Why You Want To Focus Your Authority On One Thing

It can be tempting to fold all of your consulting business roles into marketing yourself, like these LinkedIn headlines:

Executive Coach, Consultant, Speaker, Author, Business Futurist

Strategy Consultant, Best-Selling Author, International Speaker

Consultant, Entrepreneur, Futurist, Visionary

But here’s the thing: how likely are you to click on one of them because you just can’t wait another minute to know more?

Exactly.

Those headlines don’t do squat to define or attract a sweet-spot audience (and the last one looks downright delusional).

To build authority, you want to focus on one thing. One important thing that you’ll talk about, write about, think about—that you can’t get out of your head.

Teaching merger teams how to get results faster; how to market wellness coaching services to entrepreneurs; or increasing innovation in pharmaceutical research teams.

You’ll have sub-themes of course, but all of your content and marketing revolves around your big kahuna.

Because once you focus your authority, your people can find you and they’ll know you’re the real deal.

I once worked with a Fortune 500 executive coach with some serious credentials. Her problem? Even though she had a high close rate once in front of her potential client, she couldn’t seem to get past their HR gatekeepers.

The first thing we did was skinny down her LinkedIn description (the first headline above): Executive Coach, Consultant, Speaker, Author, Business Futurist.

The mere presence of anything that didn’t narrow that Executive Coach descriptor wasn’t just wasted space—it was actively repelling her ideal audience.

Because the experts who vet Fortune 500 coaches don’t trust the lack of gravitas implied in that title. It came off as “coach-lite” when she was anything but.

Upgrading her hit rate was as simple as creating focus: we narrowed her tagline and content to a white-space slice of leadership and her audience to a set of Fortune 500 technical leaders who were gunning for the C-suite.

Now she had both an ideal client profile AND an area of leadership to start building her market authority (including the name of the book she was starting to simmer on).

Once she aligned her message across her website and social media, those HR gate-keepers not only started letting her in, they started to reach out FIRST when they had a coaching candidate in her sweet-spot.

Authority bonus: in addition to skipping over the beauty contest that is corporate executive coaching these days, she also gets no more quibbling on her fees which are significantly higher than most.

Focusing your authority on one thing will fuel the growth of your reputation, your business and your revenue.