Do you even need an Expertise Demo?
But if you do...
I've started to write a book on this stuff. You can help here.
Also, the second episode of Exotic Matter is out. It's me and Spencer Ayres getting into the nitty gritty of why workshops are a bastion for knowledge work in this era of slopification.
You can listen to it here:
xx Spotify Link
Maybe you don't need an Expertise Demo.
In your journey to sell more of your Expert Services, perhaps building an Expertise Demo is not the missing piece.
Let me share what are the conditions that make it valuable to you.
This post is a helper to figure out if it makes sense to your specific context.
What problems does an Expertise Demo solve?
The number one challenge that people bring up regarding selling their Expertise is very simple to explain:
Clients don't understand:
A) what your Expertise is and
B) how it can help them.
This is the problem an Expertise Demo solves.
But let me elaborate on that
Experts know things that other people don't know.
The people that need your Expertise, are almost always non-Experts.
Buying what you don't understand always feels risky.
By making people understand what your Expertise is and how it can help them, you make it easier for them to decide to hire your services.
If you struggle with the problem I've described before, keep on reading.
There are other ways
You can share content on your Expertise
You can go on podcasts and interviews to talk about it
You can publish a book on your Expertise
You can write case studies that demonstrate how your Expertise helped a particular client
etc
If you do these things well enough and for long enough, you can build up a reputation Clients become familiar with you and they trust that you can solve their problems.
Even if they don't fully grasp what it is that you do, they can reach a sufficient level of confidence that allows them to hire your Expert Services.
This sort of authority building is paramount for Experts making a living from what they know.
But it takes time.
Are you ready to build your Expertise Demo?
It depends.
Is there a know market category for what you do? If yes, you probably have all you need to begin. Following best practices is enough.
But if it there isn't a known market category for it, there's work to do.
This is uncharted territory (challenging. Even the way you work is still kind of emerging and developing.
You'll need to first codify what you do into an overall process and from that process, you focus on one part to act as the foundation for your Expertise Demo.
Recipe for a valuable Expertise Demo
To create your first Expertise Demo, you'll need some things.
It's like the mise-en-place analogy when you're cooking something: you'll need to gather the ingredients first and figure out if you have all the stuff you need.
For an Expertise Demo, you will need:
Actual practice in serving clients with your Expertise
A model of how you work
A good problem to solve
Actual practice in serving clients with your Expertise
Early stage firms hate this bit. It can feel like a chicken-and-egg problem. I know.
If there's no Expertise, there's nothing to demonstrate.
Without it,you will lack the foundations and the discernment to deliver value in the compressed time-frame of an Expertise Demo.
This is why I don't think you just create Expertise Demos of things that seem interesting but are very new (AI)
A model of how you work
This is akin to a personal PoV or the way you think about the market you serve.
Like what I've said previously, if you are doing something that the market already recognizes, in a way that is similar to how your Expert peers do it, you can just copy the best practices.
But if you are doing a unique thing, you will need to look at how you actually work and extract from it your mental models and personal techniques.
This is also the reason why you must have actual practice working with clients: if you don't, you can never develop a grounded model of how you serve them. It's the difference between knowing the theory and how it breaks in reality.
If you don't yet have a very explicit model of how you think about this, I can help you.
A good problem to solve
The final but crucial piece. There are good problems and bad problems. When I think about a good problem, I look at 3 criteria
It must be be painful for your client;
It must be clear enough that it will be obvious when you've done your job;
It must be a problem you've solved before
Get these three right and you can start building an Expertise Demo. It will still require refinement and polish, but the ingredients will be there.
Something you can do right now
Copy this and paste it into your notes app:
What problems have I been trying to solve for clients that are not painful enough?
What do they have in common?
This should give you some perspective on your failure modes, which is useful intel.
In other news:
There's a new episode of the podcast, this time with Spencer Ayres. here's a little snippet:
click here to listen to the whole thing
I've started to write a book on this stuff. You can help here.