The F.U. Point of View: How Buyers See Your Judgment Before They Hire You

The Marketing Playbook You’re Running Expired Years Ago

When I started Communication Rebel in 2012, the advice was simple.

Share what you know. Teach your process. Give away your best stuff, and people will see your value and hire you.

And it worked, because useful knowledge was scarce. It was hard to come by. A solid how-to post was a gift, and it had its place. You were curating your expertise in these posts and making your expertise useful to the reader. The right person would decide that they don’t want to do it on their own and hire you.

That playbook no longer works (and it hasn’t for well over 5 years), but we are still pretending it does.

AI can produce a passable version of anyone’s expertise in seconds, which means expertise can be faked. It can be produced at scale, and it’s vying for your client’s ever-diminishing attention. Marketing Strategist Alex M.H. Smith calls this Meme Commerce.

The first time I taught the Nail Your Message workshop in 2020, I was shocked that none of the attendees knew what positioning was. Back then, good positioning could be enough to make an offer sell. Heck, average positioning could make an offer fly off the shelves.

Now, positioning is standard fare on Threads and LinkedIn. It’s still touted as the way to make your offer sell. Since AI can produce a decent positioning statement, everyone has one now, so it’s no longer special or as effective.

So the expert with nine years behind her and the person with a good prompt are publishing the same five tips. From the outside, a buyer can’t tell them apart. Your knowledge is no longer your competitive advantage.

The good news is that because of what you know, you still have a competitive advantage.

What Your Clients Were Paying for All Along: Taste & Judgment

Rick Rubin has produced records for some of the biggest artists alive. He told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes that he barely plays an instrument and doesn’t know how to work a soundboard. He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t like, and he’s decisive about it.

When Cooper asked what he’s being paid for, Rubin said,

“The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.”

Artists who know far more about making music than he does hire him. They’re paying for his call on what stays and what goes.

Rubin’s taste came from somewhere. He has decades of obsessive listening behind him, a very well-trained ear, so knowledge is still the foundation. It’s how he applies that knowledge to show his taste and judgment.

Notice the second half of his answer. He has the taste, and he can express it.

The experts I work with have the taste. Expressing their taste and judgment is where they get stuck.

The F.U. POV: How Expert Business Owners Express Taste & Judgment

Marketing’s job now is to show how you think, what you’d refuse to do, and where you believe your industry is wrong. Your future clients are looking for proof of taste and discernment.

A point of view is that proof. It gets your thinking out of your head and into a form people can repeat.

I call it the F.U. Point of View.

An F.U. Point of View is the stand you take on your field, built from years of watching the standard advice fail and years of getting clients results it couldn’t, that lets a buyer see your judgment and taste before she ever hires you. F.U. stands for Fed Up, Fired Up, Freakishly Unique and Flat-out Unforgettable, and yes, I mean the other meaning, too.

What a Point of View Does for Your Business

When there’s less work to go around, the work goes to the people buyers can tell apart. A point of view decides who gets chosen when fewer people are buying, and you’ll feel it in four places.

It shortens the sale.

Bev Feldman built her practice so that about 90% of her prospects show up already decided. They’ve seen how she thinks, so the call is about fit and timing instead of an audition, and there are fewer “we’re talking to a few other people” conversations because her stance gives them a reason to pick her that isn’t price or availability. The people who disagree with your take don’t book at all, which I count as a feature. Those calls and proposals were never going to close anyway.

It protects your price.

Nobody else is selling your point of view, so there’s nothing to put next to it on a spreadsheet. A buyer who values your judgment understands she’s paying for it, whereas a buyer looking at a list of deliverables shops for the cheapest list. (You are not the cheapest list. You shouldn’t have to be.) That’s also why you can raise rates without adding more: the value is in how you think, so you don’t justify a higher price with another round of calls and a bonus nobody asked for.

It makes referrals work harder.

A stance is memorable and easy to repeat, while a list of services isn’t, so referrers know what to say and who to say it to. The introductions come with a reason attached, and the people come pre-matched. And when the problem you solve comes up six months later, you’re the name attached to it, which is the whole job of a referral.

It cuts the marketing workload.

You stop starting from a blank page, because you’re applying one stance to whatever marketing you need to do and to the copy you need to write. You can show up in fewer places, because a clear stance travels through other people. 

Alana Swain grew her B2B consultancy 289% with no social media, and about 70% of her business is word of mouth. Podcast hosts and event organizers book people with a take, since “expert in X” describes hundreds of people and nobody builds an episode around hundreds of people.

A POV outshines  AI

A bot can average its way to what your field knows. It can’t average its way to where you disagree with it. Your years of judgment turn into something a buyer can see before they hire you, which a credential line on your bio never did.

Fed Up: Where Your Standard Shows

Start with fed up, because it’s easiest for you to articulate. You don’t get fed up at random. You get fed up after watching the same advice fail client after client, knowing what’s possible from experience, while your industry keeps settling for less. What you’re fed up with tells people where your standard is.

