[00:00:00] Hey, welcome to Selling Your Expertise, the podcast that helps you go from I Hate Sales to, oh, wow, that worked. I'm your host, Renee Hribar sales coach, speaker, author, and your business bestie, who's here to help you make some without ever feeling like a fake or your pushy, or you're weird. No, we're not doing it.

So today we're kicking off with something I get asked all the time, Renee, how do I create content that actually leads to sales? Now, please, I am not a content creator. I don't feel hesitant around creating it because my framing around creating it is different than the typical marketer who's gonna sell you a content calendar again.

God bless it. I hope that those work for you, but all the ones that I've ever seen are just someone else's recipe and not necessarily what you need. So today we're gonna kick this off with something I [00:01:00] know you're going to be able to use this week because my answer to this question is anchor content. I now, now, how is that different than regular content, Renee?

Well, anchor content is a, a framing that I used ever since I've come to the online space because yes, I understand. I ,agree that you do need to publish content. Your business needs to publish content, but you, you should not have to constantly be thinking about it all the time, however. You know that I love laser focused scalpel, not shovel, and that is where of all the types of content that are out there, anchor content.

I love it because it works. Even before I publish it, and it works forever, which is just so good, right? I could say it work works, right? WERK. Okay, maybe I'm not cool enough for that. So here we go. And I really, before you roll your eyes and think, Ugh, another type [00:02:00] of content I have to create, listen, hear me out.

Anchor content is not just content, it is a sales secret weapon. Most of the women that I work with come from a corporate background. They spend the last decade working on their skillset, and they are good. Uh, uh, they're so good that they get referrals pretty consistently. That's usually how they make their 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 grand a month.

Hey, some months they make 15, 20 grand, and then the next three months. They're looking for scraps. They're wondering where their customers are, and it's because they're so good that they've been able to make money on referrals, but it's not consistent and it's definitely not forecastable. So anchor content puts our hands back on the steering wheel and puts us in charge.

Sure. It's going to work for us Evergreen, and that is great. However. Right now, it will work for you also. So as soon [00:03:00] as you create this anchor content or even have the idea for it, like I said, it'll work before it even gets published. I am gonna invite. A few people, like two or three or four, maybe five people to check it out and something like this.

For me, I do a video for my anchor content. However, I also do this podcast. This could be considered my anchor content, so it's either audio, video. Written, I've definitely written my fair share in LinkedIn. I use articles all the time, so I'll take a transcription of either a coaching session or maybe even this podcast, and I will work with it until I can come up with a long form piece of content.

So I use anchor content in different mediums, audio, video, and written, and how I use it. Even before it's published, to help me lead that person to what could be a sale, right? To give me the best chance possible to get a possible conversion [00:04:00] is education. So when I say to three or four or five people that I've already been chatting with about something, typically it's my connection strategy from a few days ago.

If I'm doing anchor content in the middle of my week, which I encourage in my seven day sales cycle, that I teach zero to sales in 10 minutes a day, right? So if those of you who read the book or been in my membership or my courses, you know this, if you don't make sure you get that free sales training.

Start the journey because once you're on my email list, you can hit reply and ask me anything, and it is a great place to stay on top of what is happening. All the cool things that I do, a lot of people are like, oh, I didn't know you were gonna do that. Oh, well, you should have been on my email list. So ultimately, the way that I leverage anchor content before I even.

Publish it is. I ask those handful of people. I say, listen, I'm about to publish a whatever, whether it's gonna be a podcast, a video, or a written piece of content. But I'll use video in my case. [00:05:00] Say, Hey, I'm about to publish this video. I don't even know if it's any good. So a little self-deprecating humor works for me because that is my personality and that is something I would totally say, and you can make it your own, but something like, Hey, I'm about to do this thing.

I'm about to publish this content. I'm not even sure if it's any good. It'd be great to have some friendly eyes on it. Can I send you the link to it? To check it out once it's published. Now, if you've been talking to this person, you know, whether you interviewed them or whether you asked them to help you out with some research or whether you, uh, were commenting on their content and sort of got into a chit chat, uh, on LinkedIn or another social platform.

Maybe you sat next to 'em at a BNI meeting, or you met 'em at a conference and you've been hanging onto their business card and you meant to, to call 'em back, and you finally did call them back maybe yesterday or. A week ago, and now you're in this point where you're like, oh, you know, I'm talking to this person.

I want to keep talking to this person. What do I say? Well, in every sales process you get to that [00:06:00] point eventually. Usually pretty quick because you're like, okay, what else do I talk about? You can invite them to something you're doing. Anchor content is something you're doing, but you are clever. You're smarter than the average bear because you're listening to this podcast and you're not just gonna hope things go to plan.

Oh, no, we don't hope. I'm not a gambler. I do have hope, but I don't rely on it. I can't cash it, and so. What I do is make sure that those people are invited to check out something that I'm about to do. I'm not even sure if it's any good, but it'd be great to have some friendly eyes on it. Can I send you the link to check it out once it's published?

