Why the Most Qualified Expert Doesn’t Always Get Hired

If you've ever lost a client to someone with less experience, fewer credentials, or seemingly weaker expertise, this episode explores why.

For years, we've been taught that great marketing is about proving we're the best choice: experience, testimonials, certifications, results. More proof, more clients.

But once a buyer believes two experts are equally capable, they start asking a different set of questions, often without realizing it. Questions about trust, judgment, values, and whether you feel like the right person to help them.

You'll discover:

• Why expertise is the price of admission, not the deciding factor
• The hidden psychology behind why clients choose one expert over another
• How trust is built long before someone books a consultation
• Why your content reveals how you think, not just what you know
• Why reducing years of judgment to credentials and bullet points makes experts blend in

Whether you're a coach, consultant, attorney, financial advisor, or agency owner, people don't just choose the most qualified expert. They choose the person they trust with the journey.

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Thank you so much for tuning in to Marketing Your Truth™! If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from aligning their marketing with their values.

To stay updated on future episodes, visit https://marketingyourtruth.com, and follow me on LinkedIn, @EliNatoli. 

See you next time, where we’ll dive deeper into how to build authentic connections with your audience. 

Transcript

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No one hires you because of your LinkedIn posts or because of your podcast episodes or your testimonials. People choose you because those moments accumulate one interaction at a time, one story at a time, one belief at a time. And eventually there is a moment where someone thinks, I think this is my person. Imagine that you're looking for an attorney or a financial advisor or a consultant. And after doing some research, you narrow your list down to two people. Now, both of these people have almost the same number of years in terms of experience. Both have impressive testimonials, and they have helped clients and achieved incredible results. So objectively, they're both, let's say, are highly qualified. So how do you end up choosing between the two of them? Think about that for a second. Because eventually you do choose. You schedule a consultation, you visit their website, you watch a few videos, you read their testimonials, or maybe you check out their social media posts, and then eventually you decide between those two. Now imagine that several weeks later someone asks you, How did you choose the person that you decided to work with? What would you say? Would you say because this person that I chose had 23 more testimonials? Probably not. Or would you say because they've been in business four years longer? I don't think so. Or would you say because they have additional certifications or awards or media placements or what have you? Again, I don't think so. What people actually end up saying is something like, I just felt like they understood what I needed. Or their approach made more sense for my situation. Or it just felt like a right fit, or I trusted them. This is something that I've been paying a lot of attention to for many years. Now, at the beginning of my career, for the first, I would say five or six years, I really believed that marketing had only one job. Its job was to prove that you're the best choice and your solution is the best solution compared to all the other solutions in the market. And the more experience or the more testimonials or the more credentials that you could provide, the better your chances in terms of communicating that you're the right choice, right? The more evidence, the more likely that people would choose you. To me, at the beginning, that made a lot of sense. Because when we're making an important decision, we want someone who's capable, someone who knows what they're doing. And I still do believe that. Don't get me wrong, confidence definitely matters. Experience absolutely matters. Um, showing results that you've done the work for other people similar to them and they got good results definitely matters. Like if I'm hiring a surgeon, I want to know that they've done the procedure hundreds of times. So this conversation isn't an argument against expertise. The question that I'm bringing up is is expertise the only deciding factors that determines who gets chosen? Because for me, over time, again, I kept noticing something that didn't fit that explanation. I'd work with businesses that looked remarkably similar in paper, same industry, similar experiences, comparable results, sometimes even similar fee structure. Yet one business was thriving with opportunities while the other one was struggling to stand out. That shouldn't happen, right? If expertise were the deciding factor or competence was the deciding factor, those businesses should have performed far more similarly than they did. Now, you may think, well, what if one of them has better marketing or bigger ad budget? Well, sometimes that is true, but you might actually be surprised if I told you that in some cases, the one getting chosen was doing a lot less marketing than the other one. So that begs the question: why do people choose one credible expert over another? Now notice how specific that is. I'm not talking about choosing an experienced attorney over someone fresh out of law school. That's easy to explain. I'm talking about the moment when both options are already credible, both are capable, both have proven results. What tips the buying decision then? So then I started paying attention to all the other variables, all the other factors, especially when it came to human behavior. I even paid attention to my own buying decision. Why did I hire this person instead of someone else? Why did I choose this software over another? As well as I paid close attention to the clients who decided to step forward and to work with me. What languages they were using, right? Things like I just feel like you're the right fit, or you're the first person who really understands me. Or I watched some of your videos and I knew that I had to reach out. So the more I looked at all these different angles, my own buying decisions, the clients who stepped through, the more I realized that I've been looking at marketing through too narrow of a lens. I always assume, like I said before, that buyers were trying to answer one question, which is, can you do the job? I mean, look at how much of our marketing is built around answering exactly that one question. We're constantly gathering evidence that we're capable. