehicle for your advocates to talk about you.
So let’s do that then.
2. Know where you are in the trust loop
I was chatting with a business advisor to a few start-ups and she said: “There’s one thing that makes successful startups, but every failed startup fails in its own unique way.”
It reminded me about success and failure in my business. When things are going well, I have so much clarity and momentum, but when things get shaky – deals falling through, lower email responses, I start panicking, trying multiple things, being in a thousand places.
I learned that when you need to be calm and build on clarity.
That’s why the trust loop I shared earlier is very helpful. You can always look at it and figure out where you are on the journey.
Let’s look at this from each step and start backwards.
When your advocates are not talking about you, it’s either you are not delivering on your promise or you are not providing a vehicle for them to advocate. If it’s the latter, you need a system to allow them to refer and review you.
I remember trying to get a video testimonial from one of my biggest clients at the time. His legal team got involved. They started sending documents about appropriate video content. It freaked him out. He ended up not doing it. I should have just asked for a written testimonial, he had offered to even write something on LinkedIn.
Moral of the story: Make it easy for people to advocate.
Now, if you have made it easy but people are not advocating, then you are not delivering on your promise.
Take a step backwards in the loop.
If you are not delivering on your promise, then you are probably taking on too much and not giving enough attention to your customers needs during delivery. In which case, you need to ask for feedback and understand what you need to improve.
However, if you are delivering on what you promised and they are still not advocating, then you have probably missed out on what they really need. You are missing product-market fit. You need to go back to the discovery state to understand their challenges, and create a solution they want, not a nice-to-have.
Take a step back.
If you are not having discovery calls, it means they do not trust you enough to think that spending their limited time with you is valuable to them.
It’s either they don’t know you or they know you but don’t think you are capable of solving the particular problem they have. If they don’t know you, ask for a warm intro from someone that knows them, otherwise create enough value in the form of educational content so they begin to know you. That’s why I shared all the steps to consistently package and share your expertise.
It all starts with trust and ends with trust.
You just have to investigate where you are in the trust loop and fix whatever is missing.
3. Jolt people out of indecision (with the right curiosity)
If you fail to ask the right questions you might waste too much time with prospects that lead nowhere.
There are two phases of effective discovery conversations:
- Agreeing on a vision
- Dealing with the fears of the customer to move forward
A high performing sales representative knows that they have to deal with these two phases in tandem. They do this in four steps called the JOLT method:
- Judging the indecision: Know that indecision can pop up in any section of the process. Gauge the prospect’s ability to be decisive early in the process to know whether to move forward or not. The best sales people fill their pipeline with decisive leads.
- Offer recommendation: Provide a recommendation on what will work best instead of asking endless questions from the customer who might not know what they want, increasing their uncertainty.
- Limit exploration: Know when to stop the customer’s request for further information. Do this by being seen as a subject matter expert on the topic.
- Take risk off the table: Manage expectations and provide creative solutions that guarantee the customer would not be left with a bad bag.
When you understand that there’s an underlying fear of making a mistake felt by your customer, your approach can be more thoughtful.
Conclusion: Treat Building Trust as a Practice
(the how is the WHY)
How The Butterfly Effect Can Fan Your Motivation:
I read a book, Chaos Theory by James Gleick.
One concept in the first chapter of the book really struck me – the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, also known as the butterfly effect. This means that even tiny differences in the starting state of a deterministic system can lead to drastically different outcomes over time. In simpler terms, a small change at the beginning can cascade into a large change later on.
No matter how much you practice like Micheal Jordan and set up the same routines or set your business up like Gary Vaynerchuk, you will never have similar outcomes as Michael Jordan or Gary Vaynerchuk.
You will have your unique outcome.
Maybe better, maybe worse.
It all depends on how you look at it.
This applies to anything you do in life. You can learn a system perfectly about how to start a business, package your expertise, or write a book, and follow it to the last detail but you will end up with different results.
That’s why it’s important to make whatever you do a practice.
Trust the process. You will have a different outcome but trend in the right direction. You will develop a joy of doing the work that’s just there.
Here are a few things to keep in mind as you practice the art of attracting high-value opportunities with your expertise.
1. From single customer to buying committee
Through this book, I shared a step-by-step process to package expertise and attract opportunities.
