How to Build Thought Leadership on the Front End and Boost Conversions on the Backend Even if You Hate Selling with Yifat Cohen

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Marketing Against the Grain. Today, we'll be breaking down how to build thought leadership on the front end and boost conversions on the back end, even if you hate selling. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Ifat Cohen into EO Fire Studios. Ifat helps high-income experts ignite thought leadership on the front end to boost conversion to 40 % on the back end in just one hour a month through her done-for-you service.

0:36In today, Fire Nation, we'll talk about sales resistance, establishing credibility, growing your audience and reach, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Ifat and our sponsors. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy, and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode all about how Liquid IV is using marketing to shake up the beverage world dives deep into the strategies that have propelled Liquid IV to remarkable success, a must listen.

1:10Listen to Marketing Makes Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Ifat, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? Thanks, John, for having me. Most people will disagree with the fact that you don't have to be marketing all the time and you actually can give your best secret away and make a ton of money while you're doing that.

2:00Most people are trying to kind of like herd their information or the best tactics and think like, no, only if you pay me, I'm going to give it to you. But the truth is the more wins you give people, especially nowadays, especially with AI, the more you become the trusted authority and the happier they are to continue paying you for, to keep getting those wins. It's kind of like a little drug addict feeling. You know, you give me one win, I want more. And most people are not willing to just deliver wins like that. Fire Nation, they will want to keep going back to the source of that win. So be that win, which is why we're talking all today about how to build thought leadership on the front end and boost conversions on the back end.

2:45And this is even if you hate selling Fire Nation. So let's get into it because in a world where everyone can try to be an influencer, Everyone can try to be an authority figure. It can be very hard to establish credibility. What is your advice around this? I think the first one is that, you know, you have to get away from all the gimmicks and all the like fancy studios and all that stuff and just get back to who you really are and your authentic self. So messing up in public is totally fine because it makes you human, right? if you are actually not super polished and you are on your phone and you're laughing and you're who you are in real life, that stands out from all day, very perfectly well-defined AI that makes everybody look like, you know, in 4K.

3:38But when you're coming out and you're not just going like, look at me, I am so awesome. I am amazing. Instead, you're going like, wow, this is how I helped John find the headline for his thing and how he got 6 million views from that. Here's exactly what I did. Now you're starting to become this person who people start following and not because you're so awesome, but because you're helping them become awesome. And they follow you just because they want to become awesome. So there's two things to becoming a thought leader. First, you have to have some original thoughts that people actually want to listen to, not regurgitated chat GPT and stuff like that.

4:17So you have to have your own experience. You have to have your own ideas. You have to have the way that you see how to fix the world. And then you have to share it, like generously share it so people can take it and win with it. And when you do that over time, consistently, you start to become the go-to person for that specific thing. Fire Nation, become the go-to person for a specific thing. I love, love when people come to me and they can honestly say, John, I have become the number one solution to a real problem. Keywords, real problem. If you can do that, become the number one solution to a real problem, you are going to win.

4:56But at the same time, and if I, this is where I want to go next, it's sales resistance because it's part of the game. I mean, it's people will resist sales. So how do we overcome this challenge? Well, I think the biggest challenge in sales is when you actually try to sell something. But if you notice when you're in service to someone else, that fear of selling is never there. So when you're helping your family, your friends, you never feel like you're selling, but you're always selling, aren't you? You're selling the movie, the food, the restaurant, the clothes, your ideas, right? With your kids, you're always selling.

5:31It doesn't feel like selling when you're in service. So when you get on a sales call, if you set it up from the beginning to like buy my webinar, buy my product, buy my stuff, it feels like sales and now you need scripts and now you need to go through a process and now you need to overcome objections. But if you come from it from a different point of like, hey, I gave you this one win, for example, do you have any problem? Are you able to apply it? Is there anything else happening in your life that I can help you with? Now it's not a sale. Now it's like, hey, can I help you some more? and everybody wants to be helped.

