Grow Your Business With Clear Messaging

Kathy (host): 

Hello and welcome back to Help! My Business is Growing, a podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I’m your host Kathy Svetina. 

Kathy (host): 

An average person gets bombarded by hundreds of ads and other marketing materials on any given day, and it can get overwhelming. As a consumer, it’s almost impossible to escape from it, especially in today’s highly connected and digital world. But as a business, it’s also hard for our messages to break through the blur of everyone else’s content because the brain will naturally filter most of them out and choose only those that resonate and grab attention. The challenge that many businesses and growing businesses have today is how to communicate and spread the message clearly and effectively to rise above all this marketing and messaging clutter and reach the target audience. And this is what we’re going to be talking about today.

Kathy (host): 

And just a heads up if you want to come back and grab some of the nuggets of wisdom from our guest today. All the episodes on this podcast, including this one, come with timestamps to topics that we discuss in the blog post as well. You can find the links and the detailed topics in the episode’s show notes.

Kathy (host): 

Our guest today is Orly Zeewy. She is an author, keynote speaker educator, and brand architect. She has lectured at Wharton and taught in the Close School of Entrepreneurship at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. She is a frequent podcast guest and writes extensively on topics related to entrepreneurship. Her articles have been published in national publications such as The Marketing Journal, Smart Hustle, and Lioness Magazine. Her book “Ready, Launch, Brand: The Lean Marketing Guide for Startups” was the number one business book released on Amazon in April 2021. Or the also builds the DNA of startup brands and creates messaging that helps founders cut through the noise and scale in months, not years. Join us.

Kathy (host): 

Welcome to the show, Orly!

Orly (guest): 

Well, thanks so much, Kathy. It’s nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Kathy (host): 

You’re so welcome. I’m so excited you’re here because we’re going to be talking about clear messaging. And you know, we all know how important marketing really is and how it directly affects the financial performance of the company. But it’s really, really hard to get it right. And I almost feel like it’s part art and part science, and a lot of businesses struggle with effective marketing, and they end up flushing a lot of money down the drain because of that. Why do you think that happens?

Orly (guest): 

Well, there’s actually a couple of things that I can point to. One is that, as you know if you don’t understand what you’re marketing, it’s really hard to get somebody to buy, right? If we think of marketing, as the engine to your sales, branding is what actually informs marketing, right? Because marketing is about selling, right? It’s about selling a product or service. And what often what people forget, is they think they’re just going to somehow figure this out and I’ve literally spent my entire career creating a process around that, to come up with a way that you can clearly identify, “This is who I am as a brand. This is who I want to talk to.” Because the reality is, you really don’t want to talk to everybody, because you don’t have enough marketing bandwidth to market to the whole world. 

Orly (guest): 

The first step is really figuring out who you want to talk to. And it’s actually something I’ve come up with a lot working with my clients, which is the first step it’s like, but then I don’t get to talk to all these other people. I’m like, “Well, here’s the thing, if you do something well, really, really well. And you do this one thing really, really well, I guarantee you, what will happen is somebody will come to you and say, “You know, you do this thing really, really well for x, would you be willing to do something for me, even though I’m not x?” It puts you in a completely different position, which is now you’re seen as an authority, and people want to work with you because they seem that you’re doing something really well.

Orly (guest): 

The other piece about marketing, of course, is what people tend to do and this is definitely a bias around marketing is they expect it to work within five minutes. Like I put something out there, why isn’t it working? And it’s not like a widget, right? Widgets. And I talked about this in my book the Ready, Launch, Brand: The Lean Marketing Guide for Startups, what do you think about in terms of marketing, it’s not like, “It cost me $1 to make this widget, I sell it for $5. I’ve now made a profit.” Right? That is not how marketing works.

Orly (guest): 

Marketing doesn’t live on a balance sheet. It’s an investment. It’s something that you actually put money into, just like you do for your legal expenses, your IT support. It’s the same thing when people don’t see it that way.  They’re like, “but I didn’t get what I wanted.” Well, here’s the thing, first of all, you also have to clarify what you want your marketing to do and then you have to let it do it.

