Can you imagine a funnel business where you’re paid to speak, people have read your books and you deliver work to some of the top businesses in the world? Imagine knowing that you don’t have to work evenings and weekends, but you’re getting more done than ever before.
Last month Daniel Priestley was kind enough to jump on a call with me and talk through his process of becoming a key person of influence. If you’re a funnel builder that want’s to position yourself as an expert authority in your market, you need to read this post.
I’ve got the video below too and you can download the transcribe here.
That’s the solution proposed by Daniel Priestley. Daniel is well known as a author and speaker, having written The Entrepreneur Journey Series.
- Key Person Of Influence
- The Entrepreneurs Revolution
- 24 Assets
- Oversubscribed
In this interview, Daniel is going to teach you how to position yourself in your market and business, as a K.P.I. who can charge higher prices, pick their projects and work with more people
The funnel building market is going to become more competitive over time. As more commodity-based agencies start entering the market, and more software begins to build funnels on automation, we as funnel builders must position ourselves as an expert or authority within a space that becomes resistant to some of these changes. The way you do that is by becoming a Key Person Of Influence.
Build a better world
The world doesn’t suffer from poor ad CPC. It doesn’t need another mobile app or a slightly different noise-cancelling headphone. Funnel builders might think that we can only solve those problems. But the real problems are businesses struggling to grow. People who need better income and change-makers reaching more people.
“I really genuinely feel that there comes a time where you realise that you’re actually in partnership with society and you’re in partnership with the planet, and unless you actually have a functioning society and a functioning planet it’s really hard to run a business.”
Imagine as a funnel builder if you were able to help more parents help their kids with homework. Or help a small business employ more local people, because you grew their sales. The problems you can fix are greater than you’re giving yourself credit for.
Proximity bias
Immediately, most of us start to think “what can I bring to the table? I don’t know much and there are loads of brilliant people out there. I’m better off staying small and keeping my head down.”
That’s called proximity bias. Proximity bias means that whenever you’re too close to something you tend to devalue it, or your perception of value is altered.
“they [businesses] tend to underestimate how amazing their business is and their story is typically”
In truth you have a story, a past, an angle and a business which people want to learn more about and hear about. You are sitting on a mountain of value (we’ll get to that), that other people want to learn more about.
Do you know to help businesses grow? Or scale? Or become profitable? Then you have so much to offer to the world.
It’s never the new fad
Blockchain, Bitcoin, dropshipping, Internet Of Things. No doubt that these things are important, and they’ve made some people a lot of money. But these aren’t the things that will make you successful, or help your customers reach new heights. Our economic, sociological and technological environments are changing every day. These changes, while bringing opportunities, aren’t the reason your business will be a success.
Businesses have been making a lot of money for a long time, without any of these new advances. New technologies are not the thing to jump on. Instead you should be focusing on your brand, your reputation and your valuable knowledge. This “new thing” is not going to be what gets you to the top. In fact with these new fads, it’s only the top 10% of the market that make any money with it anyway.
“Essentially, whatever the niche is, there are only the top 5 to 10% of people who make serious money out of that niche”
So if you get into funnel building, and we assume that only the top 5% to 10% of people make any serious money. Then we know we need to focus on our brand, content and message to become successful.
No one is talent scouting
“You’ve got to put yourself out there a bit for people to discover you, so you’ve got to make the first move”
Daniel made a brilliant point about writing a book or becoming a public speaker. “No one is talent scouting”, he said.
This means that if you want to position yourself as an authority or expert within your market, you must be the one to put yourself out there first. There is no one walking around city centres asking if someone wants to become an expert. There is no one keeping an eye on you, ready to hand down the title of “expert” to you, and then ask you to write a book.
The book and the speaking come before the authority positioning.
Becoming a Key Person Of Influence
So with that let’s look at how to become a key person of influence, with a marketing funnel business.
Mountain of value
We mentioned earlier the mountain of value. A mountain of value is understanding everything that you know, or can do for the world. This is where most funnel builders trip up, as they think they aren’t as good as other people in the market.
Everyone else is so vocal about what they do and the value they bring to the market, it can be easy to forget all the amazing things that you’ve done. Dig into what it is that you’ve done and the transformation you’ve taken people on, from growing products, increasing traffic or generating sales.
“So the first step is really just trying to get present with the mountain of value that you’re already standing on, try to dig deep into that mountain and find the stories, the intellectual property, the methods, the case studies, the examples that you’ve got that are highly valuable.”
Think about everything that you can do, you can help people with all that you’ve done. There will absolutely be a series of case studies and stories that you can use to explain what you can do and help other people with.
Pitch
Next we need to look at the pitch. The pitch is how you turn everything you can do, your mountain of value into a compelling story. It needs to become a narrative about what you do, who you do it for and why it’s important.
The pitch is something that I really struggled with when starting my final business. Because I wanted to create something that wouldn’t be rejected by everybody. So I called myself a funnel builder, and explained to businesses that I built marketing funnels.
Of course 99% of businesses don’t know what a funnel builder is. The sooner I was able to explain that I help online course based businesses increase the number of email subscribers they attract to their email list. That was more compelling. Even if people weren’t course builders, they understood what a course builder did.
I still don’t think that that pitch was perfect, if I was to go back I would explain it as “I help generate sales from email lists, to increase revenue course businesses2
“What’s your name or your business name? What are you the same as? What’s your claim to fame? What is your aim and what’s your game?”
This is the difference between someone who helps people feel confident about their smiles, and a dentist.
It needs to be 20 to 30 seconds long, and understood by a 15 year old and a 75 year old. What’s your name. What are you similar to, or what are you the same as? What your claim to fame or something you’ve done that they’ll understand? What’s your aim in the marketplace – what is your goal within the next 90 days? And then what your bigger game in the next couple of years?