6:07And if you're solving one problem, it's just one problem. There's like 100 million problems that came from the one solution that you just did, right? So if you're solving that problem, now all of a sudden they're like, oh my God, maybe you can solve the next one. You have a conversation. Can I help you solve the next one? If you can, fantastic. Now you can offer your coaching. You can offer your program. You can offer your service. If you can't, now you're being kinder and you're not just trying to push your webinar and now you're getting refunds and chargebacks and all that stuff. If you can't, you say, hey, I cannot do this, but here's a resource, here's a referral, here is a thing.

6:45So if you're coming from the point of view of like, how can I help you solve an issue, whether with my program or with someone else, there's no selling anymore. They're just like being in service. And we have this saying of like, I'm never nervous when I'm in service. That takes away all the sales resistance and all that stuff out the door. Because you're just being a trusted advisor that's here to really change people's lives. I'm never nervous when I'm in service. Fire Nation, I love that phrase, lock it up, absorb it, make it happen. We talked, Ifat, about credibility and establishing credibility.

7:22We talked about overcoming the challenge that can be sales resistance. If you do those things, now it's all about growing our audience and our reach. but we want to do it without going bankrupt, without spending a ton of money to do that. So what is your recommendation here? Well, we have a service that we call the Zoom Sales Engine. And in it, there is a way to triple your audience for free. And the way that we do that is very, very easy. If I were to give you, John, tickets to, like who's your favorite singer, for example? Taylor Swift. Okay. So if I'm going like, hey, I got a$1 ,000 ticket to Taylor Swift, Or you can come for free and bring two of your friends.

8:06Who are the friends that you're going to bring? I'm going to bring my niece, who's 12 years old and has been begging me to buy her Taylor Swift tickets for basically three years. And then probably my sister as well, because she'll be devastated if I take her daughter without her. So you're going to bring two people who are diehard fans of Taylor Swift, right? You're not going to bring someone who's like, I hate her. Can I watch, you know, Stink or something? Right? Right. And they will feel amazing about you and the opportunity and being there. And they're going to be like bringing all their energy and all their jazz into the concert and just going to love it.

8:42Imagine the same stuff in a business situation where you're going like, look, I got access to this amazing guy like, let's say, Tony Robbins, Roland Frazier, right? Johnny Dumas, right? And I'm going like, hey, you can come and talk to John. He really helped me with this one thing. He's running this session and you can ask him anything you want. Now, what you got, John, is two extra people who think the world of you through referrals, right? You didn't buy them. They're not called. They came in. They're like, oh, my God, the guy is actually helpful. And you're tripling your audience just through goodwill, where people are going like, I want to hook my friends up with that good thing that I got.

9:19And now you're increasing your audience. You're increasing the right audience because they're not going to bring people who don't care about you. you getting people that actually you can actually help which again shows you as the thought leader and you can follow up and help them some more and every time you run it two people bring two people bring two people bring two people and the audience grows with the right guys without any ads and without any advertisement or any you know buying list or emailing or anything like that fire nation Ifat has been dropping value bomb after value bomb. And if you think she's even close to stopping, you've got another thing coming.

9:59So stick around, because as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors, we're going to kick right back in. Things change fast in the online business space. And when you have a team to manage and a business to run, it can be tough to keep up with all the latest and greatest marketing trends. That's why HubSpot created the 2024 State of Marketing Report to pull together the top marketing trends that you need to perfect your marketing strategy this year. The report consists of input from more than 1 ,400 marketing pros from all across the world. That's a lot of marketers, but don't worry. HubSpot pulled out the top trends shaping marketing this year and beyond and packaged it all up just for you.

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11:12Thought Leader is a speaker coaching company that has helped over 550 and counting coaches, speakers, entrepreneurs, authors, and experts land TEDx talks. Thought Leader is not affiliated with TED or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder, Taylor Conroy, is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EO Fire guest. You might be thinking a TEDx talk sounds great, but where do you start? Taylor has put together a free training that's going to teach you how to land a TEDx talk in as little as 90 days. Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online, and more.

