Network Like Mad, Become an Authority, and Grow Baby Grow

Jeffro (00:01.227)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Have you ever considered how building the right connections or even writing a book could completely transform your business? Well, Devin Sizemore has built his career helping professionals unlock the power of relationships and establish themselves as ultimate authorities in their industries. Through his consulting business and his work at Million Dollar Author, he’s guided many entrepreneurs to build million dollar networks and leverage books to drive business growth. In this episode, we’re going to talk about how to align your offline and online strategies, how to redefine your target audience to eliminate competition and how to use a book to position yourself as a thought leader. So whether you’re looking to grow your network, boost your authority or just rethink your marketing approach, I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation. So welcome to the show, Devon.

Devin Sizemore (00:45.912)
Thanks so much for having me, looking forward to it.

Jeffro (00:48.779)
Yeah, me too. And I think the first thing we should talk about is your audience. You know, a lot of folks never really picked a target audience when they first started out. So maybe after a while, they don’t think got a better idea now of who they serve. But you also talk about shifting your target audience to avoid competing with your competition. And obviously, that sounds pretty nice. Can you walk us through how a business owner might identify and connect with this new audience?

Devin Sizemore (01:13.238)
Yeah. So, so I call it the connection expansion exercise and we’ll go deep. I want to drive as much value and clarity to your listeners as possible. So when I ask a room of people, who do you want to connect with the thing that comes out of their mouth or the thing you might be thinking about when I say, who do you want to know who’s a good referral is you default to a client profile, right? Which is great. You should know your client archetype, especially if you’re doing digital marketing or anything online or any direct marketing. Great. You have to know that the problem is if we’re having a meeting or a conversation and that’s your answer, what you’re expecting is for me to then connect or refer you to whatever that profile type is. But what happens is I now have to go through and determine, do I have someone in my database that I can connect you with that needs your product or service right now? And I’m okay with you selling to them. And so it creates, it creates so many levels of conflict and friction.

Jeffro (02:03.681)
Right.

Devin Sizemore (02:09.056)
And so when I have my marketing agency and I was looking at scaling and growing, I wanted to be the authority in rooms where my competition wasn’t playing. so that 15 years ago started building the foundation for this. And so what happens in the connection expansion exercise is we do identify the client profile, which you have, I’m sure everyone listening can do that much. Next, we look at who has access to our clients. So we look at the vendors they spend money with, where they seek education, where they gather who has influence over them, who do they trust, and then who’s a general connector that has access to everybody. As we’re building those lists of access to our clients, we then start looking for alignment with our own personalities, hobbies, character traits, things we like. And we find that common ground where there’s a demographic and event people who have access to our clients that we can relate to really well, and that should shift to becoming our ask.

Because now if I say, I want to know business CPAs, you can go through your list and be like, I know four business CPAs. And you can make a direct intro saying, hey, Devin has mentioned that there’s great synergy between business CPAs. There’s no friction, right? It’s an additive conversation. And so now it starts to unlock your current network and position you for a better future.

Jeffro (03:27.49)
Well, that makes sense. And I think, yeah, you just kind of have to shift how you’re thinking about it. Because I think, you know, there’s a lot of business owners that end up defaulting to networking in order to grow their business, even if they’re dabbling in SEO or paid ads. But if they don’t have a budget or they’re starting out, you know, this is what they do. They talk to people. And so this is an important way to approach it so that you get more out of it. But with that in mind, let’s talk about alignment a little more. You know, how do you make sure that what you’re doing in terms of offline networking actually aligns with whatever online marketing strategies that you’re doing.

Devin Sizemore (04:02.038)
Yeah, so let’s take a profile type. this is where it gets really fun. And we were doing this with our clients when we had a digital agency. Again, that was a long time ago. But I have a lot of friends in the industry, including you, which is great. As we identify these connection sources, so let’s say an output is, let’s go back to the business CPA. You identify that the business CPA has access to a lot of your ideal clients. If that becomes true, then what we could start asking ourselves is, How do we create marketing strategies to reach the business CPA, not our ideal client? Because if we can draw in business CPAs to have aligned conversations with us, where we can look at JV opportunities, referral partnerships, strategic alliances, embedded offers, whatever it might be, we can then position ourselves for exponential growth, right? Because we’re creating a lot of advocates, a lot of people in the market who can talk about what we’re offering.

