How to Sell Expensive Intangible Services Featuring Steve Gordon

Today on Smashing the Plateau, I'm speaking with the CEO and founder of The Unstoppable CEO, Steve Gordon. In today's episode, you will learn how a book can accelerate the growth of your consulting business. Stay with us to hear all the details. How do you feel about your business? How would membership in a caring, collaborative community help you work toward your goals faster, with fewer costly mistakes?

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Now let's welcome back Steve Gordon. Bestselling author and marketing expert steve Gordon gives you the blueprint for writing your own million dollar book in days, not months or years, and shows you how to use your book to boldly win the best clients and command premium fees. Steve, welcome back to the show. David, thanks for having me. David Shriner-Cahn: So I can't believe that it's been five years since you were on Smashing the Plateau back in 2017. You and I were both podcasting back then.

We're still podcasting. Now that says something about either our lunacy or, or our perseverance, or maybe both. Pig headed, determination. David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah, and it was a great episode. Then we're going to get into that in a little bit. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background that will clue people in on how you became an expert on writing a book. So I've been working with, and in myself, professional services for.

more years than I want to admit at this point, but let's just say I'm past the two decade mark and heading towards the three decade mark. And I started my career in an engineering firm and bought that firm after I'd been there for about four years out of college and learned really quickly that it's hard to sell something that's very expensive and completely intangible that your clients don't understand.

And, I left that firm 12 years ago and started helping, other professionals with their marketing. And one of the very first things that I wanted to do was write a book. established my own authority and expertise. And at the time I found that to be really difficult. It took, took a couple of years to actually get it done. I threw two book drafts in the garbage on the way to getting one done. And when I finally published my first book in 2014, it changed everything. Really almost overnight.

I had a one and a half person, local marketing consulting firm at the time, and really didn't have any clients outside of our local area. And we went in about a week, during the launch from being that local one and a half person marketing firm to, having clients reaching out to us from literally all over the world and it changed our business virtually overnight. And we doubled that year. We doubled the year after we've grown ever since.

And since then I've written five books and we've reversed, engineered a process to do it really quickly. And now we've helped dozens of other professionals do the same thing. David Shriner-Cahn: So you've had, a major shift in your business. In particular, since you've written your book and now that has become something that you focus on. Your audience hasn't really changed a whole lot is what I'm hearing, but what you're offering for them has changed. It's grown.

So in my first book, which is called Unstoppable Referrals, I talked about this referral process that we had been developing with our clients at the time where we would use what we called a referral kit, which is, might take a number of different forms. It might be a presentation that you go to your clients and you offer through them or your referral partners and you offer through them. That might be a white paper. It might be, at the time we were doing, audio CDs, believe it or not.

And we had a client who was using a book and it turned out that the book was really, the most effective of all of the forms that we tried. And when I wrote my book and applied all those same principles and realized not only is it the most effective, it's the most effective by 10 X, our clients started seeing that and they started asking us, Hey, you've had so, so much success with your book. I'd really, I've always been thinking about writing one. Could you help me write one?

And I resisted for a long time because it was tough to get that first book out. And I wasn't quite sure we had the process down enough to do it for anybody else, but I kept getting asked and I kept getting asked and it really is the lynchpin for our referral strategy. So now we lead with, Hey, let's create your book because that's going to make every other bit of marketing that you do better. And we also then will teach them the referral strategy on the back.

David Shriner-Cahn: So tell me a little bit about this process to create a book and how you've really simplified it. So the first two attempts that I had to write a book were probably like what most people do. they want to do it and they have some general ideas and maybe you've got a rough outline and I would sit down to write and I'd be all full of caffeine and excitement and. be off to the races and I'd get through a chapter or two.

And then somewhere along the lines, things would just take a left turn and I'd look at the, that what I'd written the next day and go, where am I going with this I'm lost now. And that was a wall for me. And so I heard a podcast interview back in, it was late 2013. I started writing that first book in January of 2014. And I can't remember who was being interviewed, but he described his process and how he broke down his book. And I thought, oh, okay, that's perfect. That's what I need.

So I went and broke down and outlined what became Unstoppable Referrals in about six hours in one day. And I was able to outline it to such a great level of detail that when I started writing, I never had an issue looking at a blank page with that little annoying blinking cursor that wants to, wants to take you under. And that was really the difference.

So I got up every day before the family was up and I wrote for an hour and every time I did that, I'd open the laptop and the next prompt was right there. And one of the real keys was, using questions. So we, the way we do it now with clients is we typically help them organize about a 10 chapter book. And, sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's 15, but give or take 10 chapters. And inside each chapter, we use the rule of three. So there's three main points.

And again, these are hard and fast rules, but they're guidelines. And then in inside each of those main points, we have them lay out three questions to ask. And when they get down to that level of detail. And, but the fact that we're using questions really helps the brain keep going. And that is what speeds up the writing. And so my record for writing a book is eight hours.

