BRANDING FOR INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONALS 1 ...actionplan.com/pdf/hartley_08.pdffor, what the benefits for that brand’s target market are, and why it’s not a lie. Those are the things

BRANDING FOR INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONALS Robert Middleton Interviews Samantha Hartley

Copyright © 2008 Robert Middleton, Action Plan Marketing - www.actionplan.com

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Robert: Hello. This is Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing doing an expert interview for the Action Plan Marketing Club. As our guest, we have Samantha Hartley of Enlightened Marketing.

Samantha works with successful, socially responsible

business owners who still suffer from peaks and valleys in their businesses. She helps them to operate and grow more consciously and effectively and to increase sales without selling out on their values.

By identifying and communicating their unique benefits

or brand value, her clients consistently attract more customers and improve profitability. In addition, they feel a greater sense of control, direction, clarity and confidence about what they’re doing. As a result, they become more joyful business owners.

Before starting her own consulting business, Samantha

worked in international marketing for small startups and the Coca-Cola Company, for whom she managed a $12 million budget while based in Moscow, Russia. Samantha went on to head up strategic channel marketing for Asia while at Coke headquarters in Atlanta, GA.

As a consultant, Samantha has developed brands and

marketing plans for businesses ranging in size from one-person startups to $15 million global multinationals. She’s done branding for events, a city and even churches. She’s also one of my very top certified Action Plan Marketing coaches.

Samantha, welcome to the call on branding.



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Samantha: Thank you very much, Robert. Robert: The title of this interview is “Branding for Independent

Professionals: 7 Steps to a Money-Making Brand.” I don’t use the word “brand” very much in my marketing because it’s one of those words that are hard to define. It’s a confusing word because everybody talks about it differently. I want to know what you mean by a brand and what it means to independent professionals.

Samantha: It is hard to talk about because a lot of people have

varying opinions. Many people think a brand is your logo. I’ve heard people talk about their branding when what they really meant was that they changed the colors around their business logo.

Other people say they heard the brand when what they

really heard was the jingle or a slogan, like “Just do it.” You can say that the type of soda you’re drinking, Coca-Cola, is the brand. Those are all incomplete definitions.

Robert: They’re aspects of the brand, right? Samantha: Yes. The definition I use of a brand, because it’s simple, is

that it’s your unique identity. It’s the unique identity of your business that people associate with you. If you look at a person’s identity, no one person is one thing. You’re not your name, house, income or friends, but you are the sum total of all those things.

I think of brand like a thought bubble in cartoons. If there

is a huge thought bubble around a Nike shoe, for example,



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it would be all of the thoughts, impressions and expectations you have about that brand.

Robert: Can’t a brand be summarized in a few sentences or a

couple of paragraphs? Samantha: Absolutely. That’s what I call a brand positioning

statement. Some people call it a “brand essence.” As marketers, we’re looking for that tightly focused sentence that’s attributable to any single brand and says who it’s for, what the benefits for that brand’s target market are, and why it’s not a lie. Those are the things I get for each of my clients.

Robert: The concept I use a lot is called a core marketing message.

That sounds similar to what you’re talking about. How is it different?

Samantha: It is very similar. Often in our marketing, we’ll simply use

that marketing message. It says, “Here’s who I’m for. Here are the problems I solve. Here are the solutions I get.” Branding goes one step further. It also says, “Here’s how I’m different from everybody else who does it. This is why you should work with me as opposed to everybody else.”

Independent professionals tend to fall into a few areas.

There are people who suspect they are unique and different, but can’t quite put their finger on it. I love to work with clients like that. They say, “I know I have these outrageous gifts. The people I have worked with love me, but I can’t figure out how to say that in words that will attract other people.”



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Robert: I’ve worked with a lot of independent professionals such as coaches, consultants, trainers, writers and designers. It is true that to differentiate them is quite challenging. What are some ways you can differentiate yourself other than, “Here’s who I work with. Here are the problems I solve. Here’s the solution I give”?

Samantha: You said something very impressive about what makes it

so difficult to brand. First, a lot of coaches I work with are in a place where nobody knows what the heck a coach is. They feel a double whammy. They have to explain to people what they are before they can even talk about why people should work with them.

I do work with a lot of people who are in professions

where their target market needs them, but doesn’t know it and doesn’t know why.

Second, I work with a lot of people who, like coaches, are

one of a zillion. That means you’re a commodity. I’m a marketing consultant. Aren’t there 10,000 other marketing consultants you could work with? It’s incumbent upon us to say, “Actually, I’m not like other marketing consultants.”

People talk about niche markets. You want to get very

clear about who, precisely, is a good fit for you. This is where we get into fear. A lot of people fear to specialize, but it’s very difficult to set yourself apart when you don’t specialize. You also need to be clear on what uniquely makes you different. We’re going to get into those things that you can actually do.



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Robert: Why should we, as independent professionals, really care about this? You have something called “8 Signs of a Weak or Unhealthy Brand.” That’s a way to approach this, right?

Samantha: Exactly. If you’re a coach or a designer who thinks,

“Really? Why?” when somebody tells you that you need to brand yourself, here are some signs that mean you probably have a brand issue. Sometimes people have issues because they’re just not good at what they do, but I’m assuming that the product or service you provide is top quality.

Robert: Quality has to be the foundation of everything. A brand is

not a trick. If we produce miracles for you but when you go there you do not produce miracles, then you’ve screwed yourself with that kind of branding.

Samantha: Absolutely. That’s like a pyramid scheme, where you burn

your bridge with every client and don’t really have a sustainable business.

Robert: Over the years, I’ve found that my brand has strengthened

because I’ve gotten better at what I can do, I’ve gotten more targeted, and I understand the problems more and the solutions better. Since back in the ‘80s, I’ve helped independent professionals, but my specific business is very different now. As a result, the brand has evolved.

Samantha: Brands do evolve. I liken it to boiling some ingredients for

soup. The longer it steeps, the more flavor it builds. It gets more intense and specific. It sounds like that has happened in your business. It’s happened in my business, as well.



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The first sign of a weak or unhealthy brand is client

issues. You probably don’t have those in your business anymore because you’ve learned not to work with clients like that. When people come to me with brand problems, the issue almost always is the quantity or quality of clients. Either they don’t have enough clients or the clients they are attracting are rotten and driving them crazy.

I have had people literally in tears in my office, saying, “I

hate all my clients. They don’t appreciate me. They complain about paying my prices. They don’t treat me well. They don’t respect me.” Those are people who don’t understand your value.

Your unique brand value is that unique identity. If you

aren’t clear on what it is, aren’t clearly communicating it and are not attracting people who want exactly what you do, you’re going to have client issues. That’s the number one sign of a bad brand.

Robert: Does that come out of simply not having services that are

good, communicating poorly about them, or both? Samantha: It’s both. It comes from the Law of Attraction as well. If

I’m not clear on who I need to be attracting, everybody is going to come. It’s the difference between putting out the general birdseed and putting out finch food.

What’s a very common marketing message? “I help people

who don’t have enough clients to get more clients.” If I just put out that message, it’s a start. If I begin to get more



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nuanced and say that I help women business owners, I’ve gotten more specific. If I help them to get more clients online, I’ve gotten even more nuanced.

Robert: When I started my business, I said I was a “small business

consultant.” What the heck did that say? That developed into “I help small businesses attract clients.” Then I realized that not all small businesses are ideal and that I can’t help all small businesses, for whatever reason.

I discovered that the service professional was my niche,

and I communicated that. Then I really focused on this concept of people struggling with their marketing. Even that is evolving for me. In a way, you have a brand as your business, but don’t you also have brands in terms of specific services that you offer?

Samantha: Absolutely. There’s a different target market for the Big

Mac than there is for the McSalad Shaker. Robert: For instance, I have a particular brand for this new Action

Plan Marketing Club. It’s a very affordable, one-stop place to get marketing ideas and support. I also have a very high-end program, the Marketing Mastery Program, for people who make a yearlong commitment. These are people who already have substantial success in their business.

It’s that kind of wording that crafts your brand. For the

advanced program, I’m not looking for people who are struggling with marketing. They need substantial success already and want to take it to the next level, to double or triple their business.



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Samantha: Perfect. That’s very clear. To continue with my signs, the first was client issues. The

second is that you’re unknown either to your target market or for those things that you want to be known for. People know I’m a small business coach, but they don’t know that I can help them with these specific things. There’s a big distinction in that.