Yes. Is typically the answer. Yes. Sure. People want to help you out. This is a psychological proven fact. This is not just my opinion, even though my opinion is based on hundreds of thousands, and I'm not even. I would might even be more hundreds of thousands of sales [00:07:00] conversations throughout my career, hundreds of thousands of data points from my own experience and.

Everything that I'm gonna be talking to you about, whether it's here on this podcast or anywhere else, is about developing a relationship that's genuine based on context. And so these data points that I'm giving you here, my experience are all leading up to what I would never give away. People remember those uh, questions.

What if you could go on a desert island and you only had one thing, what would you bring? I'd bring anchor content 'cause that. Stuff is powerful. Okay? So anchor content, I would say, Hey, can I send it to you? And they would say, sure. And then once I publish it, which is usually that afternoon or the next morning, I would send them another message wherever I was communicating with them.

So people ask, well, I don't really like social media, so I don't use that fine. What I teaching you has, you can use social media, but it has not, it is not dependent on social media. I would say more than half [00:08:00] of my career was. Before social media, so I mean, I obviously translated it because it's talking to people.

So wherever you were talking to them, you sat at 'em, you sat next to 'em at a conference, you probably have their cell phone number, right? Maybe you text each other to meet up for coffee, text them. Maybe you are email friends because you're on their email list and they're on yours, and you email back and forth.

Cool. Email them. Maybe you talk in LinkedIn Messenger or Facebook Messenger or Instagram, whatever, wherever you speak to them normally ask them this question, Hey, I'm about to publish this thing. It'd be great to get some friendly eyes on it. It's been a hot topic, you know, that kind of line of questioning.

Again, in my, when I work with people and in my courses and and membership, I talk about these specific scenarios with the women that are in there. Because it is contextual. It does matter. It cannot be just copy and paste, please. It's only a few people. Pay attention to who you're talking to and [00:09:00] what you might say.

But definitely say something and honestly, less is more. So now you know that you can use anchor content and that it's so powerful. It would be the one thing I'd bring to a deserted island, and now I'm gonna tell you what you can do to create it. Now I'm gonna talk to you about this based on a very recent experience with one of my students for this story, because I'll never call anybody out on the carpet.

I'm gonna call her Kelly. Okay. So she is a branding expert. She is Abso freaking brilliant at helping people figure out their brand archetypes when it came down to creating content. Though that actually sold her services, she was dun, dun, dun. Overthinking it. Sound familiar? I mean, for real. She's so smart.

And I know if you're listening to this, you're. Very smart on what you do and you are so into what you do that you think everybody knows what you know. [00:10:00] Right. It's very difficult for me as well. I struggle with this also. I'm like, you know how to send a dm. It's no big whoop. Right? Or you know how to go into someone's office and talk to 'em.

It's no big deal. And meanwhile, I have clients that, I am not even kidding you. I've been on Zoom with them holding their hand virtually as they. Held back tears sometimes had to stop to cry before they could start a sales call. And these are grown women who have held executive level roles in other companies, but they have just never.

Worked on their sales skills and that's okay. They're so good at what they do. They hadn't had to, but there comes that point when they either need to or they decide to be proactive. And so that's when we usually meet. So you're here. Now, we've met, and I'm gonna tell you about this story about the woman we're calling Kelly.

She's brilliant at branding. And branding is one of those things where if you ask 10 people what branding means, you're probably [00:11:00] gonna get. 10 answers, am I right? So, I mean, she had all the ideas. She knows her stuff, but every time she sat down to share anything. She wasn't sure what to say, so I coached her through it, specifically around her anchor content.

So she's a student. We were working together. We've been working together, and she would come to these live group calls every time being like, you know, I'm talking to people, Renee, you'd be so proud of me. I connected, I used one of my favorite connection strategies, a poll, and I was, you know, chatting up, you know, five, 10 people.

I've never talked to that many people just casually about. Things that are on the internet. She goes, like, I, I'm so proud of myself. But then it would stop when it came to anchor content. She just couldn't wrap her head around it. So I'm gonna walk you through the same exercise that I walked her through.

Okay. You ready? So what I told her is this, number one anchor content equals your demo. Right? So [00:12:00] when you, let's say buy a car, uh, or. A mop, right? I just went to Costco today, God help me. Um, and it's always an adventure there, right? And I went in real quick. They have the dog food that my dogs love right now.

And they were like, oh my goodness, there's all these demos out. And I had to see it, right? I had to do it. So I, I ended up going into the dog food tasting something and I was like, all right, fine. That taste test is a demo. So when you buy things or that car, you go and test drive the car. That's a demo.

It's demonstrating what it is, how it works beyond the name, the color, the price, the brand on the exterior, right? And so whether, whatever it says on the box, whatever, it's. It looks like on the exterior of the car, when you actually experience it, AKA taste it AKA drive it, you know, with your own senses what to expect, right?

