Michel was interviewed recently for the Toronto Sun’s Jobboom Career Zone. The full article is here: Networking Tips: Get Real

Here’s a bit of what he had to say…

“When I listen to people networking, very often they’re regurgitating a memorized script, and this drives me up the wall, because there’s no opportunity for the other person to engage. A real conversation is much more powerful,” says Neray, founder and chief differentiation officer of The Essential Message, which offers a variety of business coaching and consulting services.

One of the biggest mistakes people make in networking, Neray says, is focusing too much on the benefits they can provide to others before having a true sense of their needs.

“Rather than blab on about a solution you can offer, you want to engage the other person in a conversation around the challenges they have that you’re uniquely positioned to solve,” Neray says.

Does this sound like the type of conversation you typically hear at networking events? Or is it more of the regurgitated elevator pitch variety?

Read the full article, and let us know your thoughts and experiences. How has engaging people in real conversation had a positive effect on your business? What drives you crazy about networking events?

(One of my networking event pet peeves: people who hand out their business cards like they’re dealing a hand of 3 card stud. Before you even say hello, wham! You’ve been dealt!)

Cheers,

Tracy (TheManager)

I was intrigued by the simple living movement that some people like Joshua Becker (becomingminimalist.com), Tammy Strobel (rowdykittens.com) and Chris Guillebeau (chrisguillebeau.com) blog about.

I could sense a genuine compatibility between the simple living movement and my underlying purpose in creating The Essential Message, but it wasn’t until I read this passage from Inside-Out Simplicity that the compatibility became clear:

Celebrate your uniqueness. Your life was never meant to be lived like everyone else. You don‘t look the same, you don‘t sound thesame, and your personality is special. Your deep-held values are unique. Even your laugh sets you apart. Throwing that away just forthe sake of looking and living like everyone else is one of the cruelest things that you can ever do – it will always prevent you from fully living your life. Instead, champion the things that make you unique. Celebrate them.

It’s true that many people have used the Essential Message to grow their businesses — I have helped some clients double and even triple sales results — but for others, that’s beside the point. In fact, the feedback I get most often is that The Essential Message process, workshops and keynotes give them the confidence, resilience and motivation that can only come from knowing their greatest strengths and unique value.

More and more, I realize that the question we must ask ourselves is not, ‘how can we change our life and business so that we make more money?’ It’s, ‘how can we change our life and business so that we can do something that genuinely reflects who we are — and might, just might, make us more money in the process?’

Essentially yours,

Michel Neray
Chief Differentiation Officer
The Essential Message

These files are named in a way that make sense to the people who created them, but they make no sense to me!

These days, it seems that everyone claims to be customer-centric — a strategy that mirrors one of the Essential Message foundational principles: Frame your communication using the other person’s needs and interests.

But being customer-centric is more than just a strategy — it’s a mindset that influences everything you do, right down to how you name the files you send your current and future clients.

How customer-centric are you really? Take this test!

1. Document filenames: Begin by considering what I’ve written about so far, and check the last file you sent to a client or strategic partner. Would they instantly know from the filename what the document is and why they have it on their computer? If yes, give yourself 2 points.

2. Your email signature and contact information: How easy is it for someone to add your contact information from your email into their addressbook?

If you have all your information in your signature, give yourself 2 point. If you have created a Vcard (.vcf) of your contact information, give yourself 4 points. (If you have no idea what I am talking about, take 30 seconds and search for, ‘how to create a vcard’.)

3. Meeting invitations: Online calendars allow you to create an event and then invite others to it. If they accept your invitation, the event is automatically added to their calendar.

While not everyone uses digital tools, give yourself 2 points if you send meeting requests and other events in a form that makes it easy for people to add them to their own calendars. But, if you name your events, ‘Phone meeting with Michel’ or something equally useless to the other person, deduct 4 points

Don’t laugh, this happened to me — and when my calendar alarm highlighted the event, I had no clue who I was supposed to call!

Starting with the simple stuff will help you see that being customer-centric isn’t just a technique — it’s a mindset of being considerate.

Starting with the simple stuff will also give you the practice you need for when you tackle the more difficult things, like describing your business in terms of the challenges you solve instead of the benefits you promise. (Hmmm, that deserves a blog entry all to itself!)

As for the company that sent me their proposal, I’ll still give them serious consideration — as soon as I figure out where the file is on my computer….

Essentially yours,

Michel Neray
Chief Differentiation Officer
The Essential Message

P.S. Have you seen other examples where even the best-meaning people and businesses are a little less customer-centric than they might think they are? Post your comments here!