Once you figure out what those unique things are that you

do and only you can do, and you communicate them, then your reputation is going to grow in your marketplace. That’s the kind of subtlety we want to communicate.

Robert: The way you communicate verbally and in your written

communications has to be very specific or nobody gets it. This is rampant. Your mother can’t even tell you what you do!

Samantha: Exactly. You also can’t tell one piece from another. This is

where we get into look and feel. What a lot of people think of as branding is really look and feel. What’s the logo like? What’s the color scheme? What ‘vibe’ do I get from these materials?

The third sign of a weak or unhealthy brand is

inconsistency. If you met me at three different marketing events, you would get three different impressions of the brand. If you saw my business card, website and stationery or invoice, you would think, “These don’t even relate to each other.”



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I’ll give you a couple of examples. These are people I haven’t worked with because they had such a mess that I said, “You really have to get this stuff cleaned up before I can even help you.”

One is a local chiropractor who has three different

business names. If you look in the phone book, there’s one name listed. The sign on the building has another name. The official legal name is yet a third thing. I can understand having a different legal name, but to have two others?

There’s a bank here in town I talk about all the time

because they are such a model of the wrong marketing. They have at least three or four logos. If you travel around town, you’ll see different kinds of locations. One is a Spanish-mission style building. It’s not contextual to the neighborhood. Somebody just got a wild hair and decided to do that.

If you go into one of the branches, behind the tellers is a

different logo on the wall. This is one of the easiest things to clean up and they don’t even bother.

You might be thinking, “The logos are different. That’s

sort of exciting. It shows different aspects.” No. When you have inconsistency in messaging or your brand, it erodes trust on a subconscious level. It says, “Every time I see them, they’re a little different.”

Robert: It confuses people.



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Samantha: Absolutely. Where’s the last place I want to feel a lack of trust? It’s my bank. If they can’t keep their signs lit or their logos consistent, if the logo on somebody’s nametag is different from the logo on the wall behind the teller, which is different from the logo on the outside of the building, I don’t know if they can be handling my money. It just gives the feeling that they don’t know what they’re doing.

Robert: That probably applies even more to the independent

professional. Samantha: The independent professional needs to build up trust

from the very beginning because we’re small businesses. We don’t need to look bigger than we are, but we need to look professional and consistent.

Robert: Often, as an independent professional, your website is

homemade. You design it yourself, even if you don’t have any experience in graphics.

Somebody attended my workshop last week in Atlanta. He

said, “I have a website.” We went to my laptop and looked at it. I had to let him down gently because it needed a lot of work. The design was unattractive. The site was confusing, and there was no clear branding. It was a page, but it didn’t stand for anything. There was no consistency. That’s the kind of thing people turn away from.

Samantha: In fact, people turn away from it in less than seven

seconds!



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Robert: It’s so important that your website reflects your brand. Given that it’s what people can look at 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, just having it up there isn’t enough. It has to really reflect who you are in words, messages, graphics, layout and everything.

Samantha: Your website can do so much of the work for you. There

are people who will find my website and then contact me to ask me to work with them. That is a quick sell. I don’t have to do anything. Then I can begin to qualify them to see if they’re a really good fit for me.

Robert: It’s a shortcut to your marketing. I hear it all the time.

People have used my Website Toolkit and then say, “This is starting to happen to me now, whereas it never happened before.”

People think, “I’ll get around to it someday.” You can lose

ridiculous amounts of money in potential business through this poor branding and not even realize it.

Samantha: I’m going to continue with signs of a weak brand. So far,

we have client issues, being unknown to your target market, and inconsistency. These are huge issues that are going to be reflected back in the form of poor or few clients.

The next sign is pricing issues. If people balk at your

price, it means the value is not being communicated. If you’re getting pushback, they don’t believe that it’s worth that kind of money.



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I’ve had projects that are $45,000 and $60,000 engagements. The $60,000 engagement I know for a fact that my “competitor” bid $15,000 on. When you don’t experience pushback because of the prices, you know that the value is being communicated.

Robert: If you go out to network and instead of wearing nice

clothes and a suit and tie, you’re wearing jeans and a dirty shirt, you could be the world’s best expert, but they wouldn’t want to pay you high prices just because of the impression.

Samantha: The fifth sign of a weak or unhealthy brand is “glazed

eyes.” Has anybody ever experienced that? Your message should open doors and get attention. When it doesn’t, when people say, “Oh, you’re this or that” and you say, “No, no, no,” those glazed eyes are a sign that you do not have clarity about your brand.

What bothers me the most is that I work with people who

are great at what they do. They have a gift to deliver to the world. They come up against this stuff and don’t know why.

I don’t want people to experience that pain. I don’t want

them to be told, “I don’t like that price.” When somebody says, “That’s too expensive,” my clients are the type of people who then feel like they’re not worth it. I don’t want them to feel like they’re not worth it. They’re priceless. People should be able to deliver their gift to the world.



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I want them to be able to charge what they want and not have the experience of looking at glazed-over eyes. It doesn’t feel good.

Robert: Sometimes, you’re very clear about what you do, but

you’re talking about it from the wrong angle. Instead of talking about what they get, the benefits and what it means to them, you talk the “tech talk” and process of your business. I call it “process-speak.”

You’re very clear about it, but it’s so technical that it’s not

reaching the “What’s in it for me?” thing. Another way of saying it is that we’re not speaking the language of our clients.

Samantha: We also tend to speak a language that’s unique to us, and

no one else can understand it. The next sign is hype. I called my company Enlightened

Marketing because I help people to choose, out of the whole spectrum of marketing they could do, the ones that feel good for them personally and that also work.

It’s my theory that if you’re not in joy, you’re not going to

do something. You can’t hide in your office all day. You have to do some marketing. I ask, “How about this one?” They say, “That one feels bad when I do it.” “What about this one?” “Okay, that one feels good.” The one thing nobody ever feels good about is hype.

Often, people feel the need to use these unfounded

adjectives instead of making claims about the kinds of results they get. They say, “We’re great! We’re the best!” I



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don’t like any adjectives at all in marketing. In terms of describing a service, I don’t want to hear that somebody is a “lifetime professional” or “highly skilled.”

Robert: They’re “the world’s best.” Samantha: I don’t want to hear any of that stuff. I want to hear what

you can do for me. Robert: It’s unsubstantiated. The problem is that people think of

marketing as hype. When we’re marketing our business, we think we need to use hype even though we don’t really want to because it is distasteful to us. This is a good message for people. You don’t need to use hype.

Samantha: I would be frustrated if I heard you say that. I would say,

“Okay, if I don’t use hype, then what do I say?” The answer is that you are going to talk about results you can get for people, solutions and deliverables.

Your materials, Robert, do this with the solution and

ultimate outcome. That’s what you talk about. If you promise me ultimate outcomes that I actually want, such as, “You can build a million-dollar business online while working from home,” I’m going to sign up. I don’t care if you’re great, seasoned or highly talented. I don’t give a crap about your adjectives. I want that result.

People need to learn how to shape their marketing

message into a results-based message and to identify those brand benefits, that, “I can do it for you in a way that feels good. You don’t have to do anything that feels icky.”



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Robert: If it feels icky or slimy and a little bit over the top, and you

do see a lot of that these days in internet marketing, it hurts all of us.

Samantha: The next sign of a weak brand is that you find yourself

selling. You’re in situations where you need to coerce, or you’re forced to sell or convince them. If you find yourself in that position, it basically means that your messages were not persuasive.

If we were seeing this physically, I’d describe this as you

having to lean forward at your prospect. When your marketing messages are enticing and appealing, and they speak in terms of the results, you attract people to you. They almost ask you to sell to them. They come and get you; they invite that conversation. It’s a very different energy.

If you find yourself in a situation where you feel that

you’re forced to sell in order to get business, you’re probably struggling with a weak brand.

Robert: There is a lot of misunderstanding about selling, of

course. The word “selling” has bad connotations. I say you only do selling as a conversation under favorable circumstances when someone is ready to explore doing business with you.

That has nothing to do with pressure or manipulation. It’s

just a conversation to explore whether you can work together. Everything before that is the marketing,



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communication and identity. It’s not pushing or hyping to begin with.

Samantha: Keep in mind, I’m referring to the selling that most people

loathe, which is the used-car salesman feeling of having to force and trick.

