This is why you sound the same as everyone else (and how to fix it)

Jeffro (00:01.434)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. In a crowded marketplace, it’s not enough to just be good at what you do. You have to stand out. But for coaches, consultants, and speakers, traditional marketing advice often falls flat. If you’ve ever felt like social media is a waste of time or struggled to differentiate yourself from the competition, this will be a good episode for you. Today, I’m joined by Chantal Cornelius, founder of Apple Tree Marketing and author of Standout Strategies. Chantal has spent over 20 years helping coaches, consultants, and speakers grow their businesses and she’s here to share why she believes USPs don’t work, why social media isn’t the magic bullet, and what actually does help you attract clients without frustration. So welcome to the show, Chantal.

Chantal Cornelius (00:41.038)
Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Jeffro (00:43.44)
And it’s great to hear your accent. Thanks for coming on the show.

Chantal Cornelius (00:45.806)
It’s a terribly posh British accent. I’ve been cultivating it for 50 something years. I’m glad you like it.

Jeffro (00:53.478)
It’s amazing. love it. Well, Chantal, you know, there’s a lot of business owners that are told they need to find their unique selling proposition or USP, right, in order to stand out. But you say that that’s outdated thinking. So I think we should start there because I want to hear your thoughts on that.

Chantal Cornelius (01:09.1)
Okay, I do think it’s outdated for two reasons. Unique selling propositions, USPs. The first problem is they are about selling. So people think, try to find something that makes them different. But it’s about the way they sell to other people. Most people, we don’t want to be sold to, we want to buy what we need, we want people to help us to buy. So that’s the first reason I don’t like USPs, because they’re about selling.

The other challenge with them is that most people actually really struggle to work out what makes them unique. I started looking into this back in, back in 2015. And it came about because I was working with a number of coaches. And when I said to them, what is it that makes you different? Every single one said the same thing. They didn’t realize that they were saying the same as the other coaches, but they were. And that’s…means that if there’s somebody who is looking for a coach and they speak to two or three coaches, they’re all going to hear the same thing. And there was nothing different. So that’s why I don’t think they work. Too soon.

Jeffro (02:18.725)
Okay, well like, yeah, if you reframe instead of being about selling as opposed to helping people, I imagine that could be a better way of coming up with something that actually is unique and more meaningful to the customer potentially.

Chantal Cornelius (02:24.013)
Hmm.

Chantal Cornelius (02:31.07)
It could, and that’s actually where my research took me because all the digging and reading and researching that I did made me realize that actually it’s about, yes, it’s about helping other people, but it’s about understanding what they want and actually how they want to feel. Because when we buy a service like coaching, consulting, or even having a plumber come in to do some work in your house, it’s how we want to feel when that person is helping us.

Jeffro (03:04.889)
That makes sense, because people remember how they feel. They don’t always remember what you tell them. So that’s an important thing to figure out.

Chantal Cornelius (03:05.336)
makes sense.

Exactly, yeah. And we have to remember that we can’t make anybody feel anything. So it’s not me saying, I am going to make you feel whatever, because I can’t, you know, I can’t even make you smile. I can try to make you smile and make you laugh, but I can’t do it. It’s down to the other person and to how they want to feel. So it just, really puts the emphasis on them, on the person buying rather than the person selling or trying to help.

Jeffro (03:18.894)
You

Jeffro (03:37.07)
Got it. So then of course, the next question is, if USP isn’t the answer, what should we focus on to figure out how to stand out or how to better help people?

Chantal Cornelius (03:47.414)
What we should focus on is, first of all, asking our customers how they want to feel and listening to what they say, but listening to the emotional words that they use. My customers, when I was first looking into this, said to some of my customers, why do you work with me? Why do you stick around? And they gave me words and phrases like, you’re a safe pair of hands.

