GNT #186: I read my recommendations

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A few weeks ago I was updating my LinkedIn profile, and I ended up reading all sixteen recommendations that had been sitting there for years. I hadn't looked at most of them since they came in.

Every one of them describes me as a marketer.

They aren't wrong. I was a marketer. I ran marketing for fast-growing companies and then built a fractional CMO practice.

It just isn't the work I do now.

Any one of them on its own is a nice note. All sixteen together are a description of what people think I do, and that description is years out of date.

Today I want to talk about the description of you that's already in other people's heads, and how far behind your actual work it can get before anybody says anything.

Below are the four questions I'm sending out to find out what mine says now. (Steal them.)

Let's dig in.

Nobody updates a recommendation

People describe you as you were when they needed you. That's fair. They worked with you in 2019, so they write about 2019.

Then you keep going. I stopped running marketing campaigns, stopped being the marketing leader, and started helping people with deep expertise grow efficient and profitable businesses that don’t eat up their life. That change took about three years, and it happened one client at a time.

The people who knew me as something else never found out about any of it.

Your reputation and your work can drift apart, a little at a time, and nobody tells you.

What that costs you

People hear a problem, they think of you, and they picture you doing what you did for them. So the referrals that come in are for the work you used to do.

In July, someone I trust called me because a company she knows had just lost their marketing person. She thought of me right away, and I was glad she did. She was describing the marketer.

I took the call, and we spent most of it on a different question: what did that business actually need the marketing function to do, what did they need this role to produce, before they hired anybody else into it. That's the work I do now, and she'd never watched me do it.

It ended well. I'm advising that company now on how to build the right growth team, and she decided to hire me to coach her on her own solo business.

That only happened because I was in the room and could turn the conversation.

Most of the time you're not in the room. Most of the time the referral goes to whoever matches the description someone already has, and you never hear about the ones that went somewhere else.

Four questions

Sixteen people wrote down what I was good at, and every one of those was written years ago. Nobody has told me anything current. That's what I'm going out to get.

I'm sending these to three people this month. Someone who sends me work, someone I worked with back in the marketing years, and someone I've worked with in the last year.

1. When something comes up in your world, what do you actually want my take on?

2. What do I always pull the conversation toward, even when you didn't ask?

3. What do I do that seems natural to you, but you'd say is rare?

4. When you describe me to someone else, what words do you actually use?

Tell them to be honest, not nice. If you skip that instruction you will get compliments instead of answers. The people who like you will be kind. The people who have worked with you will give you the polished version. Neither one tells you anything you can use. A sentence or two off the top of their head is all you need.

The fourth question is the one I care about most. I want to know the words people actually use to describe me when I'm not in the room.

Pick three people, send the four questions, tell them to be honest and not nice.

Read what comes back next to the old ones, and see how far apart they are.

(Bonus: If an answer comes back that makes you think, YES, that’s it… ask that person to post it as a LinkedIn recommendation. Add it to your website if you have one.)

Takeaway

You probably have your own version of the 16 somewhere. Old recommendations, testimonials, a folder of thank-you notes, the sentence a client said about you that you never forgot.

Go read them. Then look at when they were written, and ask yourself whether that's still what you want to be known for.

If not, it’s time to refresh your reputation.

I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.

-Colleen

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