So yes, you should still have your direct and market channels, your paid channels, your social channels, all those other things. But if you can start building these funnels and communicate and add value and educate after those target demographics that have access to many of your clients, we can start creating an audience there. And that’s where we get these really interesting leverage points. But agencies aren’t going to play there because they don’t understand why you would want to target these people who aren’t your clients. And you probably don’t understand that either.

What’s great is once you understand it, you can build and leverage the things that are already working to reach a different demographic that’s super accessible, but invite them in in a much more conversational way to have a consultation, talk strategy, and become advocates for each other.

Jeffro (05:47.613)
Right. And as you’re talking about this, it makes me think a lot of brand partnerships where it’s like, we are the official sports drink of Dude Perfect, right? Like Dude Perfect, YouTube creators is probably not the target demographic of Prime or mean Body Armor. And I think that’s their actual one. It’s their audience, right? And it’s the young, active people that watch their videos. And so they’re doing the same thing. They’re trying to work through Dude Perfect to get to the people they ultimately want to be in front of.

Devin Sizemore (06:18.926)
100 % and no matter what industry you’re in, there is a amount of your business that’s coming from word of mouth, right? Coming from people who believe in you and are advocating for you. So why can we not gamify and scale that up? And then if you can figure it out, empower all the amazing service providers around you to help you tap into that audience.

Jeffro (06:38.272)
So then let’s walk through this a little more, because obviously I think we conceptualize this with products, right? It’s easy to attach a product to somebody like that. What about with services though? So let’s say I go to the business CPA and like, hey, I want to be your official website partner. Are you going to put me in front of all your clients somehow and on your invoices and like, thanks to Frobro for being our website partner. How does that actually work?

Devin Sizemore (07:03.394)
Yeah, so let me give you some real case studies, right? And we’ll default to industries that maybe your listeners can relate to, right? So one thing I did is I realized when I had my agency and we were a much more digital focused agency is that, you know, I got to reach business owners and ideally I want to reach the decision maker. But I need to educate them about this really complex topic that no one really understood, especially a decade ago and so I went to local credit unions that I had good relationships with, and I talked to them about, who are you trying to reach? They’re like, business owners. Okay. So we’re aligned that we both want to reach business owners that are decision makers. I said, well, I love providing education. Why don’t we host a monthly event where you invite your business members to get educated on websites, social media, SEO, conversion rates, bounce rates, all of the lingo and stuff. I’ll sponsor it. I’ll pay for the food and I’ll provide the education, but you fill the room and you can invite people from the community, right? So you can get some new potential members in. So we co-created something where is the credit union my client? No. But the credit union and I were able to come together and go, okay, we have this need to reach the same audience. I can provide out value through education. They can provide value by hosting a space and filling the room. And collectively, we create this amazing experience. So that’s one example of how could you co-create and leverage a relationship

That’s not an ideal client. The fun part about that story is they actually ended up becoming one of my biggest SEO clients because they listened to enough presentations and went, wait a second. Right. But another example, we did a lot in the childcare industry. And so we reached out to the coaches. the top coaches that coach childcare business owners, right. On how to grow and scale their business. And I went to the coaches and said, Hey, it seems like this is who you’re targeting. Great.

Jeffro (08:36.691)
Ha

Devin Sizemore (08:56.77)
This is what I provide. So that’s just an overview of service. And we’ve had a lot of success in this industry. Let me show you some examples, right? And we’ve talked through it. Hey, we would love to work with you to help optimize what you’re doing. And in turn, we’d love to plug into your events, into your podcasts, into your interviews, whatever it might be so that we can be an aligned partner. And so over time we are in trust. And what happens is we end up at their trade shows as the only exhibitor selling what we do because our relationship’s so good they won’t even let a competitor in the room. So that’s where you become the authority in a room of ideal clients with no competition. And so any, with that last example, any vertical niche that you’re looking at going, that’s a great client type for me, who’s the coach that influences them and can you get to them? And if you can get to them, then we can co-create content, we can collaborate, we could find ways to add value through books, right? We haven’t even gotten to books yet, but I just ordered 400 bucks to give away at events as an added value alignment with the people I’m partnering with. So there’s a few examples for you.