Orly (guest): 

What I usually suggest is three months. If after three months, you’re not getting any movement at all, it’s time to revisit, but a week is not enough time to see whether your marketing works. And also, by the way, don’t do it haphazardly, which is why I always say pick one, right?

Orly (guest): 

Pick one target market, pick one service, pick one thing, especially when you’re a young company, and you’re looking to scale, it’s much easier to control one thing than to be on like 10 different platforms, and doing all this, and it’s exhausting, quite honestly, it’s exhausting. It does not give you the kind of ROI that you’re looking for.

Kathy (host):  

And you don’t really have the bandwidth for it either. Because if –

Orly (guest): 

Of course not.

Kathy (host): 

If you don’t have enough people, and you have one or two people doing all the work, it’s a lot, a lot of work. I mean, I can actually vouch for this myself. This podcast, it’s a lot, a lot of work, you would think about it, but there’s no way I could have podcasts and Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn. It would just be madness.

Orly (guest): 

You’re absolutely right. I’m always surprised by startups who say, “Well, you know, I want to market to everybody,” which of course, is impossible, especially in your startup. And then they don’t actually have anybody dedicated to do it. And I’m thinking, well, how are you going to do this right?

Orly (guest): 

And then the other thing is, for some reason, there is a bias towards traditional marketing. It’s really part of why I wrote my book because no one thinks about Lean marketing, they think about traditional marketing. A lot of times people are like, “Wow, I can’t afford to do a Superbowl ad. Therefore, I’m not going to do any marketing.” It’s like, “Well, let me put it this way,  how few companies can afford had literally at a commercial on during the Superbowl, I mean, it’s like millions of dollars for like a 32nd. Spot, and that’s not a goal actually, for a startup.

Orly (guest): 

The goal for a startup is and for young companies, to is, it’s how quickly can you build brand awareness? How quickly can you get people to come back so you build brand loyalty? And how quickly can you build brand equity, which is the value of your brand?

Kathy (host): 

Let’s talk about the difference between traditional and the lean marketing. What would you say is traditional marketing versus the marketing that you talk about the Lean marketing? What are the main differences? And can a young company, a startup also use traditional marketing in a way that serves them? Or should it be more using this Lean marketing?

Orly (guest): 

That’s an excellent question. And advertising, of course, has sort of been the linchpin of traditional marketing, right. And the thing about advertising, so there are a couple of things here. One is advertising works really well for established companies that people know about because all really what the purpose of advertising is to remind you that we are here, that we’re still great, that we do these amazing things, right. And it’s also expensive. I also say, “Unless you have roughly $100,000 a year, don’t even go there like just don’t do advertising.” A. it’s not going to help you, because people don’t know who you are. So to build an advertising campaign around something that is you’re still kind of figuring out, it doesn’t work.

Orly (guest): 

The other piece about traditional marketing is you have campaigns and so there’s, of course, you can do buys on social media. But here’s the thing for younger companies, to me, the most important thing, and this is a big piece of the lean marketing formula is it’s all about building brand awareness as fast as possible. And the way to do that is this is why this process that I talked about my book literally unpacks my process, but what I’ve talked about is this idea that once you’re clear on who your customer is, then you figure out where they go, where do they hang out? Where do they get their information?

Orly (guest): 

Obviously, you need a website, because in this day and age, whenever anybody says, “We don’t really need a website, because nobody really comes here.” Well, they don’t come here because there’s no reason to go and there’s no reason to stay. A website is critical, that is important. Whether you’re doing traditional or lean marketing, it’s important because you really want to have, so it’s like a flagship, right? It’s the place where people can get information. And it does not have to be complex. Obviously, once you’re more of a commercial site where people are actually buying making purchases on your site, that’s a different thing. But most of my work is in the B2B space. Although people do buy books, or they buy other aspects of especially for thought leaders, you need a website and you need a social media presence.

Orly (guest):

That is actually I cannot emphasize enough how important that is. Because one of the ways that you get brand awareness and also build brand loyalty is by engaging with the people you want to engage with. Think of social media as having a conversation, right? You want to think about who do you want to invite who do you want to engage with. And then you need to post things that are actually meaningful, not to you but to your ideal customer.