Say why it fails, say what you do instead, and a buyer gets to watch you think. Your point of view comes from years of client work, which separates it from a hot take or a so-called “unpopular opinion” and “hot takes.”

So here’s one of mine: F.U. to “I’m just a girl” marketing.

You’ve seen her. She’s filming from her kitchen, she has no idea what she’s doing, tee hee, and oh my gosh you guys, she somehow had an $85,000 launch. Total surprise. She’s as shocked as you are. (My Duped co-host, Maggie Patterson, calls her the BFF Next Door.)

And you’re watching her with a degree, the certifications, and a decade of client results, wondering if getting good at your work was the wrong bet.

I’m fed up with it because it teaches experts to hide the one thing a buyer is paying for. Act less like you know things, and the people who want someone who knows things can’t find you. Fumbling to riches is a lovely story. It is a terrible strategy for anyone whose clients hire on reputation and referrals.

So I say the opposite. You didn’t make the wrong bet. You don’t have to film the reels. You don’t have to act surprised by your own competence. You get to be the f@cking expert.

Fired Up: The World You’re Building

Being fed up gets you noticed. It isn’t enough to show how you think.

Anyone can point at what’s broken. (Half of LinkedIn does it before you take your first sip of coffee in the morning.) What a buyer wants to know is what you’d do instead, and what you believe is possible for them when they do it your way. That’s where the buy-in happens.

So say it. Say what you’d do differently and why it works. Then say what that makes possible for the people who hire you, in terms they’d recognize from their own life.

And be as specific about the fired up as you were about the fed up. “I want my clients to thrive” is wallpaper. “I want my clients to stop losing work to people with half their experience” is a world someone can decide they want to live in.

Mine goes like this.

I want a world where being good at the work is what gets you hired, because the people who hire on reputation and referrals can see your taste and judgment from across the room. Where your message does the explaining in rooms you’re not in, and the woman who’s just a girl has to scroll a while to find you.

Recognized, referred, and chosen first, not 27th.

That’s what I mean by impossible to miss. The right people see what you’re good at, know who to send to you, and hire you because of it.

This Is the New Positioning

Positioning used to be enough. I’ve written about positioning before, and you saw above why it stopped being as effective.

Taking a position is what survived. Your point of view has years of client work behind it, so there’s no faking it. No one can replicate the way your brain works. The buyer who reads it gets to watch you think, and that’s when she decides to call you.

The catch is reach. A point of view that lives in a 2,100-word post only works on people who read 1,600-word posts. (Hi. Thank you for still being here.)

That’s the job of the 3 Word Rebellion®. It’s your point of view at the size people can remember.

• Three words a client can repeat in an introduction.
• Three words a host can put in an episode title.
• Three words a buyer can remember six months after she first heard it.

Every benefit in this post, the shorter sale, the protected price, the referrals that arrive with a reason attached, depends on this. A stance nobody can repeat is a stance nobody can pass on.

Mine is Make Marketing Suck Less. It’s fed up and fired up in four words. A few from the people I work with:

• Veronica Perretti is an astrologer. Hers is Dictate Your Fate.
• Tracey Warren helps nonprofits keep their donors. Hers is Ignite Your Champions, and she wrote the book.
• Jessica Suhr designs brands and websites for service businesses. Hers is Designed to Flourish.

The three words are the hardest part of this work, for the same reason your judgment is hard to see: after enough years, what you know feels like common sense, and common sense doesn’t sound like a rebellion. (I wrote about that in the expertise paradox .) They’re the judgment, compressed, and they’re how it leaves the room without you. That’s what makes you memorable and referable, and it’s worth the fight.

Your Judgment Was Always the Product

The playbook you were handed said share what you know and the right people will see your value. For a few years that was true. Now the part clients were paying for all along, the call you make after the checklist runs out and it’s just you and the problem, is the part a prompt can’t produce.

If they can’t see it, this is what it costs you.

Fewer people are buying this year, and the ones who are have more options than they did two years ago. They’re comparing you to the woman who’s just a girl, to the consultant with half your experience and a louder feed, and to a free tool that produces a passable version of your advice before they finish typing the question. On knowledge alone, you lose that comparison, because from the outside, knowledge all looks the same.

A buyer can’t hire judgment she’s never watched you use. If she can’t find yours, she picks whoever she can, and the fact that you’d have done better work never enters the room. I’ve watched it happen to people who were the obvious choice on paper. That’s what the deal you made is worth in a market like this one: nothing, until it shows.

You spent a decade earning your taste. You don’t have to prove it to anyone. You do have to let them see it.

On November 12, members of The Expert Up Club start a 30-day sprint to find their F.U. Point of View and turn it into a 3 Word Rebellion®. Private tours close November 1. Book yours here.

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