In my last few posts, we explored strengths, positioning, and messaging. Now we’re going to bring these concepts together to help you design your business around your unique talents, interests, and purpose—bridging the gap between where it is today, and your vision of where you want it to be tomorrow.
[Full Transcript]
In my last few posts, we explored strengths, positioning, and messaging. Now we’re going to bring these concepts together to help you design your business around your unique talents, interests, and purpose—bridging the gap between where it is today, and your vision of where you want it to be tomorrow.
Why All Three Are Critical
Picture strengths, positioning, and messaging as being three interdependent sides of a triangle that make up your ideal business.
Strengths
On the first side of the triangle, you have your strengths. In Design Your Ideal Business Part 1: Your Unique Offering, I shared Marcus Buckingham’s description of strengths:
- An activity that makes you feel strong, and that “breathe life into us and lift us up out of ourselves to reveal something finer, more resilient, and more creative.”
- This combination of feelings drives you to do more of the activity—to practice it over and over.
- That type of continued effort is what “produces the skill improvement necessary for excellent performance.”
According to Buckingham’s ground-breaking research, playing to your strengths—rather than focusing all your energy on fixing your weaknesses—can have a huge impact on your success.
In other words, aligning your work with your talents, interests, and purpose isn’t just a “nice to have.” Identifying and playing to your strengths may be your best competitive advantage, and is a core requirement for building the business you were born to create.
By focusing on your strengths, you’re able to harness all of your natural talent and put it in the service of a greater purpose that can give your life deeper meaning and fulfillment. You can build a business that’s an expression of who you are as a person, and what you were put on this earth to do.
Positioning
On the second side of the triangle, you have your positioning. In Design Your Ideal Business Part 2: Your Competitive Advantage, I shared why a strong positioning strategy helps you set yourself apart from the competition.
Your positioning strategy is the sweet spot between your strengths and the needs of your market—your unique approach to creating value for customers in a way that they can’t easily find elsewhere.
It’s the answer to critical questions like:
- What specific, unique solution can we provide better than anyone else?
- What’s the customer problem or pain point that you’re most interested in solving?
- Why is that specific problem so intriguing to you?
- How exactly does your product or service solve that problem?
- What types of customers are you most interested in serving?
- Why will those customers pick you over the competition?
- What types of customers aren’t a good fit for your business?
Messaging
And on the third side of the triangle, you have your messaging. In Design Your Ideal Business Part 3: Your Strategic Narrative, we explored why your sales and marketing messaging is so critical to your success:
- It helps you build a strong marketing and sales foundation.
- It guides your marketing/selling decisions.
- It keeps you focused on the customer.
Starting with a strong strategic narrative helps you craft a brand story and messaging that focus on the problems you solve, who you solve them for, and how you’ll impact their lives. It’s your “red thread,” the central guiding messaging framework that resonates with your ideal customers by making them, not you, the hero of the story.
Sample Narrative Framework
- Characters/setting/challenge (current state): Make the initial focus about the customer, not yourself. What does their world and situation look like? Be more relevant to them by describing the challenge from their POV.
- Big idea: A short, impactful statement that makes a bold claim about their challenges and how to resolve them. Sets up the solution/impact sections—the “how” and why it matters.
- Solution: How you solve these challenges.
- Impact (future state): Why it matters. The big picture, high-level payoff.
- Call-to-action: What does the path forward look like, and what’s the first step that a potential customer needs to take to get started?
Why 1 + 1 + 1 = A Lot More Than 3
Your strengths, positioning, and messaging all build on each other, forming the raw material that you can use to design your ideal business.
- Your strengths inform your positioning—the sweet spot between who you are as a person and the needs of your market.
- Your positioning informs your messaging—how you communicate your unique value to your audience and market.
Remove any of these sides of the triangle, and the entire structure falls apart.
Without a clear understanding of your strengths, you won’t have a clear vision for your business based on your unique gifts. You’ll be left mimicking your competitors and trying to please every type of customer, rather than being guided by your authentic interests and talents. You’ll end up with a business designed around your weaknesses, the activities and projects that drain you.
Without a strong positioning strategy, you’ll have a hard time differentiating yourself from the crowd and standing out in a noisy market. Without a solid answer to “what specific, unique solution can we provide better than anyone else?” you’ll end up building a generic business that blends in and gets lost in the noise.
And without a clear messaging framework, you’ll struggle to communicate your offer in a way that truly resonates with potential customers. Your marketing and sales messaging will be all about your business, rather than the problems, needs, and wants of your ideal customers.
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