Your expertise may not be the first thing your customers need from you.
Before someone is ready for your methodology, they first need clarity around where they are, what problem they are actually trying to solve, and why solving it matters now.
That is the experience before the expertise.
That distinction matters more than most experts realize.
Because before someone is ready to step into transformation, they first need clarity around where they are, what problem they are actually trying to solve, and why solving it matters now.
That is customer readiness.
And customer readiness is often the missing piece in the customer journey.
Experts Often Teach Too Early
One of the most common patterns in an expertise-based business is the tendency to overteach too soon.
Experts naturally want to:
- explain their methodology
- showcase their frameworks
- demonstrate how they solve problems
- provide value immediately
But when customers are still trying to understand their own situation, delivering deeper expertise too early can actually create confusion instead of momentum.
Because your customers are not asking:
“How sophisticated is this methodology?”
They are asking:
- Is this the problem I actually need to solve?
- Am I ready to solve it now?
- Is this the right path forward for me?
That is a completely different stage of the customer journey.
And it requires a completely different experience.
The Role of Customer Readiness
Your expertise is not just meant to deliver the transformation.
It should also help customers prepare for transformation.
That means creating an experience that helps people:
- recognize the real problem
- understand the cost of staying where they are
- identify what needs to change
- see why the problem matters now
- believe there is a path forward
This is the experience before the expertise.
Not because your methodology lacks value, but because people need preparation before they are ready to fully engage with the methodology itself.
The best customer journeys do not rush people into information.
They guide people into readiness.
The Starting Line Matters
One of the most powerful ideas in customer readiness is understanding the starting line.
If someone wants to run a marathon, they do not begin by running 26 miles.
They prepare for the starting line first.
The same is true inside an expertise-based business.
Before customers can fully engage with your signature framework, your solution, they need the right foundation:
- clarity
- commitment
- awareness
- urgency
- belief
Without that preparation, even the strongest methodology can feel overwhelming or disconnected from where they currently are.
This is why so many experts feel frustrated when potential customers say:
“That was helpful.”
…but still do not move forward.
The expertise may have been valuable.
But the customer was not yet ready.
Stop Trying to Prove Expertise
Many experts unintentionally design their marketing and customer experiences around proving how much they know.
But customer readiness is not created through information overload.
It is created through clarity.
Sometimes the most effective thing you can do is help someone see:
- where they are today
- what is not working
- what happens if nothing changes
- what the next step should be
Because people rarely argue with their own data.
When customers can clearly identify the gap for themselves, momentum naturally begins to build.
And that changes the entire buying experience.
Customer Readiness Creates Better Transformation
The strongest customer journeys are not built around convincing people to buy.
They are built around preparing the right people to succeed.
That shift changes everything.
Instead of focusing only on:
- teaching
- pitching
- explaining
- showcasing expertise
…you begin focusing on:
- guiding
- preparing
- clarifying
- architecting readiness
That is what creates trust.
That is what creates momentum.
And ultimately, that is what creates transformation.
Because the goal is not simply to deliver expertise.
The goal is to prepare customers to fully step into the transformation your expertise was designed to create.
And that starts with the experience before the expertise.
Our Host
Tara Bryan is on Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin
Website is: www.Taralbryan.com
Hey, it’s your host, Tara Bryan. And I am on a mission to help more business owners learn to infinitely scale their businesses by leveraging the power of online without sacrificing the customer experience or results.
I like to geek out on all things business strategy, marketing, interactive digital and user experience. This podcast is all about what is working, lessons learned and actionable tips to create and grow a thriving online business.
Join us each week as we dive into different strategies, tactics and tips you can apply immediately to your business.
