You Are An Expert; Don’t Be Afraid To Use The Term

Tell someone you are an expert and they will listen and disregard the risks of listening.

For long time readers of this blog, you may recognize this reference, but back in 2014 there was a show that aired called “Mind Games”. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in understanding human decision psychology.

My appreciation for the show was clearly a minority opinion as it was discontinued after only 5 episodes, so if you’ve never heard of it; I understand. The show starred Steve Zahn as a behavioral psychology genius with social anxiety and other behavioral problems of his own. The co-star was Christian Slater, who played a possibly reforming former criminal, employed to help leverage his brother’s (Steve Zahn’s character) skills and keep his less helpful traits in check. Each of the episodes featured a “consulting” team who were hired to help influence an individual or group to do what a specific client wanted.

There is a specific episode that I want to reference for this article, because although the show was pop culture, the human behavioral psychology is sound, and it is very relevant for what we are talking about here.

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In the episode the consulting group is working with a client who wants to persuade someone to take his side in a corporate disagreement. The details of the disagreement are not even important because the advice is so simple that it borders on inane. The advice given to the client is to start the conversation by calling out the fact that he is an expert in the subject matter.

Telling someone you are an expert makes it more likely that they will listen to you. This is so straightforward that it almost feels like it is not worth mentioning. But so many people don’t take advantage of the device, that it certainly is worth discussing.

Of course there are a few caveats here. The claim has to be believable, it has to have appropriate scope, and the claim has to be made in a setting that allows for it to be received in the right way. First, the claim has to be supportable by your history, background and ability to converse about the subject that you claim to be an expert in. If the claim seems dubious, you will lose face.

Most sellers are experts in the industry that they work in, and only you know if you are, but learning enough to be able to support that statement is important, and if you are one, don’t be afraid to use the term. Second, the claim cannot be so inclusive that you have essentially told the client that everything you say going forward has to be believed. Make sure to define the boundaries of your expertise in order for the claim to be perceived as credible. Lastly, make sure to make the claim at a low tension moment well before any sort of disagreement seems to be coming to a head. If your claim is perceived to be a tactic to win on a point, it will likely be received poorly.

Telling someone you are an expert in a specific area is not a one-way ticket to always getting the result you want, but what it does is diminish the risk the other person feels in listening to you. Much of the job of a seller is to de-risk situations for buyers so that they feel more comfortable moving away from the status quo, and perception is reality. So, if the buyer feels more comfortable with your expertise, then the situation will seem less risky.

Perhaps more importantly, and sellers don’t do this nearly enough, you should be going out of your way to find opportunities to call others on your team experts. The claim of expertise is even more credible when it is made about another person. So, if you can credibly call people on your side of the table experts, it will be believable, and will do just as much to help buyers feel like there is less risk.

Call your account manager an expert in platform strategy and use-case decisioning; call your sales engineer an expert in implementation; call your product lead an expert in the industry landscape. Don’t be squeamish about using the term, so long as the claims are credible.

So, why is all of this relevant? Well, claiming expertise in a credible, defined, and relevant area is half of the act of giving up power, which we have discussed in past posts. In defining the scope of your expertise, you should be thinking about those on the other side of the table and what that leaves for them. By defining your expertise credibly, you are giving yourself license to take control in the matters that are governed by your expertise, but you are also defining the situations in which you should give up a bit of power and allow the alpha on the other side of the table to have their few minutes in the sun.

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This is not only something that individual sellers should be thinking about, it cuts to the core of how selling organizations should be thinking about defining their go-to-market approach and their definition of expertise. Companies consistently make the mistake of defining their capabilities in the market too broadly. When they do this, the client becomes suspect immediately, and evaluates that claim against all other claims about broad expertise. However, defining expertise in a very focused way allows sellers to develop credibility and productive conversations with buyers.

Selling organizations should be thinking about how to limit the scope of their definition of product market fit; they should be thinking about limiting the scope of their definition of content and collateral, and they should be thinking about how to limit the scope of their training which allows sellers to display credible and focused input for their clients. This will allow sellers to operate in a world in which clients want to talk to them.

Here’s how to think about it: it’s not that clients will listen to you about everything, but defining expertise will help make clients forego the risks associated with taking your advice if you have positioned your expertise in the right way.

Being an expert only matters if the definition of your scope of expertise is:

1. Needed by the buyer

2. Differentiated from others’ expertise

3. Credible

Expertise Sells