The eighth sign is no or low referrals. The problem for

people who do a good job is that, when they find that they’re not getting referrals is that people don’t know how to describe you, or to whom to describe you.

When I wasn’t really clear about my brand, I noticed that,

while I did get referrals, I got referrals to the worst possible prospects. People didn’t know who to refer me to because they were confused about what I did and could do. When you get really clear in your brand, it’s going to be different.

Robert: People are actually excited to refer people. People like to

refer people. If you’re not getting referrals, either you’re doing a crummy job or you’re communicating very poorly, or it’s a combination of both.

Samantha: You need to help people give you referrals by telling them

who and why. Who is the target market? What you can do for them?

We have a bonus sign here. If you’re feeling stress,

dejection, lack of joy, or that you have a lackluster business, it’s very likely you do not have a brand that’s helping you communicate the benefits of your business.



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Robert: Not many people think of it that way, Samantha. People think, “Marketing is hard because I have to do all these activities, and they’re not very effective. I’m getting out there, talking, networking and speaking.”

What they don’t realize, because it’s almost invisible to

them, is that this whole brand is such a powerful foundation of communication. If it is wobbly, insufficient or unclear, they have no foundation to stand on. All these other activities aren’t making an impact because the communication of that brand is not coming through. It’s not being communicated to other people, and it’s not being passed along.

You’re stressed because you have a bad brand. That’s

brilliant! Samantha: A brand is “pass-fail.” Am I on strategy for my brand, or

am I off strategy for my brand? It’s really the strategic driver of your business. You must know who you’re supposed to be working with. You need crystal clarity about this.

The number-one problem that people come to me with is,

“I don’t know who I should be working with. Who is a good fit? I know what I’m good at, but I don’t know who is going to appreciate that.” When you’re crystal clear about whom you work with and what you can do for them, it’s so easy to know where to go to market. The clearer people are and the more niched their product is, the easier it is for me to help them.



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When people don’t know what they want, it totally guts the Law of Attraction. If you know what you want and who you ought to be working with, it’s very easy to say what the things are you do that are good for them.

You’ll find it drives everything in your business. “Should I

do a joint venture with this person, yes or no?” It will be obvious, pass-fail, yes or no.

The other thing that is pass-fail about brand is that

everything you do in your business either builds your brand value or destroys your brand value. I learned this when I was at the Coca-Cola Company. They are very unequivocal about it. The mission of that business is to build shareholder value.

When I’m in a meeting talking about how we’re going to

get Fanta out into clubs so that people can enjoy their friends with Fanta, which is what that brand is about, I’m building brand value.

When I’m online wasting time searching for something,

I’m destroying the value of the brand. When I’m searching for something on my messy desk, I’m destroying the value of my own brand. If I’m reaching out by writing an ezine, I’m building brand value.

Robert: This is good news/bad news for everybody. Things like

your phone message, (which is not one of my strengths by the way), can help build or destroy your brand value.

Samantha: You’re getting way ahead of us, to the very last part of the

branding process, which is radiating your message. It’s



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the way people perceive you. “Does my phone message build or destroy value for my brand?”

Robert: It’s also important to realize that while we can never be

perfect, we can still work toward the best expression of that brand we possibly can. There’s always going to be more to learn to do it better, to structure your website nicer, to improve communication and so forth. It is never-ending work, and you’ll never be perfect.

Samantha: That’s true, but I do want people to be intentional. One of

my principles for Enlightened Marketing is that we’re intentional. The opposite of intentional is accidental. That’s when you say, “Oops!” When you hear that your voicemail message has opportunities for improvement, it’ll take you 30 minutes after this call to go fix it.

Robert: It will actually take about two minutes. Samantha: Therefore, there’s no excuse! I’m going to call you

tomorrow and I want to hear that voicemail message. You can build brand value immediately.

Let’s talk about signs of a healthy brand. “I’m totally bummed out now. This brand is dragging me

down. I have rotten clients who don’t appreciate me. I have a lot of stress in my business. Nobody refers me. What can I do?” You can brand your business.

When you have a healthy brand, the first thing that

happens is that you are known and recognized for a distinct identity. People say, “Oh, that’s the InfoGuru guy.



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He works with independent professionals and helps them attract a steady stream of all the clients they can handle.”

Robert: That’s me. Samantha: You have a visual identity and message that people

recognize. Your tagline, logo, imagery, evidence of your work and expectations all build the pieces and continue to build the value of your brand. When people go to one of your workshops, they say, “That was exactly what I expected.”

All of those things build the pieces and continue to build

the value of that brand. That’s number one. The second sign of a healthy brand is that your messages

get attention. Your written messages, website, pay-per-click ads, brochures, and even your answer to “What do you do?” at a networking event all get the attention of the right people immediately. That’s a feature, not a benefit.

The benefits of attention-getting messages are many.

First, there is a lower cost of acquisition of clients. What does that mean? If people get who I am and what I do immediately and become my client, I don’t have to market at them so much or spend as much time engaging them. That means I acquire those clients at a lower marketing cost.

Second, it’s shorter sales cycle, which is a result of that

lower cost. Sometimes people even call you.



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I remember a joyous day in my business. It didn’t occur until after I had done the Marketing Action Group with you. I was sitting in my office and my cell phone rang. Somebody I did not know was calling ME because they wanted to work with ME. It was the first time in my life that this happened. I thought, “The tide has turned.”

Robert: That came from word of mouth. Samantha: Absolutely. It came from the fact that my clear messages

were out there. Marketing was being done for me that I personally didn’t need to be involved in. Can you imagine? When your messages get attention, there are no hype and no selling. Again, by “selling,” we mean the evil kind of selling, not the proper kind.

Attention-getting messages mean I don’t have to say, “It’s

great! It’s wonderful! You’ll love it!” I just get to say, “If you’re this kind of a person and you want this kind of a result, then I’m the one for you.”

Robert: “And here’s the evidence and proof.” Samantha: That’s why it’s not a lie. The third sign of a healthy brand is that you work only

with perfect clients. There’s a t errific book called Attracting Perfect Customers, by Brogniez and Hall. I recommend it to everybody. It’s another one of those books that changed my life. It is the only book that has actually made it into my branding process, and the only outside thing that has influenced my branding process.



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Robert: We’ll include a link to the book in the transcript Samantha: If you’re interested in the ideas we’ve talked about so far,

enlightened ideas like being intentional, not having to do any marketing that feels icky and working from a place of joy all the time, that book will really resonate with you.

Perfect clients are people who get you and value you for

exactly who you are and what you do for them. They want everything you do. If you put out a new program, they want that too. They want to stay in touch with you. You are exactly what they need and are looking for.

Those people respect your time. That means that your

work with them is more efficient, and therefore more profitable. That’s your fourth sign.

The fifth sign is that they value you and pay full price.

Very often, you’ll hear, “Is that all? It’s only that much? Oh, okay!” This is what you want to hear. You don’t want to hear, “How much?! What?!” You’d much rather hear, “Is that all?”

Robert: “Gee, I thought it was going to be more.” Samantha: My $60,000 client didn’t say that, but many times in the

end they say, “When we look back at all we’ve made since then, I can’t believe that’s all we had to pay. It was really worth it.”

Another sign of a healthy brand is that your clients work

with you again and again. If you have a service that people repurchase, then once we’ve done branding, we can

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1576751244/actionplanmarketA/



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continue to refine and make plans and strategies about communicating that brand. My loyal, perfect clients come back to me again and again.

The last fabulous sign is that they refer you. They use the

right messages and refer you to the right people. What we know about people is that they tend to collect with others like themselves.

If Amy, Christy or Howard, who are some of my perfect

clients, refers me to somebody, they won’t refer me to some jerk that they met at a party. They’ll refer me to somebody and say, “You really need to know Samantha. She would love you. You would love her.”

That makes your business so fulfilling. You finally begin to

deliver your gifts through your business, which is of course the mission of my business. You’re delivering your divine gifts to the world through the medium of your business, and they’re being received by exactly the people who should get them and appreciated in ways that are enriching, in every sense of the word.

Robert: You could probably put yourself on a scale from 1 to 10

with regard to how well you’re doing with that. If it’s below 5, you have a long way to go.

Samantha: Absolutely. When people hear this, they know where they

are. If brand is their issue, they know it immediately, and they know they need to get to work on it.

Robert: This is great. You’re really giving people a sense of the

importance of brand beyond the message. People tend to



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concentrate too much on the message and not think of the bigger picture. You’re really giving that to us.

