Transcript

Dominique:
You’re listening to The Sigrun Show, episode number 425. This is Dominique, Sigrun’s content manager. Sigrun’s sick today, but the show must go on and she’s prepared a great interview for you. I’m happy to introduce this week’s guest, Dolores Hirschmann. Sigrun and Dolores talk about how to clarify your message to unlock your business. Each week, Sigrun goes live to share with you inspiring case studies and interviews to help you achieve your dreams and turn your passion into profits. Thank you for tuning in today. Building an online business takes time. Sigrun shares proven strategies to help you get there faster. You’ll also learn how to master your mindset, uplevel your marketing and succeed with masterminds.
Today’s episode is an interview with Dolores Hirschmann. She’s a strategist and coach who helps her clients clarify their ideas and design their communication strategies to take their message to larger audiences. In this episode, Sigrun and Dolores talk about how to clarify your message to unlock your business. But before we dive in, I want to remind you that John Lee Dumas’ book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, officially came out yesterday and is available for you to buy now. John is the host of the award-winning podcast Entrepreneurs on Fire, where he’s had over 100 million listens and has interviewed over 3000 highly successful entrepreneurs. His brand new book distills what he’s learned from these conversations into a 17-step roadmap to help you achieve your dream of freedom and fulfillment. The book is designed to help you overcome doubts, fears, and confusion, and create your own version of the common success. Go to the show notes at sigrun.com/425, where you will find a link to John’s book, plus all the links to Dolores Hirschmann.
Sigrun:
I’m so excited to be here with Dolores Hirschmann and talk about how to clarify your message to unlock your business. Welcome on the show, Dolores.
Dolores Hirschmann:
Thank you so much for having me, Sigrun.
Sigrun:
So, before we dive into the topic of this episode, I always love to hear from my listeners how come they do what they do, and I also share with my listeners how I know someone. So, Dolores and I actually met at Iconic, and I remember we had a great fruitful discussion, especially after Iconic, over dinner. And you were telling me you were going off to a conference and I was so disappointed I didn’t know about the conference because the dates would have worked for me. So, I remember that night I was checking flights and seeing if I could make it work. And anyway, I didn’t go to the conference. Dolores went, but somehow this sits in my memory. And we’ve been in touch a few times since we met in Phoenix, Arizona, and now you’re finally on my podcast. So happy to have you here. So, what is the root of your business? How come you are helping people clarify their message?
Dolores Hirschmann:
Thank you. Thank you, Sigrun. Yeah, I remember that night. It was, it was a fun couple of days in Phoenix with Allie Brown. It was awesome. So, I’m going to give you the really abbreviated version of this. I wanted to be an actress when I was a teen in Buenos Aires and my dad said, “Great. Go to business school, and then we can talk.” And so it’s been a journey all the way from there. But honestly it was after I became a coach and I launched my coaching practice, more of an executive and life coach, that I recognized that I love coaching, but there was something missing for me. And I asked myself, “What would I do for free all day long?” So, that’s part of the process of clarifying your message. So I said to myself, “What would I do all day whether I get paid or not, but it fuels me and it excites me?”
For me, the answer to that is hang out with people with really big ideas. And so that’s why I became a TEDx organizer because I could have talked to people with big ideas. No, I wanted to organize the whole event. I remember you were talking about the big event you were launching in 2020, which now plans changed, and you were showing us the big theater. It was kind of the same experience. I said yes to that. I started organizing an event. The biggest theater in town came and they said, “Would you do it here? We won’t charge you.” And it’s great to have a free theater, but when you have to fill thousands of seats, that’s scary in itself, right?
