Category: Online Marketing

My name is John golden from sails pop online sales magazine and pipeliner CRM, and today I am delighted to be joined by Douglas Krueger, who is in lovely Johannesburg, South Africa? How you doing Douglas says it’ll be with you, John thanks, so much for having me yeah absolutely and it’s late evening. Your time, I presume indeed it’s very late evening, my wife and I manage to read a movie she’s gone off to bed and I’m still enduring so.

Okay. Well Douglas. Just let me introduce you, he is an author of six business books, including the highly acclaimed own. Your own industry, how to position yourself as an expert and that’s where we’re going to focus in today he’s worked with multiple large clients, household names like BMW, but tell me Douglas okay own your own, your industry, how to position yourself as an expert? Why is that relevant to everybody, as opposed to just a small number of people? Well, absolutely.

The the starting point in positioning yourself isn’t as an expert is that it is a choice. People will make and in fact not a great many people vie for that premium level of competition, and for that reason, although we’re what I’m encouraging is that you aim higher, there’s, certainly less noise at the top of the market. So that’s one of the the advantages to it. It also helps us to hit a much more visceral note in terms of our marketing, rather than sounding like a low level salesperson, we actually speak at a different level.

It’s it’s a little at which we start creating tribes of followers and actually, in a sense, are depicting a type of lifestyle, a type of persona and a way of being and done at its highest level. It actually helps people to to actualize themselves and to realize who they want. So how would you advise somebody? So if I’m a salesperson right and yeah I’ve been doing okay, I mean now you’ve been bumping along here, but I feel like I really want to go for it I want to.

I want to be more successful in Excel. What are some of the first steps? I can take towards, as you say, actual izing that well one of the things that I think is a little counterintuitive that most people don’t do is to give away your best ideas for free. When we look at it from a sales perspective, we often we have a sense of being guarded or being a little reserved about how much information we actually want to give away.

There’s always that nagging doubt in the back of our minds that if we give too much, we’ve essentially furnished the solution for free, I believe that the exact opposite is the case. I believe that, when we’re very generous with what we know, rather than just selling to people we’re sharing ways forward, and I find that what tends to happen is that people come to us for the implementation and I’ve seen this.

I’ve been very blessed to see this. In my own career and in that of other speakers, experts, coaches people involved in the world of sales, the more they’re giving and the more they’re helping people to become what they want to become. The more clients come to them. For the the implementation of that ideal, and in a best-case scenario we want to be hearing that phrase, someone told me you’re the person to talk to about now.

What I try and focus on is: how do you become synonymous with an idea? So I go a little bit beyond the idea of simply being say a topic matter, expert or being a being technically good at what you do, and I start asking questions like how do how do you become so synonymous with an industry that it’s almost impossible to Talk about it without referencing you and the top names that spring to mind. Over time I mean you, you can’t speak about, say bodybuilding without speaking of arnold schwarzenegger and you can’t say data’ and TV talk shows without referencing, oprah and so on and so forth and Schwarzenegger is an interesting one and it plays into what we’re discussing here, because He is not technically the most highly accomplished.

Bodybuilder of all time, he’s won mr. Olympia seven times. There are two gentlemen who have wanted eight separate times, and yet, whenever I speak for audiences, I put up the phrase bodybuilding on a screen and I say quick: what’s the first name? Is France Mike? It’s always always Arnold yeah, exactly yeah. So, there’s a lot that we can learn from that and obviously his television appearances and so forth play into it.

But that’s part of what we’re talking about when we say expert positioning, it’s this combination of teaching leading being a personality and very much of being in the public eye. So so how would um and and I agree with everything you said there, but so from from a lot of salespeople – they, while they’re great, if you put them in a room one-on-one with a customer or you put them on the phone or you can put them On with the buying committee, you know they’re great in those situations, but if you say to them now, you’re going to really expose yourself to a much broader audience, maybe one that they don’t even see them get kind of uncomfortable.

In that air arena absolutely – and I mean you know the old joke that does the round about the the fear of public speaking being greater than the fear of death, and the conclusion we can draw from that is that at your average funeral most people would rather Be the guy in the box, but there’s immense power in that, and in fact, of course it’s a very human fear. It’s not the fear of speaking itself.

It’s the fear of being judged – and I think one-one constructive way around. That is for us to realize that we’re not actually there to be judged we’re there to give value to a group of people who don’t know as much as we do. If you have something that teachers a group helps, a group of people shows a way forward. It’s not self-serving to stand up in front of a group and do it you’re actually giving something that is very valuable to people and of course you can do it on different gradients.

You know, though, you don’t have to throw yourself into the deep end and stand up in an auditorium and atriums be for 10,000 people on your first try. You could, for example, craft a small youtube article that gives 10 tips two or three ways to and gives genuine value for free and once again, I return to that idea of saying give away your best ideas for free. Let them come to you for the implementation.

Don’t hold anything back yeah and so that then, obviously will build a level of trust right, because I mean, if you’re, giving out information you’re helping somebody, then they’ll tend to trust you more and though, if you like they’ll get past the idea of this confrontational salesperson. Buyer relationship and I think I think that’s one of the key – the key elements there and but to me also again from again from a salesperson point of view.

