Branding Your Knowledge

A Mentor’s Guide To:
Branding Your
Knowledge
“Systematically sell more professional services …

and barricade yourself from competition”

Branded Knowledge Pty Ltd
Level 8, 49-52 York Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000, Australia

Tel: 1300 58 66 44 |Fax: (02) 8079 1129
Email: contact@brandedknowledge.com.au
Web: www.brandedknowledge.com.au

Topics Inside this Guide
• Brand Your Knowledge
• Stake Your Claim
• Value Your Knowledge
• Create Treasure Troves
• Unleash Social Marketing
• Know Your Audience
• Earn Permission
• Sell Your Story
• Lead the Way
• Charge For Admission
• Master Your Brand

Phone: 1300 58 66 44 Copyright © Branded Knowledge Pty Ltd www.brandedknowledge.com.au

About this Mentor’s Guide
This Mentor’s Guide will assist you and your firm to become wealthier
~ that is our aim. When you succeed ~ we succeed.

Does your firm sell professional services? Are you
looking for a coherent marketing strategy that benefits
you and your clients?

Are you seeking proven strategies to achieve short &
long term success in both tough and good times?
Do you put profit before applause?

We can consult with you in person, but you can get a
feel for how we can help just by reading on… Read how to
erect ethical barriers to hinder competitors from poaching
clients and courting prospects.

Discover how sales-savvy marketing can shorten your sales
cycle and turn prospects into buyers.

You have already made a wise investment in us – if you read
on we will help you to achieve a profitable return on that
investment.

Brand Your Knowledge
Your brand is established by your team, reinforced by your clients,
shared by marketing and turned into profit by sales.
Knowledge, reputation and relationships are central to any
services business. You employ your intellectual capital to turn a
profit.

Your clients buy from you because your skills, experience and
methodologies are valuable to them.

As you interact with your clients so you establish a brand.
Delighted clients spread the word – that is the best marketing
you can get.

The art of marketing is to weave a story around your expertise
and your successes. Done well, you will evoke desire in your
prospects.

Your client's stories about you turn your services into tangible
experiences – that your prospects will want to share in.

Do that well and your prospects will seek you out then buy from
you.

Stake Your Claim
You have earned a deep understanding of your subject matter – how do
you become famous for what you know?
As a knowledge brand you must establish an authority on
a portfolio of topics that your audience value.

That's not easy but as it is your core business the raw
material & motivation should be readily available.

Specialists are easier to brand and sell than generalists.
To start with pick a core niche that you know and work with
that.

Whatever you wish to communicate or promote, you'll
need to define the topics and infuse your conversations
with them. Stories, either yours or industry anecdotes work
well.

Your top sales and service personnel are already
storytellers - they deliver your successes with passion,
integrity and personality.


Value Your Knowledge
Your goal is to take the knowledge of your team, make it a part of your
business processes then transfer it to clients for a fee.
You'll turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge so that
your firm owns the knowledge not individuals. You have
retained the value.

To make it part of your marketing strategy you'll embark
upon a structured process of transferring it your prospects
and clients.

You'll share what you know to prove you know it and so
your clients can benefit from it. You'll charge your clients
for it all.

You must trade that which your clients consider valuable
to gain their attention. You will trade it to earn the right to
sell to your clients. You will trade it to create a yearning, a
desire for your services. You will trade it for a fee.

It's the role of your sales force to transact business on that
basis. It's the role of marketing to earn permission to sell.


Create Treasure Troves
Your competences, products & services are treasure troves of
knowledge that you can repeatedly profit from.
Your research results, case studies, reports,
methodologies, training courses, databases and software
modules that embody your knowledge are your crown
jewels.

They are your treasure troves.

The knowledge that is retained in the heads of your
colleagues is treasure too. However, this is tacit
knowledge - it is not within a trove and cannot, therefore,
be branded.

To create a knowledge brand you must capture your
knowledge – share some with your clients, share more
with your colleagues.

A knowledge organisation converts expertise into a
process. That reduces the dependency on superstar
performers – so you profit.


Unleash Social Marketing
Socialising your expertise is a central activity of any successful
knowledge marketing campaign.

Creating a white paper, a blog, podcast, a strategic
briefing or an original piece of research is a common, and
effective, way to brand your firm's expertise – they are
types of treasure troves.

By affixing your company name to that research and
systematically socialising the association. Your knowledge
and your company become intertwined and you have
started to establish your brand.

If you can take a new word, phrase or buzz word and add
it to the language of your clients and ideally your
competitors then you position yourself as the heir to the
treasure that it represents.

Stories told by clients (testimonials and case studies) are
very compelling. Stories told about you in the press carry
the weight of the publication.


Know Your Audience
It is the role of a knowledge brand to connect a topic to an audience that
values it.

You can reach your audience in many ways – face-to-face, at
seminars, online, advertising, social media and traditional
media.

