Hi Reader,

You've had me banging on about messaging all week.

I make no apology for that.

It's the first thing you need to get right.

But let me get specific.

After years of working through this with clients, there are three things that almost everyone leads with.

None of them differentiate you.

Nada.

Credentials.

Your qualifications, your years of experience, your past clients.

Necessary. But they won’t make you different.

Everyone has credentials.

Prospects assume you know what you're doing.

What they're actually trying to work out is why you.

Process.

Your methodology, your framework, your structured approach.

All better than credentials.

It shows you've thought about how you work.

But most businesses can describe a process.

Process is just assumed now.

Results. Outcomes you've delivered, transformations you've created.

Good. But everyone has results.

Without a specific story attached, results are just numbers on a page that could belong to anyone.

Here's what actually makes you different.

Your story.

Specifically, the story of how you came to see what you see.

The career you didn't plan.

The problem you only understood because you'd lived inside it.

The thing you had to learn the hard way that people who came up a more conventional path never had to learn at all.

Stories are memorable.

Stories are specific.

And stories are the one thing no one can copy, because it happened to you and not to them.

One of my clients spent twenty years leading with her MBA and her client list.

Impressive CV.

Forgettable pitch.

When we dug into her actual story, it turned out the thing that made her different was a failed business in her thirties that completely changed how she thought about risk.

Her best clients had always come from referrals where someone mentioned that story. She just never thought to lead with it.

The Message Clarity Audit Toolkit has a full section on digging this out.

Not inventing a story from scratch.

Finding the one that's already there, quietly doing nothing in the background while you lead with your credentials.

At the end you walk away with a score, a gap analysis, and three specific things to change this week.

​GET THE TOOLKIT​

Tomorrow I’ll close out this week’s conversation on messaging. If you’ve been thinking about it, worth not waiting.

Mike