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. If I can't establish that I'm competent as an expert, then nothing else really matters, right? Competence is the price of admission, but it's also the baseline. Because once someone believes that you're capable, they're going to stop looking for more proof of it. And then at that point, a completely different set of questions take over. And these are questions that they might not even be conscious of. Questions like, do you understand what's actually important to me as a buyer? Can I trust your judgment? Will you approach this the way that I would want it approached? Do I feel comfortable putting this problem in your hands? Right? So, again, none of these questions replace competence. I want to be very clear about that. It already assumes that you're competent. So this conversation isn't about whether we make logical buying decisions or we make emotional buying decisions. I don't think people ignore expertise. I think they evaluate it. I also don't think that people purely make emotional decisions. I really think that we end up making human decisions. Okay. And a human decision brings everything into the picture, everything into the conversation. Logic, emotion, identity, values, beliefs, rest, hope, fear, trust, all of that. Again, think about your own buying behavior. If you've ever hired someone to do a job, was it based only in the strongest resume? If you've chosen a doctor, did you only care where they went to medical school? Or did you also care whether they listened, whether you felt heard, whether you trusted their judgment? Again, I don't think we can put those in a bucket of these are emotional decisions. I think they're human decisions. And so for me, once I looked at marketing through that lens, things that used to feel disconnected started to make sense to me. Like why two experts with similar experiences can build completely different businesses, right? Not because one knows more, but because people aren't only evaluating their knowledge or their expertise. They're also evaluating the human being behind the solution and the service. Not just, can you help me to get to this accomplishment or can you help me to reach this outcome? But who are you? And how do you think? And what do you value? And what kind of person will I become if I learn for you? And here's another thing that is really interesting. Most buyers couldn't even explain their decision that way, even if you asked them. They'd say, I don't know, I just like them. Again, not because the decision they made was completely emotional or even irrational, but because our brains gather information that we don't consciously keep track of. Our brain gathers information in tone, humility, confidence, generosity, conviction, personality, whether someone's words and action match, and dozens and dozens of other signals. And most of them come so fast for us to notice them individually. But together, they answer a bigger question than can this person do the job? They in fact answer the question of, is this someone that I want helping me solve this problem? And again, that's the question that most marketing never realizes is being asked to answer. And that brings us to this next question of how do buyers find the answer when they don't know you yet? And the answer is every interaction someone has with your business becomes part of an invisible conversation. And I'm not talking about what's in your website or your testimonials. I'm talking about everything, the stories that you tell, the problems you spend time talking about, even what you choose not to say. People are noticing everything. And again, most of it without realizing that they're noticing it. And every one of these moments tells them something, not about what you do, but about who you are. And that's one of the biggest misunderstandings in marketing. We assume people are evaluating our services, but in reality, they're also evaluating the person behind the service or the person behind the solution, right? No one hires you because of your LinkedIn posts or because your of your podcast episodes or your testimonials. People choose you because those moments accumulate one interaction at a time, one story at a time, one belief at a time. And eventually there is a moment where someone thinks, I think this is my person. And the strange thing is that decision feels instantaneous. It wasn't. It was built long before they were aware that they were making that decision because so much of it happens unconsciously. And because of all of this, when I sit down with an expert or a brand or a firm, the first thing that I'm doing is helping them dig out the parts that are incredibly human, the parts that their ideal buyers are already paying attention to, again, unconsciously, to make the rest of their buying decision. The parts that make someone lean into one person over another and think, I really like this person, or I really trust this person. And what's really mind-blowing to me is that a lot of businesses focus heavily in clearly communicating what they do and why their solution is better solution. But very few communicate who they are, how they think, what they believe, what they refuse to compromise in, what they notice that others in their industry don't, and all the nuances that paints the vivid picture of a human behind the business, behind the brand. Almost every expert has these things. They built them through years of experience, through successes, failures, difficult clients, thousands of conversations. So the problem isn't that they're missing them. The problem is that they've never learned to see those parts of themselves as part of what buyers are actually choosing. We've been taught that differentiation means being different, having a unique process, a unique framework, a unique offer. Sometimes that's true, but I don't think that's what ultimately helps someone choose you. People choose you because over time they come to understand not only what you do, but who you are. And those two are not the same thing. By the time buyers are deciding between two equally credible experts, the decision is rarely about finding the perfect solution. It's about deciding who they trust most with their journey. And once you see marketing that way, you're going to start looking at every part of your marketing differently. Every email, every post, every piece of content is teaching people something about who you are. Sometimes it's about your expertise. Sometimes it's about your philosophy, sometimes about your values or your beliefs. Now, whether you realize it or not, you're always teaching people something. So the only question is, what are they learning about you? And by the way, this is why I think so many businesses accidentally hide the parts of themselves that's actually influencing the buying decisions. They spend years developing wisdom, judgment, conviction, a unique way of seeing their solution, their work, or their industry. And then their marketing reduces all of that to bullet points. 10 years of experience, five-step methodology, certified in this, featured in that. Now again, those things do matter. They establish credibility, but they don't communicate what all those years actually produced. And that's often what another human being is trying to understand before they choose your solution or to choose you. So maybe we've been asking the wrong question all along. Instead of how do I prove that I'm an expert? Maybe it's what am I consistently revealing about the human being behind the expertise. Because that's what your ideal buyers are collecting through every post, every email, every interaction. They're gathering evidence, not just about your competence, but about your character, about your judgment, about the way that you see the world, about your thinking. And eventually, whether they realize it or not, all of it comes together to answer this one question. Are you my person? And in my opinion, that's one of the most beautiful things about marketing, at least the kind that I want to practice. It's not about learning another language which is called marketing or becoming someone you're not, or performing, or entertaining, or all these other things that we're being told that we need to do with our marketing. It's actually about revealing the real person behind a solution so that your ideal buyers who share your values and connect with your perspectives and appreciate the way that you think can find you. And those are the people who trust you more easily, enjoy working with you, and become the kinds of clients that you genuinely look forward to serving. Before you go, if this series has been useful to you, the best thing that you can do is leave a review so other experts who are tired of blending in can also find this series and do this work to becoming the obvious choice. And if you haven't done so, would you please take a moment to subscribe? I have more conversations that's coming that build directly in everything that we've uncovered in this three part series. I don't want you to miss what's coming next.