Can you quickly give us a bullet list of the signs of a

healthy brand? Samantha: The signs of a healthy brand are: 1. You’re known and recognized for a distinct identity. 2. Your messages get attention, which means you have a

lower cost of acquisition and a shorter sales cycle. You don’t have to do any hype or selling because your messages get attention.

3. You work only with perfect clients. I only work with

perfect clients, Robert. 4. They respect my time, and they’re more efficient. Why

did I ever put up with those time-wasting, rotten clients? In the end, I was making $1 an hour! With my perfect clients, I’ve made up to $1,000 an hour. Why? They respected my time, they did their homework and we got stuff done.

5. They value you and pay full price. 6. They work with you again and again. 7. They refer you to other people. My goal for every business owner is joy. If I ask, “Do you

want to be a joyful business owner?” they say, “Sure.”



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Unfortunately, I can’t start there. I have to promise, “We’re going to get you out of pain.” When they say, “I hate all my clients,” I say, “That we can fix.”

Robert: This is good stuff. What’s next? Samantha: Do you want to learn how to do this? Robert: Yes. You’ve promised a lot. People should be excited about

this. If I could develop a brand at this level, that would give me the business that I’ve always wanted but didn’t know how to do. You’re saying that branding is the big key.

Samantha: We’re going to look at seven steps to a money-making

brand. It seems like every good process has seven steps. Your brand is going to make money by quickly and memorably cutting through the noise and static, getting attention and communicating value. This is how you’re going to make that happen.

We start with a vision. I can’t build a business if I don’t

know what I’m building. What does your business want to be when it grows up?

Robert: Tell me more about what you mean by “vision.” Samantha: This feels like a woo-woo technique, but I actually learned

it at Coca-Cola. You want to write a one-page freeform statement that is told in present tense.

For example, “It is December 31, 2010. I’m elated because

my business is earning $1 million in online and offline



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sales. I’ve never felt better rested and less stressed out,” and so forth.

Then you want to describe how your business makes

money, who you serve, what you do, what your competition is like, the general marketplace, the company spirit and what you do every day. You want to brainstorm that.

Robert: It’s a complete picture of what you’d like your business to

be in the future. It includes not only your business, but also your life. After all, you’re running your business. You have to balance your business with your family, health and all that. What good is a business if you’re making a ton of money and you’re totally stressed out because you’re working too hard?

Samantha: Exactly. A lot of my clients are one-person business

owners. I want them to imagine building the perfect business. We call this vision a “picture of success.”

People will give me dry goals, like “I want to make $1

million by the end of 2010.” I’ll say, “How will you know when you’re doing that?” “We’ll have those checks.” I’ll then say, “Tell me what your business will be like. Start to describe what it’ll look like.” In goal-manifesting terms, it means we begin to picture it as a reality.

When you describe stuff like that, you might see it and

actually think, “I don’t actually want that to happen.” It’s a vision statement, so erase it and write what you do want to happen.



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If they say, “It looks like I’ll be really busy and miserable,” I say, “Good. We’ll write in a personal assistant. Let’s figure out how to make that happen.”

When you describe this future state of your business in

these vivid terms, you begin to get very specific ideas about how to do things. Why does this have anything to do with the branding process? Your brand is going to bring these ideas to fruition.

If you want to create a million-dollar business, you need

to have a million-dollar brand. Therefore, you need to build a million-dollar brand, which is going to look very different from a $100,000 brand or a $50,000 brand. You need to create a business that makes bigger promises to more people or to a specific niche.

That’s the first place this starts. I have some articles on

my website about how to write a vision statement in this model. In general, it describes what it will look like when you arrive there.

Robert: That’s a very powerful process. Samantha: It’s incredible. I really love it. What’s funny is that it

doesn’t seem to have anything to do with branding. For many people I work with, that’s sometimes the biggest takeaway they have.

People will cry during this process! We’re often afraid to

dream a big dream. When you write it down on paper, you realize, “I’ve been thinking too small. I can do much more. Actually, I was afraid to say that my mission is to help



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people in this way.” It can really help you to unlock what you want to do in the world.

I firmly and strongly believe you won’t be given the feeling

of what your mission is or the sense you ought to be doing something if you haven’t also been given the skills, tools and talents to do it.

Robert: Also, you don’t have to know exactly how to do it yet. If

you keep saying, “I don’t know where to get a virtual assistant,” you’re just sabotaging yourself. What do you want? We’ll figure it out later.

Samantha: I always tell people, “My job is to make it happen.” When

people say, “This is what I need,” I say, “Okay.” I almost always know the answer to “How?” What I don’t know the answer to is “What do you want?”

That was the first thing. This is a standard process that a

lot of people use in the brand. It’s like a SWOT analysis, where you take a look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. I call it a “competitive analysis.” Now, as the next step, we want to answer the question, “How are you a better choice for your target market than the alternatives?”

One of the statements a brand has to make is, “I’m better

than all the alternatives in this sense.” That’s very difficult. How are you a better coach than any other? A lot of people will say, “For goodness’ sake, I’m not a better coach than Robert Middleton!” Yes, but for your market, you’re a better choice.



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Robert: You might understand these people better, have more background in that area, have more experience working with those kinds of clients, have certain processes that you’re really good at and so forth.

Samantha: One thing we need to consider is who people work with if

they don’t work with you. I worked with a woman who is a spiritual counselor. She felt like some people might be watching “Dr. Phil” instead of working with her. I asked, “Why is that a better choice?”

It was hard at first to say what was really good about Dr.

Phil, but we decided was that Dr. Phil actually delivers really commonsense ideas. He is a really good fit for people who have not gotten in touch with their own commonsense. My client can’t help you if you haven’t gotten in touch with your commonsense. You really need to be good with that before you go to somebody else.

I work with a lot of community banks. They get very

frustrated because I am a loyal Bank of America person. Do I love Bank of America? No. Do I have sweet feelings about them? No. However, they meet my needs for efficiency, anonymity and all of that.

A community bank is a really good choice if you want to

have a personal relationship with your banker, if you want to go inside the bank and visit with people or if you don’t want all that Internet stuff.

What’s really good about this exercise when I work with

the banks is that they realize, “We don’t hate you. You



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seem like a nice person, yet you don’t want to have a personal relationship.”

I do not want to have a personal relationship with a

banker. I do not want to go inside a bank. I want to do everything online. I want to bank on my mobile phone. The community banks say, “That’s not safe. It’s not secure.” I don’t care. I’m in a hurry.

Robert: A community bank might be a better choice for a

construction person who’s always getting loans and needs to work with a loan person to work things out personally, as opposed to someone who just needs checking and savings and nothing very complicated.

Samantha: Exactly. We’re used to hating our competitors or feeling

envious or afraid of them. I want you to look at your other competitors. Theoretically, you could say, “All of the Action Plan Marketing coaches are my competitors. However, I can see that Lisa, Nora and Michelle are all really good choices for different kinds of people than they are for the kinds of people who would hire me.”

People are looking for different kinds of stuff. Would they

serve different target audiences? Robert: Even location can be important. People want to work with

someone who is nearby. There are a lot of website designers you can work with virtually, but some people say, “I want a good website designer who I can meet with personally. I won’t feel comfortable otherwise.”



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Samantha: If they don’t return your calls, you want to be able to drive over to their office! All sorts of factors can be important.

When you do competitive or SWOT analysis, I don’t want

you to just look at your strengths and weaknesses. I want you to also think about why these other things are a really good alternative for the other people and why you’re really the best alternative for certain kinds of people.

I want to mention a twist on strengths and weaknesses

that I got from Alex Mandossian’s workshop. Instead of answering the question of what my strengths are, like “I’m good at numbers,” he uses, “I feel strong when I ________,” and “I feel weak when I _________.” For example, I feel strong when I’m working with people. I feel weak when I’m filling out expense reports.

Those kinds of things show you what you should be doing

and not doing in your business. You shouldn’t do anything that’s dragging down your energy by the end of the day.

Robert: That’s interesting. I feel stronger when I’m working with

groups than when I work with individuals. When I transitioned to working with groups, I really found my power as a consultant after being in business for about 20 years. Maybe I just burned out working with people one- on-one and teaching them the exact same things.

I like the dynamism of the interaction of many people.