I mean you know becoming the expert, you know owning and just you really becoming the expert again. You know a lot of people would say. Well you know I’m I’m pretty good. I mean, I know some stuff expert. I don’t know whether I’m good, I don’t know whether I’m comfortable putting myself forward as yes, ok. This returns me to to what I believe is that the the heart and soul of genuinely becoming a recognized icon in your industry, where I believe it’s a three-part equation and I think most people tend to to get the one idea and miss the other two.

And I believe that experts exist at the intersection of three different qualities. If you don’t have all three working together simultaneously, you can actually disqualify yourself as an expert now the first one is the one we tend to think of intuitively. When we hear that phrase – and that’s that’s knowledge and knowledge is a broad catch-all term, when we say knowledge, we mean technical ability capacity, you know your stuff, it’s the ability to do the thing that you do.

But now it’s interesting is when you start to study the really top names in every industry. They are not necessarily the most technically qualified people, there’s something else going on there. They know their stuff backwards and forwards. Make no mistake about that, but there are often people who are more technically qualified than them yet less well known, and often these are people who are not remunerated on the same scale and that’s fascinating to us.

So the other two elements, in addition to knowledge, are personality and publicity and in any industry that I’ve studied looking at this idea of of experts and icons, I always find that that one comes to the fore and, of course it’s again it gets a fear reaction From us, because if we’re not very loud verbose, over-the-top charismatic personalities, we tend to think well that disqualifies me and I genuinely believe that that’s not the case at all.

If you look at, let’s take a world like say, the world of professional shifts, Jamie Oliver from the United Kingdom has become a global phenomenon, one of his books launched awhile ago. In fact, the the first book called The Naked Chef. You know millions of them sold worldwide. People bought them, flipped them open found. It was nothing but recipes. They were sorely disappointed, but what’s interesting about that is that Jamie Oliver is a fairly quiet, down-to-earth, bloke, next door, kind of character and he’s not allowed over-the-top person.

Like Seiya at Jeremy, Clarkson in the world of cars or any other big personality, we we care to think of, but here’s the key. We know Jamie Oliver, we recognize his face, we know his voice and we are familiar with his personality. So that’s as a result of the third thing, which is publicity, knowledge, personality, publicity put those three together and you have the core makings of an industry expert take one out of the equation and you actually disqualify yourself from the potential of being a recognized icon and The way I always like to phrase it with my audiences, as I say, if you have all the knowledge but no personality, you are a specialist if you have all listen, allottee, but no knowledge.

You are very good. I like it. So, that’s all that’s interesting and, as you said, I mean the personality piece because that’s been misused over years where people say there are personality types, but you can you know a good personality is a very subjective thing anyway right, and so it doesn’t have to be One type or the other and then the publicity I mean, I guess that’s the piece nowadays, where there’s no real excuse.

Is it because you have all the tools. I mean us, as individuals now have tools that we could only have dreamed of years ago. This might come surprising to anybody who’s under the age of 30, but all of these wonderful tools that didn’t exist absolutely so really leverage so really leveraging. Those tools for the publicity piece is key right. Yes, and also, you know why you mentioned levy the newness of the tools I’d like to throw in as a seemingly contradictory idea, which is that the classic skills still win out and what I mean by that is when you study someone like say, Jeremy Clarkson, who Is famously fired from top gear after a year altercation with his producer, he speaks about how the new top gear is struggling and he did it with uncharacteristic restraint, but he pointed out something that I found fascinating.

He said when you look at the credits. There is no written by and it used to be written by Jeremy Clarkson now Clarkson for all he sort of buffoonery is an incredibly strong writer and he says you know people would apply a young men. Young ladies, would apply to the Top Gear show and they would talk about their love of cars and he would say well yeah, that’s all very well, but can you write? Well, that’s the heart and soul of it, and I think those old classic skills can really set you apart in a world.

That’s perhaps not using them as much as it should, and another example that speaks to my mind is from from the United States, his micro. The globally famous host of dirty jobs on our Discovery, Channel, yes, yeah now as a sort of a suit-wearing person who spends most of his life in conferences and drinking coffee, the world’s most unlikely candidate to follow micro. I have zero interest in dirty jobs.

However, the man’s skill with words hid the beauty of his writing, his wit, his humor and his intellect ensure that I am one of his greatest fans and I think there’s something quite profound about that. You know when we, when we step aside from the sort of the the classical sales role, and we admit to ourselves, that we’re talking to human beings, intelligent human beings who respect good writing good humour, good personality.

There is a great deal of value to the mind in those it yeah. I have to say I’m glad you brought that up, because it’s it’s one of the it’s one of my look at soap boxes as well, because I do believe that it’s a terrible thing. But today you as a salesperson or or is anybody a professional? You can differentiate yourself by being polite by not but not being over familiar with people before you know them and, as you say, by writing, well and actually paying attention to what you’re writing.