You give us clarity and confidence. You get the work done. You tell us what marketing to do. You don’t expect us to try and work it out ourselves. When I was first looking into this, I had a team of people working with me here at Apple Tree and we were trying to sell lots of different marketing activities to clients. were selling blogs and social media and podcasts were… weren’t really around much, but we were saying to clients, need a blog, you need a new website. Because we thought that our clients wanted to really grow their businesses and wanted to feel excited and motivated by marketing. Because let’s face it, marketing is exciting and motivating. No, isn’t. Only if you’re in marketing. And I realized that our clients weren’t very happy. And that’s why I started saying to them, what do you actually want from us? And they kept coming back and saying, safe pair of hands, safety, security.

Listening to our clients is really, important. That then took me down the road of, so it’s about understanding how they want to feel. And I identified five strategies. They’re the ones I call the standout strategies. And each business has one. Some businesses have two of them, but most businesses have one. So it’s not about trying to use all five, because this is about being unique. And when you know which is the right strategy for your business, then you can use that language.

The example I’ve just given is of my business. I use the strategy that I call certainty. It’s the safe pair of hands on. It’s the least exciting and the least sexy of all the strategies. And actually I find it really easy because I’m really straight talking and I say class, I’m going to do this. Is that okay? And they go, yep, fine. Get on with it. Whereas I’ve been trying to use the strategy I call growth, which is all about motivating and going for big, growth. And that’s not what they wanted. So

Chantal Cornelius (06:09.14)
Listen to what your clients say and then match that to the different strategies and pick the right one.

Jeffro (06:19.427)
Okay, well that makes sense, right? Obviously if you ask, everybody’s customer base is going to be different. They’re going to want different things depending on the industry, the price point of what you’re offering. And because some people do just want to feel secure knowing there’s somebody who knows what they’re doing, telling them what to do. Like, okay, I don’t have to think about it. I can just execute, right? But others actually might want to learn it for their own business or team, or maybe they want some give and take. And I imagine that’s why it’s so important.

Chantal Cornelius (06:21.166)
you

Chantal Cornelius (06:43.694)
Yeah, exactly. There will be customers out there who do want massive growth in their business and they want somebody to cheer them on and inspire them. If those people come to me, I say, I’m not the right person for you. That’s not my style of working. That’s not how I deliver work to clients. So I then recommend them to other people to the right sort.

Jeffro (07:09.287)
So you mentioned to you mentioned certainty and growth. Can you list out the others?

Chantal Cornelius (07:11.918)
Yeah, the others, the second one is called contribution, which is works really well for networking groups and associations. It’s about where people want to be feel part of they want to feel that they want to belong to something they want to feel part of a of a community, a family, a tribe. So that works really well for networking groups where they’re bringing people together and making connections.

The third one is called Contribution. This is, I see this working really nicely with charities and not-for-profit organizations. I actually watched a gorgeous video earlier today of a charity that I’m supporting and it was showing pictures of smiling children in South Africa. And it made me go all kind of warm and fuzzy because it gave me a really good feeling. You know, it’s not just give us some money and thank you very much.

This is how you’re helping us. These are the people that you’re helping. So that’s contribution. Growth is number four. And then the fifth one is significant, which is when clients want to feel seen and heard, they want to feel more respected. They want to feel that they’re having a bigger impact and have more confidence in what they’re doing.

Jeffro (08:30.241)
Well, it’s interesting that significance is different from contribution.

Chantal Cornelius (08:34.816)
It’s very different. Yeah. Contribution is much more about philanthropy, altruism. It’s not about… I give to charities because of the way they treat me, the way they say thank you. I don’t give to charities so that I can go and go, yeah, look at me, I made a big donation. Significant is…

It’s much more, I did some coaching a couple of years ago with a speaker coach because I wanted to have a bigger impact when I speak on stages. So she taught me a lot more about how to stand, what my posture, how to project my voice. So that allows me to get up on stage and speak and have more of an impact to my audience. Does that kind of clarify the difference?

Jeffro (09:22.077)
It does. And yeah, so someone who wants impact is going to want to leave a legacy behind and maybe build something that they’re proud of as opposed to just giving something to another organization that’s maybe doing something. That’s great. I’m helping, but I’m not the one that is at the center of it. Okay.

Chantal Cornelius (09:35.406)
Exactly, yeah, absolutely, yeah, definitely. Yeah, it’s a good way of putting it, I like that. I’ve not looked at it that way before. Hmm, I like that, thank you.

