Authentically Fascinating: Polarizing Potential Clients so You’re Never Forgotten – MakingBank S3Ep14

“Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.” – Babe Ruth

Think about the ‘It’ factor. For years, extremely successful people across industries and markets, from arts to entrepreneurship, have been described as having ‘it.’ “Oh they’ve just really got ‘it.’” “They’ve got what ‘it’ takes. The whole package!” What is ‘it’? Do you have ‘it’? Is ‘it’ what it takes to be successful?

Sally Hogshead, advertising phenom, and New York Times bestselling author of Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist, answered the ‘it’ question by developing an algorithm called “The Fascination Advantage.”

“There’s the Myers-Briggs, Disc and StrengthsFinder that can tell you how you see the world. What I measure is the opposite, it’s how does the world see you and specifically how does the world see you at your best?” What Sally is interested in, is identifying your primary and secondary advantages (how you add value to a room) and using those advantages to fascinate to your benefit.

What are your advantages? First identify your hiccups—what keeps you from capitalizing on your strengths and making huge inroads in business. So often people confuse strength with impenetrability. We think, ‘I can’t let them see who or what I really am like.’ We fall into the trap of ‘all business all of the time,’ when really what inspires trust and even intrigue is authenticity.

Sally learned the importance of authentic connection with people after a near fatal car crash in her youth that left the side of her face paralyzed. She recalls, “…it wasn’t that I was visually embarrassed, it was that I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t connect with people. And so, when I would talk to people I couldn’t effuse, I couldn’t be myself, and so I wasn’t able to create connection.” Which, many years later, led her to asking ‘how do we communicate authentically so we don’t ever have that feeling of not being able to make a connection, no matter who we are or how we communicate?”

When you are a leader, you have to make huge decisions for your business and be able to communicate them. Some of them are bound to be the wrong decisions delivered in the wrong way, and sometimes you will look like an absolute genius, but it is maintaining the willingness to be vulnerable that will allow those moments to happen.

In her research Sally discovered that high performers usually have two traits, they deliver a specific benefit, and they have a speciality. Most of the time when we think of extremely successful entrepreneurs, we think of the eccentric genius—the person ready to jump in the spotlight and make things happen. But what Sally found in her studies is that a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs turned away from the spotlight, leaning into the analysis and details. They preferred to be meticulous. What both types share and what contributes enormously to their success is their confidence.

Confidence derived from knowing their speciality and being able to communicate it, set them apart. Sally encourages people to carry their speciality as a sort of internal tagline, as a marketing position to differentiate themselves from everyone else out there. When you know what you offer you can focus on having messages that unquestionably stand out. As Sally says, “It’s not about having the most messages. It’s about having the messages that add the most value and are gonna be the most likely to be passed along.”

How do you do that? Don’t make it about you. If you talk about them and not you, your authenticity gives them confidence to interact. Make your client feel fascinating and then they’ll feel a connection with you.

Interested in learning more? Head over to this week’s Action Guide to learn your advantages, how to use them and more!