Hi ,
How is it February?
Also, I’m so glad it’s February.
For the last few years, January seems like a bit of a throwaway month as people return from their holiday PTO and get ready to ramp up for the year.
This year, I didn’t let it take me by surprise. It’s been a productive period.
One of the things I’ve been doing is creating "collateral." That word is strange on my fingertips as I type it.
Every client relationship I’ve had since I founded HPC in 2013 has begun with a conversation. For the first few years, a phone call. Then that morphed into "face-to-face" conversations on Zoom.
But every relationship started with a conversation first, moved on to scoping the engagement, and then we hit the ground running from there.
Things are different now. Now I need to help my clients do a lot more "selling in."
One of the things people have begun to ask me for is sales collateral. It still feels weird, because I’m not in the sales business — I’m in the relationship business. But if that’s what my clients need, that’s what I’ll create.
To write a blurb about HPC for this new collateral, I had to revisit our existing messaging — which is all about connecting with audiences.
And do you know what I noticed??? It didn’t actually speak to the problems my clients have experienced over the last few years. Namely:
- Weak pipeline, low sales numbers
- Long, laborious sales process
- Slow user growth
- Customer churn
- (For early-stage startups) Very small marketing and sales teams — sometimes only one person in each role, and often the founder is still doing a lot of the sales work
My approach absolutely helps solve those problems. But our current messaging doesn’t communicate that.
It's a case of the cobbler's children having no shoes.
So for the first time in a long time, I’m doing a messaging strategy for my own firm — and I’m remapping my messaging strategy process as I do it.
Here’s a sneak peek of my working model (this is still evolving!):
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