Jeffro (09:44.895)
You’re welcome. You can use that for free. All right, cool. Well, I think that’s a really way to, a good way to kind of think about, like, it’s not a USP, obviously, but it helps you put a category or a box around the way you’re approaching something. And then within that, you still might have something that is actually different from the next guy in that same bucket. But at least now you’ve got a starting point and an understanding of what your customers want.

Chantal Cornelius (09:47.234)
Very much. Very kind. Thank

Chantal Cornelius (10:05.708)
Yeah.

Exactly. It’s like I’m known, I’m known in these parts as a marketing consultant who is very straight talking. I don’t mess around. I don’t say to clients, how do you think you should do your marketing? I just do this, this and this. But I’m also known, the two words that come up for me a lot when I say to clients, what do you get from me? They say clarity and confidence. They’re not actually talking about marketing. They say, you give me the clarity.

of the message that I put out and you give me the confidence to shout about it. So that’s what makes me different. There will be other marketing consultants who also use certainty, but they’ll have different words, phrases that make them really stand out. And yeah, we all do it slightly differently. So, and it’s fun that there are, oh, I identified between I think 12 and… 18, 19 words for each of the five strategies. So there are loads of different combinations that you can use. So if your strategy, for instance, is significant, you can look at the list of words that go with it and they’re all emotions and feelings and you can pick and choose and play with them and different combinations. makes it all much more fun.

Jeffro (11:24.03)
Yeah, and once you figure this out, it seems like your marketing is going to get a lot easier. And it’ll also give you the ability to turn people away with confidence and have better clients and better experience working with clients because now you’re both in alignment.

Chantal Cornelius (11:36.206)
Yeah, Much better conversion rate because you attract the right sort of clients in the first place. The ones that you really want to work with so you don’t have to be turning people away and the ones who will get you and who will want to work with you. So you’re much easier. They almost come along because I’ve had it where clients say, this person recommended you, they say you do X, Y, Z, when can I start? That’s it. That’s the marketing.

It’s done, makes it so much easier and much cheaper.

Jeffro (12:09.661)
Yeah. Well, let’s move into the actual marketing. Let’s say we figured out our buckets, our strategies, and there’s obviously a ton of options, right? There’s SEO, there’s ads, there’s social media, et cetera. I know you’ve mentioned social media isn’t the best strategy for a lot of people. So maybe we can start there and tell us why you think that.

Chantal Cornelius (12:13.102)
Yeah.

Chantal Cornelius (12:19.854)
Mm-hmm.

Chantal Cornelius (12:27.074)
Yeah, okay. The only social media platform that I use, and the only one I recommend to any of my clients is LinkedIn. When you’re selling a service, people have to trust you before they’ll buy from you. So actually, speaking, networking, referrals, those three, that’s how I get pretty much all of my business and how my clients do. Because, People need to meet me and hear from me and get to know me and I need to get to know them to make sure there’s a good match. LinkedIn is then a really good backup. I spoke a couple of days ago at a conference in Paris. I was speaking in English to a predominantly French audience. The number of connection requests I’ve had on LinkedIn from people in the audience since I got back has been phenomenal and they’re all practicing their English on me, which is wonderful because even though have a French mom, I’m not very good at speaking French.

So I’m using LinkedIn as backup to keep in touch with them, to share more thoughts, ideas. LinkedIn is where my clients hang out. I was speaking to another lady earlier on today who trains and mentors coaches. She only uses LinkedIn because that’s where coaches hang out. So it’s really about finding out where your clients are, where they’re hanging out, where they’re looking to buy your services.

I know that a lot of my friends use Facebook, but they don’t, and my clients use Facebook, but they use it for personal reasons. They don’t use it to look for a supplier. I have clients who use Instagram because they like looking at the pretty pictures, but they’re not going there to buy. They only use LinkedIn. So that’s, don’t worry about the rest.

Jeffro (14:11.708)
It’s a question of like what headspace are they in when they’re on those platforms, right? And LinkedIn is all about business.