Orly (guest):

This is why understanding who they are, what matters to them, what keeps them up at night, is so important. Because at the end of the day, you do not want to be a solution looking for a problem, you want to identify the problem that your ideal customer has and you want to be that solution, and you want to make sure that they see it, and they see you as the hero in their customer journey.

Kathy (host): 

What’s interesting about here is there’s almost like this aspect of the community, like finding where they are, where they congregate, and be a part of their journey as well. I’ve seen this a lot. I like, I like to eavesdrop on marketing and salespeople because it’s not just self-serving for my company as well. But also when I work with them in the finance aspect, I know how they think and I know how they, how they think about the metrics and how to develop the business. But one thing that I’m constantly hearing about is this aspect of community, community, community. And that used to be more in like the B2C space, but now it’s moving a lot into the B2B space as well. Right?

Orly (guest): 

Yeah, absolutely. And I’m so glad you mentioned community because of what social media has done. Social media was in an Atlantic Monthly article many years ago that basically identified social media as the new town hall. I love that because it’s really this idea that we congregate there. You’ve got 1.7 billion people, monthly users on Facebook, 1.5 billion monthly users on YouTube, I can’t even remember how much content is being downloaded every minute. You’ve got something like what 10,000 tweets a second or something like that. I mean, it’s just insane the numbers, right.

Orly (guest):

You are de facto, the moment you’re on social media, you are literally in a community. As a brand, what you want to do, is you want to make sure, this is why again, we go back by clarity is the first step. Because if you don’t know who your ideal customers are, how do you know where to go? How do you know what kind of community you want to build the community piece is important.

Orly (guest):

Because in the beginning stages of a company of, those first three years, what you really want, is you want to find people who love what you do and can’t wait to tell other people about it. And that happens in the community, right. And as it turns out, people are much more likely to believe what people say in their network than they do when you talk about on your website.

Kathy (host):

And I want to go a little bit more tactical here, when you talk about having the clarity and being really, really specific with who you serving your ideal customers, where they congregate, and how do you find them? Is there a process where you can define this as my ideal customer? And I know we have the ideal customer persona, where you’re supposed to say, “Well, this is what they read, this is what they do, there’s this marketing exercise, is that were you talking about? Or is it another process that you do?

Orly (guest):

I actually don’t use personas, because when I work with startups, they don’t know that. It’s too early, right? I mean, especially young and younger companies, they may not have that information. Instead, what I do is an empathy map exercise, which I ask you to put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer again, and it could be an aspirational customer. Doesn’t have to be somebody real by putting yourself in their shoes. I do have an exercise for that and it’s in my book as a matter of fact.

Orly (guest):

I really encourage people to get in the shoes of their other customers, and then really think about what’s their pain point? What are they gaining when they work with you. Because once you have that information, and you don’t have to, one of the things that I’ve also discovered is you don’t need 20 pages of information. You need just enough, because, again, we live in a world where things are moving at the speed of light, which is why we no longer really do business plans because business plans used to go five years out. I’m looking at the next six months and the technology is literally doubling in efficacy and speed within that time.

Orly (guest):

Things move very quickly, and really what you want is on the ground. You want to get a sense of who these people are and then when you go on, in terms of the social media platforms, which we haven’t really talked about yet. I’m mostly on LinkedIn, Twitter, because Twitter’s for authors and thought leaders, and LinkedIn is really for business.

Orly (guest):

If you’re in the B2B space and you’re not on LinkedIn, you don’t exist really because LinkedIn becomes the platform for business and every Fortune 500 company is on there. You’ve got CEOs worldwide. It’s really the marketplace, right? And what I have found is that if the engagement that you talk about building community, right? I’ve joined, of course, some communities as well. But when you engage on people’s posts, and you can’t show up, what they say, “I think so what is in 95% of life is showing up or something to that effect”, right? You show up or you show up with knowledge with information, and you are gracious, and you are open and willing to share that information. That’s another piece that I think for some people might be difficult, right? They think, “Oh, you’re giving away everything.” It’s like, “Well, I can’t give away everything that’s in my head. And I certainly can’t give away what I’m thinking about next.” I usually tell people giving away information is how people see how you think, and what it might be like to work with you.

