Sally Curtis walks you through a self-assessment to find gaps in your influence strategy. She defines an industry influencer as someone who builds trust through visibility and education, then breaks down a 12-step program covering newsletters, LinkedIn, speaking, and content. Most entrepreneurs skip the education and database work that actually drives sales.
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Thank you again for taking a forward step to become more successful in your business. I work with many people that feel overwhelmed with all of the different things that you can do to grow your business. Now, this diagnostic will actually help you understand, prioritise, and plan what you need to do specifically to focus on, and the self-assessment will help you determine what your next steps are. And of course, if you need a hand, I'm always happy to do that. It's all about influence. People buy from those they know, like, and trust. And we create our own influence and that attraction factor when we are clear on what we sell and we are visible to the people who want our services and who we want to serve. This first diagram is the industry influencer, and it helps you to self-assess where you're currently at and what's currently happening for you. This is often where most people are, this line through here that you can see, and this helps you to determine how your position is in the marketplace already, what obstacles you are facing and that are currently in your way, and the reason why some things really work for you and some don't. But again, don't feel overwhelmed. It's quite normal. But during this video and the next few videos, I will help you get clearer about what your next steps are and what are the things that you can do to to make a difference in your business. So what is influence, or who is an influencer? Influencers are passionate about serving and helping their communities. They lead, set the direction of change, influence, they build communities, and they make positive impacts. They act straight from the heart. And they genuinely, genuinely want to help people. And they do this because they are well connected. They add value and they inspire. They build trust easily and are sought after for their advice, their knowledge, and their leadership. And they often have very large communities and networks with influence. So why become an influencer? People want to connect and work with people they can trust, and this is where an organic sales process occurs. And this is the beautiful thing about becoming an influencer, particularly if you don't like that sort of icky sales feeling or that sales process. When you really start to position yourself as an influencer Sales become much more organic. They're a much easier part of the process because people are wanting to do work with you, because ultimately people want authentic, meaningful connections. And as an influencer, this is what we develop. And the 4 quadrants help you build a real relationship with your community that is not only strategic, but it's authentic and it's done in a very, very humanized way. So what does it take? Commitment's the very first word that I would think of here, and commitment to me is an act, it's not a word. And it will certainly take courage as well. So let me explain. The commitment that you're going to need is to start conversations with your communities and build the momentum of these different practices to grow your business, and a commitment to build and continue building your momentum. The next commitment is to educate with high-value information and to not be scared to give your best stuff away. On occasion, I do work with a number of clients that have great fear around giving their and sharing their great content, giving their best stuff away. And the good news is, from my experience, that is just because you haven't unpacked your inner genius enough. So you haven't dived into what it is you know instinctively and unpacked it, found more of it that helps you. Then provide your experiences from what's happened and occurred to you from within your inner genius, your knowledge base. And unpacking that can be quite an exciting process and quite an easy process to do. So what it takes is courage, commitment, and to educate with high-value information and content. So how do you start? Well, you're perfect where you are right now, and to start where you are right now is also perfect. I would suggest you have a look at your report, and when I say have a look at it, that usually means armed with a highlighter pen and/or a pencil so you can make highlights and little notes to yourself to look back on. So have a look at your report. You will see clearly areas to focus on and improve. The four quadrants for you to really look through at are the direct, direct, the network or search awareness, and of course education. Just to give you a little bit of a tip, what I find in very broad terms is majority of people don't actually spend a lot of time over here. This education component. So, and they tend to have very, very one-dimensional social media strategies, and they're generally not building a database. So being visible daily, building your database, and educating through your social media posts are some of the areas that you can really focus on very, very quickly to get some really good results. So let me just give you a quick walkthrough of this. This is obviously also part of the report and is the fundamental 12 steps elements that we use within the Changemaker programs and obviously is within your report. And the 4 quadrants that we mentioned is the direct contact, the network or search, The awareness quadrant, and then the educate quadrant. In here, the three elements that you've got to work on are database and newsletter management, your daily visibility, your phoning and emailing of clients to keep in contact, your networks. Your Google searchability and SEO, and the key one is LinkedIn SEO here. You've got the next 3 in awareness are speaking, so speaking to your community or doing speaking events, getting referrals from other people, and also proactively connecting with people, which we also do through LinkedIn. Then in the educate component, you've got the opportunity to podcast, or do recordings or videos, social media posts, and of course your blog here as well. And in the next video, what we will actually share is more on the 4 quadrants, but how the customers— the 4 types of customers relate to you. The customers that know you, the customers that know what they want, the customers that don't know you, and then the customers that don't don't know what they want. So I look forward to sharing that with you in our next video.
