How do you get your message across when everyone is shouting?

One of the amazing aspects of modernity is that everyone has a megaphone. (And that's before we even get into AI megaphones.)

But how do we get the message across to the people we want to hear it?

And what if we could phrase that differently? How can we get our message to the people who most want to hear it because they need our help?

In the animation above, we are the red dot in the middle. (We always like to put yourselves at the center, right?)

We can send a message to some people near us (the red circle). We don't have a huge ad budget like Coca-Cola or millions of followers like Ronaldo. So our message doesn't carry all that far in a world abuzz with all kinds of messages, and it doesn't reach our ideal clients (other red dots).

The typical reaction at this point is to try to water down our message so that it might apply to the people closer to us, the people we're already reaching.

Of course, if everyone does that, we end up with a soupy mess.

Yesterday, I was talking with a website designer who builds websites for small, medium, and large businesses in a variety of industries. He was smart, kind, and seemingly capable, but he didn't give me a compelling reason to connect him with certain people who would most benefit from his services. He's in a pool with a lot of other folks who help with websites.

(He's still way ahead of the web designer who told me his ideal client was "anyone with a website... and, in fact, if they don't have a website, they need us even more.")

But what if we could transmit that message in a way that makes it easy for our referral partners (yellow dots) to retransmit?

Then we can start covering more ground, reaching far more people, and even some of our ideal clients.

And then we can empower other partners who might not have noticed us earlier in the soupy mess. And if we can empower clients to retransmit, we have even more reach.

And, if we have enough of a magnetic message (poles of equal and opposite strength), we can clear out some of the noise, making room for our tribe to start coming to us.

This requires:

Powerful messaging. (Think M.E.G.A. Positioning.)

• Magnetic-- to attract the right people (and send other folks elsewhere-- both poles are of equal strength, and equally useful)
• Easy-- when you fear scarcity, remember that you can't serve everyone anyway, so why waste time on folks who are hard to market to, hard to sell to, and hard to deliver for? Your rational brain understands the math, but the lizard brain is scared. If you're having trouble with this, you need an emotional solution to an emotional problem, and that's making sales, marketing, and delivery "easy", instead of hard.
• [800 pound] Gorilla-- that's how you know you've got it tight-- when you're the 800 pound Gorilla of the market you define. Don't fight direct competitors and especially not larger competitors on their turf.
• Authentic-- it has to be you. People connect with people, and if you're not authentic, it's exhausting for you, and off-putting for others.

Your Superhero Origin Story

• In condensed form, what's the "radioactive spider bite" version of how you started on this path, that someone else can easily retell?
• (You can tell a longer version when you meet with people 1-1, give a presentation, etc.)

Regular Conversations

• You're in a relationship business, so you're in a conversation business. As an introvert who hates "selling", I tried to deny this for years. Email marketing, LinkedIn (ahem!), etc, are great as facilitators of conversation, not substitutes.
• Have a process for having these conversations on an ongoing basis. It's not just about the 1-1 follow-up to the Zoom networking, it's about creating a relationship over time.

I did a training session on this that goes into more details last week, and the video is available now. (It's about 40ish minutes, but if you watch at 2x speed like I prefer, it's 20ish minutes.)

It goes into much more detail, including how you want to make sure your LinkedIn tagline is helping you. Take that and run with it, and if you want to work on getting more referable in a fun group setting, you can join the 5 Days to More Referrals Challenge starting July 10.