Once you’ve got your pitch sorted out, everything else falls into place. Because you’ll just be creating content, publishing and products that serve that pitch.
You need to create a specific and niche pitch. For the past thousand years and longer, it’s been a good idea to be a generalist. People were restricted by their geography and their ability to drive, or walk or take a horse to your location. As Daniel puts it, you might have built the world’s best hammers, but there’s only a fraction of a percent of people who need those hammers. So you have to provide other generalist services such as plants, other tools and hardware.
Now however, the Internet means that there are tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people who want to your specific knowledge within a specific area.
- Email list building for deaf entrepreneurs
- Course building for cookery YouTube content creators
- New traffic and visitors for part-time working dads
- Audience and follower growth for sports clothing e-commerce companies
You can see these are all of those would be done by funnel builder. I don’t doubt that every funnel builder would be able to help every business on there. But only businesses who repeatedly pitch themselves, with a specific niche message, will be seen as experts within that field.
Publish
This is where many funnel businesses start to work up a cold sweat. To quote another author, Rob Moore, “visibility is credibility”.
If you are publishing content, like books, blog posts, pod casts, Instagram videos, YouTube videos, webinars, speaking gigs, webinars (I could go on), you are becoming visible to your audience and you are publishing content. The perception is that only experts publish content, so anyone with content must be an expert.
There is absolutely no reason that you can’t publish free, useful and valuable content for your audience. The book comes first. The blog posts come first. The webinars come first. The pod cast comes first. It’s only after producing regular published content, the other people can access, will you become recognised as an expert.
Products
This is where most people start, but instead your products need to come after your understanding of your pitch and the content that you publish. Daniel talks about productisisng your services. Understanding that the results you get from customers, are not necessarily tied to only one way of delivering them.
If you’re clear on the outcome you can get the customers, you can sell them a multitude of ways to help them. The test that Daniel uses is that he’ll send you 100 customers tomorrow, with their credit cards out ready to buy. How does that make you feel?
If you are sweating nervously then that’s a sign that your services aren’t productised. That you’ll struggle to deal with an influx of customers, so therefore you’re going to struggle to grow.
As you increase your authority and become a key person of influence within your market. Your time is going to become more and more valuable. More and more people are going to expect help from you, and you can only help so many people per day. So you must learn to productise and systematise your services.
“Clients are never buying your time. Never. If you think they’re buying your time, try and charge them to play a game of chess, or to bake a cake together. They’re not interested in that. They’re buying some sort of an outcome. There is some outcome that they want to buy.”
There are many ways to scale out and product ties your services. By asking other people to help you deliver projects, or by creating scalable products like books and courses. Even a small team of 2 to 3 members can massively scale out your impact within your business and your marketplace.
Your job is to continue growing your influence within that market, and allowing other people to deliver the results to your customers
Profile building
“The goal is not to be in the spotlight, the goal is to become a spotlight for something”
When interviewing Daniel this was probably the biggest breakthrough that he gave me on the call. My job is not to say “look at me”, my job is to say “look at that”. By highlighting important changes, opportunities and trends within a marketplace, we can position ourselves better as an influencer.
The sustainable and long-term growth being an influencer, comes from shining a spotlight on important topics. Rather than trying to position yourself as the important topic.
This is also a fantastic way to get around the natural inclination of thinking you’re egotistical, when we talk about yourself. Instead, you’re going to be talking about a subject or topic repeatedly, and shining a spotlight on that.
It’s not about how many people you can reach, it’s about how deeply you can reach people. If you had 500 people who have listened to 15 to 20 hours of your staff, you’re probably gonna have a very strong and powerful business. Whereas most people would try to get a shallow interaction from 50,000 people-which doesn’t amount to anything.
You must build your profile within an industry, which is through repeatedly publishing content, creating great products and the next stage-building partnerships.
Partnerships
Partnerships are about envisioning what you want to see in the world. What difference or change do you want to see in the world today?
There are parts of that vision that will require partnering with other people. If you have a method or a system that can help 100,000 people, you need to find someone with a hundred thousand people on that list. Partnerships are about working out a fair exchange of value, and giving as much as you can get (if not more).
It’s also about looking at products and services that already exist, and packaging them into new offers and deals. Your customers don’t want to install WordPress, install a theme, choose the plug-ins and write the content. But you also don’t need to create those things from scratch. You’re partnering with those services, to provide a new outcome to your customers.
Person Of Influence
Realise that you’re sitting on a mountain of value, and the people will pay to hear it. Get over your proximity bias by understanding that everything you do, add some kind of value to someone. Work on your pitch and craft a compelling story around what you do and why it’s important. Then create repeated content and publish as much as you can in order to position yourself as an influencer and secure your profile. Finally work on partnering with other businesses and platforms, in order to bring the best results your customer.
What if I can’t do all this?
I think the most common objection that I here to this process, is that people feel intimidated about the size of the project. Most people just want to pay their bills and live a decent life.
The important thing to remember is that becoming a key person of influence does not mean becoming a Zuckerberg or a Bezos. In fact, many examples we give of huge influences are often people that had no interest in being in the spotlight at all.
Becoming a key person of influence means understanding your audience and how you can help them. If you can only help 500 people in the world, but become the most valuable person in to those 500 people, you are a key person of influence.
As we mentioned, even a very deep relationship with her tiny percentage of people, will result in a very profitable and powerful business.
Daniel Priesley
Daniel’s books are available Online and in most bookstores. He also has a series of audiobook versions (some of which he’ll be rerecording!)
You can find Daniel on Twitter @DanielPriestley and Instagram @danielpriestley. If you’d like to download the transcript of the video and interview, you can download that here.