Key Topics:
Problem Awareness | Customer Readiness | Expertise-Based Business
Highlights
- Customer readiness is often missed in an expertise-based business
- Overteaching too early can create confusion instead of momentum
- How to create an experience that prepares customers for transformation
- The shift from proving expertise to architecting readiness
[00:00:00]
Hey everybody. Welcome to today’s podcast. I am thrilled that you’re here. Hey, in this podcast I’m gonna talk about the pre-buying experience as part of the customer journey. So one of the things that I’m always reminded of every single time I listen to a pre-sales experience, whatever that looks like, is putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and where they are in the customer journey.
So, a lot of times before your customer purchases, right, they’re looking to make a buying decision. Do they want to work with you? Do they believe that you have the authority to be able to help them go from where they are today to where they want to go. Right? So those are the things that they’re thinking of.
You have an experience where you are showing your customer, you know, kind of who you are and what you’re about, and helping them sort of have a micro win, is really the first [00:01:00] step to them coming into your experience.
And so when you’re thinking about what that looks like, whether it’s a webinar, a training, a challenge, a whatever, doesn’t matter what it is, is that your goal is to prepare them to be ready to step into your experience. So if the transformation of your experience is to take them from point A to point B as it should be, right, as you’re, putting them into your offer, the question becomes like, what is it that they need here in order to naturally end up going yes, this is the problem I have, and I want to use my time, my resources, and my energy to be able to solve it now. Right?
So the question becomes, what is this? What is it that you need to do here to prepare them to walk in and say, yes, this is the problem I have and I wanna solve it now.
And this is the [00:02:00] part I think that a lot of people don’t get right. They wanna talk about their experience. They wanna talk about even their, their pathway and their methodology and something kind of, interesting about what’s going on in the marketplace or whatever, right? But they lose that ability to prepare their potential customer to make a buying decision. And it’s not just buy my thing. And it’s not just like, here are the, here are the things like, i’m gonna give you a taste for what my experience is. It’s truly like how do we get them to the starting line and have them be prepared, right?
If I’m gonna run a marathon, in order for me to get to that starting line, I have to be training before that starting line, right? There are things I have to do to prepare myself to be able to run a marathon. If I want to learn how to drive a car, right, there are things that I need to do before I get my license. So all of those things, like what [00:03:00] are the things that your people have to prepare in order to step into your experience so they could start to solve their problem?
That is what the pre-training or the pre-event, or whatever you wanna call it, is, right? It is the precursor that gets them prepared. One of my favorite, all time favorite, webinars that I’ve ever been on was from a, a group and they were, their whole thing is how to have cash flowing assets instead of waiting for retirement.
And so the webinar was all around what age, based on where you are today, what age are you going to be able to retire? That preparation and finding out, like at that starting line, the starting line was like, you’re not gonna retire until you’re 130 years old at the rate you’re going. That prepared people to be like, I wanna make that change, right? This problem I want to solve now because I don’t wanna retire when I’m 130 years old. That prepped [00:04:00] them for the starting line, which made it a really simple way to get to that sale because they had prepped them for that starting line.
So when you think about your thing, what is the thing that needs to happen for them to be so clear that they have a problem and they want to solve the problem now. That becomes your pre-training experience that allows you to sell them into your primary offer. So I challenge you to really map that out, maybe put that in ai. What is the thing that’s happening in the journey before they have really declared that they have a problem. Because the goal of that is to have them identify they have a problem and that you are the best person to help them solve that problem as quickly as possible, and that they wanna make a commitment to solve it now and not six months from now, a year from now, or what, whatever. [00:05:00] That is the whole goal.
So when you show up and you’re training, you are not training people on anything within your methodology necessarily. You are training them on how do they get primed that, that, that they have that problem that they want to solve? Again, when you are focused on your ideal customer, your ideal customer has something that’s happening here and they need to articulate that problem.
When you think about that webinar that I was talking about, the whole webinar was just doing the math to find out what, literally your retirement age is. People don’t argue with their own data. How do you have somebody, you know, get the data to say, yep, this is a problem I have and this is how I want to solve it.
