[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Big Ticket Pros, the podcast for agencies, coaches and high end service providers who know what it takes to thrive in competitive markets. I'm your host, Ana Gonzalez and you can find me on social media at Anapa Prime. Our guests share insider tips, strategies and sometimes cautionary tales to help you post bigger deals and scale your business faster.
Big Ticket Pros is sponsored by Fast Track Funnels, the new way to bring in consistent daily sales for your business in 2025 without cold outreach or burning cash and ads. We use this method with a brand new business to generate more than 100,000 cash collected in less than 30 days.
Download the free step by step blueprint that shows exactly how we did
[email protected] that's getconversions.net Today's guest is Liz Hart.
Liz is a managing partner at pinch, the leading research based branding and marketing firm for professional services.
A visible expert in the professional services space, she regularly writes articles, conducts webinars and speaks at professional services events around the nation.
So, Liz, welcome to Big Ticket Pros.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: I'm so happy you're here. So in your experience, what is the best piece of advice you would give to someone just starting out in your industry?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Yeah, a couple things come to mind, but if I had to narrow it down to one, I would say to approach the build of your pipeline in a way that educates and resonate. Ditch the tell and the sell. Educate and resonate. What do I mean by that? You know, a lot of times when we go into pitches or when we're in business development mode, we tell, we, we tell what we do, talk about our services, tell about our company and then we go in for the hard sell. That doesn't really work in today's environment. Today's environment is crowded with so much fluff and junk and noise in order to rise above that you need to be seen as important.
How do you do that? Educate. When you're in giving the pitch, rework your pitch so that you are solving a problem that is keeping your audience up at night. And when you pitch that way, you are educating them. You're giving, you're. They are leaving the pitch having thought about a solution that they hadn't thought about before. And when you do that, you're highly relevant. And when you're relevant, you build your pipeline. So I would say that is the, that's my personal mantra. And I would say that's the biggest piece of advice I could give someone.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: I really like that And I really like that you're saying you need to be seen as important. You need to. You need for people to see you as an authority. And how do they see you as an authority? Well, you educate them. You show them that you know the way, and you lead them to a solution.
And then the pitch, if I understood correctly, the pitch just unfolds by itself.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: That's exactly right. You know, there's a real theory behind this that there was an American psychologist who in 1920, coined this term the halo effect. And that's really what I'm talking about here. And the halo effect, all it means is it's this. It's the way people perceive you based on some other quality.
So if. If those of us in the business community who are trying to build our book of business and get more, Build our pipeline with the clients we want more and more of, take advantage of this halo effect. When you are seen as an incredible expert, an authority, like you said, that creates the illusion, if you will, to your audience that, hey, these guys must really be the problem solver I'm looking for. Because look at how they're educating me in these five minutes that I started talking with them. So that's why it works. It's because you are showing up in a way that is different from the rest of the pack who's just trying to give the hard pitch and the hard sell.
Educate them, educate your audience on a real problem that they're trying to solve and talk about how you would do that in a way that's different from the others. And that. That's really what I'm talking about here.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: So I, you know, I never heard about the halo effect. Thank you for mentioning it. I will do more research on that. That's super interesting.
And you know, the fact that you mentioned that it is how people perceive you based on your quality.
And I. It makes me think, okay, so this also has to do with the no like and trust thing. If you have an authority and people know you because you're educating them, they start to liken you, and then they start to trust you, and it just creates a whole triangle. You know, the trust that they have in you, the trust that they have in the fact that you can solve their problem, and the trust that they have in. All right, if I put myself in your hands, I trust that you're going to solve my problem and that I can make it work.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Yes. You know what's so interesting about what you just said is if you were to rewind like a decade ago, this would not be true. We would not be having this conversation. Because the thing that instilled trust is relationship. And that was over everything else. Relationship, Relationship. Relationship is how you kept clients, how you. How you would close ongoing business.
Today, it's different because.
And why is that? I think it's because of how loud and noisy the marketplace is with so many different offerings and so many different solutions and so many different choices. So now relationship no longer has the power that it once had. Is relationship important? Of course, I would never say it's not important, but in order to get on someone's radar, stay on their radar, and then ultimately get selected, it's about your expertise. How much of a credible authority are you? And we've done research on this. We've been doing this for over 10 years at this point, and we've seen this shift specifically in the B2B marketplace, where firms used to close deals on relationship alone. And that no longer works.
The thing that. That buyers are looking for is expertise. And so there's actual science behind this. But I. I just thought it was so interesting when you brought that up. It made me think of that dynamic and sort of the decreasing power that relationships have.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I.
What you just mentioned reminded me of.
There's a book I read a few years ago. It's called the Long Tail.
And what do you say about how the market is so. No, not noisy. Noisy. That's a really hard word for me.
It's so noisy nowadays, it's because we have infinite shelves. Like, you go to the grocery store and you see, I don't know, 5, 10 products of the same thing, and you have the shelves there. But now with Internet, it's just infinite.
And I think it's harder and harder nowadays to.
Again, what you said, to. To get on the radar, to stay on the radar, and then to be selected.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Yes, yes, absolutely. And you're hitting on another important dynamic in this overall shift, and that is everybody learns and make decisions online. I mean, and of course, people still call their friend, their colleague, their peer, and say, hey, I'm looking for X. Who do you know that does that? That still happens. But when those referrals get put into place, the very next thing the person does is they go online and check out the names of the people or the companies or whatever the products that was just referred to them. So we are all being judged and vetted, whether it's fair or not, by our digital presence. So our brands have to be up to snuff, and they need to Be presented as authoritative, as informative, as educational when people do find us online.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
You know, I think that to piggyback on what, on what you said, it made me think that it's like, yes, we need to be the authority. Needs to be presented as authority. Authoritative, informative, educational. But also it's no longer only about what we know or about who we know, but about who knows us.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Yes, that is, that is very true as well. And when.
