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| ISSUE №163 · POSITIONING | VIBES VISION & VALUES |
Adam O’Leary Invited Me On His Podcast
I got an email from a guy I didn't know asking if I would like to be on his podcast. Because I'm something of an egotistical attention whore, I said, "Of course!"
In our pre-interview, Adam and I discovered that, although 25 years apart, we grew up within half a mile of each other, and now he lives in Spain, I think. We both belonged to Boy Scout Troop 19 in South Weymouth, Massachusetts. We had a weird amount in common, so there was a certain kind of trust that started right at the beginning.
He asked me if I would do a live positioning exercise on his podcast, and I said, "Hell yeah!" (Apparently, when I tell stories, all of my responses to questions are enthusiastic.)
This Took Guts - He Had No Idea What I Was Going To Say…
I think it takes a rare person to say "rip apart everything that I have just worked on". Adam was so receptive to feedback and reframing that it was an extraordinarily productive hour. If you are so inclined, watch the whole episode on his site:
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This Is How I Think About Positioning For Your Agency Website
There’s a couple of really strong ideas I have about positioning:
Creating positioning is for you. It is a forcing exercise that helps you make the right choices about things that are most important to you.
Everything after that is for your audience/market, etc.
If you keep those two things in mind, things get a lot easier.
Sometimes positioning starts with a blank canvas, and other times it starts with an existing point of view that isn't coming across. Working with Adam, this was definitely more of a responsive/remediation kind of approach rather than digging deep to figure out what makes Adam's approach so special. So I want you to think of this more as a rescue mission rather than a well thought out, discussion & research-driven exercise that you’d find in DemandOS.
The 7 Steps
FYI, I have a longer version on my website that goes into more depth and shows before-and-after examples, but here are the 7 things that I thought about when looking at Adam’s website:
The Doorman Test: Can a visitor understand if your website is relevant to them in two seconds? Essentially, do they know that they are in the right place? (Is your website opening the door?). We changed Adam's headline from a process statement to an emotional statement about how his target audience feels.
Does It Grab Attention? You can grab attention in all sorts of ways, through visuals, through motion, but I have always found that words are more effective. In Adam’s case, he was very tidy. He was continuing down the page, describing the process…and not that Adam isn't compelling, but a yawn may have escaped from my mouth. So, we turned this into something I call Accuse & Rescue. We said, quite literally, to site visitors “It’s All Your Fault”. We told the unvarnished truth, but in the next sentence we delivered a peek at the solution. We shocked the reader, and then immediately gave them comfort.
We Gave The Audience A Name: we specifically named the target audience. Previously, there was bland language about business, and now we named exactly whom Adam serves: agencies, coaches, and consultants. naming your audience is the flipside of the doorman test. It's designed to get people to stop reading if they don't identify with the named audience, it's their opportunity to dip out.
We Made It Visceral: Adam’s business is very clever. He helps you identify partners who make engagement with your business fundamental to getting the best value out of their business. But he was very academic about expressing his business. We just made it emotional - instead of talking about partner and process-driven referrals and embedded workflows, which is all very impressive sounding, we got right to the punch and said, "Referrals are a gift."
We Named A Villain & a Consequence: Adam’s previous expression of the problem was talking about how firms relied on referrals. Unlike our blame game in #2, he wasn’t clear what the problem and it’s impact is. So we named a villain - “over-reliance on referrals” and then expressed that the villain was stealing real growth from their business.
Don’t Make Your Reader Feel Like An Idiot: Often, people who sell expertise, like agencies, coaches, and consultants, unintentionally talk down to their prospects. Adam had framed this as “…traditional fixes are strategic suicide…” Well, nobody wants to hear that. That makes them feel dumb. So we changed it to “…these are the traps that smart people fall into for all the right reasons.” Instead of making our reader feel inadequate, we are offering them a step towards insight, and quite honestly, we positioned Adam as someone who's going to tell you the truth.
Don’t Bury The Lede: Adam has a trademark on his intellectual property - Embedded Distribution℠. Those words are the container for all of his smarts. Prior to us working together, he had that container listed in his menu bar and nowhere else. But that container is the logical and intellectual framework around which his value proposition lies. You've got to get the most important stuff right up front so that your reader can know what's going to happen next.
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This Isn’t REALLY Positioning…
We've talked about positioning and its complexities in this newsletter a lot. Vibes, vision and values & finding the things that are most true about you and your team - that is the heart of your positioning work. I guess the lungs of your positioning work would be understanding your audience - you know that, as a theme, I harp on a lot: Return on Understanding.
But the brains of your positioning is remembering who the positioning is for. It's always for the market, the audience, the reader, because they are trying to contextualize you. They are trying to put you, your business, your offer, your expertise into a container that makes sense to them.
A long time ago, a friend asked me what a “good” definition of marketing was…I stumbled around for a while and said:
Marketing is assembling the ideas and facts about your product or service in a way that it has the most positive & high impact effect on the desired audience.
I don't know if that's the best definition, but from my way of thinking, your intellectual property, your ability to understand your audience, and the outcomes of the services you provide are all of the ideas and facts that your audience needs to know in order to make an effective decision about talking to you.
So my website teardown with Adam was probably closer to my definition of marketing, but it was really based in the ideas of Vibes, Vision & Values and Return on Understanding. Sometimes, I think that you might get tired of hearing about these two concepts. TBH, I can't really imagine that because I find them to be endlessly fascinating, but in some ways, rather than thinking about this as positioning or marketing, let's put it into some really simple terms.
Positioning & marketing are commercial applications of being human. Vibes vision and values are about clarity and a sense of belonging. Return on Understanding is about empathy & acceptance.
Seems endlessly fascinating to me…
So, I Made Something Fun - The WAH-WAH Detector
Sorry to disappoint, these are not directions to your nearest Jersey/Pennsylvania WaWa. When I was a kid and we would watch Charlie Brown holiday specials, all of the adult voices were trombones going wah-wah-wah.
Since I look at a lot of agency and consultant websites, that's what they often sound like to me. Lots of words, very little meaning & like the iconic Peppermint Patty above, it makes me snoozy. So I'm on a mission to get rid of all that stuff that is boring & sounds like everybody else in your market.
It’s free. It takes 30 seconds, and you will learn the things that you say that don't mean anything, that are boring, and sound like everyone else. Please, I am begging you, try this out:
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