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| ISSUE №166 · POSITIONING |
Did You Ever Watch That John Travolta/Nicolas Cage Vehicle Face/Off?
In a nutshell Travolta is an FBI agent. Nicolas Cage is a paid assassin. Cage has planted a bomb in LA, and before Travolta can extract the location of the bomb, Cage gets a head injury and goes into a coma. Apparently in 1997 the FBI was working on the face transplant technology so they transplanted Cage's face onto Travolta so he could go undercover in prison and find out where the bomb was hidden. Cage eventually wakes up from his coma, somehow gets Travolta's face, and so now you've got good guy Travolta looking like bad guy Cage and vice versa.
I was doomscrolling on Instagram and somebody mentioned this and so I've been thinking about this movie. What's stuck in my head is how weird it would be to feel like you, but be seen as someone completely different. And I realized that a lot of the time when I am talking to a potential client for the first time, I feel just like me but they are seeing somebody else.
Here’s A True Story
A couple of summers ago, I was talking to a prospect that was referred to me. We weren't a terrific fit. He was trying something really ambitious and didn't have enough cash to invest in my help without feeling stressed out. I was trying to thread the needle and give him something that he could afford and that wasn't completely unfair to me.
I was so taken by his ambition that I really wanted to help, so I made him a ridiculous offer… and I explained that this was much lower than my usual price and that I was doing it because I was excited about his opportunity.
He ghosted me. I REALLY wanted to know why - after all, I had extended myself for his benefit. I had gone out of my way to try to help!
Because I wanted to know why he ghosted me, I (uncharacteristically when I think there isn’t a great fit) followed up a lot. He eventually responded and gave me this feedback:
He didn’t like my Zoom background. That gave him the idea that I had something to hide - if I couldn't show the room that I was working in, that made me untrustworthy.
He didn't like my camera placement. He thought it was unflattering and distracting.
He didn't like that I made jokes during our call. He found that to be unprofessional.
He didn't like that I tried to craft an offer for him because he said that made me seem desperate.
He told me that his sales skills were significantly higher than mine. And if he were going to pay someone to help him, he wanted them to be a superior person.
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Uhh - OK? Why Does He Think I Look Like Nic Cage?
After all and certainly because this is my story, I'm the good guy. I'm the John Travolta FBI agent - why do I look like bad guy Nicolas Cage to him?
I stewed about that email for weeks. I printed it out. I taped it to my wall because I couldn't understand what gave him all of those impressions that were so different than what I intended.
I use a Zoom background because some people in my family are afraid that they might walk into frame while I'm on camera.
My camera setup is fine. I don't think very much about it because I think of a camera as a way to create connection rather than a production.
I make jokes all the time. I think it's part of my charm (?) & that it's a regular reminder that we work in marketing - it's not life or death and we should always try to keep our work in perspective.
I crafted an offer for him because I was trying to help. He was taking a big swing and I was 100% sure that he would fail without assistance.
His sales skills might be better than mine. I don't know. But I wasn't offering my services as a sales trainer…And I'm unclear why our relative skills in a very limited set of parameters that wasn't the topic of discussion were relevant. He may have well told me that he could run faster, which, because he's 40 years younger than I am, is almost certainly the case but I wouldn't necessarily consider that if I were asking about how to structure my business, my offer, and my operations.
But what really got to me was that whole "superior person" thing. In some ways he was expecting me to look a particular way and act in a particular way because in the absence of any previous interaction he had decided that somebody in my position as a coach/consultant should BE a very particular way.
The reason that I stewed about that feedback for weeks was that I don't really have a concept of “superior person”. Success as an entrepreneur is much more about skill set, understanding, attitude, aptitude, and willingness to keep going even when everyone else might have quit.
In retrospect, I have never been more delighted to be a disappointment to someone.
So, Thanks For The Peek Inside Your Therapy Session, Tim. Is There a Fucking Point Here?
Why yes there is…I'm glad you asked. Something that I talk about with all of my clients, especially those in my DemandOS program, is that your positioning has to match something that the market can ingest. Your self-categorization has to match some mental model that the market, and more specifically your prospects, have.
As an example in early 2010s, the SEO industry tried to rebrand itself as Web Presence Optimization or something like that. When agencies started talking about web presence optimization, prospects got confused because they thought they were there to talk about SEO. Thankfully that fad only lasted about a year, but I watched really good agencies struggle to sell their services because they wanted to elevate themselves above lower-cost providers.
The box that the market wanted these firms to fit into was SEO. There was no freaking WPO box. It didn't really matter how talented you are if you are selling WPO when the market wants to buy SEO.
Just like my prospect had a perception of what an agency coach/consultant should look and act like, when I didn't meet that expectation, my level of expertise, experience, and perspective didn't matter.
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Your Positioning Can’t Be Successful If It Only Considers Your POV
My young prospect and web presence optimization aside, your positioning lives in a space between you and your prospects. Your positioning is an abstraction of the thinking, analysis, and operations that allow you to create desired outcomes.
