7 Answers to Your Top FAQs About Visible Experts
I am excited to talk with my friend and fellow marketer, Sylvia Montgomery who is a Senior Partner at Hinge, about their new book, The Visible Expert. Here are some questions I asked her about being a Visible Expert.
Q: What is a Visible Expert?
A: By definition, a Visible Expert is a professional with high marketplace visibility and a reputation for expertise. They’re the industry stars everyone knows and trusts.
Q: Who can become a Visible Expert?
A: The good news is, with hard work and a strategy in place, anyone can become a Visible Expert. All current Visible Experts originally started as unknowns and rose to their level of visibility through hard work and establishing themselves as experts. While you can’t become a Visible Expert overnight, there are certain steps you can take the build your reputation over time.
Q: How did you conduct your research for the book?
A: When we first began wondering about the effect experts have on the firms that employ them, we knew we had to examine the concept of a Visible Expert from multiple angles. To really understand how Visible Experts work, we couldn’t just ask them—we also had to ask the buyers that they influenced. To begin, we interviewed 130 individuals who are recognized experts in their fields. The questions tended to fall into two main categories:
1) How being a Visible Expert affects their business
2) How they become a Visible Expert
Next, we surveyed 1,028 buyers of Visible Expert services with questions designed to explore why and how buyers select Visible Experts. We then analyzed that data to look for patterns and draw conclusions.
Q: So…what did you find in your research?
A: Quite a bit, actually. While you’ll have to check out the full book to get a complete understanding of our results, there were two main findings that we’ll summarize here.
First, firms that employ upper-level Visible Experts receive significant benefits across the board.
Second—and perhaps most surprisingly—most Visible Experts, regardless of their industry or background, follow a similar path to success.
Q: Could you speak to the benefits Visible Experts can bring to their firms?
A: Of course. When we asked our Visible Experts what effect their increased visibility and expertise had on their firms, over 60% reported two main benefits: 1) improved brand building capabilities and, 2) increased growth and business development.
Q: How do Visible Experts impact lead generation?
A: Thanks to their established reputations, Visible Experts have a variety of methods and resources to improve their firm’s lead generation. Through extensive content production, speaking engagements, networking activities and search engine marketing, Visible Experts are able to generate more high quality inbound leads.
Q: How long does it take to become a Visible Expert?
A: While the answer to this question depends on multiple variables, we did discover a subgroup of Visible Experts who achieved their status 5X faster than other experts. We discovered that these “Fast Trackers” followed the same building blocks of traditional Visible Experts, with a few additional components—for instance, 85% of Fast Trackers wrote a book.
Have more questions you want answered? Check out the full book for more information about the benefits of Visible Experts and the necessary steps to become one.