What's In A Business Name?

Turns out quite a lot when it comes to naming your business and your products and services.

In a recent mastermind meeting with peers, a member was in the hot seat bringing a perplexing business issue to his colleagues. He needed real help.

His core offer is a live customized workshop delivered to small to mid-sized businesses in the leadership category. He gets glowing feedback marks and has a steady flow of invitations to speak from business associations.

Now, ready to scale, his strategy is to bring his message and methodology to many more businesses by offering a one-to-many productized group training program.

His thought was to take his live customized training and turn it into a group semi self-paced course.

Because he gets a lot of enthusiastic and glowing feedback from his live trainings, he expected the group program to "fly off the shelf."

It didn't.

The issue before the mastermind: What went wrong? Why isn't my program selling?

In an era where we are hit with so many offers and products and programs, every service business owner's challenge is to stand out from the pack and to immediately capture your prospect's interest and curiosity.

We have but a few seconds to get them to say, "Tell me more."

When we are marketing a service one-to-one, we have more time and more opportunity to explain and inform our prospects, to invite them to see themselves working with us, to gain a vision of future desired outcomes.

But when we want to expand and replicate ourselves, (no one taught us this better than Michael Gerber in the E Myth Revisited) we have to boost and accelerate that message so it hits the bulls-eye with prospects immediately.

Our most well-known brands understand that the might is in the message.

So how important is a business or product name?

When I first started my business, I learned there was this essential arrow you had to have in your quiver:

The 30-Second Elevator Speech

Today, if you take 30 seconds to tell people what you do and who you do it for, they will be asleep before you finish or glancing down at their phones.

Our attention spans are practically nil so your name and your offer have to hit home fast and magnetically.

Now this member's program name was actually quite good.

It turns out, according to the feedback from his peers...

..."It's a cool name but I'm not sure what I'm getting."

..."I like the name, it's clever but the takeaways sound similar to other programs I've seen.".

As his colleagues dug deeper, the golden nugget of feedback emerged:

"Your most unique and best benefit is nowhere to be found in your message!"

The reason this happened is because the product name was clever but forgot to bring out the best and most differentiated part of the offer.

If you're going to be cutesy or clever, then you still have to be crystal clear with your value and benefits,

unless you're Nike and you have many millions to spend on explaining why Just Do It means you should buy their athletic shoes.

I remember going through this myself when I rebranded my business to The Business Fox, and then when I launched my book on networking.

I had a really good name for the book - Network Like A Fox riffing on my business name -but was missing a tag line that aptly delineated what was uniquely beneficial about this book on networking versus the dozens of others out there.

Through sharing with my peers and colleagues, I listened to them feed back to me what they heard when I described the contents, what I was trying to tell my potential readers.

Over coffee one day, one of my colleagues hit the nail right on the head and gave me the perfect tagline:

"Oh, she said, your book is on TARGETED networking, meeting the right people for your business".

Yes, that was it. My book was on Targeted Networking and that tagline did the trick. Because of that message, the book sold many copies and many workshops in firms and business associations. (I even have another presentation coming up in October).

The message keeps on giving.

We can immediately see examples of great business and product names that have rocked it:

Patrick Lencione - The 5 Dysfunctions of Team

The 6 Types of Working Genius

Geno Wickman - Entrepreneur Operating System

Verne Harnish - Scale Up Coaching

Jeff Walker - Product Launch Formula

To be sure, there are dozens of businesses with names and product names that are quirky and not crystal clear.

If you have a giant marketing budget and time to educate your market, you can afford the luxury of being clever and cutesy, but for most of us in the small to mid business market, we have just a few seconds to capture the attention of prospects and have our business names get them to say, "tell me more."

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We'll be diving deeply into business and product naming, in addition to so much more in productizing your expertise with playbooks in my upcoming Playbook Profits?? seminar series starting tomorrow September 16, 2024. You can still jump in for free: https://fractionals.ai/playbookseries