But for your positioning to have the intellectual and emotional impact you want, it has got to connect very deeply with what your target market and the prospect immediately in front of you is experiencing and expecting. What this means is that you need to connect how you think, what you deliver, and how you show the value of it to your market’s mental model of their problem, what their concept of a fix is, and how they understand value.
Here Is A Framework To Make Sure That You Stay John Travolta & Are Never Seen As Nicolas Cage
THE PROBLEM: Are you using language that is evocative of the same language that your target market uses to describe the problem? If you don't know what language your market uses, that's an issue but you can find that language on Reddit, in sales calls that you've had, and in the testimonials you see on yours and competitors' sites. If there is not a real match between the way you describe the problem and the way that your market expresses the problem, you are going to be a Web Presence Optimization seller in an SEO world. This is the easiest fix in the framework.
THE SOLUTION DELIVERY: Your solution and its delivery have to fit inside of the world in which your market lives. If your solution doesn't match their existing world or technology stack or level of resources, you don't have positioning that works. Imagine this scenario - you work with local hardware stores. One of your clients is having a hard time becoming visible in the local market…so you come up with ideas for billboards, bus wraps, and a Super Bowl ad. You can probably get all that done for about $10 million - and you know 100% that everybody in town will know about this hardware store. They will dominate their market. The hardware store owner, on the other hand, says, "I was thinking more like $1,000 a month. Can you get me on the Super Bowl for that?" If your solution delivery doesn't match the expectation of your market or match the resources of your market, you have positioning that is completely wrong for the market you are trying to capture.
THE VALUE: If you can't express the value that you bring in the language and currency that your target market understands, then you don't have positioning that works. I can remember this so vividly from my SEO days, where many of my clients' previous agencies sent reports that showed search impressions and keyword rankings. I was so clear in my mind that those are two fucking bullshit metrics - and I wasn't going to invest my time to deliver a metric that I didn't think was valid. But guess what? The clients that had the expectation and understanding that search impression and keyword ranking were valuable felt uncomfortable when I was telling them it wasn't and that they should stop valuing the currency of keyword ranking. Now I'm going to tell you that for about a year and a half I fought the good fight and told our clients that keyword ranking and search impressions were stupid metrics. But one day the anchor client of my agency said, "Can you just please run a keyword ranking report for me because my boss keeps on asking about it and he doesn't care that you think it's stupid. This is something that's important to him.” So I was up there on my high horse telling my clients that they valued my services the wrong way… I could not have been more wrong. Even if I was empirically correct (and I am), I am providing a service to their business so I have to honor the way their business understands value. So if you and your client or prospect don't value the same things, you don't have positioning that works.
Back To My “Superior Person” Prospect
Was he right to think that my Zoom background and dad jokes were indicative of me being able to deliver less value? Absolutely fuckin' not. But was I wrong to stew for weeks about the idiocy of this guy? Absolutely fuckin’ so.
I was so sure that my positioning and presentation were universally okay. It took a long time for me to understand what he was saying. I heard it as a criticism based on surface-level opinions and I thought that he was remarkably immature for judging me on things that were unimportant.
Do I think that I am empirically correct that all of his criticisms didn’t truly matter and had no impact on my ability to rock his world? Yes, absolutely - I am empirically correct about that…
Kinda…
The thing that I didn't recognize in that moment was that it wasn't unimportant to him. Just because they were surface level and potentially immature, those things were the currency that he valued. He wasn't looking for somebody to collaborate with or somebody to investigate with. He was looking for someone to emulate. His value equation didn't rest on the results that he got. His value equation was based on the changes that he could make to himself and his thinking, based on the appearance of somebody who was more mature, professional, and expressed mastery in the same way that he understood.
In this case, I could not have filtered him out as a prospect because he was a referral from a friend, and I would have taken the call under almost any circumstance. But after I stopped stewing, an important lesson emerged for me:
In the absence of engagement with my content and positioning, I can't actually be sure if somebody can recognize the value that I could bring to them even if I am emphatically certain that I can help.
If I don't understand what somebody values or how they understand the concepts of value, I can't be sure that there's any common ground. If I don't ask questions that allow somebody to express how they think about value, the failure is on my part for not creating the understanding.
Back To Face/Off
Here is the part that this 1997 thriller gets right. By the end, Travolta gets his own face back. He had to walk all the way through the bad guy's life to earn it, but he comes home as himself.
That’s the entire job of positioning. You don't put on a mask for the market. You make your real one legible enough that the right people recognize you on sight and the wrong people keep scrolling.
I still feel like me on every call.
What changed is that I stopped assuming the person across the table sees the same guy I do, and I started asking how they see the problem, what a fix looks like to them, and what they actually count as value. When I skip that, any gap between my face and theirs is my fault, not theirs.
Travolta got his face back by the credits. You get yours back by asking the questions that let your market tell you which face they are looking at, before you fall in love with that pointy Nicolas Cage visage.
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