Book Review: Sell with Authority by Drew McClellan and Stephen Woessner

Sell with Authority by Drew McClellan and Stephen Woessner is an absolute must-read for any digital marketer. Now to be fair, I may be a bit biased as I personally know both of these authors and I know first-hand how brilliant they are. While there is a ton of valuable information they both have up their sleeves they can offer the world (much of which they have already, see below), this book so clearly outlines the details of creating and executing a proper content strategy, it’s beautiful and brilliant and simply stunning.

There are a handful of core concepts Drew and Stephen share in this book. Here’s the sneak peek, but seriously, you should buy the book and read it yourself. It’s about 170 pages, you can do it!

How to Sell with Authority (According to Drew McClellan and Stephen Woessner)

1. Go niche. Be very specific about who you’re selling to and here’s a good example of building a niche for your small business.
2. Have a point of view. This helps to further narrow your market and helps you focus on working with the people you want to work with.
3. Be clear about your service offerings. You need to be able to produce more than one singular thing. Now, you don’t want to be a “yes” man/woman, but you need to be able to pivot and be flexible to serve your clients.
4. Create cornerstone content for your target audience. This is a big undertaking, but it’s so worth it. Find a meaty piece of content – an annual research report, a weekly podcast, an annual event – and make it so good that you can slice and dice content from it for the next year or so.
5. Create cobblestones. These are the pieces you slice and dice from your cornerstone. They aren’t necessarily new ideas, they’re all ways to support the main idea, the main CTA, your cornerstone content.

That’s it. It sounds so simple – which is why they’re so brilliant. This concept is a tricky one, a really tricky one, but these two have boiled it down to be so streamlined. If you find that you’re enamored with Drew and Stephen, here are other ways to learn from them as well:

• Profitable Podcasting (Stephen’s Book)
• Onward Nation (Stephen’s Podcast)
• Predictive ROI (Stephen’s company on thought leadership for executives)
• Agency Management Institute (Drew’s company on helping agency owners be better agency owners)
• Build a Better Agency (Drew’s Podcast)

These two are not only content geniuses, but they’re also both the nicest humans. Drew literally gifted me this book because COVID is scary and prior to that, he sat behind me on Space Mountain and tapped my shoulders to let me know which way we were going to dip so I wasn’t as freaked out as I was the first and only other time I went on it when I was 11. For the record, I was still shaking when we exited the ride, but his taps were much appreciated. In the past, Stephen even offered free advice to my company as we were trying to win a large client, just because he’s the nicest.

So yes, eat up all the content goodness these two have shared because they’re totally right.

And also feel good knowing they’re awesome people too.