10 minute read
Mind Your Business
Mind Y ur Business
Mark Levy: “You Need to Be Amazing in One Area”
By Yitzchok Saftlas
This column features business insights from a recent “Mind Your Business with Yitzchok Saftlas” radio show. The weekly “Mind Your Business” show – broadcasting since 2015 – features interviews with Fortune 500 executives, business leaders and marketing gurus. Prominent guests include: John Sculley, former CEO of Apple and Pepsi; Dick Schulze, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Best Buy; and Beth Comstock, former Vice Chair of GE; among over 300+ senior-level executives and business celebrities. Yitzchok Saftlas, president of Bottom Line Marketing Group, hosts the weekly “Mind Your Business” show, which airs at 10 p.m. every Sunday night on 710WOR and throughout America on the iHeartRadio Network.
On a recent 77WABC “Mind Your Business” broadcast, Yitzchok Saftlas (YS) spoke with guest Mark Levy (ML), founder of Levy Innovation LLC, a positioning and branding firm that helps consultants and other thought leaders increase their fees by up to two thousand percent.
YS: You’re a differentiation expert, one of the leading dif-
ferentiation experts out there in the world. Can you describe what you do?
ML: I help people find what I call the big idea of their business, the thing that their business is going to be known for, that’s going to be elevated at the fore of their business, on their website, in their products, in their pitches. It’s going to be their front and center, and anyone in the marketplace who falls in love with that idea will seek them out because they embody that idea. That’s the idea of differentiation.
Sometimes people come to me, and they want to differentiate themselves – they’re a speaker, a consultant, a coach, or something like that. They get very confused because their lives, their business, are about so many different things. They can do so many different things and so many different concepts are important to them. When they come to me, they’re apologizing for all the cool stuff that they know how to do and all the cool stuff that they’ve done in their life. I tell them: don’t apologize to me for being this amazing human being who knows a lot about everything and can do so many different things – that’s what makes you great.
You need to be amazing in one area. But I believe that you should be great in countless areas because our minds are not precision instruments. We draw from all kinds of different models and all kinds of different ideas in life. So, to me, the more things that you understand about the world and the more things that excite you and you can draw upon, the more robust your business and your solutions will be.
How would you package the
type of individual that is a per-
fect fit to be your client?
I deal with thought leaders and I deal with organizations, and it’s usually about people who are super-smart at what it is they do. They want to be known for one big irresistible idea, but they’re not necessarily known for that yet. Or it could be that the idea that they’re known for needs a refresh because the public has acclimated to that idea, so, it doesn’t stand out as special as it should. So, we come up with something brand new. What is that idea and how do you write and speak about it so that people get excited about it?
Something I really should specify is that the best people or the best organizations to differentiate are daring brands. They’re daring, and they’re willing to stand out. Sometimes, people come to me and they say, I want you to position me, I want you to differentiate me and I want to stand out. And I say to them, you know, if we differentiate you properly, you will stand out, so understand that people will love you. But you’re also going to be very visible. Are you OK with that? Are you comfortable with that? Because you can’t be about something lukewarm. You have to go all in about a specific idea. You really have to be that; it has to be a cause in your life. You have to really support that idea. And everything you do has to be around that idea. So, you can’t really take half-measures if you truly want to differentiate in a way that’s going to make a big change in your business and in people’s lives. If you’re not comfortable in that skin, then there’s no way you’re going to be able to live with it and make it work.
enough. They need to have a dozen or sometimes dozens of elevators pitches. We know how difficult it is to perfect even one elevator pitch. So, why do you say this?
People find it very difficult to talk about elevator pitches or elevator speeches because they find it very hard to sum up their lives or their businesses in a way that does justice to them that’s quick enough that people are interested and so forth. Elevator pitches kind of scare people because they devote their lives to doing a specific job or a specific task, whatever it is they’re doing, or creating a specific product. And then they have to speak about it within a very short timeframe, let’s say 10 seconds or 20 seconds, that’s all it is.
The problem with most elevator pitches is that people try to roll their whole life into the elevator pitch, and they make it so generic and uninteresting that it can’t hold people’s attention. That’s why they find elevator pitches so difficult. What I say to people is you need elevator speeches of different lengths. You need one of, let’s say, seven to ten seconds about what it is you do. You need one of 30 seconds. You need one of 90 seconds or so, because it depends on the situation you’re going to be in. But not only that, you need those different length elevator speeches for everything you do. You need them for your business as a whole, for each one of your products that you sell, for each one of your services that you sell.
If someone asks what I do for one of my pitches, I would say, “Consultants and other thought leaders hire me to increase their fees by up to 2,000 percent.” And then if someone said, “Oh, my G-d, how do you do that?” Then I would say, “I do that predominantly in two ways. The first way is I’m a differentiation consultant…” Then, once I get them interested in what I have to say, I’ll talk in more detail about my business.
A format that I created that may fit some of your listeners is that you say very simply who you are and what you do. And then you say, “But the way I do it is very unusual.” When you say that, then what you are going to do is highlight your point of differentiation.
We’re going to move to anoth-
er topic that you love talking
about, and that is brainstorm-
ing meetings. I’ve heard you
say that brainstorming meet-
ings don’t work.
The reason why I say brainstorming meetings don’t work is because the way I see them happen is this: that often an organization needs a new idea either for a client or for themselves. And they set a time to do a brainstorm. Everyone has a million other projects to work to operationalize around that idea in a product they’re creating, a service, a campaign, whatever it is.
That’s why I say brainstorming meetings are broken just because of the way that they’re set up and people get too busy. So, to me, the way to go about a brainstorm meeting – I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have the brainstorm meeting – but I am a big believer that everyone in the organization who’s going to be involved in the brainstorming meeting has to have what I call a thinking campaign before the brainstorm has to happen. So, by the time the brainstorm meeting happens, they come
on. So, no one is really thinking about the idea that they need to be brainstorming about. I’m not saying that this happens in all cases, but I’ve seen that happen, and I’ve worked with lots of organizations, so it’s almost an abdication of responsibility, to do thinking about what they’re going to be brainstorming about in the meeting. When the meeting happens, people come to the meeting, and now they’re under tremendous pressure to come up with an idea that’s usable. And so they’ll go with the first halfway decent idea that anyone comes up with in the brainstorming meeting. Now, the whole brainstorm tilts towards that idea, like everyone says, “Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea.” And so now all the little satellite ideas that people create are in service to that halfway decent idea that they created. And now the brainstorm is over and now they have to go with that halfway decent idea because they waited so long to do the brainstorm. They didn’t do any thinking about the brainstorm ahead of time. And so, the whole meeting was in service of that first halfway decent idea. So now they have no option but to the meeting with so many ideas and images and stories and their minds are revved up about what is a good idea. A brainstorm about the brainstorming meeting goes way better, way smoother. The caliber of ideas is much more interesting, it’s more out there because they looked at the subject on their own from so many different ways.
Another thing that I do sometimes is that when I ask people to come to the brainstorm meeting, I give them all a piece of paper, and I ask them to write down everything that would be distracting them at the brainstorm. So, no one is going to look at this paper whatsoever. I tell them, “I want you to write down all the things that might hinder you from being present here, and you’re not going to have to share this. Then I want you to fold that paper up and I want you to write your name very clearly on it.” And then I go around with a hat or something and they just drop it in and I say, “OK, know that everything that’s going to be distracting you in this meeting, you’re going to be able to see it at the end. When we’re finished, I’m going to give everyone their paper back and you’re going to open it. So hopefully now in the meeting you can relax because you’re not going to have to remember anything other than what we’re focused on right now. It’ll be there in black and white at the end.”
Mark, we have only around one-minute left, so it might be an unfair question, but we’ll ask it anyways. Perhaps you could share. What’s your most important marketing tip?
Oh, yeah, that’s easy, my most important marketing tip. So, this has to do with both your marketing to the outside world or if you’re a leader in an organization to getting your messages out within your organization. And that is, honesty is key, that you need to be honest about your motivations, about how you do the work you do, why things are the way they are and the more honest and open you are. The more you get that stuff out there, and the more people will appreciate you for what’s real about you and are going to want to be around you, they’re going to want to buy your products. They’re going to want to buy your services, and they’re going to want to work with you.
You want to be as open and honest about what makes you you and what makes your company your company.
