Welcome to guest writer, Pete Machalek, SagePresence!
As a filmmaker who works with business professionals to help them design and deliver compelling messages, I often surprise my clients by telling them not to worry about their story so much.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I tell them. “There’s a time and place for your story. But it isn’t the most important story you need to tell.”
If their own story isn’t the most important one for them to tell, what is?
The story that comes in handy the most isn’t their own story. It isn’t the story of their company, or the story of their product or their service or any aspect of their offering.
The story they should focus on first is the story of their clients.
When business people tell the story that their clients experience, they communicate the significance and the value of what their business delivers.
When they talk about themselves, it usually comes across as a clumsy, self-serving data-dump.
Let me demonstrate.
First, the clumsy attempt at a story about me and my company:
My partner and I formed SagePresence in 2001 after running an acting workshop for two years, because the actors told us they were getting so much out of it that we shouldn’t just be working with actors, we should be working with everybody. So for the last ten years, we’ve been working with business professionals at every level of all kinds of organizations, helping them communicate more effectively and present themselves with more impact, so that they can network, sell, present and lead better.
(This is a reduction of the sort of thing I used to say years ago, before we got our own process figured out and put into practice. The full-fledged version is way too long to print here, sometimes lasting as long as 90 minutes for some poor networkers who had the misfortune of getting trapped in a conversation with me at the time.)
Now, here’s the more compelling story, the one about my clients:
Business professionals come to SagePresence when they’re feeling challenged to face important audiences. As filmmakers, we give them messages that tell the story their audience wants to hear, and the performance skills to tell those stories with dynamism that captures their audience’s attention. So when our clients head out to face their challenging audiences, they feel ready and able to thoroughly win them over.
Can you see how much more compelling this is?
Here’s what you want to do to come up with a story like this:
- Tell us about your ideal clients. Who are they? What situation are they in when they need you the most?
- Tell us what you actually do for them.
- Then tell us what better situation you lead them to.
That’s about it. Let us hear the difference your business makes for the people it helps. We’ll get a clear picture of who you want to help and how you help them, so that we can identify ourselves or someone we know or someone we meet as a potential client for you.
Give it a shot, and let me know how it goes for you!
Pete Machalek
pete@sagepresence.com