11:49Visit thought-leader.com slash fire. Join Taylor for this free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs. That's thought-leader.com slash fire. Ifat, we are back, and I want to talk about skepticism because it's a common obstacle that all of us will face during our journey here. How do we turn skepticism into sales? You know the phrase shopping therapy? Oh, yes. So you find that people love shopping and they want to buy things. The problem is when there's no trust in the purchase itself, in the transaction. For example, I have more trust buying from Amazon than from the manufacturer themselves because I know if anything happens, I trust Amazon to make it right.

12:36That type of a relationship is not easily given online anymore because, you know, after COVID, we have all the fake and the deep fake and, you know, everything there just going like, hey, buy my stuff. So what has happened is we lost trust in everything that we see online. And if we've ever tried to apply the information ourselves and we haven't gotten any wins, we start doubting ourselves. So I can look at you and go like, oh my God, he walks podcasts. I have no idea how to do it. I tried 10 times. I failed. Why will his$2 ,000 product ever work for me? Because obviously the free stuff never did.

13:18I'm a loser. I'm the idiot. Everything that I see that he's doing out there and his audience is doing out there is fantastic. But I tried and I suck. When you start delivering wins in real time, people go like, hey, maybe I don't suck that bud. You know, I thought I can't do it, but I was able to do this one thing and it actually worked. And this is a biological thing. There's a book called The Winner Effect. Oh, yeah. Which, right? Yeah. That basically says that once you get one win, you start thinking automatically like, oh, my God, I can maybe get another one. Let me try again. And if you're the one delivering those wins, they start thinking that you're the source of their winning.

14:00And the next step from buying after that is an easy way because you go like, oh, I can actually do that. This actually works. It could actually work even more if I invest a little bit in it. And the road to sales and results is much easier. Fire Nation, this is the step-by-step process to get you down the road if you're feeling stuck. And I want to kind of move into content creation because, Ifat, it can be overwhelming, to say the least, especially with all these new tech options that seem to be literally popping up daily. So what is your advice here around content creation? The biggest challenge with content creation is that we're trying to do it on our own.

14:40and talking to a motionless camera is the number one killer of any energy or jazz that you can get. And it gets boring and it gets annoying and then there's something else and you'd rather do anything other than create content, right? So even I myself, I have someone who activates my expert gene, as you will, where they interview me about the things that I want to put out there and they get me jazzed up about my own stuff. and when I look at their face, I know whether or not I'm communicating what I'm saying or I'm not being understood. And that little thing is completely missing from everyone who's trying to do it on their own.

15:21And if you look at the big guys, Alex Armozi has a team, Gary Vee has a team, Lewis Howes has a team, you have a team. Nobody that actually can stay with it for a long time ever done it on his own. Even Gary Vee, when he started with the TV, the wine TV, there was a guy behind the camera that would laugh with him when he would say a joke or something like that. And yet all of us, we're trying to be lone wolves, right? And try to get it on our own. And then also try to become experts in something. It just doesn't work. So we have to do it together. The other side is if you want to become a thought leader, you have to have leading thoughts.

15:57You can't get all your content from ChatGPT. You can't just go like, hey, give me all the solutions and then just posting them. Because now you sound like everybody else out there. It's not you, it's not going to resonate, and it's not going to build a brand. So getting over content creation, there are tools that you can kind of like systematize it, but you have to do it with someone else who kind of like judges you up and gets you excited about that content and can do it for you. Fire Nation, this is a process that Ifat has gone through, countless numbers of her clients have gone through. And these are uncertain times.

16:33But even in these uncertain times, you believe that we can still build a brand. Tell us how. Right now, people are really looking hard to who can I trust to tell me what the right thing is. I have friends who are sending me like these links of, hey, this new tech came out because I'm that geek and I'm geeking out over everything. And they're like, hey, is this good? Hey, does this work? Hey, what do I do? Right. Everybody's looking for someone to trust. And you can come out there online and be like, Hey, trust me because I told you to, or you can come in and say, Hey, trust me because I'm actually going to help you.