So, anyway, but in the process of doing that, I became a TEDx organizer. I recognized that even seasoned speakers that were applying for my TEDx, and there were hundreds of them, that they have been doing the work for years, they just lacked the succinctness and the clarity, the crispness, to talk about the work and get people to go, “Ah.” Because their applications were long and tedious and boring, honestly, to read, and most of them didn’t get selected. And they were amazing, amazing professionals in their field. So, you know how they say sometimes you do something for free or volunteer for something, and it reveals your path? So, that revealed my path. And I understood that, one, I enjoyed going into people’s head, understanding what they did and then translating it in what I call plain English. Now, English as a second language for me, but plain English for them. Like, how can you in six words or a short sentence get someone to go, “I need to talk to that person.” So, that’s how I came to this moment.
Sigrun:
Yeah. Well, you went a little bit fast. So, you went to business school. You didn’t become an actress. And after business school, did you do some work before you decided to become a coach?
Dolores Hirschmann:
Yes. So, I married an American who was a tourist in Buenos Aires. One of those dates that you’re not supposed to marry that date because he was not a date. It was like, “Show Buenos Aires to the Americans.” Well, several months later we got married. Kind of like, I saw the post the other day of you sitting next to your husband and he fell in love, but you didn’t. Same thing. We met, and that night, he circled the day he was going to propose to me. Luckily he didn’t say anything because I would have run away. And then he got to work, right? He did his thing. Because again, it took a while. But so I moved to the US. We have four children. And I also believe that entrepreneurship is the best gig for motherhood. And so while my kids were little, I started four different companies.
I started a clothing company. I started a language school because as my mom says, “Can’t you just hire a tutor to get your kids to speak Spanish?” No. I had to open a school because my neighbors wanted it too, and it had six teachers and hundreds of kids and a partnership with Rosetta Stone. That’s how I think. And then I started a software company, an app development company in 2009, when the iPhones came out. Because I was like, “Why not? I’ve always loved software.” So, in that whole path, I was very active on my own terms. I started companies that grew and they were profitable, fairly small, but that’s how I kept it because I had four children under the age of six.
And then it was when my youngest went to school full-time that I looked at my LinkedIn and my resume and I said, “What do I do now? I’m unemployable. How do I combine all of these experiences?” And I had my own little mini crisis. It was about 38, 39 years old, trying to figure out who I was. And that’s what drove me back to school for coaching, mostly for myself, to be honest. Because I go deep in the projects I take on. I couldn’t just hire a coach. I had to become a coach. So, today I have combined my 48 years of experience, honestly, Sigrun. I’ve combined my level of my creativity, my business background, my capacity to turn ideas into profitable companies, but I also use my coaching skills to listen to what people are not saying and bring that to the forefront and help them clarify that message so that there’s not just words that come out of their mouth, but an experience that people and their audiences feel.
And when that happens, they connect and they identify each other as partners in a journey. Because I think we professionals, I mean, you are doing a beautiful job with your company, and I know you believe this, because we’ve talked, that you don’t just teach these people how to grow their business. You and I know that in order to get to where their business needs to be, like the million or two million or whatever zeroes, it needs to be a journey where we become that person that runs that company. There’s an identity, an evolution of our own selves. And so I like being the coach that also walks the journey of, who do you need to be to take that company to that level. Because it takes courage and it takes persistence and it takes managing our self-doubt and our imposter syndrome, which we all have. It’s not that it’s not there. It’s that we’ve learned to live with it and partner with it, to some extent.
Sigrun:
Mm. I love how you phrase it, partner with it. Yeah. So, coming to clarifying your message, this is such a big topic and people can still have a profitable business and their message is unclear. Just like you said before, the people who want to speak on the TEDx stage, they had businesses. They were known people in their field and still they couldn’t explain in simple terms what they actually do so it’s exciting and attractive to potential clients. And I deal with this every day with my clients, that this is a journey that they are on, but how can we shorten that journey? What are the steps that you suggest that one takes when they say, “Okay, I’m going to do this work now, Dolores. Tell me what to do”?
