What are your goals?
Whenever I start a new project with a client, the first question I always ask is: What are your goals?
I am consistently surprised at how frequently the person is taken aback by the question. These are people with impressive careers, many of whom have started or run successful businesses. Surely, they have led a goal-oriented life.
But when it comes to a book, or some other type of writing, many jump into the project without much thought to the purpose. Sure, they know what they want to do - write a great book, write a great op-ed, start to write more frequently on LinkedIn - but rarely do they have a good sense of why they want to do all these things.
Creating a quality product is the baseline for an engagement like this. Many people want to write something inspiring, which is a great goal, but that is never enough. Book sales alone aren’t worth the time and effort it takes to write a book. Getting something placed in Newsweek or MarketWatch or even higher-profile places like New York Times or Wall Street Journal will give you a nice buzz for about a day or two, and then you have to go back to work with pretty much the same situation you had before.
Instead, you need to use the product for some goal beyond publication. I’ve worked with people to leverage a book to start a new consulting line, increase speaking engagements, and even get a better job. Some people want to just get their thoughts out into the world, or secure a legacy of some sort, and that’s fine, but I find that with more specific goals, the more the author gets out of the project.
These specific goals can be anything - from increasing revenue to securing new clients to landing a keynote gig. Clients who have a specific target audience for an op-ed (and I mean specific, like one or two potential clients) are usually able to have a much better return on investment than generic brand-building goals.
I actually really enjoy when authors come to me with blatantly ego-driven goals. One person said, I want to get on CNN. Did she land a CNN interview? She did, but that was really only one step in a broader path towards increased exposure for her and her business.
Starting with a goal like “broader brand influence” can be challenging, because that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. That kind of goal may work in a large corporate environment, but for an individual or a smaller company, there aren’t the resources to dedicate to such a large and ambiguous aim. Instead, something very specific like “I want to be on CNN” or “I want to be in the New York Times” can help us back-map the highest leverage goals of the project and identify all the success metrics that could come out of a book or thought leadership engagement.
Maybe you want to be on CNN, but maybe that’s because you think it will get you new clients. If you don’t get on CNN, but do get on the local news and become a go-to consultant in your region, that’s a win. Maybe you say you want a keynote address, but maybe that’s just because you want to break into new industries, and a panel discussion at a high-profile conference would suit that goal just fine.
How do I work with my clients to identify their goals? I use the following questions:
What is the core message/idea(s) you want to communicate? What do you want readers to take away from your writing?
Why are you the one to communicate these ideas?
What is your target audience?
What does your core audience want?
What are they motivated by?
What are they afraid of?
What are they used to hearing/reading? Do you want to break that pattern, or fit within it?
What are you offering them they can’t get elsewhere?
Who are similar leaders you admire and aspire to? How will what you say be similar to what they say? How will it be different?
It’s five years in the future and you have achieved everything you wanted to and even more. What does that look like?
These help me identify the more straightforward goals, but also the things the client might not be thinking about. The audience questions, in particular, help identify potential areas that the client may not have thought about - a new group of people to target, or an opportunity they hadn’t considered.
What are your goals for writing more? Why do you want a book? If you’re interested in walking through these questions, drop me a line.
