Every so often, you send an important professional document to someone. The most universal experience is applying to a job, which you do by sending HR your resume. Your resume is a proof asset; it describes your experiences, accomplishments, and expertise.
If you lead a business, you send many documents like this. For example, you know people who have referred you to projects worth millions of dollars. You want to stay at the top of their mind, so they refer you to more business, and you decide to email them each month. What do you send them?
Similarly, your prospective clients and customers deal with the problems you solve, often many months and even years before they reach out to you. It’s outside of their line of business, so they don’t know how to think about the problem, and they want to learn. How do you connect with them?
These are your opportunities to demonstrate your expertise through proof assets. You start a proof asset through writing. Some examples of end products: blog posts, emails, whitepapers, ebooks, books, reports, and social media posts and comments. Even speeches, videos, webinars, classes, and podcasts start off with writing a script, or, at the very least, an outline. You show the work that you feel proud of, the aspects of your business that you wish more people knew about.
If you’re up for a bigger swing, it’s also a chance to try something fresh and original. If you’re a company that processes payments online, a whitepaper is a perfectly good proof asset. However, if you do something interesting, like honoring your customers by making books they’d like to read, then you earn the opportunity to stand out like Stripe Press does. You don’t tell customers your brand is worth spending time with; you show them.
Case studies are proof not only that you work with clients who trust you and that you deliver, but also that they like you enough to go public with the project. They’re also opportunities to tell a story. Even though it’s been many years since Teehan+Lax shut down, their case study with Medium comes to my mind all the time. The genre is a case study, yet the form it takes engages you at a much deeper level.
There are, of course, many other proof assets. You can solicit useful testimonials by asking clients for their permission, and then prompting them to respond to thoughtful, specific, questions. You can also ask them to serve as references. You write a changelog to document what you’ve changed, and make the release notes interesting. “Reputation is all about repetition,” I wrote.
Proof assets are useful whether you’re famous or not. They’re useful whether they go viral or not.
Are you who you say you are? Prove it.
Thanks, Peter, for showing me this term.