Freewriting

Is Your Brand Intentional or Unintentional?

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In my last post, “Make Your Elevator Speech Distinctive,” I said I’ve become known as “the guy who helps his clients raise their fees by up to 2,000%.” That’s true. People refer to me as the 2,000% guy all the time.

It’s important to note, though, that my 2,000% “brand” or “promise” had to be invented. That is, I had to dig through my projects and study the facts, after which I discovered this result I’d been producing but hadn’t been advertising. If I hadn’t dug, the market wasn’t going to come up with that fee-raising benefit on its own.

You could call my 2,000% moniker a feat of intentional branding. I manufactured it, and pushed it out there through my materials, networking, workshops, and speeches.

At times, though, I’m not sure we have to work so hard coming up  with a brand. Sometimes a brand finds us. Call it unintentional branding. I have a story about that kind of branding, too.

I wrote the first edition of my problem-solving book, “Accidental Genius,” ten years ago. At the time, I was 37 years old, and let me tell you: For the first 37 years of my life, no one ever called me a genius. Not once. Enthusiastic, yes. Creative, yes. Funny, yes. A genius? No.

When “Accidental Genius” was released, that changed. Suddenly, people were calling me a genius right and left. Since the book came out, I must have been called by that name five hundred times.

Understand, I’m not knocking it. Every time I’m called a genius, I’m grateful. But here’s the thing: In the ten years since that book came out, I’m no smarter than I was the previous 37. If anything, I’m not as bright as I once was.

The word, though, became associated with me through repetition. 25,000 copies of my book were sold with my name and the word genius on the cover. I gave speeches where I talked about ways of accessing your genius. I did dozens of interviews where I talked about how people could have “a genius moment.” The association was unintentional, but it stuck.

My questions to you, then are these:

  • What happy branding accidents have happened in your career?
  • How have you been tagged by your audience in ways you didn’t expect?
  • Is there a brand growing around you that you’ve been ignoring or resisting?

Using Internal Documents to Win Business

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When the original edition of “Accidental Genius” hit the market ten years ago, one of the first readers to contact me was Andy Orrock.

Andy told me he would get his best ideas during his daily run. Unfortunately, when he’d return home to write them down he’d be disappointed. “It’s as if a filter got between me and what I wanted to say,” he said. His writing sounded stiff and artificial, and it was hurting his career. The business plans he’d send investors went unread.

Using the “Accidental Genius” freewriting technique, as well as other associated techniques, Andy learned to trust the natural ways his mind used to develop and express thoughts. Slowly, his written ideas started matching the honesty of those in his head.

Andy, however, has pushed the concept of honest expression further than most.

He is now the chief operating officer at a Dallas technology company. There, the salespeople don’t try winning business by sending prospects glossy marketing materials. Everyone knows those are fake. Instead, the salespeople send prospects internal documents — written by Andy — that have been repurposed for public use.

Here’s how it works.

At the start of a client project, Andy writes a detail-rich requirements document that spells out the client’s problem and the steps needed to crack it. The document serves as an internal blueprint around which his firm’s development team can plan their systems and programming work. When the project is finished, the document gets filed.

Now, when a prospect calls and wants to better understand the capabilities of Andy’s firm, Andy digs through the files and finds the requirements document that most resembles the prospect’s situation, crosses out and disguises sensitive information, such as developer and server names, and emails them this “redacted document” as proof that his company knows what it’s doing and has solved this kind of problem before.

Says Andy: “Our documents show prospects 90% of the answer, and  demonstrate that we have a mastery of the details. For the first time, prospects feel like they’ve reached a firm that understands what they’re facing.”

The candor of his writing and approach has become a potent sales-conversion tool for his firm.

My question for you, then, is this: What assets do you have that can supplement or replace your marketing materials, so prospects can get an unadorned view of how you think and solve problems?

Writing and the Functional Hero

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In the book, “Which Lie Did I Tell?,” William Goldman writes about his younger days as an awful writer. He was so bad, in fact, that in college he was one of three editors of the school literary magazine, and even then he couldn’t get a single story into his own magazine.

Things changed when he read a short story collection by “Rich Man, Poor Man” author, Irwin Shaw. Goldman thought Shaw’s tales were among the best he’d ever read. More importantly, they were told with such ease that Goldman said to himself: “I could do that.”

Shaw’s writing helped make Goldman into a professional writer. Years later, Goldman would write the novels and screenplays for “The Princess Bride,” “Marathon Man,” and “Magic,” as well as the screenplays for “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men.”

Heroes come in different styles. We have heroes who do near-impossible things, like win a batting title, forge a peace agreement, or walk on the moon.

Then we have another type of hero: one whose works seem wondrous but doable. They give us a model to follow. Call them functional heroes. Irwin Shaw provided a functional hero for William Goldman.

When I have to write something ambitious, I often call on one of my functional heroes for assistance. I read their work over and over, so I can dope out their methodologies and pick up their cadences.

For the first edition of “Accidental Genius,” my hero and role-model was Nicholson Baker. In particular, I idolized the self-conscious, self-deprecating honesty he showed in his book about John Updike, “U & I,” and tried to introduce that into my work. For the second edition of “Accidental Genius,” I called upon the aforementioned Goldman to serve as my muse. His long chatty sentences and focus on story inspired me to loosen up as I told my tales about liberating the mind through freestyle writing.

The funny thing about my use of Baker and Goldman as guides? Neither edition of “Accidental Genius” sounds anything like the work of those two gentlemen. It was enough for me, though, to hear them as I wrote.

How about you? Who are some of your functional heroes? Who are your muses?