3 Key Considerations Before Your Big Repositioning Move

Hi community!

I'm thrilled to kick off my Authority Insights newsletter with you all. My intention is to share insights, strategies, and resources to help you grow your businesses through leveraging your company’s most important asset: YOU.

I originally planned to launch this newsletter in November 2021, during my book launch for Innovation Starts With I, but my intuition said it wasn’t the right time. So I pushed it out on my passion product roadmap. Please invite others who you think would benefit to subscribe. Hope you enjoy it!

For this inaugural edition, I’d like to share my top 3 strategies to help you make solid steps toward repositioning yourself and your business!?

1. Outputs vs. Outcomes

The first crucial step is to differentiate your desired outcomes from outputs.

When I ask people about their business goals, many speak of wanting a million followers or a thousand YouTube subscribers. When I ask them why, they either don’t have a strategic answer, or they believe that will help them get visibility and lead to business growth, but haven’t done enough research to validate all that effort.?

A bunch of subscribers might look impressive to some, yes, but these are outputs, not outcomes. If you’re a corporate exitor, the whole reason you dove into entrepreneurship was to live the life you want, right? If you’re a visionary, get clear on the what, and don’t jump too fast into the how. Chances are you’re not a thought leadership marketing expert and won’t have the best strategies for the how. You may end up embracing tactics that are exhausting and not getting you the results you want. If your marketing efforts are not generating sales, that’s a key indicator that you may need to re-examine the outcomes you want and get crystal clear.

To get clarity, reflect on these questions:

• Why did you start your business in the first place?
• Looking at the next 3-5 years, what is your vision? What message do you want to share? What transformation do you want your audience to achieve through your speaking, coaching, or consulting?
• At the end of the day, how do you want to feel as an entrepreneur? What needs to happen for you to feel you’ve achieved success in your mission?

Focus on the impact and outcomes, not just the numbers, details, and tactics. Every single action should be aligned with your vision, both for yourself and for your business.?

2. Understanding What Drives and Energizes You

Knowing yourself is key. Following a cookie-cutter roadmap to grow your visibility and business probably won’t work out well for you since it’s not aligned with who you are and your unique strengths. You may make some progress, maybe you’ve checked some boxes, but did that help you get to where you want to be? We don’t know what we don’t know, and if you’re not experiencing the outcomes you want, then chances are it’s time to reflect and get feedback on your gifts.

For example, in the professional speaking world, there are two tracks. The Speaker A track is for experts who are great entertainers and who get energized from being on large stages. They perform well, have excellent keynotes, consistently get great feedback, get tons of referrals, and likely are represented by a speaker bureau or agent, travel regularly, and have a lineup of new fans and stageside leads after they speak. Speaking is their business and a major source of revenue. The Speaker B track is for experts who get energized and grow their coaching or consulting business through smaller groups such as corporate workshops, leadership retreats, group coaching sessions, and occasionally speak on larger stages to grow their authority or as a lead generation strategy. Speaking is not their main source of revenue, but one of their multiple streams.?

Which track aligns most with you? Thriving in front of a large audience or connecting with a more intimate group??

Many entrepreneurs I work with answer “both”. This usually means they aren’t clear enough. It’s best to focus on one track because the roadmaps and strategies to get to those outcomes are different. If speaking doesn’t energize you, or you’re just not great at it and you don’t think it’s worth developing that talent, perhaps writing or a different activity makes your heart sing.???

There’s no right or wrong answer, it’s about what feels right to you and where your strengths lie. This is where getting feedback from others is key. Align your path with what energizes you most. And you’ll double the results.?

3. Less is More

When I launched my book "Innovation Starts With I," I explored various marketing and positioning strategies. There were so many to choose from: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, email marketing, PR, bookstore events, book tours, speaking, pre-order campaigns, author collaborations, getting on podcasts, building a personal brand, getting book endorsements, creating masterclasses and courses, starting my own podcast, and even launching a LinkedIn newsletter! It was overwhelming—if you’re an author, you probably can relate. Prior to starting Ripple Impact, I was executing multiple strategies without direction. I then had to take a step back:

Where could I put the least amount of effort, make the biggest impact, and get closer to achieving my desired outcomes?

My goal was to eventually help entrepreneurs grow their businesses at a larger scale than I was doing at the time through coaching and speaking. As I was still experimenting and figuring out the how, I decided to reposition myself and build my personal brand. It felt a bit squirmish, but I knew that’s how I could make my biggest impact. I was going to be the face of whatever I built next, and I soft launched Ripple Impact to separate the brand identities, since the Saleema Vellani brand would be a forever brand and be focused on thought leadership whereas Ripple Impact would have a program that would be delivered. Just making that separation helped me identify my goals for myself and my book.

I decided that pre-orders would be key in order to generate revenue, given nearly all the in-person conferences I had been invited to got canceled or moved to virtual during 2020. I launched a successful Indiegogo campaign to get outside my sphere of influence and sell thousands of books, along with corporate bulk book orders along with my speaking engagements. I got invited to contribute to some publications, but deprioritized PR as it was just not getting results that would actually help me get to my outcomes in the short or medium term. I context-switched and focused on getting some solid book endorsements, such as from Seth Godin, Dan Pink, Adam Grant, and several others. It took time to get the strategy down right, and then it was seamless execution. I also felt that global book tours would be most fulfilling, so I went to Dubai, Colombia, El Salvador, Oman, Mexico, and several countries to speak to communities of entrepreneurs.?

This may sound like a lot, but my strategies were all connected in some way or another and my team knew how to help execute them, and we had lots of fun along the way. It was initially painful to let go of many strategies I thought would be important, and then I had a sense of relief once they were on the backburner, such as starting a podcast, launching a LinkedIn newsletter, and investing in a hefty retainer for PR.

The key lesson here is that focusing on a few areas that you excel in and that you enjoy—and that are strategic—is far better than spreading yourself too thin.?

Align these areas with your desired outcomes and energizers from the first two steps.?

I look forward to sharing more insights in upcoming editions.?

With gratitude,

Saleema

P.S. If you know anyone who wants to grow their authority and visibility as a means to grow their business, please feel free to share this newsletter with them – it might just be what they need!