Orly (guest):

And we live also in a world of utter and total transparency. It’s been really interesting because as somebody who has been at this for a long time, I’ve been able to really watch this evolution from nobody knows anything, right? Like, don’t look behind the curtain kind of thing. Right? It’s ironic, my initials are, O-Z. Right? I have a fun time with that. Don’t look behind the curtain, don’t look at the little man behind the curtain with the levers, right?

Orly (guest):

But now it’s like all that information is there for us. The thing that’s not available is what do we do with it. And I have found that is really where I’ve moved into this arena of being able to very quickly gather information, and then turn it into something useful because if I can’t use it, it’s just noise. And it’s not just the noise, it’s also the context is important as well to look at the information and figure out what is it that it’s specific to you, that will help you because I cannot tell you how many times I have looked at a certain thing that I wanted to do. And someone actually laid it out for me on a piece of paper or on a post or whatever it was, and I said, “There’s no way I’m going to do this myself ever. No, no.” Well, that’s the other thing. When I wrote my book, people said, “I really wrestled with, should I have all my exercises there?” And then I realized I was talking to my editor, and he was like, “Well, it’s not like people are going to be able to really do like they’re going to try doing it, and they’ll realize that you really need you.” And I think we are underestimating both how overwhelmed people are, they just don’t have the time to do this. And also for you, it’s easy. I’ve spent 25 years just on this process. Yeah, for me, it’s easy. And also, the last piece, which is I think, the most important thing, it’s impossible to do it for yourself, I can’t even do it for me, and this is what I do.

Kathy (host): 

It’s hard. I think it’s harder, even if you’re an expert in that particular field because you do not have, you’re so emotionally invested in it, you’re so close to it, that you just cannot see the forest from the trees. You’re walking on the ground, but you really need to be 10,000 feet up to actually see all the territory, not just what is straight ahead of you.

Orly (guest):

You’re making such an excellent point. And I actually one of the things I talk about is this idea of the ugly baby thing, right, where nobody wants somebody to call their baby ugly, right? We tend to be, and as a mother, who was raised kids that resonates for me, but you don’t have to be a parent to understand that because most founders think of their startup as their baby. For you to call your baby ugly, which literally means obviously, it’s not ugly, but it doesn’t work. There’s something you’ve got to fix and change or shift. And it’s you’re so close to it, that it physically hurts to do that. But to have somebody stepping back enough who’s not vested in the outcome, right? I can say to somebody, “Well, here is what you’re saying. Is this what you really want to tell people? Is this what you’re really about.” And what happens is when you could kind of step back a little bit and see it from a different perspective. Then often,  people will say to me, “Yeah, my name really doesn’t work does it?” 

Orly (guest):

You might want to read, I want to revisit that right? Because sometimes the name also doesn’t fit. But websites are notorious for being you know, nasal gazing, right? You go on to somebody’s homepage. I have no idea what this is. I have no idea what you do. And I have no idea if this is something I even want, and you’re already trying to sell me like I literally walk- I land on the homepage as I can. This is one of the worst things. You land on the homepage and immediately something pops up that they want you to sign up for like “I don’t know what this is, what am I even signing up for.”

Orly (guest):

And they’re doing this because they want to capture email, which, as a businesswoman, I totally get, of course, you want to capture emails, but do it in a way that feels respectful to your visitors, because nothing shuts people down faster than having them feel like they’re being sold. Right? And somebody said to me, and I don’t know who said this, but you know, everybody wants to buy, but nobody wants to be sold.

Kathy (host):

It’s true. And you bring a good point about this conversation that I’ve been also hearing about through the grapevine about gated content. And a lot of companies are now going away from the gated content, because they are realizing that the leads that are getting through these lead magnets, the email addresses, you have to have a lot of salespeople calling these people that are not really qualified because the emails or the phone numbers that give you are just practically crap, unfortunately, right, they are not even valid. And from a consumer perspective, for me, I always appreciate when a company actually on gates their content. I want to give them my email more because I can see the value that they’re providing. It doesn’t have this transactional piece to it, like, “Hey, if you want this information, give us our email address,” but I could see that they’re serving with value. I want to ask you, what is your philosophy on gated content?