Jeffro (10:04.21)
Awesome, that’s really helpful. And thank you for that. I hope you guys at home are taking notes because I know the wheels are turning in my head already. So let’s talk about books since you brought that up. I know you’ve got a lot of expertise in helping professionals write books. Can you just expand on the role of a book when it comes to establishing someone as the ultimate authority in their field?

Devin Sizemore (10:25.58)
Yeah, so this is one of those things where I think we all, know, hindsight’s 20-20. I wish we all could go back and do something different. I wish I had written a book 10 years ago. Having worked with over 60 authors last year on writing their book, implementing it seeing an ROI, I then became a client, right? So I wrote my own book. So when we talk about books, I can talk about it from having my own and what I’m seeing, but also from what 60 plus clients are doing. The interesting part about books is they’re not all equal and this is really, really important. There are pamphlet books and e-books. I would put those in the same bucket, right? We’re probably all used to that, right? You opt in, you get some sort of short, maybe a white paper style, under 20 page something. Great. That’s great for conversion funnels and whatever we’re trying to do. But that doesn’t build a ton of authority because it’s not the tangible physical take real estate thing. We also have the other end of the spectrum, which is the super dense thick books or tech books or workbooks. Those books that I think everyone’s probably read or even the audio books you listen to where you’re like, I’m so committed to this, but I’m only three chapters in and I can’t finish. and the bookmark ends up in there or the audio book just ends up not being played because you just can’t stick to it. So what we specialize in and my recommendation for anyone listening is we write high value books. So super valuable, great content, very packed but we like to call them airplane books. You need to be able to digest the book in about two hours. So my audio book just launched. My audio book is one hour and 54 minutes. In that time, what happens is people not only will buy your book, they can actually get through the whole book, which allows them to lean in to the credibility you bring. getting back to your question, it’s about the type of book you write, but if we write persuasive books, it will undoubtedly position you as the expert at whatever you do, it will unlock doors you can’t even understand, and your pipeline and revenue has to increase.

Jeffro (12:29.607)
So let’s, obviously I get that. think a lot of people agree with that sentiment. I think there’s also people who have taken the time to write a book and then they hit publish and they cross their fingers and nothing happens because obviously you need a marketing plan behind it in order to actually leverage the book for speaking engagements or more business or whatever. So can you talk about that piece a little bit?

Devin Sizemore (12:52.652)
Yeah, it’s critical. have at least one meeting a week with someone who wrote a book that’s doing nothing. Not one of our clients, right? But someone else in the market who wrote some sort of book. Common things that you need to be really careful with, the title and the cover design are critical. I see that be a mistake a lot where you align it with something you think feels good, but not what your audience wants, which makes it really hard to market the book. But to your point, the book is a tool.

You’re not writing a book to sell a million copies and hope that that million dollars or whatever you generates, which you’re going to retire on, right? You’re writing a book to be a tool and you have to treat it as such. This is another asset to your marketing funnel. So using it as an opt-in is great, right? So you can build funnels just around your book. Hey, download the ebook copy, right? But you control the PDF, you capture their content, you send it to them. Now they’re in your funnel. Now you can nurture them Right? That’s an amazing way to generate revenue. And a lot of authors do that. You can also leverage the physical copy, which is what I do a ton of. So what I did when I wrote my book, as soon as it came out, is I sent all of my top referral sources, a hardcover of my book signed with a call to action bookmark. And then I gave them two paperback copies as well with my business cards and a call to action bookmark and said, Hey, just wanted to send this to you. Appreciate the support over the years. That alone filled my calendar. Because they have a physical book in their hand and now they feel like they owe you. So they’re gonna share the other books you gave them, because that’s instant value. And, right, the people who get those books then reach out. So that’s me being proactive on actually putting a book in the mail, yes, the mail, right, and hitting people in their mailbox in a way that most people aren’t, because I’m adding real value. The other thing I do is I’m a closing keynote at an event and then I just align with another event that I’m sponsoring. And as I mentioned, I’m giving books away.

So everyone attending the event is gonna get a copy of my book with a call to action bookmark in it, teasing whatever I’m trying to promote. So I’m adding value, because they get a book that they perceive has a $15 value, right? So there’s real tangible value with a call to action, and now it’s sticky. When’s the last time you threw a book away? When’s the last time you actually went to a trash can? You didn’t, right? Books don’t, they take real estate. They end up on the bookshelf on your nightstand on a desk, and at some point they’ll engage with it.

