Become the Go-To
Have you become the go-to person for someone at any point in your life? In this episode of Incorporating Superpowers, host Justin Recla welcomes guest Theresa Lina. Theresa is the CEO of Lina Group, a business strategy firm that helps businesses become the Go-To leaders in their market space. She is the author of the book Become the Go-To. This book serves as a tool for companies in a competitive market to thrive and innovate– to gain market leadership through differentiation. Tune in to learn the Apollo Method of business success and become the go-to in your market.
Justin Recla:
Welcome back to Incorporating Superpowers. Today, well today, we’re going to be exploring some things that are going to help you be the go-to in your industry, in your market. Because my guest today is Theresa Lina, who is the author of the book Be The Go-To. I absolutely love this concept Theresa. Welcome to the show today.
Theresa Lina:
Thank you so much, Justin.
Justin Recla:
So, you are the founder and CEO of Lina Group.
Theresa Lina:
Lina Group. Yeah.
Justin Recla:
Lina Group. So, this is your firm is a strategy that helps companies differentiate and dominate their market so as to become the go-to resource for their chosen market. So, talk to me about this concept. How do you develop the process that allows your clients to become the go-to?
Theresa Lina:
Yes. So, I actually have written a book on this called Be the Go-To: How to Own Your Competitive Market, Charge More and Have Customers Love You For It. In the book, I lay out the methodology that I developed many years ago, really as much as anything to try to solve my own problem back then. But it’s a four-phase methodology I call the Apollo Method for Market Dominance, and we can get into the details later, but basically, it’s a step-by-step approach for really the four things you need to do to truly differentiate on a sustainable basis, in a competitive, so that you can avoid or get away from being commoditized, and get paid on the value you deliver instead of just, functions, features and capabilities.
Justin Recla:
I love this because, in the marketplace, it really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, and social media has kind of made every industry, even smaller, right? The fishing pond has become smaller because everybody and their mothers are in the market in some way, shape or form. So, when you look out into the field of businesses, what are some of the things that are distracting entrepreneurs, and business owners from really operating at the level which your book highlights?
Theresa Lina:
Yeah. It’s so funny, because I initially developed this for professional services companies, because of course, it’s hard, you can’t touch and feel and try out a professional service. You have to buy it on faith and then experience it, and so those are really hard to differentiate. But then it’s, as you mentioned, as the industry moved online and as digital marketing has taken off, and it’s so easy to go out and see what everybody else does, your customers can see that. Now finally, companies can. You see, it used to be that people had delusions of their uniqueness, and because they really only saw themselves and maybe a handful of competitors, they would bump into specific customers.
As consultants, we would be talking to lots of different companies, and we would be able to say, “Hey, there are 3000 other companies exactly like you. There is nothing unique about you.” But they couldn’t see that. Once everything moved online, people could increasingly see that they weren’t unique. You can Google you, you can go to the websites of your key competitors, strip off the names, and they’re going to sound exactly like you, nine times out of 10, in my experience. So, it became more apparent. So I think, the old distraction used to be, hey, we just need to be different enough from the other handful of companies we’re competing against at this customer. Now the distraction is, oh my God, we got to keep up with the Joneses. We’ve got to at least sound like everybody else.
The people are going in the wrong direction really, usually, because they’re like oh, so, and so is talking about that. We better be talking about that. Instead, you really, and people get focused on capabilities, functions, and features, as I said. They get focused on, here’s what makes our widget operate a little bit differently, or here’s, here are the people that we’ve got in our company or the projects we’ve done, which of course are the same everywhere. What law firm that does intellectual property, doesn’t have a really great intellectual property lawyer on their team who’s done a bunch of IP projects? So, the key is really, figuring out how you can solve problems for companies or for people, for individuals, and how you, what problem are you going to specialize in and own? That’s really at the center of the methodology.
Justin Recla:
I love this. We’re going to dive down this rabbit hole even further on the back, and I want to talk about some of the four principles that you talked about and explore the, some of the stuff that you highlight in your book, How to Become the Go-To. But before we go on break, where can people go find more information about you?
Theresa Lina:
Well, the book website is apollomethod.com. So, you can get a link to buy the book on Amazon, or the book is available at any number of retailers, really, around the world. Although it’s just in English now, it’s coming out in South Korea later this year. So, you can go to Amazon. You can go to retail websites or stores, and then apollomethod.com, and then the company website is linagroup.com.
Justin Recla:
Fantastic. Folks, go take a look at Theresa’s book and start studying some of these principles. I think these are really, really great concepts that we’re going to explore here on the backside of this conversation, right after the break. But before we go on break, if you are looking for a community that is, can support you, uplift you, remind you of who you are in the world, go take a look at superpowerexperts.com. We’re here to support you, to pour into you, to pour into those that are pouring into others, and to remind you of the work that you are here to do in the world because it matters. Stay with us. We’ll be right back.
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