You know, more than words can tell you, am I right? And [00:13:00] so how the heck do you do that if you are. Trying to sell your expertise. You're like, it's so ethereal. And that's where she was coming up against a big brick wall. So anchor content is your demo. She's like, I get it, Renee, I understand your words. And then I broke it down to say this, when she worked in corporate as a brand designer for a huge marketing firm, she was hired for her brain.

She was. Kept on board and grew with the company because of how good she was. So whenever she interacted with anybody through her work, they already knew what she did, how to apply it, why they needed her, and the value of her expertise. But now you take her out of that corporate environment, she's still.

Brilliant and phenomenal. More so now the network just have the restrictions of being in a corporate, you know, under Lord. She was able to just blossom and the work she did is amazing. However, she has to [00:14:00] educate people who aren't familiar with her brilliance, who aren't sure how to use it. For them who aren't quite aware of how valuable it is or how long it would take if they tried to do it, which is a part of our offers, right?

Making those high ticket offers, so it's education. If you've ever heard me talk about the four mile markers that everybody has to cross before they can say yes to anything, even a brick of gold, a free brick of gold, it's education, so proximity, reason to reach out, education indoctrination. Education is the longest mile marker.

So anchor content equals your demo. That's the number one thing I told her. Education cannot be. Dampened. I mean, honestly, it can do not diminish the value of education. So anchor content equals your demo. This is not viral. We're not trying to create a viral video. This is not something we're trying to get 10,000 views on and become Insta famous.

If that [00:15:00] happens, hallelujah. We're not blocking it from happening. It's just not our intent. It's not what we set out to do. So. It isn't designed to go viral. This isn't an email or a DM that you send before a call or before you, your a webinar you're running. It's the post you can reference in a conversation.

It's not about reach, it's about resonance, and that whole experience is exactly what needs to happen so that the person who you want to. Either make your client or connect with them in some way or collaborate in some capacity. They need to know more about who you are and what you do based on experiencing your brain and action.

That takes over when somebody refers you, right? So that's somebody else saying, oh no, she's great. She did this for me. Look. So they show you what, if you're getting a referral from someone, [00:16:00] they show you what the other person did, how they did it, the value of what they did, right? So that's all taken care of.

But if you just are on social media or you have a website, or you're presenting at an event and it's just your title and your bio, it's, it doesn't hit home, right? We need that. Demonstration. Number two, you can reuse anchor content a lot. So anchor content is your demo. You can reuse it a lot. One good piece of anchor content can genuinely last you years.

I use mine in emails, training sessions, welcome sequences, you name it, it goes beyond your title, your bio, and whatever packages you have listed on your website. It does work for you. Like it works. Their problem awareness, their their readiness to. Find the solution that they didn't even know that they needed.

And number three, it starts with a real question. So knowing the anchor content is your demo, number one. Number two, knowing that you can reuse it. And number three, knowing that it [00:17:00] starts with a real question. And this is where you start to build your anchor content. So when I asked Kelly, the student in this example here, what do your clients ask you over and over, and Kelly said.

How do I stand out in a sea of sameness? Boom. That was it. That became her anchor content, how to stand out in a sea of sameness. Now, when she wrote her anchor content, which she ended up writing, she told a story of a real client that she had, but again, like I just did, she changed her name and she was able to give details about the.

This client that she had worked with the before story, right? The client had tried this and the client had tried that and it just wasn't working. And then she met Kelly and when she finally met Kelly, Kelly worked her magic using her signature system, which included brand [00:18:00] archetypes. And of course she went off on what those are.

I can't even begin to regenerate that, but it was a really great coaching session. And Kelly. Got specific. So Kelly was able to share a story of a real client changing her name, answering the question, how do you stand out in a sea of sameness? Kelly got specific, and guess what? People responded. So here's your action step this week.

Write down one question your clients ask you all the time. Not 10, just one. And then either make a short video, a post, or even a voice note answering it so that you can share it with. Someone else. Keep it simple. Keep it real. Don't overthink it. You have you, you can always delete it, right? I have a lot of clients like, oh my goodness, it's out there, girl.

It's, you're not Moses. You didn't write it in stone. I think you can edit it, [00:19:00] right? And so like, give yourself that levity, please. Like give yourself that permission slip. I always reserve the right to make this better. So here you go. For this one action step, starting off today, on Monday, I want you to think about you creating your anchor content, and it all starts with writing down one question that your clients ask you all the time.

Now if you want help turning that into real conversations with clients, click the link in the show notes and hop on my email list. 'cause that's where all the good stuff is. And yes, you can hit reply and I'll actually write back. All right friends, I'll see you on Friday when we talk about what happened when Kelly used her anchor content the right way.

And until then, keep it simple and make it fun. You got this.