Orly (guest):

Yeah, you’re spot on about that? Yeah, I think to me, information is only useful if I know what to do with it. I don’t really believe in holding on to it. And, and only letting you see a little bit of it, and only if you sign up, like my website. When you land on it, there’s tons of information, right. I’ve got all my articles, and I’ve got all my thought leadership, it’s all right there. Because I believe that the more you share with people, the easier it is for them to start to see who you are. And to understand whether or not you could be a fit for what they need. And I do that, I hate being sold. I hate these like, buy now, buy, buy, buy, right?

Orly (guest):

First of all, can I just say I never read these newsletters ever. And so I don’t have one because I have a bias against newsletters, not to say that at some point, I’m thinking about building courses and webinars, and there’s gonna be other stuff, right, other products. But the newsletter, it’s like, first of all, it’s so onerous to have to come up with something that every month, every quarter. It’s a lot of work, right? It’s like a podcast that you’re doing 10 times- 12 times a year. That’s a lot of work.

Orly (guest):

And I think that people are so burnt out on newsletters, what they want is just in this six seconds, which by the way, is as much time as you have right when I land on your homepage, it might be five now, just FYI. It used to be 12 in 2000 and since 2002. Now, we’ve literally halved our attention span, which is, not hard to believe given that we live in this rapidly moving tech-obsessed and tech-savvy digital age. But what I’m finding is that all I’m really doing, and this is you’re just getting my thinking about it.

Orly (guest):

I want to open a conversation, I want to build relationships. Relationships are not built on newsletters or on email, give me your email. Relationships are built, when there’s a trust that the other person is not trying to sell you. They’re trying to inform you, they’re trying to educate you. They’re sharing information. I share information all the time. I do webinars, seminars, workshops. It’s just I open it all up, and I answer people’s questions, because what I’ve realized is, nobody is going to be able to replicate what I do. Because they’re coming at it without any of the knowledge that it’s taken me 25 years to figure out, right? I find that the the more open I am and the more I share, the better relationships I’m able to build and those relationships.

Orly (guest):

I’ve literally had somebody contact 20 years after we had met, and gave me an amazing project because they remembered that I at that time, I was sharing all this information and sharing helping them solve a problem. And I mean, that’s an amazing thing to have somebody reach out to you 20 years later through LinkedIn. I might add to say, I’d like you to come in and talk to us about doing this project. That’s absolutely amazing. And I think a lot of it has to be I think we should be talking about also being consistent in your messaging as well. Right? Yeah, that is a piece that comes into a two, it’s not that one day you offering X and the next day you offering Y and no one really knows what to come to you for.

Kathy (host):

Let’s say that you have gone through the exercise where you have defined your ideal clients, you might actually even had a couple of interviews with them to really understand them. Now you know where they hang out. And you really want to scale you want more sales, but you know that you have to go and build relationships first, how would you go about doing that? Would you go partner with some, let’s say someone like a referral partner? I mean, how tactically how would you go do that?

Orly (guest):

Again, a really good question. And I think strategic partnerships are definitely the way to go as you’re scaling, because especially one that’s been around for a long time, you’ve already got the trust factor, because I mentioned that that’s really important. You can have the greatest thing ever, but how are you going to get somebody to buy something from you when they know nothing about you, and you’ve just you’re only been out there for a little bit. Again, it’s back to that building brand awareness.

Orly (guest):

The other thing I want to mention is messaging is huge, right? Because you said, you have to be consistent? Well, part of the way that you do that is you get clear on the messaging so that this empathy exercise I mentioned, I build messaging from that, that’s really directly related to both the pain and the gain for your ideal customer. And once you have those key messages, that everything comes out of that, like I stay in my lane, right? I’m not trying to sell you that if I don’t know what if you’re asking me something I don’t know how to do. I don’t fake it till I make it, I find you someone else because I have all these strategic partnerships with people who can do things that I can’t.

