Last week I attended a fantastic session at the virtual LMA Conference where Passle's Connor Kinnear was joined by Linda Orton, CMO at Alvarez & Marsal. In the session Linda shared some top tips on how to get experts within your firm to demonstrate their expertise. She then highlighted how marketing and BD can drive value, and ultimately help the firm to win new business. 

In the video below Linda talks through how other Marketers can work with their experts to help them demonstrate their expertise, here is her checklist;

• Establish a personal brand and ask "What do you want to be known for?".  Your experts will know their professional stance and you need to help them build out their personal brand.
• Identify who you want to influence. Who do your experts want to impress and show their clear expertise or knowledge to? 
• Determine the topics that your clients care about. Helping your experts to focus is crucial. What topics will resonate?  Linda recommends the book Shortcuts by John Pollack and says it's a great way to enable people who are not natural writers to use analogies to persuade and innovate. 
• Read what clients read and note what could impact their business. Help your experts to understand what their clients are reading, encourage them to follow their clients and engage with them on platforms like LinkedIn so they can see what actually matters to them.
• Think Digitally, in Short, Pithy Language. Perhaps the most important takeaway - "No one has time to read 5,000-word long-form documents, we all create them, but the reality is most professionals and C-Level folk do not have time to read them" If you can help your experts to write and communicate in a concise manner, it's going to be more effective.
• Write from the heart. If you want to help your people to get better at writing, offer them some tools to improve. Linda's second book recommendation Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, is a practical look at the challenge of storytelling and can be a good source of inspiration and build confidence in writing.
• Share and engage on social media - Once your experts have created a knowledge piece, you cant just post it to the company website and expect it to reach its intended audience. You need to be proactive. Coach your experts into how to get that expertise in front of the people that matter most. Marketing and BD teams can play an important role in driving maximum engagement. Later on, in the session, Linda talked about how they sometimes use LinkedIn ads to increase the reach of the insights.

Why?

The big question is WHY? Why does Linda spend her time and effort to get her experts to write content and then use spend budget on driving exposure on LinkedIn?  What is in it for A&M? or the individual experts? 

The answer is simple - It drives new business! 

As an example, from a campaign with the Anti-Money Laundering team, One insight from one of their experts, combined with some spend on LinkedIn Ads led to 3 Request For Proposals, and an $8 million dollar piece of business.

The full video of the session will be available soon. Make sure to head to blog.passle.net and subscribe to see the full presentation when it is released.