Just changing one word in your marketing can change your sales destiny. Here’s how:

A 3 letter word

Sandra had been trying for years in vain to sell her services as a systems expert. Once inside a company, she could immediately see the inefficiencies in their back office admin and re-structure all the data floating around in their system to flow seamlessly and efficiently. The problem? She couldn’t explain what she did for a living in a way that companies wanted to buy her services. Through our research, Sandra found out that people were desperate to buy her services. Say what? That’s right. People wanted what she was selling. Only they weren’t calling it what she was calling it. They were calling it CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The buzzword was CRM. Everyone loved CRM. Everyone wanted CRM. Once Sandra started to offer her services by changing one single word, within weeks, she got her first contract after years of getting nothing.

Influencer or Affiliate

Another great example of how one word can make a world of difference is Amazon’s recent launch of their influencer program, which turns out to be just a light modification of their existing affiliate program. Just change ‘affiliate’ to the more on-trend ‘influencer’ and voila, you have a new program.  When one word can change your whole business, you really have to look at what words you’re using when you talk about your business.

Coach or Expert

One of the most interesting transitions in our repositioning work when working with coaches or consultants is the use of the word expert vs. coach. In most industries there are negative connotations that have to do with coaches or consultants. People think they’re remedial workers, called in during crisis. Other people think they’re over-priced, glorified outside help. When we repositioned a client from a communication coach to an LGBT communications expert, corporations started listening. And listening hard. See, all it took was is one word.

Oversimplifying

I don’t want to give you the impression that just using a different word will change your business or destiny. It takes my clients and companies like Amazon reams of data and analysis to decide on what words to take out and words to replace them with. It’s all about strategy at the ten thousand foot level and it’s about positioning.
So be careful about those words that you decide to market your business with. It can be a loaded gun.
Want to reposition your messaging to grow your leads? Follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, watch me on YouTube or connect with me on LinkedIn –and let’s talk.