THIS WEEK’S BRIEF
Your Clients Already Know How to Find You. Do They Like What They Find?
Hi {{first_name}}! Ya’ know, something has changed about the way people hire professional services and most firms haven't caught up yet.
It used to be that a referral meant a phone call. Someone you trusted told someone they trusted about you and that person called your office. The video on your website, the content on your LinkedIn, the way you showed up online, none of it mattered much because the conversation had already happened before anyone went looking.
That's not how it works anymore.
Today the referral still happens but what follows it looks completely different. Before anyone picks up the phone they go looking. They type your name into Google. They find your LinkedIn. They land on your website. They look for video. They want to see you before they talk to you. They want to know how you think, how you speak, whether you seem like someone they want in the room when something important is on the line.
That research is happening whether you've prepared for it or not. The question isn't whether prospects are doing their homework. They are. The question is what they find when they do it.
For most professional services firms the answer is underwhelming. A headshot. A bio written in the third person. Maybe a LinkedIn post from four months ago. No video. No voice. No sense of the actual human being behind the credentials. Just a resume floating in a browser window.
Compare that to a competitor who has a clean, confident two-minute video on their homepage where they speak directly to the exact problem their clients are sitting with. Same credentials. Same experience. Completely different impression. The competitor feels known before the conversation starts. You feel like a stranger.
This is the visibility gap and it's growing. Prospects have gotten better at doing research and more comfortable making judgments based on what they find online before any human contact happens. The firms that understand this are building a video presence specifically designed for that moment, that quiet window when someone is deciding whether to make the call.
The referral gets them to your door. What they find there determines whether they knock.
Five things you can do today:
1. Google yourself. Type your name and your firm name into Google right now. Look at the results the way a stranger would. What's the first impression? Is there anything that moves or speaks?
2. Watch your own website with the sound off. If someone lands on your homepage with no audio and no context, what do they learn about you in the first ten seconds? If the answer is not much, that's your problem to solve.
3. Check your LinkedIn headline. It should say exactly who you help and what you do for them. Not your title. Not your firm name. What you do for the person reading it.
4. Count your video touchpoints. How many places online can someone watch or hear you? If the answer is zero, that's where to start. One video, anywhere, is better than none.
5. Find a question you get asked every single week. That question is your first video. Answer it on camera in under two minutes. You already know the answer. You just haven't recorded it yet.
One more thing.
If you want to talk about what a simple, well-executed video presence would look like for your firm, reply to this email. That's exactly what I help people build.