Devin Sizemore (15:13.354)
and that’ll be that memory hook that like, yeah, that’s right, Devin is the expert on that thing. So you have to use it as a tool. We have dozens and dozens of strategies. You’ve gotta use them. And you gotta find the ones that are working. You gotta A-B test it, just like you’re doing with all your other marketing. But it can unlock things that again, maybe some of these other things you’re trying are stuck.

Jeffro (15:37.978)
Yeah, I like that glimpse into how what’s possible right if you do it the right way and use it as a tool Let’s talk about the the front end though because some of these people he said already did the work of writing a book What about the people that have just been too busy to sit down and write a book? Maybe they’ve got the knowledge or expertise but They just will never get around to it. How do you help them actually get a book made?

Devin Sizemore (16:01.346)
Yeah, it’s another huge problem, right? I would say four out of five people and four out of five listeners here probably want to write or thought about writing a book or someone’s told them you have an amazing story or you should share what you do. It’s very common. The amount of people who actually get across the finish line, a fraction of a fraction. And so that’s where Million Dollar Author, that’s where we come in, right? We want to partner with you to get you across the finish line. There are a lot of publishing companies that will pitch your stuff and maybe help you write it. What we pride ourselves in is we have a system where if you by yourself can dedicate 30 minutes a day to write, we can get your book done in 90 days. Or we have a done for you system where we’ll interview you for two hour interviews, we’ll capture all the content, we’ll assign a ghostwriter, they will write in your voice and we will still chase that 90 day mark to get your book done. Because the act of writing a book is great. You’re gonna get clarity, you’re gonna get… you know, validation in your process. You’re going to get edified in the process by getting feedback and testimonials. But until you have the physical real thing, until it’s on Amazon, until you can put the best seller logo on it, it’s not doing anything in the world. So let’s get to the finish line. This does not need to be a one year, two year, three year journey. Matter of fact, the guy this week I talked to whose book’s not working, took him three years to write the book and it’s not working. Right? So it’s a double ouch.

Right. So let’s get your book in the world. Right. And for my book, it was 45 days. So from blank screen, the book in hand printed was 45 days for me. That’s probably not your normal experience, but that’s my reality. And then I was using the book and ordering copies right away, right. For funnels, for Legion, for speaking engagements, podcasts, client referrals, events, I’m sponsoring direct sends to cold prospects, anything and everything I can do. So

Jeffro (17:23.578)
Mm-hmm.

Devin Sizemore (17:51.606)
You gotta partner with someone who has a track record of getting books done and has a system that can get you across the finish line and does everything. You don’t wanna go to someone who can just ghost write but can’t format, do the cover, do the title. You need the whole package. So find a company that can do that and let’s capture your knowledge, let’s get it in the world and let’s make you an authority.

Jeffro (18:14.637)
Makes sense. And with that in mind, can you actually walk us through a success story of one of the clients where you’ve helped them write the book, you’ve helped them market it, and it actually did help their business grow?

Devin Sizemore (18:27.372)
Yeah, I’ll share. I’m going to share a few just so there’s a variety. So first, Liberty Spenders, Kurt and Kristen, they’re great. So this is a marketing company. They specialize in helping people tap into religious and political marketing. so owning those things, fascinating, by the way, super controversial, especially now. So they launched their book to make a pivot from raising political funds to going into a full scale marketing agency. Multiple six figure accounts that they’ve closed since having a book.

Jeffro (18:45.86)
You

Devin Sizemore (18:57.932)
Reclaim your role as CEO, Jason’s awesome. So he pivoted from the SEO world. He still has an SEO agency, he’s brilliant in that space, but he also does fractional COO work. And so he used this book to launch that direction. Before the book was printed, he closed two clients, just teasing to his network what was coming. So two clients before the book was even published just by becoming an authority. And another example, wealth manager, get wealthy for sure, MC, great guy. Um, he, when I was talking to him last week, had two people that booked on his calendar from reading the book. Um, they showed up with highlights and bookmarks and asked him questions about specific pages and strategies, which basically pre-sold everything he was selling. So these are just a handful of, again, the 60 I just worked with, but we worked with over a hundred last year clients that are using the book in some way, or form to open doors and make

Jeffro (19:53.323)
I love that. I do hope to write a book in the near future. I just have to prioritize it a little bit. And I think that’s always the key, right? You got to decide you’re going to do it. And then you partner up with someone like you who can actually make it happen. Otherwise, it’s just going to stay at the bottom of the list somewhere.