Chantal Cornelius (14:17.582)
Absolutely, yeah. Facebook have tried it with business pages, but it hasn’t really taken off. And I’m too old fashioned. I don’t know enough about Twitter or X or whatever it’s called and TikTok and Instagram and all of that lot to know whether there are businessy options. But I just know that my clients or my clients’ clients, like you say, they’re not in the right head space. Their head space is linked in when they’re going business.

Jeffro (14:44.243)
Right. And especially we’re talking about service business here, because obviously if you think of big brands and they just want to have impressions in front of you, like Coca-Cola or something, they’ll advertise in any platform because it doesn’t matter where you are to remind you that Coke is about drinking happiness, right? But if you want to go buy a… Yeah, so… But yeah, that’s why LinkedIn is helpful because that context allows people to receive the messages differently and you can speak specifically…

Chantal Cornelius (14:51.587)
Yeah.

Chantal Cornelius (15:01.367)
they’ve got you on that one, haven’t they? Brilliant.

Jeffro (15:12.936)
to a need of a particular type of person, even reach out to them directly. You’ve got their profile and you know who they are.

Chantal Cornelius (15:17.246)
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And you’ve hit a really important point there. It’s about reaching out to them. I need to spend time this week going back through all the people who’ve connected with me in the last few days since the talk on Saturday and go back and start a conversation with them, either in French or English. Google Translate, we’ve had very handy.

But you know, start building up a relationship with them because people have been sending me connection requests and saying, thank you very much for your talk. So I’m going to go back to them and say, great, you’re welcome. What resonated or what did you find useful or what next for you? Because I know that quite a few of them are potential clients. And I don’t, I’m lucky, I don’t need millions of clients, but I do need to build relationships with those people in order to turn them into clients. So yeah, there’s no point in me blasting out.

drink happy type adverts because I’m much more about building relationships. Same for anyone who provides a service. That’s how it works.

Jeffro (16:20.699)
Yeah. So what are your feelings on how LinkedIn is kind of moving more towards video in their feeds?

Chantal Cornelius (16:28.554)
I like video. I like the fact that people are using different ways of getting messages out because some people prefer watching and listening to it to reading. What I do struggle with a bit is when people assume that you can listen to what they’re saying. I’m currently sitting in my office in my garden. My partner isn’t in here at the moment, but he often is. I, if I’m looking at a feed on LinkedIn, I can’t just start listening to a video because he might be on a Zoom call, he might be on a call to a client. Equally, if I’m on my phone on a train or I’m out in a store, unless I’ve got headphones on, I can’t listen to the video. And I do find that some people are assuming that we all can. Now, where it works is where people put subtitles onto their videos. I love that. And please, anyone listening, if you’re going to put subtitles onto your video, please check them before you put it out. If I use subtitles, it reminds me how badly I speak. I did one a little while ago and instead of it saying I am going to, it I’m gonna. And most of these subtitles systems can’t spell my name. So please check and put in some punctuation. But otherwise, yeah, I love videos especially when they’ve got subtitles because I can just read them and I love watching the body language as well.

Jeffro (17:53.489)
Yeah. Well, a lot of people, like not even just in the office, but if you’re laying in bed at night scrolling, you’ve got a partner who’s asleep, like, okay, you’re just going to be looking unless you got headphones in. So captions, do them. It’s not hard anymore. So what about, so LinkedIn, out of social media, focus on LinkedIn. What are some other ways that experts and business owners could try to attract their ideal clients once they understand their strategy?

Chantal Cornelius (17:58.936)
Thank

Chantal Cornelius (18:12.672)
way.

Chantal Cornelius (18:22.368)
Networking, very definitely, is a great way. It allows you to actually physically meet people. I actually do a lot of online networking too. So yes, I’m not physically meeting people, but I can get out there and meet people. When you go to a networking event, particularly an online one, wear something that is going to make you stand out. Because if people have got a screen full of little thumbnails, I mean, I’ve got stripes on today for anyone who can see this. And I’ve got colored background and I’ve got funky colored glasses and lipstick on. And so I stand out and I do it on purpose. I also encourage people to speak out at networking events. It’s very easy to just sit on a Zoom screen and say nothing. But if you’re going to do that, what’s the point of going there? In the room, face-to-face networking is brilliant. What I love even more is going to networking events where there’s somebody, there’s a speaker. If you’re happy to do a bit of public speaking, volunteer, offer to do the speaking slot because that gets you in front of the whole room. And if you’ve never done any speaking before, go to Toastmasters. I’ve just rejoined after 20 something years. I’m going to go into one of my local clubs. Toastmasters will teach you how to do the basics and I’m going because there’s always more to learn. yeah, networking and speaking. The other one is asking for referrals.