I wrote a book that's just shy of a hundred pages and eight hours using this method and our clients routinely who aren't professional writers, who most of them would tell you. I'm not that comfortable writing. They'll come in. And in about 30 minutes a day, over the course of 30 days, they'll have their book finished. The first draft will be done. It'll be ready to edit and publish. Wow. David Shriner-Cahn: And what kinds of results.

Do these folks get once they get the, and is this their first book typically? For most of them, it's their first book. We do have a number, a growing number of clients who are coming back for their second or third or fourth book with us. But for most of them, it's their first book. And most businesses only need one. One book will transform your business. And the results obviously vary greatly by the type of business they are.

But almost universally, what we see is they get this initial sort of bump in the marketplace because it's an exciting thing to publish a book. Most business owners have thought about it at one point or another, and they, when we talk to people, they constantly are telling us, oh yeah, I've had this on my bucket list for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years. And when you go out to your network and say, Hey, I just wrote a book I'm really excited about it.

I would really appreciate your help in getting the word out. People get really excited. It gives them some good dues to go share about you and they really want to get behind it. So that typically will lead to, the first wave of new clients coming in for our authors. In that first batch. And it's really exciting to see we'll have people text me and they'll say, Hey, I just shared my book for the first time and you won't believe it.

I've got five people that are willing to share it, or, I shared it with somebody who. I know I should have been a client of ours for years. And, now he really understands what we do and we're meeting to talk about how we can help him. So it's fun to watch when those sorts of things happen. David Shriner-Cahn: Steve, how long are folks commonly in business before they write a book like this?

Most of the people we work with are, they've been in business for at least a few years, but we've actually got, three, now we have used this process to launch their business. we're working with an educational consultant out of California. And, she was a teacher who wanted to move into the private sector, start her own consulting business and worked with her to get her book written. She launched it last November and within a month she had received national media coverage.

She's been mentioned in national media, had a couple of feature articles on her since then, and went from no business to a thriving now consulting practice in, in less than a year. So it really works at all stages.

David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah. so for somebody who may be a longtime employee, somebody who's mid to high level, who has been in the workforce for 20, 25 or 30 years or more, and they either decide they want to transition into consulting, or they've been pushed out of their job and they decide that they don't want to do that anymore. They want a consulting business. How soon should they think about a book?

I think if you're going out to do consulting in an area where you already have expertise because of your role and in your corporate job, I think one of the very first things that you should do is write the book. It's going to leap-fund you ahead, maybe five, even 10 years from where you would've been. Otherwise you're going to be perceived in the market as an authority and an expert right away.

And you, and I both know this transition from having a, a regular job and a regular paycheck into the entrepreneurial world into consulting is a tough transition for people. And I, a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's, you now have all of these options for what you should do with your day and your time. And when you're in a job, you've got guardrails.

When you come out into a consulting practice that you're trying to build, and you're trying to get clients as the kind of first order of the day. There are easily a thousand things you could choose to do. And, most of them won't give you the level of authority that having a book will give. And, the book will allow you to focus your efforts around that.

It'll allow you to let the book go and promote you, instead of you going and trying to sell people and working with you, it'll go do that hard work out in front of you. David Shriner-Cahn: How hard is it to write a book when you haven't really decided on exactly what kind of niche you're going to serve? Because one of the challenges I see with new consultants is they have built up their expertise over decades. They have pretty broad expertise, in a discipline.

So there are a lot of different kinds of problems they could solve. There are different kinds of ideal clients that they could pursue. And they're often really challenged to go narrow and pick one to focus on. Is that a challenge for writing a book before you've really established much of a practice. We work with people who've been in business for decades and they still haven't made those critical decision. They're still working with any client that comes along.

So don't know that it necessarily is unique to people who are new to consulting, but I do think it's an important decision to make. It's one of the things that when we have a client come in. One of the first conversations we're going to have is, who are we really serving and how narrow can we make that? And I will tell you that it's hard to make that market too narrow for most consulting practices.

And you think about most consultants they're going to work with anywhere from five to 50 clients in a year, on average, maybe there are a few, that'll have a few more than that, but we're not talking about needing to go out and find 10,000 people to work with. And so that, that gives you a unique advantage compared to a lot of businesses. You almost can't create a market too small to serve. So I've got a financial consultant that we work with. We've done four books with him.

And, when we started working together, his main market was anyone who was preparing for retirement. And then, within that he had a sub niche of people who were members of the state retirement system here in Florida, where were both based. And then he of sub-nitched that down to professors at one of the universities in the city where he's located. That's maybe 10,000 people total. And since doing that, he's had four record years in a row with a total universe of prospects of 10,000 people.

You can't get it too small. David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah. That's assuming that they have the interest, the need, the resources. Sure. And the willingness to pay you. You it's gotta be a viable market. It's gotta be a group of people who would normally buy the type of thing that you're offering, but you've gotta work really hard to get it too small. David Shriner-Cahn: Steve, are there things that consultants and people selling their expertise?

Can do in advance of deciding to write a book, that'll make the process easier. So I think the number one thing to have, and I think this is really foundational to starting the business, but it also is vital to writing the book you need to have what I call your opinionated worldview. And what I mean by that is, when most people start a business, they start it because they believe that there is, some problem out there in the world and that they have a unique approach to solving it.

