What is mavenship?

A maven is an expert in a particular field of business. They are well known throughout their industry and very knowledgeable of it. To be a maven you have to have more than just understanding of a topic; you have to know its ins and outs.

Often mavens are the people that you turn to as experts in a field.

A great example of a maven would be Bill Gates or more recently, Elon Musk. These often-polarizing figures have achieved celebrity status for both being wealthy, respected, and knowledgeable in what they do. Don’t fool yourself, as becoming a maven of your industry is no easy feat. You don’t become a maven overnight. However, there are quite a few steps you can start implementing for yourself and your company, to start becoming one. Even if you do not ascend to a maven, the philosophy contains great nuggets of business wisdom.

It takes years to truly become a maven, and whilst long and hard-earned, there are effective lessons you can take from the theory of mavenship to implement and elevate your business right away.

So instead of being totally fixated on becoming a maven, your time is better spent finding ways the following advantages can apply to a business, and how the lessons learned from Mavenship make you, the business owner, a better leader.

Why is mavenship important?

There are lots of ways that mavenship can be leveraged into your business in terms of mindset, marketing, and sales strategies. There are plenty of similarities between the ‘Client over Customer’ mindset and the ‘Theory of Preeminence’.

Gain authority and influence

You can leverage your knowledge and expertise in your trade or service to become a trusted educational source for your clients. By advising clients with the best solutions for their problems and upholding gold standard business practices in your industry, people will view you as an authority figure. This authority can be leveraged as people are likely to trust you, talk about you, recommend you, and follow you for guidance. Be unique as possible in your messaging, position your advice as different from others, and show how you are doing things the right way. Act as an advisor for how your industry ought to be across the board.

Better sales and marketing messages

When you are seen as a credible source of information, it makes you more trustworthy in the eyes of customers and they then become your clients. Sales snowball when the products or services are of good quality and follow the principles of preeminence, and your company name becomes associated with it. The price then becomes less of a barrier for clients when they have more confidence in the service that they are paying for. By having a highly visible maven who leads the industry, people are willing to pay more for your offering and keep coming back. For example, look at Dyson, the man who convinced the world he is the foremost sucking and blowing expert, and the products his company makes are of the best quality. If you remember Dyson’s story, the company broke into the industry by basically saying all other vacuums are terrible and lose suction. This distinguishes their product as different. Here, we can clearly see the maven advantage being played out. You don’t have to become a maven by taking shots at everyone else in your industry, you are likely to have more success by playing a positive preeminent game where you focus on your strengths and highlight them to their highest potential. This works with the subconscious mind of your clients that keeps putting the message in their mind that your company is the best, leading, and expert in what it does. Over time this information is stored in people’s minds and as long as you can sustain the messages you say in the service that you deliver; people will easily come to associate you with that exact message.

Advertising through social media

Once you position yourself as a bias-free source of information, you will gain access to media outlets looking to run stories based on your ‘tell-all’ industry advice. For example, you reveal unfair tactics your competitors have been using or shine a light on manufacturers that have been cutting corners and sacrificing quality. Remember media sources are good to run both negative stories and success stories. Wherever possible, we recommend that you keep your content positive and reaffirm your core messages and values. If you can get public exposure, it adds another layer of authority and leads to unparalleled credibility.

New streams of revenue

With a new client base, you can leverage additional services to offer. The key is picking additional services that are still within your industry, so you can easily make the connection and sales between the new related products or services and the previous ones. A maven is also positioned to react to changes in the industry. When a major shift in trend or technology emerges in the market, you can start offering it as a solution or alternative to your clients since trust has already been established. Convincing your previous client to opt for the new system or technology that suits their needs will take a lot less effort to do so. We recommend that you aim to be on the cutting edge and never ignore a new potential revenue stream as it could mean the death of your company if you miss a major market shift or lose trust by giving up your expert leading position. Remember RCA with their VCRs or Motorola with their Pagers? Where are those brands today? Companies on the top that disregard market shifts and new technology are often passed by rivals and forced out of the market. A maven is a pioneer of innovation and keeping up with the latest market trends.

Word of mouth referrals

Another benefit of maven marketing is how it generates quality referrals for your business at no cost. With proven success, trust, and satisfied clients, this encourages your clients to recommend your company to others without you even asking them to do so. We can say that getting clients through word-of-mouth referrals is great because there is even more trust that is built up in your company without you having to do all of the work. People want to listen to their family and friends. A recent study found that 83% of people trust recommendations from family and friends. We know that the saying, “All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends and all things being unequal, people still want to do business with their friends” holds true and means that if you can become a trusted advisor, someone that looks after the client, a friend, then you will find it easier to get the business of your client’s friends too. Trust and the emotions that it makes people feel drives client’s decisions. Trust makes people feel a sense of calm, safety, reassurance, and it lowers their anxiety and stress. They are in a much better position and usually much happier when they make their decision. They feel confident that they won’t be let down.