Orly (guest):

But I think, to your point about scaling, I don’t think it’s possible to scale one customer at a time. I’ve tried it, believe me, and it takes forever. And in the world that we’re in right now, where you have all these amazing digital tools. I’m talking to people across the country around the world. We are suddenly in this place, which is something I’ve wanted. For me, this is a real positive. And not that to say that the pandemic has been a good thing because clearly, it has not. But one of the things that have come out of that is all of a sudden, we’re realizing “Wait for a second, we’re we’re on the World Wide Web, right?” I mean, we can talk to anyone, especially when everybody was in lockdown. Let’s face it, we’re the big girls. They’re much more likely to talk to you, but the important thing, that this is the other key thing about clarity.

Orly (guest):

How do you know if a strategic partner is a good partner, if you haven’t done your work to figure out who you are? Right? Because I look at what is their messaging? What’s their value prop? How are they kind of showing up in the world, what’s the voice of their brand, and not everybody’s going to be a fit, you know, so I look for people who are process oriented, but are also very creative.

Orly (guest):

And as you said earlier about the science and art of marketing. Absolutely, that is true, it is both a science and an art. If you’re just looking to make as much money as possible, that’s probably not a good fit for me, because that usually leaves out the relationship building. And it’s more like, let’s skip to the part where people buy. I like the idea of people who are already working with the types of clients that that I know I’m a good fit for because I’ve done my homework, and I know who I work well with, and they’re really entrepreneurial. They’re people who are doing something really amazing. I like working with people who want to make a difference. People who have found something new to say, or have a interesting take on kind of how they’re approaching their work. And then, for it’s finding these strategic partners, who are also looking to fill gaps, right. I think that’s a really smart way to scale.

Kathy (host):

And what I’ve also heard there as well is that strategic partnerships are also in a way an extension of your brand as well. Correct?

Orly (guest):

Absolutely. This is why it’s so important that you connect with the right ones, because nothing I mean, once you know how it is. In the social media sphere, you make a mistake, that mistake lives on forever, I don’t care if you’ve, if you’ve deleted it, it never goes away. You also want to be careful that the people you partner with you, which is why you want to do your research. You’re not just going to connect with anybody which is why you know social media is such a great tool because it allows you the time to build a relationship so you know go not just go on their website and have some informational zoom meetings, but really talk maybe even talk to their customers or see, attend one of their webinars to see how they talk about what they do and really get comfortable because I’m not talking about having 100 partnerships, I’m talking about a handful, maybe a couple, maybe three at most, right? You can do the work and it’s easy to do.

Orly (guest):

This is where technology is really your friend because you can get that information. I’ll tell you, I’ve taught students this. You can go on Facebook, what I love about Facebook is if you look up companies on Facebook, what you get is their culture, which I think is so fascinating. You will see how different those cultures lookup. Look just by what they post, what are they doing? Are they all dressed up for Halloween? Or are they like all straight-laced and corporate, right? That tells you a lot about the company.

Orly (guest):

Plus, of course, you can go in on their about section. It tells you everything when they were founded, how many you know what their revenues, I mean, this is the part where I have to say it is it takes time to do it. Which is why I would suggest only doing this for a couple of different partners. But you can get everything you ever wanted to know about this company. And then again, if you’ve done your work, and you know where how you connect with them, you can say, “Yeah, that really sounds like it’s a good partner.” And then, of course, you try it out, you take it for a test drive. I’m talking to people by doing joint webinars, because I feel like that’s a good way to see how they are. I’m finding that’s kind of a fun thing, because then you know, everybody’s got some skin in the game. Right? And then we see what comes from that.

Kathy (host):

I want to switch gears a little bit here. And I one question that I always as a finance person get asked is how should I price? And this is something that is extremely fascinating to me is because pricing is such a loaded topic. It’s not just about the cost or how much money you need. There’s always it has this aspect of branding, it’s the aspect of value, it’s how much do you value something? And how do you price it? And I feel like a lot of that comes with the clarity of who your customer is, what they care about, and how much do they care about solving for that problem that you are solving for? I want to get your take on it? How do you look at the pricing in the sphere of clarity of messaging?