For one of my clients, she is has an experience where she is, the problem people have is that they’re not doing what they, know they should be doing because they’re, they’ve got all [00:06:00] sorts of excuses or all sorts of other things going on, right? And so her, her experience helps them solve that, right? It helps them give them the proper skills so they’re focused on the right things in order to reach their goals. And so the, the pre-training is that they haven’t been able to do that on their own, right? They haven’t been able to solve that problem. Either they don’t know what the problem is, they haven’t defined it, they’ve got 42 million of them, or they just, they don’t know that they need to just focus on one thing and drive that forward through this methodology in order to get to the outcome. So the question becomes what do they need here in order to be prepared to walk in and make a decision to say, this is a problem I have right now and this is how I want to, and this is why I wanna devote my time to it today.
I think I mentioned in a prior podcast that I made a [00:07:00] buying decision around an experience that I was joining and I had to make a decision, is this a problem I wanna solve right now? And is this problem enough for me to be able to put my attention on it? And lastly, is this person the right person for me to spend my time with, right? Do they have a methodology that helps me go from point A to point B in the fastest way possible?
So those are the questions that your people are asking. This pre-session is meant to get them to that point. But they’re not gonna argue with their own data so you’ve gotta dial in what is the data? Right?
When I was looking at it, it was like, okay, I wanna have a certain number of leads coming into my business every single day. Do I have that right now? Go do the math. Go look at it. Nope, I don’t have that. This is what I need. This is the problem I have, and if I don’t solve this problem today, then this is what’s gonna happen. That was the conversation going on with this [00:08:00] pre-training. And then I was like, okay, so yes, I have this problem. This is the problem I am trying to solve. Do I wanna solve it right now or do I wanna solve it some other time? Yep. I wanna solve it right now. Then the third question becomes, does this person have a methodology, a pathway for me that helps me do it faster than I can do it on my own? Do I trust this person? Is this person the person who is the right fit for me? That is third in terms of thinking through this.
So your job in your pre-training is to answer all three of those so that they’re starting on the starting line and ready to move forward. The sale shouldn’t be a big deal if you’ve set up their pre journey appropriately. What that takes is that you understand who they are, what they’re dealing with, and how to prepare them to step up to that starting line.
If I [00:09:00] wanna run a marathon, I do not want somebody to pre-train me on how to sit on the couch, right? I want them to be training me on how to run a marathon, right? What are the things that I need to be doing, right? I need to believe that I can run a marathon. Once I hit that starting point of being able to train for the marathon, I need to believe I can do it. I need to believe that there’s a, I need some help with that, there’s a problem in there and that somebody can give me the path, right? That’s the pre-training.
So when you have a tendency, and we all do it as experts, is we wanna teach, we wanna give them our methodology. We wanna give them the quick win around how we’ve helped people or a little slice of how we can help people. And we go into the weeds and we do all the different things around our methodology and our frameworks and all of the things that’s actually not serving you. [00:10:00] What’s serving you is preparing them to step up to that start line and know they have a problem, so clearly articulating the problem, belief that they can do it, and the need to do it within a specific timeline. If all of those things, all of those boxes are checked, then you know that they’re going to buy.
It shouldn’t be a question, right? So often people are like, well, I don’t know if they’re gonna show up. I don’t know if I’m gonna convert. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. And if you’re designing it correctly and you’re designing the experience in a way that lock steps somebody through the pre-buying experience then the buying experience shouldn’t be a mystery. It shouldn’t be hoping that people are gonna show up because you’ve set them up for success. You’ve set them up to just continue the path forward.
It’s a different way of thinking about that, um, that sort of, sales event, if you wanna call it, that marketing event [00:11:00] in the front of the sale and really starting to dial in what is it that your people need in order to be prepared for that starting line.
So hopefully this serves you. If you love this episode, give it a, like, give it a rating, send it off to your friends. Definitely reach out to us if you wanna talk more about this, would love to and hear how you’re liking the podcast. Alright, until next week.
