Unlocking the Power of Your Story

Effectively serving and satisfying our clients depends to a large degree on maintaining workable interpersonal relationships with them.

It is our individual personalities that help increase our likeability in the minds of potential clients.

By telling your story, not the stories of some else, you can showcase your personality.?

We have an intuitive, emotional side as well as a deliberate, rational side.

Too often in business we only try and connect with people on a rational level but this isn’t enough to actually change how people behave.

People may understand what you want them to do, but if they aren’t emotionally engaged, they just won’t do it!

A good story offers detail that potentially ideal clients and referral sources can use to make their own judgments, ideally forging authentic, emotional connection with you.

Your Creation Myth

Marketing guru Jay Abraham suggests that your story take the form of your creation myth. That's the story of you and your personal brand.

What is your story? Where did you start? What does it mean to your business? What failures have you experienced that led you to your success in business?

Walking my storytelling talk and to give an example of what Abraham suggests story as creation myth here’s a short version of my story.

My Story

My first exposure to marketing services was what I now call ‘copy-cat-marketing’.? Although the term may be new to you, the practice is probably very familiar.?

In effect, this approach involves promoting your services much the same way that everyone else in your market—in other words, your competitors—is promoting theirs.? Presumably this approach is based on the belief that if it works for them, it’ll work for me.

In my case, wanting clients for my fledgling law practice, I adopted the same client-generating activity that lawyers had always used to maximum effect: schmoozing.

Now more commonly known as networking, schmoozing has been, and remains one the best strategies for marketing services.

Happily, my networking-as-marketing generated the flow of new clients necessary to build my practice … and equally important, generate the income necessary to support my new family and pay the bills.

Gratifying as was my life as a small-town lawyer, it definitely wasn’t my lifetime career goal.

The Dreaded Marketing Wall

When the time came to leave the practice of law in a small town to pursue new opportunities in a huge city, among the many new challenges was my head-on encounter with a new and mysterious monster: the dreaded marketing wall.

For whatever reason or reasons, my networking-as-marketing approach to generate new business was less effective as a big-city consultant than it had been as a small-town lawyer.

My search for marketing training led me to a full-term certificate course in marketing offered by a nearby university.

Long story short, this course triggered my first marketing a-ha moment.?

That breakthrough occurred when I realized that marketing is more than doing lunch and schmoozing.? It is in fact, a step-by-step process that is both repeatable and predictable.

And even better from my perspective, it was closely aligned with the process of strategic planning, which at the time was my preferred consulting service.

It was fairly easy to adapt my strategic planning methodology to the newly learned steps of the marketing process.

Similarly, it was equally straight-forward to apply what I had learned about the marketing process to generate more new business for my fledgling consulting practice.

Combining the more refined focus necessary for networking in a big city with the key elements of a step-by-step marketing process consistently generated more desired ideal clients and new business for my consulting practice.

And the rest is another story for another time.

Source: How Personal Branding Generates More New Business (Lesson 2)

LEARN MORE:

• SEE: How Personal Branding Generates More New Business in either or both of the Website and Features sections of my LinkedIn profile;
• The Power of Personal Branding: How to Make Your Business Stand Out
• ASK: Post a question or send me a message. Thanks in advance for your question(s).