I started a little project about six months ago now. I wrote down a list of about 50 people who know me, who I’ve worked with or who are networking contacts, who I knew would be happy to hear from me. And I started phoning them and I was relentless. And from August until the end of December last year, I made 199 phone calls because yes, I tracked them all. So this was phoning people saying, hi.

How are you? What’s going on in your world? You know what I do. Who can you recommend me to? So I wasn’t asking them for work. I was asking who they knew. And the amount of new work that has come in from that has just been phenomenal. I had somebody email me yesterday based on a referral from a referral from a referral three, four months ago. And she’s now heard about me and she’s like, I need to book you in for these workshops. So yeah.

Chantal Cornelius (20:47.222)
referrals. Ask. Just ask. It’s not as hard as it

Jeffro (20:50.043)
Well, I like the way you do that too, because you’re not asking them for business. People like to be helpful. So they’ll go out of their way to find somebody to refer to you.

Chantal Cornelius (20:54.52)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I had a lot of fun with it because I set myself a goal of talking to five people every day, Monday to Friday. And they had to be new people, not people where I was phoning back having left a message. But if I get somebody’s answer phone, get the voicemail, I leave a message saying, you’re obviously very busy. I’m phoning because I’ve got a favor to ask. Didn’t tell them what it was. And then I would say, give me a call this week. Here’s my number or I’ll phone you next Monday. And I always tell people when I’m going to phone them back. And then I do phone them back. But I always just said, I need to ask a favour. And then when I got them on the phone, like, can I ask you a favour? And everyone goes, yes, of course you can. Nobody said no. So yeah, we like being asked. It’s great fun. And I reconnected with so many people I hadn’t spoken to. Most of them said, oh, it’s so nice to hear from you and not all of them had referrals for me, but they’ve all gone away to think about it.

Jeffro (21:55.567)
Yeah. Well, so there’s two things here I want to highlight for our listeners. Number one, you did it. You made the phone calls, even though that might have seemed like 200 calls. That’s off. I’ll get to that. Like, I don’t want to. Right. But you did it. Number one. Number two, you tracked it. Right. That’s the other thing that’s important. If you’re running a business and not just doing a hobby, you got to keep track of this stuff so you know when to call back the next Monday if you didn’t, you know, if they didn’t answer and you forgot or whatever. If you have got follow up items or anything like that, if you have

Chantal Cornelius (22:00.834)
Yes.

Chantal Cornelius (22:05.484)
Yeah.

Chantal Cornelius (22:15.316)
Absolutely.

Jeffro (22:21.933)
special things that you want to remember when you’re talking to them, like making notes on that. You got to start doing that. So.

Chantal Cornelius (22:27.418)
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah, you’ve got to track it. I’m a big fan of databases and spreadsheets, and I’ve got, I work with two screens, and I have one screen on this, on my right-hand side, which permanently has the list. It’s still there. I can look at it now, and I can still see. I’m still working through the list. In fact, I’ve got the final person tomorrow. I’m having lunch with her, because I phoned her up and said, can I ask you a favor? She said, yeah, let’s do lunch.

But I’ve got I’ve got everybody there and I’ve still got some people who I have left messages for and they might have said Call me in three months time. They’re on that list highlighted dates details You know, I even I even put in details of if somebody says to me I’m going on holiday to Germany next week foamy when I get back. I make a note of that when I call them How is the memory did you have a good time? How is your holiday?

It just makes a huge difference when you’re talking to people and building those relationships. It really does.

