Why Leverage Matters for Impact
Entertainment vs. Behavior Change
As a thought leader and public speaker you’re often mistaken for an entertainer rather than a commodity. The trick is viewing speaking gigs as more than just a paycheck, but as paid business development opportunities. You should already be researching your clients, but take the time to learn the vernacular, and use that research to identify potential problems that your vision can solve, and work that into your content.
When you can offer up free advice from a place of integrity and passion, leadership takes notice and you go from the party clown business to the behavior change business.
Organizational Change Initiatives
Thanks to years of education and experience, our doctors knows more about our heart than we do, hopefully our mechanics know more about our transmission than we do, so then shouldn’t our consultants know more about a healthy company than we do? Each of these roles requires a tailored solution to best suit the situation; this starts with a diagnostic.
Diagnostics accomplish three things:
Make a small, low-risk sale to a B2B client
Implementing a diagnostic differentiates you in a powerful way and makes your client consider why no one else has ever diagnosed their specific situation. This not only weakens the position of other providers, but allows you to do so without saying anything negative about a competitor.
Align the client’s expectations about your platform with your content
Oftentimes clients will come in contact with your product and believe it can magically fix all their issues. Although there certainly may be places you can help, frequently their issues may be out of your realm of expertise. Running a diagnostic helps insure that you and your client share an expected outcome, avoid any miscommunications and walk away happy with the experience.
Identify the target issues that need to be addressed
Just like your car, you have to get under the hood before you can accurately pinpoint the source of a problem. Once the source is diagnosed, you can then implement a custom strategy to treat the client’s issues.
A good diagnostic is not a one size fits all remedy. Depending on the scale and size of your client’s needs a diagnostic could be a few questions over the course of a few minutes, or could take months. At the end, that time spent creates a clear definition for success and provides integrated metrics that you can use as benchmarks for success.
Instructional Design
You can’t be in one place all of the time, but instituting an Instructional Design program provides you with the resources to:
Remotely gauge success.
Maintain a high impact role in your campaign’s execution.
Create accurate and reliable assessments.
Establish clear learning objectives.
Instructional Design ensures that your initiative is correctly tracking the agreed upon metrics and is moving the organization closer to the anticipated goals.
By developing short active modules that engage their audience, provide accessable aha! points, and formulate follow up questions, you can insure that the ideas at the core of your campaign circulate the workplace throughout the length of your campaign.
What is Sticky?
In our world relevance is a matter of consistency. As technology evolves we have more ways for delivering and consuming content, but we often focus more on tactics and less on strategy. With hundreds of thousands of blogs, YouTube pages, and Twitter accounts, the one thing their most successful users all have in common is a strategic, steady stream of new content for their followers.
The days of irregular content are over. If your audience can’t find what they want on your page, they can find it on someone else’s. This stresses the importance of maximizing your social media presence to build dialogue with your target community. Newsletters have gone the way of the rotary phone. In our current global village people are far more interested in being heard and engaged with, so pull them into conversations about your content. Monitor and take part in the dialogues around you, Tweet back and encourage video responses to your content.
The goal here is an open road of communication, even if that road includes disagreements and less than stellar reviews of your work. Even dissent can be engaged with and used to spawn discussion, and discussion leads to connection.
What's is Scalable?
Scale can mean several different things:
Scale of Your Message
Is your message reaching the right people, at the right doses, in the right way?
Scale of Your Content
Is your content creating the appropriate impact in different markets and different modalities?
Scale of Monetization
Your content is your primary asset. Are you taking advantage of opportunities to monetize the increased attention on your content?
Scale of Your Personal Time
How many keynotes can you make in a month? A year? How many books can you write?
Scaling is a matter of context. Are the rewards worth the efforts? Those rewards can be a reflection of your wallet, ego, or own sense of evangelism (depending on how you define success). Scaling is a difficult task, but the further behind you get, the harder it becomes to catch up.
What Matters to an Individual?
Your target market wants the pay off your vision provides. They want to be more confident leaders, to increase their sales numbers, they need the skills, tools, and mindsets you provide to help them succeed, and maybe find a bit of happiness in the self-improvement.
What Matters to the Organization?
Organizations are looking for a bottom line, for something they can measure. At the end of the day they aren’t concerned with warm-fuzzy feel-good content if it’s losing them money or isn’t solving the problem. Those quantitative numbers are measured throughout your delivery process and gauge the success or failure of your campaign.
Organizations want to see that your content changes behavior, that those changes improve business conditions, and that implementing your change is more cost effective than the alternative. Use your content to address existing needs or particular circumstances within an organization; if your product can assist the transition in a company merger, then you better be marketing towards merging corporations.