You’re not IBM. Stop trying to act like it.
You know the bridge to the future is safe, but your prospect sees the risk of getting fired.
After all, as the saying goes, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Sadly, you are the little guy, which makes you the risky bet.
What does this mean for you? It means your proposals don’t get approved. It means your case studies never make it past your Point of Contact.
It means your prospect picks the larger firm.
Fortunately, you are not doomed. You have a tool IBM doesn’t. That tool is your story, and it needs to be told. Right there in your website and your proposals and your case studies.
That’s where we come in. Whether it’s by teaching your people how to do it or by us rewriting your sales documents ourselves, the goal is to make your prospect see you as an even better bet than IBM.
It’s your story that infuses your prospects’ brains with the trust hormones that make them pick you. Get someone to help you pull that story out and figure out how to work it into your sales documents.
Who hires us and why:
- A Dutch civil engineering firm that is pitching a commercial development project in Riyadh.
- A Turkish software startup that wants to grow its sales in Europe.
- A British cloud storage company that wants its CTO to present better to the board.
- An Italian steel manufacturer that wants to increase its credit line with a German bank.
- An American e-commerce company that wants its software engineers in India to communicate better with warehouse managers in California.
Basically, it doesn’t matter whether your industry is software, electricity, construction, or something else. If you pitch X to Y, we’re the ones who help.
What we do:
Sales collateral rewrites
Selling premium services requires your customer to trust that you are the right person to take them into the future. And there are specific ways for you to encourage that feeling.
We redesign and rewrite your sales materials so you leverage your ability to show your customers their new world and maximize the trust they have in you to get them there.
Presentation training and practice
If you want to sell internationally, you need to up your game presentation-wise. That means improving your speaking skills.
The four key components for that are business storytelling, filler-word reduction, speech practice, and a vocabulary upgrade.
We use a mixture of one-to-one and internal group classes to get you and your team up to speed fast.
fCO (fractional communications officer)
With an fCO, you get a CO for half the cost of an in-house CO, and, more significantly, on a no-contract basis that leaves you with more flexibility.
Use us for financing activities, investor meetings, and customer communications.
Companies our clients have left:
Note: Since discretion is paramount to us, you will find no testimonials on this site, and there are no samples of our work. Sorry, this logo wall is as far as we go. For confidentiality reasons, Matt won’t even tell his own mom the names of the people he works with, and he changes pronouns and other identifying markers for his clients often. For example, that “Dutch civil engineering firm” mentioned above wasn’t actually in The Netherlands, and the “Riyadh” project wasn’t actually in Riyadh, it was in another Middle Eastern city.
If you would like to see samples of our writing, consider subscribing to the email list below, or reading recent issues of the newsletter. There are also over a hundred podcast episodes, and there are over a hundred videos of Matt on this site alone, along with three books and hundreds of blog posts. And if you’re a LinkedIn person, there is more on his profile there.
What makes for a successful client?
- A history of serial problem solving.
- A frustration coming from one of life’s slaps in the face.
- The fear of god (an external force that makes them want to solve the problem that #2 brought to the forefront).
Look inside yourself and get in touch with these three traits in you. You’ll get a lot more out of it if you keep them close at hand!
If you want to hear more on that subject, listen to this podcast episode:
Why the focus on engineering-heavy industries like software?
Engineers have a special need when they are talking to others: They are technical people speaking to non-technical people. Getting those non-technical people to buy in is much easier if the engineers “talk to the dog” — speak in the language of the audience, not in the language of engineers.
Engineers are also one of the most globally-mobile groups. They tend to be produced, disproportionately, by middle-income countries, and then be sought after around the world.
How do I know if my engineers need communications assistance?
Your engineers might need communications assistance if you experience one or more of these situations:
- Your RFPs are getting turned down late in the game.
- You would like your engineers to represent the organization in public.
- Other departments groan when they hear the engineers will be presenting.
- You feel like the engineering voice is being drowned out in board meetings.
- You are trying to raise money, and an engineer is part of the pitch.