That’s a strength I have. Samantha: That’s a very good thing to notice. Alex’s example was that

he felt strong when he was onstage at his own event, but



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he felt weak when he was one of 20 at somebody else’s event. That’s not about having an egomaniacal personality. It’s about knowing when you feel an energy flow that helps you deliver your gift. When you feel energy leaking out, it makes you feel disempowered and weak.

Robert: This is very good. I like to present to a group, but I don’t

like being on panels. Samantha: You’re getting information from your body and your

energy that tells you what you ought to be doing. We’re always looking for advice from outside ourselves, but that is advice we’re getting from inside ourselves.

The next thing is the target market. After I’ve figured out

the vision, what I want my business to be when it grows up, and after I’ve figured out the things I’m really good at and how that compares with what other people are doing, that’s when I begin to see who I should be doing it for. The people who appreciate strengths and qualities like mine are this specific target market.

As I said, I do a really specific perfect client list. You’re

going to do demographics, which are the externally identifiable selectors like location and gender, and psychographics, which are things like attitudes and motivations. In my list of 30 things, most are psychographics. I have things like, “They pay me joyfully and on time. They’re always prepared for their meetings. They think big about their businesses.”

Interestingly, one of my clients is a husband-and-wife

team who own a bed and breakfast. They have a dog-



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friendly location. We did all of the demographics and found that the combined income is $75,000 or more, they travel for pleasure at least four times a year, and things like that. Then she said they like big dogs.

There is a big difference between the kind of people who

like little dogs and the kind of people who like big dogs. It’s the Golden Retriever crowd versus the Yorkie crowd. She wanted people who like big dogs. I said, “It’s your inn. It’s your client list.” Immediately, I got ideas about how to find people who like big dogs.

Robert: Not only that, but you can communicate this in your

marketing materials. You could have, “We love people with big dogs. You can come visit our B&B with your big dog,” and have a picture of a family with a couple of big dogs. That just zings. It communicates and connects.

Samantha: You use language and imagery. It’s a differentiator. I

personally have big dogs, and I’ve had a little dog in the past. I like both, so I don’t feel left out of their target either way. I’ve traveled with dogs, and there are plenty of places to stay, but your dog has to be 25 pounds or less. That’s a dog that fits in a purse. I don’t want that kind of dog. That doesn’t help me out.

This client is very unique in that they have that. She also

said they listen to NPR. That’s a specific kind of person. She’s very clear on exactly who she wants.

I want you guys to have that specificity in your marketing.

When somebody comes to me and says they make this much money, do this much traveling and listen to NPR, I



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immediately get specific, concrete marketing and communication ideas about how we can reach them and what will entice them. It’s very specific.

I usually ask people to keep things positive in their

perfect-client list. Robert: They should say what they do want, not what they don’t

want. Samantha: Yes. This same client said, “My perfect client doesn’t color

their hair in my bathroom!” I said, “Normally, I ask you not to put the negatives in there, but it sounds like that’s a specific issue that we need to do something about.”

Robert: Another one is, “They don’t smoke.” Samantha: Their perfect client doesn’t smoke. We do have to get

certain things in there. That’s target market, which includes both niche and who exactly you’re serving. We get really clear on all that and then refine it and hone it down into the perfect client.

Robert: I want to address something about this, Samantha. A lot

of people say, “I have a service for everybody.” They’re not targeted. Tell us the problems with that.

Samantha: My first question would be, “How’s that working out for

you?” Robert: “I don’t want to miss the little-dog people. I don’t want to

miss the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh. They pay money as well.” What can you tell those people?



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Samantha: Everybody feels like they are different from everybody

else. Margaret Mead said, “You are unique and special, just like everybody else.” She was an anthropologist, so she really knew people.

We all feel like we’re different from everybody in the

world, and we value information and products from specialists. Look at the Mac and PC people. I identify with my brand. I want people to market to me specifically.

Therefore, there is actually more money and benefit for

you in taking that thing you do and creating three different niches. “I’m afraid of leaving this one out.” Take an aspect of your product and market it specifically to that target over there.

I tell people, “Let’s hone this down to the narrowest thing

we can possibly hone it down to.” When they say, “What if I market to women?” I say, “That’s 50% of the planet. Can we try harder?” “I’ll target women business owners.” That’s good, but women own 60% of the businesses in the United States.

If you can get it down to a very concrete niche, like

“chiropractors in the Midwest” or “owners of big dogs that have skin allergies,” ideas immediately come to mind. They say there are riches in the niches. There’s a lot more value. The messages and benefits write themselves when you are very targeted.

I can find clients more easily, and they’re going to be

attracted to that message and value it more. They will pay



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more money for the service which addresses those big dogs with allergies. If you could do “Weimaraners with allergies,” you’d be even more specifically marketing. You might say, “I can’t quite make a living on that because it’s only 10,000 people.” Really?

Robert: You don’t want to have the world’s most narrow niche. I

call it “the left-handed bowler from Scandinavia.” However, if you said, “We work with those people,” at least they’d know and respond.

Samantha: The other thing I hear is, “I would be bored if I worked

with the same people over and over, like the left-handed bowlers from Scandinavia.” Let’s say that was 10,000 people. You’ve worked with five of them and now you’re bored. What did you learn from those five? Can you create a product or home-study kit for them?

You could put up a specific website that says, “For left-

handed bowlers from Scandinavia. Here’s everything you need to know about how to increase your score and be more ambidextrous.” Again, there is more money in that than in saying, “Does anybody out there want to increase their bowling scores?”

Robert: Exactly. When it comes to defining this niche or target

market, you don’t necessarily hit on it overnight. Sometimes, it takes a little bit of trial and error. Sometimes, it takes years of refining, but refine it you must because if you don’t, you’re really missing out on the power of your brand.



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Samantha: The other thing is that even if you put the finch food out in the birdfeeder, you’re still going to get some squirrels.

When I decided to hone my target audience, to specifically

market to socially responsible small business owners and to speak a spiritual message, which is that you have divine gifts that you are uniquely endowed to do and that you not only have a right, but also a responsibility, to deliver, I was scared to death when I put it up on my website.

Robert: “That will eliminate everybody and they’ll think I’m a

flake.” Samantha: Absolutely. The Chambers of Commerce, the banks and

all these serious people I work with are going to see that and feel repelled or afraid.

Robert: But what happened? Samantha: Au contraire. First, all of the jerks from the Chamber and

the businesspeople who were all about money and not about doing something beneficial for their clients didn’t want to work with me.

Robert: That’s wonderful. You eliminated the ones you didn’t

want to work with. Samantha: Exactly. I defined my target audience as people whose

business does something good for their communities, their clients and possibly the world.

I worked with a local business that manufactures concrete

blocks, cinder blocks and blocks used in retaining walls in



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people’s backyards. They said, “Can you help us in our business?” I said, “I work with people whose businesses do something good for their clients, communities and possibly the world.” She said, “Yes, that’s us.”

They make cinder blocks, but they feel they do something

good for the community. Of course, they do. They’re making the foundation of people’s homes and making their yards more beautiful.

My message really resonates with the right people. Robert: It’s not the specific products. It’s the attitude toward the

product or service. You can sell anything and have a fabulous attitude, that it’s a contribution. Likewise, you can sell the world’s most incredible thing and think, “I just want to get the highest price and who cares.”

Samantha: Exactly. Let people self-select. If you’re really clear on

your message, you’ll be surprised by some of the people who come to you. They’ll say, “That’s for me.”

The definer of a brand, in terms of the way they answer, is

not “That’s good” or “That’s bad,” but rather “Is it good for me?” Mercedes is a perfectly good brand, but I prefer Lexus. Does that mean Mercedes is good or bad? It means one is for me, and the other one is not for me.

This is what we need to realize. When people say, “I don’t

want to work with you,” they’re not saying, “You’re rotten. You’re terrible at what you do.” They’re saying, “It’s not for me. It’s not what I’m looking for.” I found that the people I didn’t actually want to work with said, “That’s not



39

for me.” The other people, whether I knew them or not, looked at what I was offering and said, “That’s for me.”

Robert: That resonates. In practical terms, you put this in your

materials and on your website. We have a page in the Website Toolkit called “Who do we work with? Who are our clients?” A lot of websites don’t even have that on their page. You keep wondering, “Do they work with me? Who are their clients?” There’s no real definition. As a result, it doesn’t draw you in.

Everyone needs to have this on their home page and on a

page that says, “Here are our clients.” People read it and think, “That’s for me.” You’ve gone a long way if you can accomplish that. It’s just not that hard.