The Essential Mind Map, artfully created by Courtney Neray

If you are in charge of putting together a conference or training program for your organization or business, chances are you’re looking for content and programs that have an immediate impact on business results, as well as lasting change.

And, chances are, you’re looking at topics such as sales & marketing, client attraction, employee resilience or motivation, teambuilding, leadership or positive culture. According to Jeanne-Marie Robillard, Senior Account Manager with the Global Speakers Agency, these are some of the most requested keynotes and presentations she hears from clients. At the same time, it’s understood that what clients definitely do not want is content that’s simply re-packaged from previous presentations and training material.

Search stats bear her out. Maor Daniel of Eden Advertising & Interactive, told me that search words such as ‘sales,’, ‘marketing’, ‘leadership’, ‘teamwork’, ‘peak performance’, and ‘employee motivation’ score highest while many other search terms that describe underlying business variables are noticeably absent from the SEO suggestion list.<

The company’s insightful researcher, Stan Oppenheimer, noted that; “Ultimately your traffic is as only as good as your ability to engage the searcher. If anything, time should be sent crafting your Unique Selling Proposition. People tend to get hung up on traffic and as a result have a crappy sales message.”

This leads me to an interesting hypothesis; if organizations (and their employees) think they’ve seen it all, perhaps that’s because they have – yet they continue to look for new solutions to old challenges in the same old places.

In order to find truly fresh solutions to age-old challenges, I suggest we look at those challenges from a different perspective – a deeper one.

Sales & Marketing and Client Attraction: At the core of every successful business, big or small, in any industry and in any geographical area, is the ability to answer two essential questions:

1. What is your unique position in your market?
2. What is your sustainable, authentic competitive advantage?

Adding salespeople or increasing your marketing budget is one strategy to improve sales results, but unless the organization is clear about these two questions, it’s a strategy that’s bound to be inefficient.

The link between The Essential Message and sales & marketing results, and to client attraction is a direct one. The Essential Message helps strategic teams discover this fundamental focus for the organization, and we work with sales and marketing teams to ensure consistency across every customer touchpoint.

This is how we helped Guardium, a start-up, achieve 60% year-over-year sales increases and position the company for a successful acquisition by IBM. It’s also how we helped a local financial services company achieve sales results four times better than the industry benchmark.

Positioning, Unique Selling Proposition, Competitive Advantage and Brand Differentiation: These words are most closely affiliated with The Essential Message. However, the key difference is that traditional marketing approaches place an almost exclusive focus on the external variables such as market need. That certainly seems reasonable enough, but that is also why so many companies go down a path of superficial marketing ‘spin’. It is neither sustainable nor credible to either customers or employees. In contrast, The Essential Message begins with an inward focus to identify genuine strengths and core purpose. With a platform of authenticity of identity, you can develop messaging that achieves the ripple effect of benefits across the organization.

Teambuilding, Teamwork and Collaboration: The benefits of absolute clarity about your organization’s competitive advantage and core purpose extends beyond sales and marketing results. Only when the members of the team understand the true mission of the team can they all pull towards the same goal. And just as the organization has an Essential Message, so does each member of the team. True collaboration happens when each member is valued for his or her unique contribution.

Employee Motivation and Employee Resilience: Dr. Seligman, considered the father of the Positive Psychology movement, describes a meaningful life as one that consists of ‘knowing what your highest strengths and talents are and using them in the service of something that you believe is bigger than you are.’

Indeed, more than just higher sales, (as if that weren’t enough), our coaching clients and event participants tell us that The Essential Message gives them the confidence, resilience and momentum that can only come from knowing who you are, what you really bring to the table and the true value you offer — as a business and as an individual. That’s the emotional bottom line that motivates and sustains you to improve the financial bottom line.

Peak Performance: You are at your peak state when you are in alignment with your purpose and authenticity. Many people think they know what their purpose is and where their authenticity lies, but are at a loss to clearly articulate it. The truth is that if you can’t articulate it, you don’t really know it. That’s why the process of discovering and communicating your Essential Message is so powerful – and empowering. Drawing on your Essential Message, either as an organization or as an individual, is critical to achieving peak performance on a consistent basis.

Leadership: There are many styles of leadership and many aspects of leadership — including decisiveness, ability to engage and enrol others, display of confidence… but these are mostly outward displays of leadership, are they not? What is personal leadership if not, at its core, an understanding and internal conviction of who you are and what you bring to the table – just as market leadership begins with your organization’s unique differentiation and competitive advantage. This is what I refer to in my keynote, titled, ‘Differentiation-Based Leadership‘.