Devin Sizemore (20:10.358)
Yeah, you need, you got to put some skin in the game too, right? Like the reality is you got to buy in because then you’re committed to getting it done.

Jeffro (20:18.424)
Right, exactly. ideas are a dime a dozen, especially as entrepreneurs and business owners, we’ve got so many ideas that we never get around to. But something like this is so if you do it right, it’s not only a cool thing to have a book, to be an author, but like you said, you’re able to leverage this to grow your business, right? Which then if you do it right, you can now hire people and free up more of your time and all that, especially as you become seen as an expert in these things.

I think it’s really exciting and I love the fact that you’re doing this and helping other people do that. What else would you say? We started by talking about networking, right? Are there other ways that professionals can use their networks to create opportunities that aren’t immediately obvious and basically think outside the box to make stuff happen?

Devin Sizemore (21:06.508)
Yeah, so amazing question. 100%. So I will guarantee you without a doubt that your current network has opportunity that you haven’t tapped into. And it goes back to shifting your ask and shifting your mindset around your network, right? So often we’re focused on closing deals, filling pipeline, and we’re so stuck in that, which is great, and you should be, because revenue does drive business. Don’t mistake me, right? Please hear me that you need those things. You need funnels, conversions, leads, you need it all. But… If we just go to your network and we just reach out to one person a day, just one, and we just send them this message, hey, Bob, I hope you’re doing well and having a great day. It’s been a while since we last connected. Anything new and exciting in your world, any new challenges. I’d love to get a time on the calendar to catch up, see what’s going on in your world, make sure I make some connections for you. Here’s a link to my calendar. I look forward to meeting. Just a nice check in email, all the languages about them, and an invite to have a meeting.

You’ll start booking some meetings on your calendar with people that again, you’re not getting value out of right now. They’re just a name in your database. Now, when we get into that meeting, we want to mine for information and we want to do a few things. First, we want to ask enough questions so we can recalibrate, right? Who they’re chasing, what services they’re offering, who would be a good connection for them. We also want to make sure we learn enough so we can edify them and we can say like, Hey, you know, Bob is the best at XYZ.

And then want to be able to make two to three strategic connections for them within 24 hours of the meeting. If we can add value by making those connections following the meeting, what happens is we start to train our network to do what we want, which is to make connections for us. And this wheel starts to pull out value out of this network that you already have. But you’re again, you were so focused on profiling into prospects instead of profiling into just open conversations and educating and adding value. And if you can shift that, happens is your calendar will fill up, you’re gonna start adding value to a lot of people, and you create this value equity where everyone owes you now. And that’s when the scales tip and you start getting referrals and connections back in a big, big way.

Jeffro (23:22.85)
So I like that and I want to ask a clarifying question because I can see how this would happen where people start referring people to you, but maybe their network’s not that good and they’re just like, I got to send somebody to Jeff or whatever. And they send you somebody who’s not a good prospect at all. Right? And so now you’ve got this meeting on your calendar that’s just a waste of time because they were never going to buy. They don’t have the budget. They don’t have the right stage of their business or whatever. And now You committed a meeting with them and you don’t want your calendar to be taken over with all this waste of time. How do you avoid that?

Devin Sizemore (23:58.882)
Yeah, so there’s five core principles I talk about in the book. One of them is never make assumptions about a relationship. And so you never know what that person has access to. And so my challenge is if the meeting feels like a total dud is to ask more and better questions, right? How deep can we go so that I can mine for it? What does their spouse do? What does their family do? What is their friend circle? What organizations are they a part of? So you have to become truly curious about the people you’re meeting so you can find the opportunity, even if they can’t find it themselves, right? Even if they’re sitting in the room going, have no clue how to help you, Devin. Great, right? I’m going to ask enough questions to figure it out. And then my ask is always around where I think there’s potential, right? So, Hey, I want more speaking engagements, podcasts, whatever it might be. I’m going to ask for things that I think this person’s equipped to actually help me with, right?