Dolores Hirschmann:
First, chances are if you’re listening to podcasts, if you follow Sigrun, that you are in a business or a journey that you’ve traveled yourself. High chance is that you are a holistic health coach because you went through a journey yourself or some kind of profession that you have been in the shoes of your ideal clients. And so first steps is, imagine what it feels to be 10 years behind. When you didn’t find a solution, when you didn’t solve the problem. And it’s not just where they are tactically, but how are they feeling and more important, what is the conversation in their head? What are they telling themselves? Because I can tell you that if you come to me, clarify your message, use my methodology and a blueprint to grow your business and scale, and the word scale is not in the vocabulary. They don’t care about my methodology.
What is in their vocabulary is that my ideal client feels like there’s an elephant foot on their chest and that their throat is constricted. That’s how they feel. They feel that they have so much to give to the world. And when they tried to say it, it became an anxiety process. So, first feeling to how your ideal client feels right now, not when they are successful after they worked with you. And let’s put some words into that and let’s put some words into what they want. So, I have a framework that I use and we can put it in the show notes, but it’s, to action so that outcome. So for example, for me, it’s to clarify your message so that you can unlock your business growth. Simple. So, the outcome is what people call me for. “I don’t care about my message. I just want me to make more money. I want to grow my business.”
So, the outcome is business growth. So, always get really clear of how your clients talk about what they want. Not how you say it, but how they say it. And then every conversation, and when I mean a conversation is a podcast interview, maybe a cocktail conversation over Zoom nowadays, or it could be a post or a blog, I call them all conversations, lead with the outcome. Let me give you an example. A few years ago, we got a puppy and she was chewing everything in my house. And so I always say that we have antennas, we people have antennas, and they are tuned to what we need right now.
And my antenna was tuned to, how do I get my puppy to stop chewing? So, I would go on Facebook or whatever I needed. Any article or any title that said, “Get your puppy to stop chewing,” I would actually look at it. That was the outcome I wanted and any piece of information that started with that outcome, I would pay attention to. Then it will tell me how. But I don’t care about your methodology, your process, or your hows until I can confidently know that you have the path to my outcome.
Sigrun:
And I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong. They are so much focused on what they offer. So, let’s say you offer some specialized nutrition so you lose weight and you are trying heavily to sell that, but it’s not landing. Because I don’t care about this particular method. I’ve never heard of it. I’ve never heard of you. Yeah. I want the outcome, right? So, that’s good, but how do we make that sound good, sexy?
Dolores Hirschmann:
So, there’s a lot of pressure on sexiness and the sexier or smart that you want to make your language sometimes. Sometimes you put too much hot sauce. Sometimes you just overthink it. And so I would say there’s a balance between simplicity, crisp-cality, I don’t even know if that’s a word, but the clarity and crispness of a message and it’s kind of sexy in it. And so honestly, if you are about to hire a copywriter for your company, I would say think again and go and listen, and literally go into Facebook, go in to groups of your ideal clients and ask, “What’s stopping you from whatever?” and listen to what they say. The best copy that we can ever write is the one that we don’t write. It’s the one that we literally bring from the mouth of our clients.
So, how do we do that? We keep it tight, we keep it short and we keep it focused. I was in a meeting last week talking about a challenge that we’re planning and you know. You do a lot of launches and I commend you for that because I still have a little nausea when I do a launch. It’s still kind of a [inaudible 00:16:35] and you and I are going to work together very soon. But they were talking about the title of a challenge that Russell Brunson just did a few months ago, ClickFunnels, and he called it Get Leads Challenge. There’s nothing sexy about that, but it’s to the point. Get Leads Challenge. Do you want leads? You come in here. So, I would say, Sigrun, it’s, yes, sexy is good, but clear is better.
Sigrun:
So, maybe people are over-complicating it and making it sound too smart.
Dolores Hirschmann:
Yeah. Too whatever. Too marketing, too whatever. And I think you and I can agree that 2021 and after 2020 and the year we’ve had, I think marketing has changed dramatically. There’s a lot of noise online and people are looking for clear, simple, straightforward, shortest path, authentic. The less complicated it is, the more people are attracted to it. So, I think even in the communications and language of 2021, you want to keep it focused. An this is a struggle for many entrepreneurs because they will say, “Well, there’s a lot of outcomes my clients could have.”