We have come full circle to fundamental focus of the Essential Message. This is the common denominator that connects leadership in sales and branding to personal leadership.

——————–

Whether it’s teambuilding, peak performance or leadership – or networking, customer service, personal branding, or sales communications – in order to have an immediate impact on business results, as well as lasting change, you must have keynotes, presentations and training programs that address the fundamental issues that drive the issues that drive the business results.

That’s one reason why The Essential Message is an essential part of so many different disciplines. (In fact, the community of people certified as Essential Message ‘Consoachants’ already includes brand and marketing consultants, copywriters, strategy consultants, life coaches, relationship coaches, and career consultants.) It’s also why The Essential Message keynotes and breakout sessions fit well with the theme and purpose of different conventions and sales meetings.

If you or your people can’t articulate the organization’s true, authentic competitive advantage in a way that’s clear, compelling and confident, then maybe it’s time to look deeper… to your Essential Message.

Essentially yours,

Michel Neray
Chief Differentiation Officer
The Essential Message

There are many, many ways to specialize and define your niche — including being a generalist for one specific type of customer. You can also define your niche by almost any variable that makes sense for you, including your activity, the field in which you operate, your role, title, region or, (one of my favorites), the specific challenge you solve. All that matters is that you define your niche narrowly enough to stand out from everyone else.

Are you afraid of being put in a box? Are you afraid of what's in the box? Are you just afraid of all boxes?

That’s when you can intentionally build an identifiable brand and consciously carve a slice of the market for your yourself and your company.

Remember, it’s easier to build a strong reputation with a narrowly defined niche – and grow your business from there — than it is to cast a wide net and hope to attract a loyal following.

It really comes down to this. The clearer you define your niche for yourself, the clearer it will be for the clients you want to attract. It’s an ‘essential’ element of your Essential Message.

If you understand how specializing supports your personal and professional success, and you still haven’t done the work to discover your differentiation, then you might be suffering from ‘nichephobia’.

There are many causes of nichephobia. You may be afraid of turning away potential customers. You may think that you do several things exceptionally well, and you don’t want to limit yourself. You may think that defining a narrow market will result in a smaller business opportunity.

These are the kinds of intellectual rationalizations that people go through to justify to themselves why putting this work off is OK. But in my work with members of the Bull Pen, doing Clarity Package sessions with corporate clients, and training other coaches, consultants and copywriters to become certified consoachants, I’ve uncovered deeper sources of resistance.

In some cases, people are held back by a fear of finding out that what they have to offer and what they have to say about it, may not be all that important. Probing deeper still, I have found the opposite — that if they discover their unique contribution to the world, they would be obliged to play a bigger game.

This reminds me of Marianne Williamson’s famous passage from her book, A Return to Love, (Harper Collins, 1992. From Chapter 7, Section 3):

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?”

Your Essential Message shines a light on that part of you that is “brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous”. Perhaps that’s why you continue to resist defining your niche… And perhaps that’s why it takes courage to define it narrowly enough.

Last week, the issue of thought-leadership came up — and that gave me pause for thought…

From reading the original post and subsequent comments, it occurred to me that becoming a thought leader is an inevitable by-product of The Essential Message. Then I realized that it was more than just a by-product; it actually is one of the key goals of discovering your Essential Message.

Now let’s be clear — I am not referring or advocating anyone become a thought leader simply for the sake of becoming a thought leader. That strikes me as shallow and inauthentic, and as a result doomed to failure. Everyone seems to have a unique, specific area of expertise and interest that they might not be aware of, or they might not value, but once surfaced, becomes the authentic platform to build their thought leadership on.

What I do advocate, then, is that people actively discover what that platform is…

Here’s why:

1. Becoming a thought leader forces the individual to shine a spotlight on one specific area expertise and interest. By building on it, you are literally contributing to humanity’s library of knowledge. You are helping the world evolve, (presumably in a positive way.) Would you deny future generations of your efforts? If you could contribute in this way, do you think you have an obligation to do so?

2. If you have been following my writings for a while, you know that The Essential Message places a great deal of emphasis on solving challenges. Your thought leadership, then, continually seeks to solve challenges for people who have been left out of previous thinking. In others words, your thought leadership has the very real potential of helping some others in very real ways.

3. From a marketing and business-building standpoint, your thought leadership establishes your unique differentiation and competitive advantage. This places you in a better position to be called on by the media when they are looking for an expert (in your specific area) to quote; and to be called on by clients who are looking for an expert to solve a specific challenge they have. Yes, higher fees may result from this as well, but please note that this is different from traditional selling which seeks only to ‘sell more’. Authentic thought leadership seeks to clarify the specific area and the specific challenge to such a degree that those clients who are best suited for it will self-select.

