How can I share my message from different angles? How can I connect with new clients and hook them through emotional connection and relevance?
It’s a question my colleague asked, and if you’re an entrepreneur or leader in the women helping women economy it’s a question you’ve had, too.
Not for the Coy of Heart
The question is actually two related questions: how do I share the same message from different angles? And how do I connect through emotion and relevance?
The answer lies in a five-step process I use in my own and my clients’ marketing. What you do is you:
- make the first move (put aside any coy or wallflower tendencies),
- show up repeatedly,
- open up about yourself,
- connect through stories, and
- follow up.
This five-step process works flawlessly for sharing your message from different angles and connecting with new people, whether potential clients, collaboration partners, or even personal friends. Here’s what I mean:
Adulting 101: How to Make New Friends
I moved to Phoenix sight-unseen in 2017 after living in Maryland my entire life. When I got here I needed to make friends, ASAP.
So I went to events: an adult Girl Scout troop event, a green business event, a women’s networking event. And here’s what I did:
- I made the first move: I introduced myself, asked for business cards, asked for phone numbers. Later, I made the first move by inviting my new acquaintances for coffee or happy hour.
- I showed up repeatedly: I texted, emailed, connected on LinkedIn, attended gatherings they invited me to, and continued inviting them to hang out.
- I opened up about myself: I shared that I was new to Phoenix, why I left Maryland, about my relationship with Steve, my family, my stage of business, what I was struggling with, what I was proud of, what I do for fun.
- I told stories: this is part and parcel of opening up. You can’t connect without telling stories. Stories are the most basic form of human connection, going back through our ancestors to times when oral traditions and mythologies were what defined cultural groups and families. We are stories. Everything we experience is a story.
- I followed up: if I liked my new friends (which I usually did!) I texted to ask for updates on what they’d shared, or to say how much I enjoyed spending time with them. Later, I would ask them to meet up again.
You’ve probably heard or thought this: “it’s hard to make friends as an adult!”
…No it’s not.
Making friends is easy. The problem is that most people are not comfortable making the first move (it’s too forward. No one will like me.), showing up repeatedly (I don’t want to nag anyone. Am I being too much?), opening up (we barely know each other — is this TMI?), telling stories (my life is boring), and following up (it’s too much. I don’t want to be too forward).
Written out as a 5-step methodology makes it sound clinical, like a contrived or insincere to make friends. But if you zoom in on the way you do anything — play piano, cook, answer emails, write thought leadership, have sex — it all comes down to a series of steps. It was only when I analyzed how making friends came so easy to me that I realized I was following a process. It’s the same process I use to network and find new clients in my business.
Finding New Clients is Hard — Really?
The same skills I use to make friends are how you connect with prospective clients and hook them — or engage them in a relationship, if you like that better.
YOU must make the first move. YOU must be open emotionally and connect through sharing relevant stories that show people how much you have in common.
Many people are unwilling to make the first move. That’s why you hear complaints that it’s hard to make friends or find new clients. People want to show up on social media and have clients to fall into their laps like a deus ex machina. That’s not how it works. Do you want new clients? Go get them! It will set you apart from 90% of the rest of everyone who hopes and prays the clients will magically come to them.
Make the first move again, and again, and again.
You’re Not Looking for a Bridesmaid
After you make the first move again and again and again, be patient. Relationships take TIME to build. You wouldn’t meet someone and ask her to be your bridesmaid a week later.
You need to make the first move multiple times to gain the trust of someone new. Trust is built by showing up over and over again. By being emotionally open and sharing relevant stories again and again. Just like you don’t become best friends with someone the day you meet, a prospective client needs time to get to know you.
This isn’t true for businesses that sell products or super specific services. If I need a plumber, I don’t care how well I know them, I care that they can fix my toilet.
But for heart-centered entrepreneurs who offer personalized services — and many entrepreneurs in the women helping women economy have deeply personal brands — new people need to know YOU. They need to feel emotionally connected to YOU, and feel the relevance of what YOU do to their lives.
I’m already DOING THAT, you’re thinking. I’m beating a dead horse with the same message!
Three Practices to Ignite Connections with New Clients
You are a creative, dynamic, brilliant human who learns new things and has new experiences every day. There is no way you’ve wrung your message dry. No way that you’re done telling stories that hook people with emotion and relevancy.
But if it FEELS like you’re done, these practices are waiting for you:
1. Stories, stories, and more stories.
Every day challenge yourself to think of FIVE stories. They can be a line or a sentence, whatever it takes for you to remember. They can be personal, or the story of a friend or someone you read about.
For Level 2 of this exercise, find one of your core themes in each of your stories. Let’s say your core themes are leadership, resiliency, and reciprocity. Ask, where’s the leadership in this experience? There’s no right or wrong answer, there’s only your answer.
This exercise, and the story bank you will build by practicing it, will ensure you NEVER run out of angles to share your message, or powerful ways to connect with new people.
Theresa Robinson does this beautifully. She tells powerful, incisive stories on LinkedIn and she never wavers from her message.
2. Listen more deeply than you’ve listened in your life
You know that feeling when you read a piece of writing or listen to a podcast, of oh shit it’s like they read my journal!
To angle your message to be that relevant requires empathy, emotional openness, and… listening.
What are your people saying? What are they writing in their emails to you, in private groups, and on social media? What are their questions?
This is a bottomless well of relevant and emotionally resonant angles from which to tell stories and connect with people.
My coach Eleanor Beaton is great at this. Go to her website and you’ll start being retargeted in her with ads from her. It’s worth it: her copywriting is fantastic.
3. Revisit your contacts
In our lust for the new, we neglect the relationships that we have. When was the last time you combed through your LinkedIn contacts or email list and reached out personally to existing connections and former clients?
Do not underestimate the power of 1:1 reach outs. They make people feel cared for, remembered, and sought-after, and they’ll make YOU feel good, too.
Personal connections are our highest value currency in entrepreneurship and marketing. Not everyone agrees: in a world obsessed with unicorn startups and venture funding and mass appeal, being personally connected with an audience isn’t everyone’s focus.
For heart-centered service-providers, you’re missing a plethora of opportunities if you’re not revisiting existing relationships and keeping them current. (After all, the customer most likely to buy from you is the customer who’s already bought from you.)
Become Unignorable
This five step process will never go out of style. Connecting with resonance to new prospects will always aid your business. But there may come a point in your growth when you need to increase the volume of incoming clients. That’s when layering paid strategies on top of this process is important.
But no matter what paid strategy you add to your marketing, your ability to forge strong, fierce connections with new clients is commensurate with your willingness to make the first move, to show up, and open up, again and again. When you practice these five steps with diligence and honor, your people won’t be able to ignore you.
Now, what’s a reliable and powerful way to attract new clients so you can make the first move? Publishing magnetic thought leadership.
The business impact of thought leadership can’t be overstated: Over 80% of decision-makers say excellent thought leadership increases their respect, perception of capabilities, and trust in an organization. And 60% of those who are willing to pay a premium say it’s because the thought leadership of that organization demonstrates deep thinking and other virtues decision-makers value (source).
How can you make your thought leadership sing?
The 5 Pillars of Magnetic Thought Leadership.
It’s free, it won’t take 100 years to complete (it’s just 5 lessons!), and it’s got exercises, examples, and insights to make your thought leadership as magnetic as ice water after a marathon.
Click here to join the free email course, 5magneticpillars.com.
Image by Christina @ wocintechchat.com via Unsplash