So let's get into that a little bit.
It used to be that referrals would just say, oh, you know, give Anna a call, she's amazing. And then someone might give you a call.
So to your point, because we have so many, so many choices these days now those referrals need to say more. And you want referrals to say, call Anna. She is the expert in X. Nobody knows more about growing businesses than her. If you want to talk pipeline, you've got to talk to her. She's, you know, that's what you want referrals to say. And if you don't build a brand around an some kind of expertise that you have, it's harder for referrals to say that. That's where they just say, oh yeah, Anna has a podcast. It's interesting. You know, that's totally different than saying what you are an expert in. And so you're right, it's what people know about you. And then I would go further to say it's what they say about you when you're getting referred or when you're getting vetted against a list of five other companies or products.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess that being a jack of all trades is not so good anymore.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. There's two things that are not good anymore. Being a jack of all trades and being the best kept secret. Secret, like those things, those things used to get leverage, but not anymore. And yeah, it, you know, expertise is the opposite of, of jack of all trades. And you know what's opposite of being the best kept secret? Being visible.
It's just being visible. And so we actually coined a phrase. Speaking of phrases that are coined, I mentioned halo effect earlier. We actually coined a phrase called the visible expert. And what we mean by that is don't just be an expert. Your expertise needs to be visible. It needs to be findable. So when you're visible as an expert, you've achieved like the holy grail of what you want to achieve for your business. Because that's when people come to you, they're so hungry for true authentic expertise.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: Yes, Authenticity, self.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Yes, it does.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Now Liz, can you tell me just like one practical or like a tactical advice for people to be visible?
[00:11:53] Speaker B: That's a great question.
So one thing I always say is when it comes to building visibility, there's no get rich quick scheme overnight. You know, it's not like you do this one thing and all of a sudden visibility magically appears. So people have to prepare to be consistent. I mean, look at your podcast. You have a consistent thread of valuable podcasts through conversations with very informed individuals and you keep that consistency up. It's really, really important that when companies are out there trying to build visibility for their brand, that whatever the technique is, they're doing it with consistency. So there's no one and done when it comes to what techniques will work. The best way to answer that is to study the behavior of your audience.
So in, in what I mean by that is audiences will like, let me reverse that. Sometimes companies say, okay, our marketing budget is X. Let's spend it all on these three trade shows. Let's just make a big splash and we'll have the best booth.
And then it's crickets after they spend that money on the trade shows. Why? Because if they had taken the time to study how their audience learns, they might find, know what, our audience doesn't even go to those anymore. Or they send their junior level people there and all they do is party and they're not even interested in the walking around the booth, you know, show floor. So you really have to understand, how does your audience learn? In what channels are they learning? What are they trying to learn about?
And that is that intel is what you use to figure out.
Should you be in the public speaking circuit? If so, where? What should you be speaking about? Should you be in social media? If so, where and what should you be posting about?
Should you have a blog? Should you have a podcast? Does your audience like to consume information in a digital format like video and podcasts? Or do they prefer to read like a downloadable piece of content?
So knowing, I see companies just sit there, smartest people around their boardroom table all the time and they come up with like the marketing techniques of the day. Let's do these three things.
And it never works because those techniques are not tied to how their audience actually learns. So it was kind of a long answer, but hopefully that makes sense. It's really about knowing the tactical is about how your audience learns and gathers information.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes total sense. I love it. And I love what you said about study the behavior of your audience and like learn how they learn and know how like where they're at and you know, human psychology does not change. And if you, I think if you crack the code of your audience, like again, where they are, what they like, what they want, the only thing that you need to do is to do the reps and just like get all your at best in.
[00:15:19] Speaker B: That's right, that's right. And, and think of marketing as like a well oiled machine.
So to the point that you're making, they learn in different avenues at different times, at different stages of the journey. Right. So that's why short digestible pieces of content work so well for just trying to get on someone's radar. If you're trying to stay on their radar, well that's where things like a downloadable piece of content, something that you can track so you're seeing, oh, people gravitate towards this now I'm going to send them that. And then finally when you're trying to get selected, that's usually another mindset that your audience is in. So different techniques at different stages of the mindset. The decision making mindset is also so important.
Love it.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: So Liz, tell us about who you are and how people can reach out to you.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: We work in a very defined space. We work exclusively with professional services firms so that's a challenging space because our clients don't have a widget to sell. They have expertise which is intangible but that's who we work with.
I just love working with that space because it's so gratifying when you can help them understand how to grow their businesses.
And I would encourage people to go to our website, hingemarketing.com make sure you say Hinge Marketing because the other Hinge is a dating app.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: So we're here.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: The first thing I thought we named our company first so but go to hingemarketing.com and check out our library because we have all kinds of free content there that talks about some of the research that you and I talked about today.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Awesome.
So we're going to wrap it up here. Thank you Liz for joining us and sharing some wisdom about thriving in a competitive industry.
You can learn more about what Elizabeth does by visiting hingemarketing.com check out their library.
If you are an agency coach, professional services provider or otherwise some expensive stuff, we'd love to have you in a future episode. You can
[email protected] and once again, if you want to learn about the new way, we're booking dozens of qualified calls per week with no ad spend. Download our free
[email protected]. that's all for now. Go get that big ticket punch. See you later.