4. Authentic thought leadership strengthens your self-perception/self-worth/self-confidence. While external validation is nice, I am referring here to the personal satisfaction from what Dr. Seligman might describe as leveraging your signature strengths to a more significant end beyond yourself. There seems to be something inherently fulfilling in ‘making a difference’. You can play small and make a small difference — or you can play a bigger game and make a bigger difference by consciously embracing your thought leadership.

So if the response to the question in the title of this post is a very definitive ‘yes’, the question then becomes, ‘What are you doing about it?’

Essentially yours,

Michel Neray
Chief Differentiation Officer
The Essential Message

This is a seven minute interview with my mother, Ruth Bindefeld Neray. As you watch the video, and see the wisdom that comes with years of living, picture a younger woman not even 20 years old, caught up in horrific world events she cannot understand. You may have friends of that age, or friends with kids of that age. Picture them — or yourself — at that age.

My mother told me that of all the photos of herself as a younger woman, the one that haunts her the most is the one shown here. She is 19 years old in this picture, and she has just returned to France after a year in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. When she looks at this picture of herself, she sees a young woman who, behind her eyes, still holds the horrifying images witnessed in the camps. In her mind’s eye, she’s still there.

Everyone may read their own ‘Essential’ message into the picture above and from the video below. What message do you read into it?

Special thanks to Amram Shapiro for the interview. It was published on his website, Book of Odds.

Some people also use the holiday to focus a light on the things in their daily lives that enslave them or diminish them spiritually — that keep them from being who they truly are.

Matzoh is unleavened bread eaten during Passover as a reminder of the Jewish people’s escape from Pharaoh’s army. They didn’t have time to allow their bread to rise, and so they ate flat, unleavened bread. Eating Matzoh is a powerful reminder of the spirit of the holiday.

After I gave an Essential Message teleclass last week, in which people from all over the world participated, I got an email from Carmela in Israel to wish me a Happy Passover. She asked me if I knew the spiritual meaning of Matzoh.

She explained…

“Matzoh is a reminder for us not to leaven with our ego as a bread with yeast, but to remain flat and humble, knowing our place in every sense, to know our abilities as well as our limitations.

Being a free soul doesn’t result from a puffed ego. That kind of ego only enslaves us. We unchain our soul by being like a Matzoh, in humility of self-recognition.

Unfortunately both people and nations tend to forget.”

Be like Matzoh. Thank you Carmela.

Essentially yours,

Michel Neray
Chief Differentiation Officer
The Essential Message

Thanks to my friend Avi Liran in Singapore for sending me this, and an even bigger thank-you to his daughter for drawing it. Artist Savyon-Li Liran will be 11 on Feb 26.

While some people celebrate Valentine’s Day, others celebrate the Chinese New Year — the year of the Tiger! (And no doubt, some people celebrate both!)

Both days fall on Feb 14 this year.

According to Chinese tradition and beliefs, the Tiger is vivid, lively, engaging and lucky — and truly courageous.

Like the tiger, to love and to be loved is vivid, lively, engaging and lucky. And also like the tiger, to truly love and be truly loved, one has to be truly courageous.

Happy Valentines Day. Happy Year of the Tiger.

Essentially yours,

Michel Neray
Chief Differentiation Officer
The Essential Message

Funky jewellery courtesy of Slashpile Designs (www.slashpiledesigns.com)

Dogs may understand marketing far better than we have ever given them credit for. They know, for example, that if they want to establish themselves in a certain territory, they need to leave their scent all over it.

Male dogs generally mark their territory to lay claim to it; female dogs mark their territory to attract a male, (although dominant females may want to lay claim too.)

Either way, it’s marketing 101.

No one will ever buy from you if they have never heard of you.

In the dog-eat-dog competitive world, this may be the most important lesson.

You can’t build a business by keeping who you are and what you do a secret — no matter how great you are, no matter how much you believe in the laws of attraction, and (even) no matter how compelling your Essential Message.

That’s why the most successful among us are constantly marketing — writing articles, giving speeches, attending networking events, sending newsletters… being ‘out there’.

And like a dog’s scent on a fire hydrant, your customers’ memories can be easily painted over by fresher, more recent and possibly more dominant ones. That’s why you have to constantly remind the people in your target market that you are alive and well and open for business.

So what are you doing to mark — I mean ‘market’ – your territory?

Essentially yours,

Michel Neray
Chief Differentiation Officer
The Essential Message