Sigrun:
Yes. What do you do with that?
Dolores Hirschmann:
What do I do with that? And so I would say, “What is the keystone outcome? What is the one thing that is a domino effect that if you fix this, then the rest will come?” So, for me, if you get your message clear, a lot of things will line up beautifully. But you can have clarity on your lead capture strategy. You can have clarity on your products or build the online products. But if there’s no front door that will have the sticky part of the market with your company and that message that makes a bridge, then none of it matters. So, for me, while we do a lot of the scaling part on the blueprint part, without a clear message, nothing begins. So, that’s where we begin.
Sigrun:
Yeah. So, okay. The steps are to listen to your ideal client, get into their shoes and realize how they’re feeling in this moment before they start to work with you and what they actually want as the outcome. Now, sometimes people say they want one thing, but actually they’re wanting another.
Dolores Hirschmann:
Yeah. I was just in a long meeting. I’m working with a consultancy firm and there are seven partners. Hard to work with more than one time at a time when they’re all the CEOs, right? And I was having a struggle sharing this with them, is that a client wants something but really you and I know that they need something else. And one of the problems is that when we see what they need, we try to fix it. We try to say, “Okay, really? Yeah, that’s fine. But here’s what you need.” And you send them a whopper of a proposal that they will never buy. Wait, it’s usually more expensive than they were thinking, and they don’t feel that need. So, you have to give the client what they want to reveal and take them to what they need.
My puppy, yeah, putting a cover on the couch was what I wanted, but what I really needed was a dog trainer. And it was a little bit of a longer term solution than putting an alarm on a chair on the couch so that she wouldn’t sit on the couch or whatever. So, in some ways you have to meet them where they are, and the language has to reveal that. When I was coaching TEDx speakers, the first 60 seconds of your talk or your post or whatever, it has to be 100% about the audience. And you can do that successfully. Then you take them on a journey and then maybe you can reveal what they need and it will resonate with them and they’ll move forward. Or simply they will hire you for what they want at that moment only for them to say, “You know what? This is great, but now I need this.” And you inside said, “Oh, I know. I knew it all along.” You can’t say it. It’s like your kids. You can’t tell your kids what they’re going to experience in five years because they’re not going to hear you.
Sigrun:
Yeah. But I feel in this first 60 seconds, if you have that long of a chance, if people don’t click away after eight seconds like they supposedly do, it is more than the six words. And it feels like it is a lot about feelings. People buy with feelings instead of facts.
Dolores Hirschmann:
Yes. And so if we’re talking about a talk and usually online, you have eight seconds and that’s why you need the six words. But when we’re talking about a speaking engagement and people are somehow listening to you, those 60 seconds is either about, I usually teach two strategies, simple. Either we use resonate questions, meaning questions to your audience that they will either resonate with them or not, so that they can self-identify that you are talking to them. Or you tell a story in present tense, but you don’t give any context. For example, you would say, “I just got fired,” and then you tell the story. If you say, “Yesterday I got fired…” When I give this example, I say this. “I just got fired. Yesterday I got fired. I might get fired tomorrow.” I know I’m doing it too fast.
But if you pause, your physical reaction to each one of my ways of saying it will be different. Because when you speak in present tense, your body, physical and emotional being, will react as if something is happening right now. Then within a second you recognize, “Well, she’s just speaking on stage so obviously she’s not getting fired right now.” But in the moment there’s a chemical brain reaction of, “This is happening right now.” When a speaker speaks in past or future, they’re just telling a story and I can be engaged, but I’m not going to be on alert because the verb tense she or he is using is not right now.
Sigrun:
Mm. I love that. So, what if I have figured out all these things and I’m like, “What’s my message?” How do I know if it’s landing? How do I know it’s correct?