Samantha: The beauty of this stuff is that it’s not hard. It’s just that

people either are not intentional about it or don’t know about it. Now there’s no excuse because you’ve heard it here.

Once you know who your target market is, you’re going to

do differentiation. Differentiation is the heart of branding. This is USP, unique selling proposition. I define it as the special sauce, that thing which turns a hamburger into a Big Mac.

Robert: “What’s your special sauce?” I love it. Can I steal that? Samantha: Absolutely. If you want to easily define brand, you say it’s

the special sauce. Special sauce is ketchup, mayonnaise and pickle relish. I don’t know that for a fact, but it’s



40

basically Thousand Island dressing. You put it on a hamburger and it makes it a Big Mac.

Robert: The big thing with Kentucky Fried Chicken is the “11

secret herbs and spices.” Samantha: The thing with Coca-Cola is that there’s a secret formula,

and three people have the key to the safe that it’s in. Yes, there’s mystique. There’s an appeal and some sense that this is different from everything else out there.

We need to figure out what that is. If people think, “I don’t

know what that is,” well, first of all, you’re different from everyone else out there. Let’s figure out what is special about you. What can you do for your target audience that no one else can do? That really helps us to focus.

My target market comes to me for those things that they

feel I can do that nobody else can do for them. Why is this so darn hard? The first reason this is so hard is because we’re inside the bottle of our brand. It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle. That’s why I get to look like a genius.

When somebody comes to me and says, “Here’s who I

am,” and I say, “Here’s your brand,” they literally gasp. It’s not just emotional people who gasp. Lisa Nirell and I worked with a client who helps machines talk to each other in manufacturing plants. They’re systems integration specialists. When somebody said the magic words, there was a gasp in the room, and someone said, “I think we just got it.”



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If you’re yearning to know what is special about you, but you can’t figure it out, there are a few questions you can ask yourself. What have your clients told you when they’ve said, “Do you know what you do that I love so much?” You can ask them why they chose to work with you versus other options. You can ask, “When we worked together, what were the things you got?”

I’m asking you to do a little “market research.” Robert: “Why did you choose us over the competition? What do

you think makes us special? When you talk to others about us, what do you say?” You need to know what you’re not thinking of yourself. Like you said, you’re inside the bottle. I love that.

Samantha: What compliments have people given you? When I name

somebody’s brand, when we discover this or they come upon it themselves, when they see the seams in the answers to the questions, it’s as if they’re being told the compliment they’ve been waiting to hear their whole lives. I say, “Your real gift is this, this and this. It’s your essential gift.”

When I left the Coca-Cola Company, I worked with a

company to figure out what I should be when I grow up. They gave me a Birkman (a personality assessment), did some other stuff, and then said, “You should probably own a franchise.” I knew I wanted to own a business, but they said, “We don’t think so.”

What nobody ever said was, “What’s your essential gift or

talent?” If they had bothered to ask me that, they would



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have seen that I shouldn’t be in a franchise, for goodness’ sake. My essential gift is best delivered to the world through this business here.

That’s what we’re looking for. When you’re doing this

process, I’d love for anybody who wants help to come to me, but if you feel like you want to work on this on your own, get a partner or somebody who knows you and can “read that label” to you.

Do a survey of your clients who love you. Go to your

raving fans. Don’t bother surveying your rotten clients because they’re the ones who don’t get you or your value.

Robert: There’s no point in talking to them. Samantha: I’m not saying that we don’t want to know why somebody

didn’t want to work with you, especially if you’ve lost them as a client. They can provide good information as far as developing your service and marketing. If they came to you for the wrong reasons, you can do something about that in the future.

I do want you to look at the people who say, “I am so loyal

to Robert, I would never work with anybody else.” Find out what they value so much and what specific features originally attracted them. “It was that he had this product. His solution seemed so practical.” What were the benefits they got? The person who is going to help you read the label needs to help you identify the themes.

We want to get this down to some specific differentiators.

I call it a “portfolio of benefits.” I work with a lot of people



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on branding and have studied a lot of branding. I have local ad agency I work with, and they tend to look for what they call “brand DNA” or that single differentiator. They’re looking for one thing.

If you’re a coach, I find it very difficult to find the one

thing that makes you different from all the other coaches. Robert: It’s often a small handful of things instead. Samantha: I call it a portfolio, and it consists of three things. Why

three? Three is a perfect number. I have had clients where it’s been only one or two things, but those are usually not independent professional service businesses.

For independent professional service businesses, we

usually look for a portfolio of benefits, any one of which, or all of which combined together, makes you the only one who can do what you do for your target.

I’m going to give you a big-business example, which is

Geico. I watched the ad, and the little gecko has only three fingers. They said, “Tell us why people should work with you.” He said, “It’s easy to use Geico.” That’s one benefit. What else?

“There’s no middle-man.” My local insurance guy is a

broker for other agencies, and he takes a commission. When Geico says there’s no middle-man, it means I go directly to the company.

The third thing is that “you’ll probably save a buck or

two.” I love that language. It’s such a mild promise.



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There’s also a cute Supreme-Court version of that ad where they say, “I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico.”

They have realized that it’s difficult to differentiate

insurance. There are so many insurance companies. They’ve provided three reasons, any one of which, or all combined, might convince you to try Geico.

Robert: Some of them are doing very good advertising.

Progressive is also doing excellent advertising. Samantha: That’s the price-comparison one. They say, “We might be

cheaper.” They might not, but they might be. The Action Plan Marketing group provided a good

opportunity because there were 12 people who came together in the first group and several more since then. A lot of people realized, “Hold on. I’m doing this, and I saw that a lot of people are doing this. How am I different? Who should I be working with?”

One of the coaches I worked with is Nora of Nora Wolfson

Consulting. She works with a lot of corporations. Robert: She works with family businesses. Samantha: That was her discovery, but the first thing she worked

with was a lot of corporations. She has a partnership with a large consulting firm. They do high-dollar engagements. That’s wonderful and, while she enjoys those a little bit, they’re not her true love.



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When she and I worked together, we looked at what is true of Nora that would be her essential gift. Nora grew up in her own family’s business. She studied psychotherapy and worked for a while as an incredibly talented psychotherapist. Now, she’s a business consultant and can help people get these business results.

When I looked at that background, I said, “Nora, your

target audience should be family owned businesses. You have a background in it. It’s your own story. I don’t know where they would need more psychotherapy than in a family owned business with all the incredible people issues. You need to go there. They need the concrete business skills you can bring them.”

Realizing that her unique gifts combine to make her the

perfect person to help family owned businesses was the shazam moment. She hadn’t realized it before because she was inside the bottle. The opportunity of your differentiation is figuring out what’s going to be unique about you.

The next step in this is to put that into words. Your Audio

Logo process is really a very close version of how we do this. I do a positioning statement and a values statement. At the end of the day, you have to be able to take that out on the road in the form of an audio logo.

Sometimes your audio logo will not express all those

unique differentiators because its job is to get attention. When you deliver the information that gets people more familiar with you, that’s when you start to say, “Hey, I got your attention. Here’s why you should work with me



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instead of anyone else you’re considering.” That’s the value or positioning statement, which is the next step.

Robert: I went through an exercise recently in which I had one of

my marketing coaches interview several people who had gone through various programs. That can be a great exercise, to create case studies that reflect your brand.

It’s valuable in a lot of ways. One is that people can read

those and get a real sense of you in the words of your best clients. Additionally, it’s great for you because it validates you and helps you be clearer about your brand.

Samantha: It’s a credibility builder. It’s terrific. You’ve asked an

independent third party, to whom people will be honest, to collect the information about your brand for you. If you need to, you certainly can do this kind of surveying yourself. I personally always use a third party.

People say, “I can’t afford to hire Bill Metcalf. He’d be the

best person to use.” I had an intern do it. I paid that intern $25 an hour, but I’ve had interns in the past who have worked for free in exchange for college credit. Think creatively about who you can get to help you out on this.

The point of the value positioning statement and audio

logo is to take those brand differentiators and say, “Now I know what these great things are that I do.” In this step, I want you to put them into benefit-oriented words that you can use to communicate to your target audience.

There are only a few times when you’re going to use

something that’s a feature in your marketing or brand. It’s



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like that HEMI engine. I don’t even know what a HEMI is because I’m not the target audience, but they talk specifically about the HEMI engine.

