You’re never going to know it all. You need to start helping customers now, with what you know now.
I know it’s tough because you want to feel like you know lots until you start helping people.
There are 3 roadblocks to not using what you know to help customers.
- But I only just learnt this myself, from someone else.
- If I know this, then it’s probably common knowledge
- I’ve already charged someone for X, I can’t charge them again for Y!
The truth to all of this is that you DO have valuable knowledge that people want to pay for. Your customers are desperate for solutions to their problems.
Let me tell you a story
4 years ago I started my digital marketing and website design business. I had a background in corporate marketing and didn’t really know what small businesses wanted. So I immersed myself in digital marketing for small businesses.
Nothing was working the way I had learnt at my corporate job, but eventually pieces started to fall into place using my new small business marketing knowledge. I was asked to speak at a few events, I attended networking events and picked up more and more work.
What I found is that speaking at events, I would present stuff that was totally fundamental to me. Basically teaching my process. To me it was so so simple because I did it every day, but my audience and network lapped it up. I kept expecting someone to tap me on the shoulder and say “this is old news mate, you’re not teaching us anything new.”
No one ever did. I was also terrified that someone would yell out from the crowd “ah but you just learnt that from Troy, or Ryan or Frank!” Imagine getting called out for plagiarising on stage, live. Literally that was my worst nightmare.
So to cover myself, I always credited anyone that I had learnt from. My initial thought was “well it’s suicide because then my audience won’t listen to me, they’ll just go straight to the source”.
What happened? When I mention big industry names or people the audience hadn’t heard of, it made me look like some kind of research mega machine. It looked like I was doing nothing but learning and I had the good grace to pass that knowledge on. Because I credited what I did, it added weight, trust and credibility to what I was talking about.
So how can you start?
Look I’ll be honest. Getting people to pay to teach them is tough. Actually let me edit that, STARTING to get people to pay you is tough.
I’m known for consulting and helping people build awesome marketing funnels and automation, using WordPress websites. I’m flown all over the world and have customers across the globe. More often than not, I simply consult and design a marketing funnel for their business, I don’t build it myself.
However I started by speaking at free networking events. I talked at networking groups, meetups, pubs, restaurants. Anywhere that would take me. I recorded every single presentation and talk that I gave, cut it up and posted it to my website.
After a time, I started emailing my list the talks I was giving. Before long I was being asked to talk at larger industry events.
What do you need to do? Find a networking event and offer to talk to the audience. Networking events are desperate for speakers. Make sure they’re happy and know (clap your hands) that you’re recording it. I used a smartphone and a mic for my first recording and it worked great.
Offer to let them use your footage for whatever they want. I guarantee you’ll people coming up to you at the end talking to you.
Takeaway
There’s always something holding us back from achieving what we want. We really just have to decide what’s more important, or lack of confidence or our desire to help people. If you’re a smart business, all you’ll ever want to do is help people. I can assure you that even the best in the world have confidence shakes, but as long as people find what we’re saying is interesting and helpful – that’s all that matters.
Is talking and consulting something that you want to do? When it comes to using new skills do you feel like you shouldn’t yet? Let me know in the comments below.