Jeffro (23:27.991)
Yeah, because maintaining relationships, if you have a lot of touch points with a neighbor or family who is close, see them lot of time, know, okay, you’ve got room in your brain for that. But if you now have hundreds of people that you’re trying to connect with and build a relationship, that can’t all stay in your brain. It’s going to start falling out. So get it in the spreadsheet, organize it, and then now you can have the same effect without feeling overwhelmed.

Chantal Cornelius (23:50.682)
Absolutely. And it’s a nice way of doing it. You know, don’t, when you’re on the phone with somebody on Zoom, you’re not looking at the screen and go, okay. So it says here that you just go, how was your holiday? And so many people go, how do you remember that? Well, I’m in marketing, I’ve written it all down. But I know the names of some of my parents’ dogs and their children. And I know when their children’s birthdays are, because it’s in the database.

Jeffro (23:58.509)
Yeah.

Jeffro (24:09.433)
Yes. Mine is a steel trap.

Jeffro (24:18.745)
Yeah, well that makes people love you, right? They feel seen and cared about.

Chantal Cornelius (24:20.878)
Indeed, it builds up the relationship. for me, certainty is the strategy that I use. So it doesn’t just go through your marketing and sales, it goes through your customer service with every interaction that you have with a client. So my clients almost expect me to know where they’ve been on holiday or what the dog’s called or that’s what I do.

Jeffro (24:45.485)
Yeah. But this goes back to knowing what your strategy is because if you’re in a different bucket and you tried to be like, hey, how’s your dog Fifi? They’re like, why are you asking about my dog? Like you’ve got to write down different things that they care about. So that might be, hey, last time we talked, you had a goal of hitting this revenue number. Are you there yet? Or have you broken this habit yet? Like that’s the stuff they want you to check on. And so you need to write those things down.

Chantal Cornelius (24:53.628)
Yeah.

Chantal Cornelius (25:01.524)
lately.

Chantal Cornelius (25:05.856)
Absolutely. Yeah, very definitely. are different, very definitely. And in the book that I’ve written about it, I’ve got sections for each of the five on how to live the strategy. So yeah, if growth is the one you go for, then the coach that I’ve been working with for seven or eight years, uses his strategy as growth. He’s a former Paralympic judo medalist.

He’s constantly growing and developing and coming up with more crazy challenges to push himself, which I love because he’s living it himself. He’s not just saying to his clients, come on, grow, grow. He’s doing it. He’s challenging himself. Really important. Yep. Yep.

Jeffro (25:48.451)
and you bring people along for the ride. All right, well Chantel, thank you for joining me today. This has been a really great conversation. I hope people have been taking good notes and getting some ideas for new ways to put themselves out there, start networking or posting on LinkedIn, reaching out to people, especially once you do the work of figuring out what your strategy should be, what kind of approach you’re going to have in your market and industry. if you’re not sure what that is, Chantel has a free test you can take to determine your standout strategy. So the link will be in the show notes.

Make sure you check that out and then that’ll help you with all this decisions making going forward.

Chantal Cornelius (26:22.882)
Yeah, definitely. That’s the free test is the way for anyone to, you’ll get results that show you which is the right strategy for you and then you can play with the words, play with the language.

Jeffro (26:32.28)
Okay, so I was going to ask you one more question is, know, if someone listening wants to stand out and attract better clients, but doesn’t know where to start, what is the first step that you’d recommend for them? I’m guessing it’s the test.

Chantal Cornelius (26:43.046)
It’s the test. Yeah, brilliant. Yeah, go to go to my website, click on the take the test link. There’s a whole there’s a whole jumble of words on the on the page. Pick no more than 15 that you know your clients say about you. So if you say to anyone listening to this, if you say to one of your clients, how do you feel when you work with me? Those are the words that you’re listening for. And if you’re not sure, ask them. Tick 15 of them up to 15 fill in the details, hit submit, and it comes through to us and we crunch the numbers and then I’ll send you a report and some personalized ideas on what to do next.

Jeffro (27:19.832)
Awesome. Thanks for doing that. And thanks again for being here today, Chantal. Thanks to all you guys for listening. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. Keep standing out, and we’ll see you back here next time. Take care.