Yes, if they’re going to buy, I’m going to start moving them down a pipeline funnel. I’m going to do call us to action and close them, right? But if there’s nothing else that comes out of it, I’m going to position my ask to mine for the best information I can. And then I’m going to trust the law and numbers, right? I’m going to continue to stick to the plan, add value and stay curious. And you’ll be amazed what happens just this week alone. A private invite to sponsor an event that has no sponsors. That’s interesting because now you’re the only voice of authority, right? Podcast invite for a podcast that doesn’t book, like you can’t get onto it. Matter of fact, most people pay to be on it. Invite to a private mastermind that’s sold out, but they gave us a spot. JV partnership to a JV list that typically pays, but for some reason we’re not paying. Like these are all real outcomes from meetings that I had no idea what the outcome would or would not be.

So you gotta take the meeting and stay curious and then play the game, right? Like how do I make and find value here and how do I add value?

Jeffro (25:58.858)
Yeah, no, I love that because you can’t have the short-term focus on either this is a customer or it’s not. And then you check out, no person is a dead end is another way I would put this. Right. And yeah, if you’re, if you’re thinking long-term, then you can of course afford to be curious about this person, not knowing where it will lead, because you don’t have that arbitrary deadline in your head of like getting something out of this person tomorrow. Right. So.

Devin Sizemore (26:24.61)
Yeah, let me share one real quick before you ask the next question. This is fun. So the book client I met with this week, IT company in New Jersey, wrote a book, right, that’s not performing. That is a seven layer deep referral. That is a direct client referral, right? But I actually traced it back. I’ll record a video on it because it was fascinating. I was like, I want to see how many layers of connections there are here. And it was seven before the direct person I knew.

So they introduced me to someone who introduced me to someone who introduced me to someone who introduced me to someone who introduced someone who referred me to this ideal client. Now there is stuff happening with all of those other people, but sometimes it takes that many before you get that hot to close ready position prospect. And I’ll play that game because I’ll play it longer than you, which means I’ll out compete you and I’ll end up in rooms that you’re not in.

Jeffro (27:15.616)
Well, Devon, this is awesome. I love how excited you are about networking. It makes me get more excited about it and want to kind of start booking more meetings and referring more people on things. So I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing this background and all these ideas for how we can get more out of our networks and help more people at the same time. So I hope some of our listeners are going to be doing the same thing. And you guys at home, if you want to connect with Devon or maybe even get help with your book, his links will be in the show notes. So definitely check that out and connect with him.

One last question for you, Devin, before I let you go. For small business owners who may not have the budget to hire a consultant for a book or any piece to help them grow, what would be your bit of advice for them that they can implement today to strengthen their networking or marketing efforts?

Devin Sizemore (28:03.404)
Yeah, it’s a great question because yes, it is an investment, right? But we all want the cheat code and the short strategy and things that work. you know, authority through content works no matter what strategy you’re using. So if you’re comfortable hitting record, right, record some content because that will help and start to position you as an authority. If you don’t want to do that, then write some content. If you don’t want to write and tap into the million AI tools that are out there to help generate added value content to position you as a, as an authority.

and focus on solving problems. One thing you can do right now is open your social feed on whatever social platform you’re on and look for people who are asking questions. Right? What are they asking for? What solutions do they need? Start solving those problems. Tag other people in your network, share links and podcasts that might provide value. Recommend a book to them. Just that activity alone will start to rewire your mind to look for all these opportunities to add value. That costs you nothing.

but it starts to make people in your network aware of you, brings you back to top of mind and starts to show them, hey, that guy knows people or that gal knows people. They’re, they’re, they’re going to add value. All the stuff we just talked about, you can do for free. You just have to commit to do it and then stick with it because nothing happens overnight. All of these relationship or authority building strategies take time. So commit to it now, give it at least 90 days and see if it’s changed your mindset or it’s opened some doors for you.

Jeffro (29:35.272)
Yeah, no, I love that because networking is not about sitting back and waiting for the value to come to you. It’s about being active and going out and providing value to others proactively. So I think that’s a great place for us to end today. Thanks again, Devon, for being here. Thanks to all you guys for listening. Keep thinking outside the box and I’ll see you back here next time for Digital Dominance. Take care.