Robert: Power! Samantha: You’re a guy, so you know. They’re going to name the

HEMI because the benefits are implied. Here’s an example of when an independent professional

would use a feature as opposed to a benefit. All I have to do is make sure I mention Coca-Cola within the first three minutes of a conversation, and I’m in. Why? The benefits of the fact that I used to work at the Coca-Cola Company are implied to my client.

I don’t take that risk. I come right out and say, “Why do

you care if I worked at the Coca-Cola Company?” and then go on to explain why it’s a benefit to my clients and how “I’ve now translated big-business marketing techniques into a small business setting to make sure they work for you. This is big-business branding, and I can help you apply it to your small business to get more clients.”

However, I could just say “Coca-Cola,” and often do. Robert: That’s very powerful. You find that thing that’s the

attention-getting trigger word. Samantha: In your industry, it might be a certain certification or

jargon. Keep in mind that there are times when it’s okay to use a feature if the benefits are so strongly implied that people would get it immediately.



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What I liked about what you said was that you took a

marketing strategy, which was case studies and testimonials, and told me how it can actually communicate your brand. The next step we’re going to talk about is strategies.

When we were at the Coca-Cola Company, people felt that

there were selling strategies, marketing strategies and brand-building strategies, but you couldn’t do it all in one. I say that’s nonsense and failure of imagination.

There is nothing you are doing that can’t simultaneously

communicate your brand. As a matter of fact, it’s either building or destroying your brand. If you have a ad in the paper for a sale, and you say, “That’s a selling thing. I don’t need to build my brand with it,” I beg to differ.

Robert: That’s nonsense. Your brand has to go through

everything, no matter what strategy you use, whether it’s speaking, networking, writing articles, etc.

Samantha: The strategies I generally talk about in my process for

expressing and building your brand can also attract clients to you, but you specifically want to use brand-building strategies for teaching people who you are and teaching your market what you want to be known for.

I’ve written a ton of articles on this stuff, partly because

that’s what my brand is about, having expertise that can help people. I use articles to do that. You can speak, write books and so forth, to communicate your expertise.



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Let’s take speaking as an example. Your brand is about being an InfoGuru expert, so it’s about giving away information with the implication that “If you think that was good, there’s way more where that came from.” You give away information on attracting clients in a way that helps people go to your website and buy more information about that.

The name of your presentation can communicate your

brand. Robert: The title of an article can also. Samantha: These are ways you shortcut and lodge in people’s minds

little, memorable sound bites, nuggets or fortune-cookie messages. You want to use your brand-building strategies to get your messages stuck in people’s minds and communicate to people what you are.

Obviously, website and online are huge opportunities to

teach people who you are. You want to make sure that you’re constantly communicating those three aspects of your brand. You want to tell stories. “Here’s a story about when I worked for somebody from this specific target market and when I delivered them those three qualities I just told you about.”

Is your product differentiated, like the hula hoop or iPod,

where it is the product itself that is different? Is it how you do something that’s different? Is it who you do it for? Those are all ways you can differentiate yourself.



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The strategies should always refer to that. Good strategies include speaking, writing, networking, online presence and publishing, forum commenting, having a blog and ezine distribution. Ezines are terrific.

People might think an ezine is a keep-in-touch strategy.

Really? Do you think you can keep in touch and build a brand at the same time? I’ll bet you can. How do you do that? You do it by constantly reminding people, “Here’s an ezine in which I’m giving you information about my expertise.”

Robert: I would say the ezine is my primary brand-building tool.

People know about it all over the world because I put it out every week, and then it points people back to the website. It’s all consistent.

Samantha: If your brand is InfoGuru, you have to deliver

information. Somebody else might say, “I’m not good at writing.” Then teach people about your brand in a different way.

You alluded to the last thing when you mentioned

voicemail earlier. This step is “radiate, express and cascade your brand.” I say radiate because it needs to emanate. Take that nutshell of a message and send it out through everything.

Have you ever gotten a red sock in your laundry and

suddenly everything is pink? That red sock is your brand! You need to turn everything just a little bit pink. Get that message out. We test our message and refine it. We wash, rinse and repeat.



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You want to test that message. I’ve had people leave with an audio logo, and then come back and say it didn’t really work. Okay, what part of it did work and what part of it didn’t? Let’s say the target audience worked, but the ultimate outcome didn’t. We switch it around and try again. They say, “But I told people I do this, and that’s unique.”

We’re not going to rewrite the brand. We’re going to work

on the exact communication of it. What are those topics, and what are the titles? What do you sell? Give a name to that specific product that you sell. That’s part of teaching people who you are.

Robert: You can even have titles to your programs that convey the

benefit, like the Marketing Mastery Program. That conveys that they’ll all master marketing, which is the whole idea of that program.

Samantha: Exactly. You want to cascade your brand to all your brand

touch points, like your business card, website, voicemail and things like that. You want to make sure that every way people ever see anything about you is consistent. You can think of it in terms of anything with your logo on it, but it’s really anyplace people might encounter you.

I work with a lot of realtors and service professionals who

have a sign on their cars. What if that car is parked in front of the liquor store? You say, “It’s my day off.” It doesn’t matter. If being at the liquor store is going to be a problem for your target audience, you need to take that sign off your car.



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The sad, yet empowering, thing for us is that we’re responsible for the way our brand is every minute of the day. There are a lot of famous people who get caught in a bad moment. It’s damaging for their brand.

Robert: There’s a whole TV show, “TMZ,” dedicated to that. They

try to catch celebrities doing stupid things. Samantha: It hurts their brand. If you’re a little bit of a rebel, you

almost can’t be caught doing something bad enough. However, if you’re known as a good girl, like Miley Cyrus, and you take some edgy photographs, it can come back to haunt you. We really want to make sure that we’re responsible for not leaking any messages.

Take responsibility. Brainstorm all the possible ways

people could encounter your brand. Make sure that you’re really keeping up with them.

I’m going to give you an example with one of my clients.

Carol owns a payroll company, Millennium Payroll Solutions. She had a partner, and he had done all the marketing materials. This business was a jewel in his crown. He had tri-fold brochures created. You know how we love tri-fold brochures, right?

Robert: They often look sort of tacky. Samantha: This was totally tacky. He wanted things to look rich. He

wanted to reflect his personal brand, not necessarily the brand of the business. Because the company is Millennium Payroll Solutions, he had all these 1s and 0s, like computer language, on the front of the brochure. It



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was gold and some other colors. It looked very rich and technical. That’s what the brand communicated at the time.

They found that when people got the brochure, they

thought the service was expensive. There were no benefits expressed in the brochure. They were not communicating why people should work with them, even though they knew why.

When I started talking to them, we realized that a lot of

small businesses think it’s too expensive to outsource payroll. They’ll sit there until 9:00 p.m. working on payroll. If you make a mistake in payroll, you have tax accountability. It’s a scary thing to do yourself.

Some other people had been using national services and

found that they got nickeled and dimed to death, which really made it feel expensive.

We developed the fact that small business owners could

outsource their payroll to this company, and it would end their hassles without being expensive. It also would free up their time for revenue-generating activities or spending time with their families. It was very benefit-oriented.

“If you’re really fed up with being nickeled and dimed by a

national agency, or if you’re exhausted from staying at the office and working on your payroll, scared to death that you might make a mistake that will cost you millions of tax dollars, then this is the company for you.” The tagline



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we came up with was “Hassle Free Affordable Payroll Solutions.”

A lot of people who come to me want a tagline. What they

usually mean is, “I need a brand. I don’t have the nutshell message that I need to tell my clients about the benefit of working with me.” The core benefits of working with Millennium for your payroll solution were that it was hassle-free, you didn’t have to mess with all these papers and tax people, and it was affordable.

Robert: It sounds great. Samantha: We communicated that by taking away all the gold and 1s

and 0s that made it look hard. There’s a simple, clear logo. You can see it on their website, www.MillenniumPayrollSolutions.com.

That’s the “after” of a brand that came to me in trouble.

They suspected they could really help their customers, who they loved so much, but were able to communicate that. They’ve grown by leaps and bounds ever since.

That’s the seven-step branding process. It can be easy. It

can be a path from struggle to joy. I think you can tell that I love what I do.

Robert: Absolutely. We still have a little bit more to cover! Samantha: Thank goodness! I could talk about this stuff all day long,

and I do.



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Robert: What if you’re totally new and haven’t even started your business, or you have what I call a “$19.95 special” business card, where it cost $19.95 for 500 cards. You’re happy because you didn’t spend much, but it has -10 branding. If you’re small, new or don’t have a lot of money, can you still use this process?

