How to figure out what's your perfect Expertise Demo
Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment Would you capture it or just let it slip? - M Matters
I've started to write a book on this stuff. You can help here.
From the myriad services you provide, what is the one thing that would be the perfect Expertise Demo?
You're supposed to put some energy behind that tip of the spear.
Focus is important here so you probably want to make this decision in a way that gives you enough confidence to go all in.
As usual, the answer lies between you and your clients
Let me tell you a personal story that illustrates this:
A while ago, before my own positioning was more honed in, I was hired by an agency owner to help them rethink their offering of products and services.
This intersection between Expertise and Product is precisely my sweet spot, but my method was still emerging. As usual, I had prepared some materials and Miro boards.
As we began working on our first-session, we've realized that some of the exercises I had planned would not be that useful. So I proposed we change directions. We redirected that session's focus towards a specific issue that had all the hints of being much more transformative.
As work progressed in that new direction, I created new Miro boards (really bare bones ones) and we dove in. That session would lead to more sessions (at the behest of the client) and in the end, the work arrived at a more practical place.
However, through it all, I was feeling unsure about how my client had perceived the difference from the planned activities and the ones we actually did. I feared they had seen that adaptation as unprofessional improvisation on my part.
Then came the surprise:
As the project wrapped up and I did a final check on what stood out to them, I asked them the million dollar question:
“At what moment during our work together, did you first feel you had made the right decision in hiring my services?”
I thought they would say something like how I had introduced each exercise and why it would help us.
But they said something different. They said it was when they first saw me rebuild the session live, while I narrated why I was making specific decisions on what exercises to keep and which to remove.
For them, that moment was when they realized that they were in good hands and that I was the right guy for the job.
For them, that was the Magical Moment of working with me.
I have since asked this question to every client and the answers always revolve around that: My quick thinking and real-time narration of what we would do and why we would do that.
This is the sort of situation I started to include in every new client engagement.
And it worked.
By elevating the sort of interaction that truly made clients feel comfortable and secure, I was now creating sessions that were more predictably successful.
You can do the same, of course.
Going beyond the Magical Moment
Detecting your current Magical Moment is relatively straightforward.
But this provides you with just part of an answer. If you design an Expertise Demo that includes the sort of situation where your Expertise shines, but solves nothing, you're still not there.
Also, if you create an Expertise Demo that addresses a valuable problem and makes you look good but takes too much time or is too expensive to run (both for you and/or your customer), you still have work to do.
Because an Expertise Demo should hit multiple goals, it's useful to develop it from a structured perspective. One that allows you to compare how one possible Expertise Demo would more or less fitting than another.
You can use a scoring matrix for this.
But be aware that scoring matrices can give a false sense of certainty.
I don't believe they are very good at helping to select between options, unless the differences are too great. But matrices are very good at hinting what can be improved in each option.
My current version only considers the 7 goals of an Expertise Demo
What follows is a fictional example:
Assume I'm an Expert at Remote Work and getting teams to work well asynchronously.
Assume I have a proprietary measurement called the TRD Dysfunction Profile. It helps teams understand how they tend to suffer when working remotely.
Assume that I've learned that Clients love it when I can point to research-based explanations for low team productivity and how to improve it.
That's my Magical Moment.
I'm comparing two possible ideas for an Expertise Demo:
Because these scores are so close and scoring matrices like these are not an exact science, for this specific situation I'd use the results as a map for what to improve on both Expertise Demos:
I'd try to make Expertise Demo #1 easier to understand (a better name); more prescriptive (provide recommendations with the diagnosis) and introduce more opportunity for nuanced client input (sub types for the profiles or exercises where clients can add a specific element to their result).
For Expertise Demo #2, my focus would be to make it shorter (perhaps 45 to 60 minutes, still not ideal); de-risk the outcome (co-creation of something less context-dependent than guidelines) and make the outcome even easier to share (one-page report; very actionable)
What was the last time you felt someone was really competent at their knowledge-work job?
It's easier to judge the physicality of great carpentry. But what about great applied thinking? Great coaching? Great thought-partnership?
This is an useful question to ask. It contributes to your own repertoire of the many ways Expertise can manifest and become obvious.
In other news:
I still have some more thoughts on the idea of Expertise Demo, but I've been getting no feedback at all. So I'm leaning towards it not being something that people like/understand/find interesting. Let's see.
I'm super excited for launching the podcast and I've spent a bit of time on the website. If we're being honest, maybe too much. Such are the struggles of the creative mind: we can justify spending ungodly amounts of time on details most will miss.
Great week for chats. Will Greenblatt and I spoke about keynote speaking and workshops and weird careers and being vulnerable. Alan Doherty and I spoke about workshops in hostile environments (fascinating stuff!), brilliant people carving their own careers and how wrapping one's work is always a tough thing to do.
Still working the podcast, sorry. So much editing to do! I'm glad this is not a permanent thing I need to do forever.
This week I completed 3 straight months of posting on LinkedIn every business day. Don't have growth hacks, but I have some things I've learned. First link below.
This is still coming up, you can start following on spotify.
I've started to write a book on this stuff. You can help here.