Orly (guest):

I’m going to give you a couple of answers. One is David Achor, who is literally the person who started this whole conversation around the brand. And he has written several books. He’s now on YouTube, I mean, the guy’s probably the 70s. And he wrote a book on building strong brands. One of the things he talks about in this book, and in fact, I started my whole process around some of the things he was talking about. But this idea that what it costs goes directly to the brand perception. It actually turns out that if you charge too little, it’s just as bad as if you charge. The way you know, and really, this is just anecdotal. But the way you know you’re charging the right price. And he actually says this, I think he talks about this in his book is you say the price and then you wait. And if the person hesitates just for a couple of seconds, that’s a good price. If they immediately say no, two things have happened, you’re probably have not made your case for the value or they’re not ready to buy or they’re not the right client. There’s actually three things right that you want to look for. But the price it’s not just this formula of “Okay, I add up, and I’ve done these exercises, you add up all your expenses.” Yeah, then I’d be charging $1,000 an hour, I would love to get to that point. Not quite there yet.

Orly (guest):

But yeah, it’s it’s really more about the first step is you need to establish the value and the value is not the value to you. But what does your that potential client get as a result of working with you, which is why you really need to understand who they are, and you need to ask a lot of questions. I think one of the mistakes we make is we’re too quick to give the price and what I’m learning and I’m still learning. I mean, everything I’m telling you are things that I’ve had to learn. It’s not like, you don’t just know this stuff, you figure it out along the way. But one of the things I’m discovering is, you want to keep asking permission, right to continue this conversation.

Orly (guest):

And when you get somebody on the phone, and they look like they could be a potential customer, potential client, you want to first establish, is this something that they value? Is this something they’re struggling with? Is this something that they want to fix? Because if the answer is no, it doesn’t matter what your price is. Again, it’s like you want to slow it down a little bit to try to really, because by asking these questions, it also shows that you’re really trying to come up with something that’s going to work for them.

Orly (guest):

And so I struggled with this a lot. I have especially post-pandemic. I’ve had to completely rethink my entire practice. Because everything I was doing before is no longer what I do. Because we’re not meeting a person, you know, things have shifted. The pricing is, I would say, it’s an especially I would say, for women, because women tend to have a harder time with this question. Ask a man who does what you do, what they charge, and then charge accordingly. I was shocked by this. It’s like, really? You charge this much money? What am I doing? Oh, oh, my God. We do it, sir. Like, yeah, yeah, that’s what I charge. Okay.

Kathy (host):

Orly, this has been absolutely delightful. You give us so many good tips on how to do our customer personas, how to clarify message pricing, especially I absolutely appreciate that. I always ask this question for every single guest that comes on this podcast. And this is, what is the one thing that our listener can do to clarify their message. Something very simple that they can do in the next week or so to get them closer to that message that is really tight and will resonate with their market?

Orly (guest):

This is actually a super simple thing you can do create a survey, and send it to your clients, and I would say three questions. One of those questions would be what do you get from working with us? Another question would be, something about your website, just or something about your, and how, what they’re getting from, and what could be improved. And then the last thing would be, how has working with us changed your life, your business. You want to get a sense of what you’ve done to help them. And I think if you do those things, and you can do Google forums, you can do Survey Monkey, something really simple. I mean, how quickly can you put a form together, 15 minutes or so. And if you already have a client base, you’re going to get a lot of really good information. And then I hope you would call me because I can’t help you figure out what to do with all that information.

Kathy (host):

If they do want to call you, where can they find you, Orly?

Orly (guest):

Okay, so obviously, you can reach out to me. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m the only Orly Zeewy. It should not be very hard to happen to me, you can reach out to me at orly@zeewy.com. You can go on my website, and there’s a link to my calendar, which it’s easy enough. I’m on Calendly, so you can find me there. But I would suggest start out by connect with me on LinkedIn. And let’s schedule. I offer a complimentary 30-minute audit or review of your LinkedIn or your website or we can talk about really any of the things we’ve mentioned here. I’m happy to do a 30 minute with you and then see if if I can be of help to you. Awesome. Orly, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much. Kathy. Really enjoyed our conversation.