the truth-tellers guide to explaining what you do
"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant..." - Emily Dickinson. Sometimes, there's more truth in metaphors and missions than a regular description of your biz.
People look bored when I explain what I do, Stella. How do I talk about my work in a way that lights them up and attracts my ideal clients?
Ooooh, grasshopper. We are about to have some fun!
Stella had a string of phenomenal conversations with some of her mentorship clients last Thursday. And we just happened to be talking about the same thing. Total coincidence. (Stella prefers synchronicity).
The theme was: how to tell the truth about what you do. But before we get to that...
The standard line on this is to speak in terms of benefits. What you can help your clients achieve or become. I just listened to a training call with Kendall SummerHawk, who said there are 5 main outcomes humans seek:
1) better relationships
2) improved performance
3) better health
4) more money
5) better lifestyle
I just adore how straightforward that is, and will just assume it’s true. So which one of those values is your top priority, in terms of outcomes for your clients? Feel free to rank them in priority order.
For example, Stella really is all about the benjamins. I teach my clients how to write and market so they make more money. For me, #2 is performance, and #3 is lifestyle. If you’ve been reading for awhile, you know that I’m also all about health and community, too. But those aren’t my top priorities in business.
So there’s that.
But from there, I’m starting to notice a really curious phenomenon. So I want to put a bee in your bonnet, dear reader, because here at Stella’s laboratory, we’re all about sharing cool ideas, even if they’re still in development.
A powerful way to convey the value of your work—especially if you do something that’s hard to explain straight-up—is with a metaphor.
This is where my mentorship clients come in. One is a life coach who helps women in their 30s, 40s & 50s get “unstuck” in their lives. She LOVES working with the unsticking process, and she’s amazing at it. But she’s been having a heck of a time communicating that in networking and sales conversations.
Here’s a snippet from our conversation last week:
Unstoppable Red Head: You know what I really do?
Stella: Tell me.
URH: You know when your pipes get backed up when there’s a glob or a hairball stuck down in there? And rotorooter’s got to come… and run that snake-thingy down the drain to get things moving again? That’s what I do with my clients. I clear the gunk and the hairballs out from their psychic pipes.
Stella: …so you’re really a plumber.
She’s now playing with this “plumber” idea as a fun & engaging way to talk about what she does. Her latest report from the field was that people really "get" what she's up to... in a way they never did before!
Another mentorship client has her sights set on being the COO and right-hand woman to top coaches. On her way to that goal, she’s helping clients come up with systems to run their offices better. She’s found that coaches and service providers “get” what she does, but there was some lingering confusion. How is she different than a VA?
“You can’t leverage a VA until you learn to delegate and manage,” she says.
So she’s on a mission to teach coaches that they’ve got to change the way they work. No more flying by the seat of your pants. No more hoarding tasks. No more burning through assistants because you haven’t learned to be an effective virtual manager. She just bought the URL changethewayyouwork.com. Because that’s REALLY what she’s doing.
Here, it’s not so much metaphor, as it is “at its core, this is my mission.”
So, yes, be benefit-driven when you talk about what you do. But is there a metaphor—or a simply-stated mission—that makes even more sense?
The world is waiting eagerly to hear them.