And, I've had consultants push back on this and say, I do it like everybody else does it, but yes, that may be true. But most of the time there's a twist that is uniquely yours. And it's often that twist that you're building the whole business around. And yeah, you want to have this reason why we exist Thinking done coming into it. I think that's really important to have David Shriner-Cahn: What's your unique worldview for your business?

My, my unique worldview is that selling professional services is different. That the way that most of us are taught to market and sell works really well if you're selling a product, but when what you're selling is your own expertise, you have to take a different approach. Most of the sales techniques that work really well for products actually, erode trust if you're selling yourself.

It's very hard to use some of those sales tactics and then go jump in the phone booth and come back out in your Superman Cape to save the day as the super consultant and have the person that you just arm wrestled to the sell, with all your fancy closing lines and scripts and all this other stuff that people teach and then have them accept your advice as a trusted advisor. And you've gotta take a different approach.

and that's really everything that we do comes from that place of equipping consultants to, to be able to make that very different type of sale and make it easier. and more simply. David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah. How closely aligned is the process you're describing to consultative sales, where you're as the salesperson, you're just helping a prospect, solve a problem.

I really think that the book is the sort of the tip of the sphere in that, one of the reasons that we lean on that tool so heavily is that for a lot of the people that we work with, putting on the salesperson hat, isn't their first desire when they wake up in the morning, it's not what they see themselves as. And what the book allows them to do, and of course there are other formats you could do. You could do this in a presentation, you could do it in other formats.

We just find that the book carries so much more authority with it and is easier to share than any other thing that we found. But the book allows you to take all of your best thinking around how you solve a particular problem for a particular type of person and package it in a way that's very easy for people to share. It's no risk to the prospects, because there's no scary salesman, that's going to jump out of the pages and make 'em buy something.

And it gives you the space to make your entire case. And so one of the things that we walk all of our clients through is we're. We're laying out the book, as we want to start with, what is the problem that the people you're trying to serve are grappling with. And not only that, what are the consequences of it? Because they may have an inkling of some of the consequences because they may be experiencing them.

But you, as the expert know that if they don't address this, they're a big, scary monsters right around the corner. And they need to know about that. So we need to tell 'em those things that builds trust. Then we need to lay. Your approach to solving the problem, we call it your unique mechanism. And this is I always like to equate it to the Wizard of Oz.

you've just been, dumped by the tornado, into this strange place and you want to get home and everybody tells you, you have to follow the yellow brick road. Your unique mechanism is the yellow brick road, and that's going to end at this beautiful gleaming gemed, Emerald city, which is going to be your gateway to your future. And so at the end of the book, we want to paint that picture of what's possible for that person, once you've transformed them and take them on that journey.

When you're able to do that, you can do things that are typically hard for most consultants. That is, you can address all of the objections that commonly come up in sales conversations all up front in the book. You can address all the questions that come up. You can address all of the ways clients sabotage themselves as consultants. We know all the time that we can, lead the horse to water, but we can't always make them drink.

And we can point out all of the places where they're going to, they're going to blow themselves up. If they don't follow our advice. All of. Increases their trust in you. It increases their relationship with you and all of that can be done before you ever meet. Which means when they show up, you have the experience of them basically trying to sell you on why you should take 'em as a client. And that's an easy sales conversation to have. David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah, it is very different.

Steve, I want to, first of all, congratulate you on what you've done with your own business is pretty remarkable. And congratulations also on serving folks, that can really benefit by having a book. If somebody wants to go deeper with anything we've discussed, access any of the resources you might have available, or get in touch with you, where would be the best place for them to go. Yes, David, what we've done.

We've set up a page where they can get a copy of my latest book, which is called the million dollar book, which will lay out our whole system for how you can write your own seven figure business book that will, attract the kind of clients you want. And, I'd love to make a copy available to anybody listening, for free. They can go to themilliondollarbook.org, themilliondollarbook.org/smashing, and they can get a copy there. And, Again, completely free.

We want to get that out to as many people as we can so that it'll help as many consultants as it possibly can. David Shriner-Cahn: My guest today has been the CEO and founder of unstoppable CEO, Steve Gordon. Steve, I want to thank you again for coming back and joining us. David. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. David Shriner-Cahn: When you visit the Smashing the Plateau website at smashingtheplateau.com, you'll find a summary of each episode, along with the links we mentioned on the show.

On today's episode with Steve Gordon, we learned how a book can accelerate the growth of your consulting business. Are you building a community? Check out Circle, the all in one community platform for creators and brands. Bring together engaging discussions members, live streams, chat events, and memberships, all in one place, all under your own brand. Circle is the platform we use in the Smashing the Plateau Community.

I love the way Circle puts your people, discussions and content all in one place. Get a free 14- day trial of Circle at smashingtheplateau.com/circle. That's smashingtheplateau.com/circle. I'm David Shriner-Cahn. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our show. I'll see you on our next episode.