Samantha: Yes, you definitely can. The key thing you can think about,

even with your $19.95 business cards, is who you feel called to help. If you’re not even sure about that, the way to figure it out is by identifying what problems you solve. A lot of people have come to me just to have me help them figure that out. “I know I deliver a solution, but I can’t figure out what the problem is.”

The Golden Fleece, the portal to the big answer, is really

focusing in on that. What problems can I solve? When you get really clear on that, you can pull up your head up, look around and say, “Who has these problems. Which of those people do I feel most drawn to work with?” That’s the way in on this kind of stuff.

I had no website or marketing materials. I had nothing

but a black-text-on-white business card. I didn’t have a fancy logo or anything. I started with a benefit statement, which is like a tagline, on my business card, which said the problem I solve and the solution you get. I networked and spoke, networked and spoke.

I had a $100,000 business just by networking, speaking

and word-of-mouth. Those are the only ways I got any business for the first five years that I was in business. You



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don’t have to do all of this complicated stuff. All you really have to do is show up and tell your truth.

Robert: Often, people think, “I can’t start networking until I have

my website.” What did people do before there were websites, for goodness’ sake? It’s great to have your website. Work on it, but don’t let that stop you.

Samantha: It totally shouldn’t stop you. That will only be a problem if

your target market is very website-oriented, if that’s what they want to do. If you say, “Everybody in my target market has a website and really wants to engage with people that way,” then you might want to make that your first priority.

In the beginning, though, you can just get out there and

meet people. Again, the only bad news is that it’s a little bit hard to do this sitting in your office, especially in the beginning.

You want to make a line in the sand. You can take your

best possible guess at who your target market is and how you can benefit them, and, from there, you can refine it. Even you, Robert, and I are refining it. As our businesses grow, we begin to refine who can be helped by the special skills we’ve acquired and who we still want to help.

You have to make a line in the sand in the beginning and

leave the house with that value statement or audio logo. Robert: For goodness’ sake, don’t go out and flub it by saying, “I’m

a coach” or “I’m a consultant,” and hope they play 20 Questions with you and figure out what you do. You need



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some preparation, think it out the best you can and then give it a shot.

One of the things I’ve said a million times is that your

audio logo or message does not have to be perfect. It has to be decent. I’ve had people say, “I’ve been working on my audio logo for six months.” When I ask, “How’s it working?” they say, “I haven’t tried it yet because I’m not sure if I should use ‘a’ or ‘the’ here.”

That isn’t going to make a difference. Go use it with 20

people and see what it is. Then you can fine-tune it. If you really understand this basic concept, between my materials in the Fast Track program and this program, you have a fabulous foundation for building a powerful brand and message and getting it out there.

Samantha: When I hear that kind of a story, Robert, it tells me, “I’m

afraid. I’m afraid of making a mistake. I’m afraid I might fail. I’m afraid I might poison the pool. If I tell one person my audio logo and it’s wrong, then my whole business will be destroyed after that.” Those are all lies we tell ourselves to keep ourselves small.

I ask people to really hook into the why. Why am I doing

this? I really want to help people. I want to help people not be in pain when they’re marketing their business. I want to help people get their message out there and help the world.

If you connect into why you’re doing this and what you

really want, the bigger reason you’re in business, then it’ll get your behind out of the house.



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Robert: Then you connect with your real enthusiasm, which is part of your brand. It’s who you’re being, how you’re interacting, your level of excitement, belief and conviction about what you do. That’s all expressed through everything else. It’s not all about having the perfect words. The words are just a part of it.

Samantha: I’m glad you said that. When I was branding my business,

I looked at what people had said about me through my business. I had some other qualities that are benefits. One of the things that always stuck in my craw was the fact that people said, “You have so much energy.” I thought, “So what? That’s not much of a differentiator.”

What I understood later was that it made them feel

inspired to go try it themselves. Energy is a feature, and inspiration is the benefit. Do I say that I feel so inspiring? I’m not that grandiose. I don’t feel like I’m inspiring. I’m not Mahatma Gandhi or someone like that. However, when I speak about what I do, the passion, excitement and energy I have for it makes my target market feels inspired.

That’s a benefit of working with me. You’ll feel inspired to

go out and try this on your own. This is a really good example of how I took a compliment that I didn’t know what to do with, and didn’t necessarily feel comfortable with saying, and stepped back. Now I know that when the right people work with me, they do feel inspired.

Robert: I feel inspired just interviewing you! I’m sure a lot of other

people do too. I know a lot about this stuff and have read



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a lot of books. However, there’s always another angle to it. You’ve given me such great stuff today.

The penultimate question is how do you work with

clients? If someone is interested in getting branding help from you, what do they do? What’s available?

Samantha: I do still work one-on-one with clients. It’s more of an

investment because you’re going to get personal time. I have a structured process, which you’ve heard, that I use and am personally going to reflect back to people and help them to sculpt and shape their materials.

That’s a few thousand dollars, and it’s not for everybody

starting out with their business. There are also ways to hybridize individual work and work on your own.

If somebody feels really called to catapult their business

forward and wants to invest in that, they can work with me. It takes about 10 sessions to do those seven steps.

People will leave with a clear vision for their business, a

very clear understanding about who they are, who they should be working with and what their message is, strategies and an action plan for weaving that message throughout their business so that they attract and work only with perfect clients.

Another way to work with me is through my Branding

Action Group. We take that same process and do it in a group format. That is a really good way to work if you want some one-on-one time but like the synergies of a group. A lot of people are there to read the label they see



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on your bottle. My website is a great place to find out more about when the next group is forming.

In January, I’m going to launch the home-study version,

which will contain the kit, audios and some interviews I’ve done with experts. You will hear about branding your business through the look and feel and branding your business with your website, speaking, Facebook and all those tools people are using nowadays to express their brand.

I suggest that everybody who wants to get started right

away goes to my website, www.EnlightenedMarketing.com, and takes the free brand assessment. You’ve taken it, Robert, right?

Robert: I took it. It was great. It’s very revealing and simple to do.

You answer questions and score yourself. Two minutes later, you get an email with all the answers and an evaluation on every question.

Samantha: A lot of people have told me they think it’s a little too

much value for it to be free, so it will be free for just a little while longer. You get seven to nine pages of feedback on 31 dimensions of your brand. You’re going to self-assess, based on these 31 dimensions, and then I’ve written very rich, specific feedback that’s going to be personalized depending on your rating.

As I said, it will only be free for a little while longer. I

recommend that you take the assessment as soon as possible. It will give you a starting place. It identifies exactly the places where you have issues with your brand,

http://www.enlightenedmarketing.com



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whether it’s with your vision, your lack of referrals, your pricing and so forth. There’ll be a very clear action step.

Obviously, there are a lot of ways you can get started, but

if you start with the assessment, it really helps focus your next steps. I love when people contact me after having taken it because then we know exactly which areas of their brand need personal work.

Robert: That’s great. We’ll put a link to it in the transcript

so they can find it easily, as well as a link to your website.

Samantha, is there anything else? Samantha: I feel really strongly that it’s no accident that whoever is

listening to this message is hearing it today. I hope it’s made a difference and that you have heard something in here that you can take action on immediately.

I challenge you to go take action on the thing you heard

that you know needs your attention. If you feel like this is the next step for your business, I wish you would take action on that as well.

Robert: I suggest that people do that vision exercise right away.

That can really get you excited. Samantha: It can change your life. Robert: It absolutely can. There’s a version called “Interview from

the Future” in which you pretend someone is interviewing you from a trade magazine for your profession, saying, “It

http://www.enlightenedmarketing.com/assessment/



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is 10 years later. You’re now a leader in your field. Explain what your life and business look like.” It’s very similar to the vision exercise. You really map it out and let your imagination soar.

That’s what you’re living into. Out of that, you start to

create your brand and everything else. That’s a fabulous starting point and a fun, powerful exercise.

Samantha: Thank you, Robert, for all that you’ve done for all of us

infogurus out in the world. Robert: Thank you for a great interview. They are fabulous ideas

and will really make a difference to a lot of people. Thank you very much, Samantha.

Documents

BRANDING FOR INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONALS 1 ...actionplan.com/pdf/hartley_08.pdffor, what the benefits for that brand’s target market are, and why it’s not a lie. Those are the things