Most of what I shared was a simple case involving you, selling to a single buyer (one decision-maker).
Things get complex when the sales include multiple stakeholders, particularly when you are selling in B2B (to another business). There is the internal champion, technical lead, business manager, decision-maker, economic buyer. You have to build trust with all of them – through conversations, supporting documentation, pitch decks, onboarding material.
The approach is still the same. The assets you have to create to reach each person in the buying committee is different.
That’s why the sales cycle in the B2B process takes months, sometimes a year.
Pace yourself.
Understand the decision making process and the sales lead cycle.
2. The High-Value Convo Northstar
I remember sitting in the intercontinental hotel lobby with one of my first clients.
After days of long meetings and negotiations with possible partners, we had a victory drink. Excited, I said: “It’s been a successful trip. Seems the partners are on board, ready to sign.”
His brief laughter was filled with over 30 years of experience, and with his German accent, he responded: “Nifemi, there’s no deal until the money is transferred into our bank account. We can sign all these papers, but it really means nothing until we get payment.”
When you are running a business, the north star is “money deposited into your account.”
Cash collected.
Cash is king.
I used to have all these different metrics for measuring the performance of my business, until I focused on the main thing: “Is money being deposited into my bank account for value created and delivered?”.
That’s it.
If you’re packaging your expertise to find new job opportunities, are you getting job offers?
Keep your goal very simple.
In the practice of having high-value conversations, the second closest thing as a point of measurement is the number of high-value conversations you’re having. Trust the process, knowing that if you have significant high-value conversations, opportunities will emerge.
Every week, ask yourself, “how many intentional high-value conversations are I having?”
That’s your Northstar.
3. Make the Choice
Motivation is a choice.
This is something I learned last year as I studied the psychology of entrepreneurs, writers, and athletes.
There are 3 Cs in motivation.
- Competence: Can I do it?
- Consequence: Will it work?
- Choice: Is it worthwhile?
Let’s look at each C.
Competence “Can you do it?”
Anyone can do anything if they decide to be a student of the game and prioritize learning.
Consequence “Will it work?”
If you’re clear about a simple goal, as long as you understand the value of compounding growth, and you are using each iteration of learning to drive towards your goal. It will eventually work. It’s all a matter of time.
Competence and consequence both just require patience.
The last C is usually the hardest for all of us.
Choice “Is it worthwhile?”
Every day, as you show up to do the work, is it worth your time? That’s the question everyone grapples with in this era of endless choices. It’s up to you to choose whether you want to continuously create opportunities for yourself, your family, and community.
The people that have agency stay motivated. Why? They make the choice.
Yes, you can too.
4. Build Your Practice
I was catching up with a friend, who also happens to be a coach.
I told him how, even though I had written 4 books, I still struggle with calling myself as an author.
He said: “Hmm. I wonder why. Have you ever just tried it? When people ask, what do you do? How about just answering, I’m an author.”
I responded: “Yeah, but I’m not just an author, I resonate more with engineer for instance or even entrepreneur. But yeah I write, I make music, I build businesses. I guess I do a whole bunch of things.”
He pushed back: “Yeah, but if you meet someone on the plane and you most likely wouldn’t see them again, why not. It’s such a low-stake conversation. Just tell them one part of you. You don’t have to tell your life story. Say, I’m an author. Try it. See how it feels.”
That’s when it dawned on me. I was treating every conversation the same.
I’ve been so focused on mastering my elevator pitch, freezing up at happy hours when I’m asked what I do, seeing every opportunity as a time to practice my clearly-defined unique value proposition. It had me all wound up.
Not every moment is a high-stake, high-value Conversation.
So I created this conversation value & stake map as a reminder.
Understand where you are on the map, and learn how to flex between high to low stakes and value conversations.
This whole approach is a practice:
Practice:
- clarifying your positioning.
- having discovery conversations.
- creating conversation magnets
- having “low stake” conversations to discover yourself.
- setting up systems to sustain your practice.
- doing business.
- overcoming and letting go of your ego.
- building your confidence.
- finding meaning in what you do by how you do it.
- knowing the type of conversation you’re having.
- showing up.
It’s a choice to practice patience.
The HOW is the WHY.
I hope you start practicing today.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
