There's a downside to the excitement however. It's easy to underestimate what's involved in transforming that clarity and confidence into real prospects, sales opportunities and revenue. This often leads to a deadly mistake in execution.
In the video below I share this secret, and highlight the keys to successfully navigating it.
It's important to remember that the journey we talk about here is a natural journey. Going through the disappointment phase is to be expected - not avoided.
Simply implementing a strategy - no matter how good it is - is not akin to turning on the spigot and seeing water immediately flow from the hose. No matter how good your message, offers or tactics are, it takes some time to build market presence and awareness that turns into engagement and discussions.
Remember the three phases of presence you need to develop to drive the results you desire:
Awareness: people don't see, hear or notice what they're not aware of. The first job of any effort - outbound, inbound or allbound - is to earn your prospect's attention.
Familiarity/ Comfort: if you're doing something interesting and worthy of attention, you're most likely doing something different. Humans are biologically progammed to avoid (at least initially) what's different. Different means danger in the reptilian brain. Your second job is to create that familiary and comfort. You do that by consistently delivering a value creating teaching point-of-view.
Curiosity: Seth Godin has said that attention is the most valuable asset a business can have. I think there's something more valuable - curiosity. As you create familiarity and comfort, you have the ability to create curiosity; and it's curiosity that powers real engagement and opens the door to valuable sales oriented conversations.
Please don't try to skip steps and go to sell right away. Remember, you've got to get people engaged and talking before you can sell anything to anyone.