Each client has a different agenda, priorities, goals and
objectives. A CEO has a different perspective and different
needs to a CFO or an office manager. You must understand
your audience.

The closer your expertise relates to your clients own view of
the world - the stronger your knowledge brand will become.

Many clients say they don't “do marketing”. I tell them that
networking is relationship marketing – they do it instinctively
therefore they don't realise.

Using marketing techniques you nurture clients until they are
ready to work with you. It takes time & no technique works for
all clients.

Sell Your Brand
Sales is about helping a client understand what they need then helping
them to acquire it. Sales is valuable, ethical & rewarding.

In many professional services firms salesmanship is seen
as the seedy side of business. In reality, without
salesmanship then a business is on a shaky foundation.

Your marketing messages must align your specialty with
your client's needs. When you relate your core
competencies to your target audience they start to get
interested.

Without focused alignment your brand will not be sturdy
enough to withstand due diligence never mind increasingly
competitive challengers.

If you have enjoyed sustained commercial success then it
follows that salesmanship has been artfully applied.


Earn Permission
Once you have your treasure trove, you must tell your audience about it.
First - you've got to earn their attention.
A client's attention is valuable, that is their down payment.
They deserve something of value in return. How valuable is
your client?

You don't give away the jewels but you can let visitors look
from a safe distance. The closer they get, the higher the fees.

Next you want permission to interrupt them. Then consume
their time in person. Ultimately, you want to invoice them. You
must earn the right to proceed - every step of the way. Do
you have enough capital?

Think of it another way – seek sincerity. You don't want to
waste time on window shoppers. Ask for an email address,
invite to your blog or an event. Ask for something of value
(their time) for your knowledge.

At this stage they are no longer a stranger – and you have
the start of a relationship. Now you need to nurture it.


Relationship Selling
Selling to people that know you is a lot easier than selling to strangers.
Professional sales people build relationships.

They develop trust. They manage conversations to discover
what is important. They work hard to prove their competence
and yours.

They gain commitment and earn the right to engage in a
mutually beneficial transaction. That is professional selling.

A corporate sales professional is a far cry from the cheesy
used-car salesman. That negative image hinders engineers,
lawyers and consultants from learning the craft that will win
new business.

A top seller must be a consultant, mentor, coach, a trusted
advisor. Your clients are sophisticated, savvy & skeptical. If you
don't invest in a systematic, structured sales process – your
competitors will.

In truth, your best performing consultants do this already but
hesitate to call it selling - what else would you call it?

Lead the Way
To protect your brand you'll need to shield it from competitive forces.
When copycats arise – take the compliment and the lead.

You must establish provenance - an awareness and
perception of ownership. That means you have to fearlessly
excite, provoke and challenge. The status quo is your enemy
– not your competitors

Invest time to craft memorable anecdotes that demonstrate
the difference that your services make. Share them.

Learn to listen then artfully steer conversations in person, at
conferences, on the web, in books and in the press. Weave
your knowledge into the social fabric.

You will make it easier for others to picture themselves as the
recipient of your benefits if they connect emotionally.

By telling emotive stories that showcase your competence,
you strengthen your leadership.

Even better, invite clients to do it for you.

Mastering Your Brand
You have achieved mastery of your marketing. You have erected barriers
that your competitors will struggle to climb.

When your target audience thinks about the problems,
solutions and benefits that your knowledge embodies – they
will think of you.

Your competitors appear as followers not leaders. They lack
your firm's prestige – and you can command higher fees.

They'll fall back to competing on price. In the process they will
erode their own value proposition, making it harder for them
to win lucrative new clients. Of course, you can always hire
their best talent.

You have linked your expertise, your market, the embodiment
and the means of distribution in such a way that makes it very
difficult for a competitor to stake a rival claim.

You have erected barriers to entry that are expensive and
time consuming to erode. Well done.


About Branded Knowledge
We are Business Development specialists. We use the power of
Sales, Marketing & Discrete Technology to grow your business.

We founded our business when after a long search, failed
to find a sales & marketing firm that put our sales first.

We run a consulting practice so understand many of your
challenges. We must invest in our clients before hoping to
help them. Our time, expertise and relationships become
aligned to your goals.

We threw away the corporate mission statement and
adopted a motto instead: “Sales Is Everything”. We hope
you appreciate our focus.

Our motto aligns our team with what we must do for our
clients and the difference that we must make to be
successful.


A Mentor’s Guide To:
Branding Your
Knowledge
As a thank you for reading
Please accept a FREE One Hour
Consultation
simply by picking up the phone.
Branded Knowledge Pty Ltd
Level 8, 49-52 York Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000, Australia

Tel: 1300 58 66 44 |Fax: (02) 8079 1129
Email: contact@brandedknowledge.com.au
Web: www.brandedknowledge.com.au

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