Tell them a story.
Don’t sell them. Don’t ask them to follow you or like your latest post. Don’t tell them why you’re the best and give them a list of 20 bullet points trying to convince them why.
Instead, tell them your story. Tell them what inspired you to start. Tell them about the struggles in the beginning. And the struggles in the middle. And the ones from yesterday. Tell them about the good times that got you through. Tell them about the wins. The loses. Tell them what gets you out of bed in the morning. Tell them why you’re here.
We all have a complicated, interesting, sometimes boring, hard, beautiful story that got us to this moment. By telling our story with others, sharing our experiences, insights and inner thoughts, now suddenly we’re connecting in a real way. Now we can begin to build trust, then loyalty, then love.
The ability of stories to connect us is ultimately what allows a business to go from commodity to trusted resource. Because now we have a shared connection. A shared purpose.
And it’s all about purpose. Knowing your purpose, and by extension, your business’ purpose, opens every door. Once you have this, everything else flows. And you can focus customer acquisition on connecting with those customers who share your purpose, and not worry about the others. They’re not your customers.
For those of you who have read ‘Start with Why’ by Simon Sinek, you've heard this philosophy and, most likely, value it as much as I do.
I started TwoRoads Strategy to help companies figure out what their purpose is, and then actually go do something with it. The concept seems simple enough, but it’s surprisingly difficult to think through ‘why you do what you do’ when your every day is focused on sales and profit margins. And it’s even easier to lose sight of your purpose as the years tick by. The irony, of course, being that little will boost sales and profit margins in the long run more than focusing on your ‘why.’
So, my purpose is just that; to help companies help themselves and remember why they started their business in the first place. I love hearing from and learning from entrepreneurs; their war stories and battle scars and, ultimately, how they persevered to ‘make it.’ The posts to come will be my attempt to gather stories from entrepreneurs and learn about what drives them and fuels their purpose each day so, hopefully, we can all better understand our own.
- Beth