Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy.

Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from Michael Szatrawka. I hope I said that right. And it is this, and this is in reference to a video about positioning yourself. This is a great insight when talking to a lead, but how do you talk about what you do to people at networking events slash parties? I started trying some of your approaches over the phone and it's really been resonating with people. In person with random people, it's kind of like, what's up? Like not even trying to sell anything, I'll tell people I offer digital solutions to gain your competitive edge. Then they're like, oh wow, so how does that work? Then I go into the full service of what I do and by the end of it, I see they're totally lost and when they initially started off pretty interested. I hope that makes sense. Thank you for reading this, et cetera, et cetera. Thank you very much. Okay, I'll try to keep this together. There's a bunch of things going on here. So first, in general, until you get good at this, in general, I like to answer the what do you do question, the cocktail party question or the barbecue question where you're at a barbecue and you're at the keg or you're getting some ribs and someone's standing next to you that you don't know and they say, oh, nice to meet you, Michael. What do you do? And the cocktail party answer is some of the barbecue answer is that the answer to that question and what a lot of people do in this situation is they decide what they're going to say by judging the person who asked the question. I'm not a fan of this, whether it's a taxi driver or some lady in a three-piece pantsuit, you don't wanna judge them and be like, oh, they're not gonna understand what I do. I'm just gonna give them a dumbed down answer and say, oh, I do computer stuff or I work online. You give them kind of like a lame answer because you don't believe that they're a potential customer or whatever. That's not what Michael's talking about here, but people tend to do that. Instead of that, I like to have people come up with a cocktail party answer that a six-year-old can understand. So this can be difficult for people because it means boiling down all of the amazing products and services and offerings that you have in all of the ways that you engage with clients and all the wonderful things that you do into something that feels dumbed down. But that is, you need to be able to communicate what you do in a very simple way. Otherwise, you probably don't really know what you do. If you can't communicate it simply, you probably don't have a great understanding of the value that you're actually providing to your clients. You probably know exactly what you do activity-wise, like I do SEO or I do web development or I write copy, I write sales pages. You know that, but that's not what they care about. And they don't really wanna hear about that unless they're another, unless they're a peer of what you do. They wanna understand what you do for your clients. And if you don't understand that, you're gonna have a really hard time expressing that. Okay, so in this particular situation, you should be able to come up with an answer that works for prospects and for people at a cocktail party. And the answer that he says he gave is this, I offer digital solutions to gain your competitive edge. And they're like, oh, how does that work? I mean, personally, I'm confused by the answer. It's sort of like, yeah, I'm just confused by that. Digital solutions, okay. So you do something with computers and the word you're there is on a phone call with a prospect where he said it's working a little bit. They're already kind of, they're ready for this kind of a conversation. There's been some marketing that has happened previously. But if you're at a cocktail party and this is a totally cold intro, that's, to me, that's too confusing. It's more like, my response to that is really is, what, what do you mean? If I was being polite, I might say, oh, how does that work? But I don't know what that means. It's too hand-wavy to come to cold. Like if I'm coming to that cold, I don't know what that means. So you're probably better off coming up with something that is a little bit more, not general, but just every day. Like you should be able to tell this to a nine-year-old and they'd be like, oh, okay. Yeah, I kind of get that. So what is that? So like an example of our next door neighbor, it was like the head of archeology at Brown University. And when my kids were really little and we first met them, they were sort of like, oh, what do you do? And he said, I dig holes. And they're like, oh, that's funny. He engaged with them at their level. He was like, you know, he was like the head of a department at university, but he was like, I dig holes.

He had a way to express it to them in a way that they would understand. So for you, in your case, I don't know, like I can't even make one up for you now because I don't know enough to understand it. But here's what I would recommend. If you get really specific with who your is, so who the target market is, then it's pretty easy to turn that into an X, Y, PS or an X, Y positioning statement that probably that if it's good, everyone will understand. And it would be something like, I help freelancers attract more clients. Like anybody could understand that pretty much. Like my nine-year-old could understand that. I help freelancers attract more products. That you do that with digital solutions will come later in the conversation. But the question that you want people to come back to you with after you give your cocktail party answer isn't what do you mean? Or you don't want them to scrunch up their face. You want them to say, oh, how do you do that? So don't tell them how you do it. Just say, I help target market with expensive problem. And if they respond with, oh, how do you do that? Or better yet, I'm a target market or my brother-in-law is target market. And they'd probably love to attract more clients or whatever, whatever outcome you deliver to them. And then they can say, oh, how do you do that? And then you can get into the all of the other stuff that you said kind of glazes their eyes over. And again, this is, I mean, marketing, I mean, 90% of it, maybe 100% of it is just about communication. Yeah, probably 100. No, it's not 100%, but it's by and large about being able to communicate with people. And that means coming up with language that they understand without having to explain every single little word. So this is on you to figure out. So like if you were selling to people that lived in Spain, you would switch to Spanish, right? Or if you're selling to people in France, you would switch to French. You would use the language of the buyer. You wouldn't insist on selling in your own language. And by language, I don't just mean French, Spanish, English, German. I mean the words that they will understand. So it could all be happening in English, but you want them to understand the words you're using. Even if they're not in your target market, you want them to have a Rolodex moment. So your language needs to be simple enough. So they say, oh, I know someone who is that thing, that type of person that you help. It doesn't have to be freelancers. It doesn't have to be consultants. It doesn't have to be dentists. It could be environmentalists. It could be people who are obsessed with recycling. It could be people who shop at Whole Foods. I help people who shop at Whole Foods get their groceries home without increasing their carbon footprint. Oh, how do you do that? I mean, that's a totally weird thing that I just randomly came up with, but that's the format. I help people like this solve this problem that they have or capture this opportunity that they strive to catch. To me, it's also a problem. So all right, so where do we... Okay, so my answer, to bring it back to the question, the digital solutions to gain your competitive edge, the digital solutions piece is kind of like your how. It's not even a clear how, but it's kind of like a how. So if I was going to turn this into an X, Y, P, S, X, Y positioning statement, what you're saying is I help people gain a competitive edge. This is too vague. Could be, you know, are you talking about sports, like high-performance sports athletes? Are you talking about freelancers? What are you talking about? Are you talking about speakers? So I'd focus in on some kind of target market, and I would add that to your cocktail party answer and then say the main expensive problem that you help them with, and that would be... that would get a conversation going in the right direction because if the person doesn't ask, how do you do that, then you haven't opened up a loop in their mind to hook your message onto. Okay, so I could talk about this all day, so I'll stop there. All right, hopefully that helped. I'm Jonathan Stark, and if you have a question for me, hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and we'll find it, and I'll answer as soon as I can. See ya. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at ThePricingSeminar.com. That URL again is ThePricingSeminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have...

another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to JonathanStark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is JonathanStark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.