17:12And I'm going to help you in real time. And I'm going to show everybody how I'm helping you to do that. And so once you start helping people and you build a brand and you know, a brand is what people say about you, not what you say about yourself. If you start helping people and they start going like, oh my God, he's the one who can really help you with podcasting. Don't look for anything else. Forget all the other people out there. That's the path. That's the way. This is who you should go to. That's how you start building your own personal brand of that go-to person, that trusted advisor. And so in uncertain times, a lot of people trying to find the shortcut and they're trying to find like, how do I get out there and what AI can I use to blow myself up and what are all these bots that, you know, I can tap into.

17:56When really what we all want is that relationship with someone that has our back and that we know they have our best interest in mind and they will give us the advice that fits us where we stand today, not five years from now and not three days ago, right? Like this is what I'm struggling with right now. Can you help me? And if you become that person, you will build a brand that is trustworthy, that as technology changes, as politics change, as life changes, they'll still come and refer to you because you're the one who had their back when they needed you. And they'll be very happy to refer their friends, buy from you, tell the world about you, and your life will be amazing because you're actually making an impact and you're actually making a difference.

18:41And Fire Nation, when it comes to all this new techie stuff, there's a great influencer who I follow. His name's Naval. And I love this line that he has, which is, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And the reality is 99 % of people out there on social media are playing stupid games. They're blowing themselves out. They're doing this for a quick look, a quick laugh, more views, whatever it is. But what are they actually getting from that? because they're not providing some real solutions to real problems in this world. And if you are willing to do that by going through this process that Ifa is talking about, then you have lasting influence, a lasting legacy, a lasting opportunity to do some really important things here.

19:31So you see people playing stupid games, that's all right. They're doing what they're doing, but they're winning stupid prizes. We play real games to win real prizes. And real games means provide real value to real people, real solutions to real problems. Ifat, take it away. What's the one thing you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our chat today? I got two things. One, I think, you know, this is another controversy that I think a lot of people won't agree with. I think a course is the obstacle between your client and the result that they want. They come to you and they go like, oh, I want this.

20:10And you're like, sure, three, six months. If you do all this work, you will get there. Most of us don't do the work, right? We don't show up to the gym every day, but we still want the results, right? We still want the six pack. So you can either use Photoshop or you can actually allow someone else to come in and do that for you, where you can focus on your expertise and then someone else does everything for you. And this is something that we do. We take care of all the tech. We take care of all the social, the posting and the sales and everything else so that you can focus on what you want. But if you want to learn to do this to yourself, there's one tool that I would love to share with you.

20:50Yeah. It's called Cast Magic. And John, I will share a link with you. It's amazing. It takes the entire podcast that you just did and creates real awesome content in your voice in your, uh, in the way that you like to do it. And it solves all the content creation. Um, I have a resource sheet that I can share with you with all the tools that we're using that, uh, your people can start using and it will save so much time. The thing is that you have to pay attention to very, very, it's very important because I've tested it both ways. I call it in out. If you give it something that's like nothing, you know, there's no substance to the conversation.

21:31you won't get anything good. If you give it something that has a lot of substance, that is strategically designed to showcase you and your expertise, you'll get amazing things back. So you can test it out for free and see how much time it saves you. But make sure that whatever content you put into it is actually your brilliance, your wisdom, the way you see the world and how you can actually help people. And then you'll get amazing stuff out. Ifat, give Fire Nation a call to action. If they want to learn more from you, connect with you, where do they go? The ZoomSalesEngine.com. Because once you put this system in place, it becomes like an engine that starts generating sales for you and thought leadership and conversions and all that stuff that you like.

22:18So the ZoomSalesEngine.com. Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Fire Nation. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with YC and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type IFOT into the search bar, and the show notes page will pop right up. And that is Y-I-F-A-T. IFOT, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you, and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks so much, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors for sponsoring today's episode, and Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs are great at three things.

23:00Productivity, discipline, focus. That is why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master these three things in 100 days. And we're talking step-by-step. Visit themasteryjournal.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy, and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode all about how Liquid IV is using marketing to shake up the beverage world dives deep into the strategies that have propelled Liquid IV to remarkable success.

23:36A must listen. Listen to Marketing Makes Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions.