Jay Kingley recently came on Sales for Nerds to talk about optimizing referability, the 3 levels of marketing, and how a Provocative Perspective helps cut through the noise and the time wasters to bring the right people into your orbit.
What’s a Provocative Perspective? It’s a view that helps your ideal client reframe issues in more helpful way, that goes against the grain of “conventional wisdom”, often because the conventional wisdom fails for a particular niche.
Jay cites the example of Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, which isn’t even necessarily accurate, but it’s so interesting that it became a viral sensation, and make Sinek millions of dollars.
I wasn’t clever enough to call it a Provocative Perspective, but my tagline of “fun, anti-CRM for independent consultants” serves as one, letting people know that Mimiran is kind of like a CRM, but kind of not, and it’s for independent consultants, not sales teams.
One of my customers talks about “design-last web design”, emphasizing that so many web designers get wrapped up in the artistry at the expense of utility.
The best part about the Provocative Perspective is not that it helps you stand out when you talk to people (either directly or via your website or other online presence). It’s that it gives your network something valuable to say to people in their network who would benefit.
So if someone is complaining about needing to update their website, but the last web designer wasted a bunch of money without producing results, you could say, “well, you might think about design-last web design, etc, etc, etc. Let me introduce you.”
Now, you don’t just have an introduction or a standard referral, you have a unique connection. It’s not just “Bob is a great web designer”, it’s “Bob does web-last design”, which is different from the other web designers you might be considering.
What’s your Provocative Perspective?
(Listen to Jay’s full interview and get the show notes here.)