I really think ya can differentiate you, because I think people there’s it’s become so casual that it’s it’s just become lazy and kind of almost you know insulting right yeah. So I think the human mind sits up and pays attention when it perceives something of a little bit of quality and there’s a fabulous book by Steven Pinker and that the title eludes me now. I think it’s called the sense of style and it’s a book about writing in general, but he uses a fabulous phrase and he comes at it from a sort of a neuro psychology point of view and he says style earns trust.

He goes into a lot of the signs behind it, but the very simple version is: when people see that we pay attention to small details, whether it’s in writing, whether it’s in how we go about treating others whatever the case might be, that small sense of style Convinces people that there is a greater intellect behind it and that here is a person who can be trusted can be taken seriously. You almost earn merit points beyond what you’re actually do by simple shows of of care for small things.

So I think I think that phrase is really profound. That style earns I’m a hundred percent believer in that also believe that you can, you can never be. You can never be too polite right. You can certainly be the opposite, but I don’t think you can be too polite and and it’s better to start off being formal, as opposed to start off being familiar with that earning that right and and my my other one is, I was believe you will never Get you will never get docked points for being overdressed? Yes, because I’ve done it myself in the past, like I’ve, shown up in a suit and tie for a meeting with people and they’ve all been in t-shirts and shorts, but hey nobody’s going to say well, look at him they’re going to say you know you still Going to gradually respect you, but if I turn it up to a room of people who were in shirts and ties, and I was in t-shirt and shorts, I’m kind of the same reaction right.

Yes, I can think of only one example that contradicts that. But it’s such a bizarre when I divert I just share it with ya: go we have a speaker from Johannesburg and he’s he’s globally famous by the name of Clem Sunter he’s a futurist in Scenario planner, who was the ex chairperson of anglo-american corporations, a very high-level He said he’s a very intelligent, very charming man, but because of this very high level of success, the dynamic reverses for him.

He stands on a stage in a very baggy Jersey, hands in pocket laughs at his own jokes and he comes across as an absent-minded professor type, and it’s it’s very charming. But absolutely I agree with your point. If I had to do it, it would just simply look disrespect yeah, I mean exactly. I mean we see the Steve Jobs, I mean when you get to that stage. You can basis name your own uniform right, yes versus because it looks so charming to be human.

Exactly exactly it’s perfect, so tell me in the last few minutes we have here. You know tell me another couple of aspects about how you advise people other than you know, reading your book. But what are another couple of ways? People could start to elevate. The idea of themselves of an expert – or, if you get their head around, even attempting to do that. Yes, absolutely I I think one of the mistakes people tend to make early on is they find it difficult to calibrate what level of expert they are and because we all have some degree of humility, hopefully built into the psyche? We find it hard to say I am an expert and in fact you shouldn’t an expert is something that someone else calls you who then, and what what we want to do is start off with a certain level of humility.

That says, I know this much and that’s what I can teach and as your knowledge grows, you can teach a broader and broader base and you can share with more and more people on, say, an increasingly global level and that that simple little equation I find helps People to let go of a great deal of the fear and insecurity around the idea of being an expert. If you do not have the the insight into physics of someone who’s been around, studying it for decades.

Well, teach at the level of say a primary school teacher and you are an expert to a group of people who know less than you and there’s something Noble and something beautiful about that and that’s fine and, as you grow more your your influence expands. So don’t out claim what you actually know and there you know that that way you never get caught out and in fact, one of the things that I like to challenge people.

Whenever we speak about this topic, so I say the first time you speak as a recognized expert in a public forum in the Q & A session, at least once you should say to someone I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question and there’s nothing wrong with that, and I think it’s a very healthy thing to do. Not only does it actually build credibility with the audience, but it keeps you at a certain level that says it’s.

Okay, not to know more than I do. That’s that’s a great that’s a great tip. Actually, I love that one. That’s a great takeaway for people out there is to be able to confidently say I don’t know the answer to that. I’m sorry because otherwise, if we’ve seen too many people pass where you know you stand, then you think. Oh, I just got asked a question. I don’t know so now my brain is going to go into overdrive, coming out with some nonsense to try as experts there’s no upside to it.

Yeah absolutely well. Listen. Douglas has been a great a great conversation that we could talk a lot more and hopefully we will. Hopefully you come back and talk again soon, but before we go I’d like you to tell the audience a little bit more about yourself how they can find out more about you, yes, certainly most of what I do is the the writing. I write books that are entrepreneurial in nature and I speak on the same topics.

My articles and articles are all available on my website, which is Douglas, Kruger, CEO and I’m going to say, dot Z, a in South Africa. We would say: Zed a and I’ve got a little weekly motivational newsletter called from amateur to expert and the idea behind that is every week I send out one free tip that says: here’s the way amateurs would do it. Here’s the way experts would do it. Let’s raise the standards, well, listen Douglas Kruger in South Africa in Johannesburg.

Thank you for joining us. My name is John golden says. Pop online says magazine. Pipeliner CRM, see you all for another expert interview really soon. Thank you. So I encourage you to subscribe to sales popped on net. The online sales magazine also subscribe to our YouTube blog and then comment get involved in the conversation, love to hear what you have to say.

---

Websites help sell stuff! Do you have one?