I'm continuing on our theme from last week of coming up with valuable ideas.

Because at the end of the day, if you want to be seen as an authority and leading expert by your clients you need to have knowledge and insights they can't get from anywhere else.

Now at first flush, that sounds quite daunting, doesn't it?

Having knowledge and insights your clients can't get from anywhere else sounds like something you'd have to be a professor or partner in a major firm to get. Or to be hit by a sudden flash of inspiration.

But that's far from the case.

Because often, new knowledge and insights for your clients comes from simply transferring knowledge over from other fields or other types of client.

For example, in my very early days (before I focused on marketing) I made a bit of a name for myself in R&D by importing a bunch of workflow and just-in-time techniques I'd learned in a short spell in manufacturing.

Those techniques were nothing new to operations veterans. But to the guys and girls in R&D who lived in their own silo, they were close to revolutionary.

And often, new knowledge and insights for your clients comes from glueing together different pieces of the puzzle from a variety of sources. And sometimes those pieces come from outside your field or even the world of work.

Or sometimes it just comes from hard work. Doing the research. Asking questions. Interviewing people. Doing surveys. Speaking to other experts and bouncing ideas around.

Sometimes it sneaks up on you. You accumulate experience working in your field and solving client problems and you end up taking for granted the things you know that are actually new and insightful to clients.

Or as I said last week, you just get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper and start sketching out models and thoughts.    

When you think of it that way and look at all the different ways you can come up with new ideas and insights that will position you as an authority, it doesn't seem anywhere near as daunting as being struck by inspiration.

But the key is you've got to do the work. Do the research. Spend quiet time bringing your ideas together. Think hard about your client problems and other things you've seen that might be relevant.