Dolores Hirschmann:
Yeah. You know it’s correct when people react. You know it’s correct when people are communicating, commenting on your posts, when people are sending you a note, when you write an email. I write an email every week. Not every message, subject line, or copy lands, but I can tell some did when I get 10, 15, or whatever many replies. It’s like, “Oh, that just hit it right on the spot.” So, not every piece of communication is going to hit a chord. But overall, your core message, basically you know when it works when, when you say it, people say, “I want to learn more.”
Sigrun:
Does it need to be a curiosity in it, like almost I need to know more in order to understand it, or is it super clear, like you said before?
Dolores Hirschmann:
Well, I think it has to be a curiosity that is anchored in their need. So, you don’t want to reveal everything you do. Maybe you just say, I have helped 100,000 people lose weight.” You could just say that without any how. And if I’m one of those people who have tried everything, my antenna will go up and tell me more. Especially if that is said in a context of a safe space. For example, if we are having a girlfriend or a colleague kind of Zoom with 10 women, and someone says that, I will definitely follow up with that person. That’s why speaking engagements are so powerful because when you’re in a safe space where someone invites you to their audience or you’ve created an experience, then it just takes someone to reveal that that person has helped people or solves a problem for me to follow up with that. We hire people that we met in safe spaces.
Sigrun:
We do, we do, and we invite them to our podcasts.
Dolores Hirschmann:
Exactly.
Sigrun:
Yeah.
Dolores Hirschmann:
Follow them.
Sigrun:
Yeah.
Dolores Hirschmann:
Honestly, digital marketing is great, but we’re still humans working with humans. And so the more you can be with humans, whether it’s a live Zoom or whatever, the better.
Sigrun:
So, do any sentences come to mind as an example of a clear message?
Dolores Hirschmann:
Yeah. So, I can go in my notes. Obviously, when I was asked, I was like, “Ah, blank mind.” But so, ours is to clarify your message so that you can unlock your business or your business growth. Two, someone was to redefine… And this is something that we use a lot in TEDx in the tell us about your idea, is to redesign parenting. Or this is one that I just worked on with a client, to redefine teenage years so that we can help our teens thrive. This is a psychologist who worked with teenagers and her ethos is that we just don’t speak ten language, and that there’s a whole lot of in translation in parenting teenagers or teaching teenagers, like mentoring teenagers. So, it’s that simple two-part framework of action and outcome. And whether you use a whole sentence or you use one part of it, it depends on the context of the exchange.
Sigrun:
So, what kind of people are you working with mostly?
Dolores Hirschmann:
So, my people are, 100% of them are service professionals. It’s meaning they’re selling a service, whether it’s executive coaching, consultancy, health coaching, or corporate consulting of some level. Most of them are personal brand. Many of them have grown a team. And what I help them is understand the core message. I always say that our businesses are like the mamushkas. There’s always a business inside of a business. And so once we stabilize the business that they come to me with, we’re always finding also the businesses that were hidden. Because many of my clients are creatives and they have so many ideas. And I say, “Okay, well, let’s make this idea grow first, and then let’s explore the next idea and maybe implement it, and then do something different with it.”
I always tell the story that I actually started a stage agency where we were putting people on stages. It was a great idea. There’s a definite market for it, but it was not aligned with my… Well, it’s very aligned with my core value proposition. That consumer service was not something I wanted to focus on growth. So, I sold it. And now I have Pete Vargas run the stage agency. I sold it to a bigger company. So, I have been playing a lot with the concept of teaching service professionals, service entrepreneurs, how to clarify their value proposition and their ideas and their message, and then choose which one they want to grow and which one they might want to pilot, which one they want to get rid of but if not a get rid of, how can we put a bow and sell it? It’s a cleanup process of what do you want to scale?
Sigrun:
Yeah. And I have noticed that even if you have a clear message, you have programs, and again, these programs need messages. And then each time I launch, we actually revisit that, is this message the correct one for this launch or do we need to renew it today? Because the world changes and a message that worked last year may not resonate this year. I was using “recession-proof” and “turnaround” a lot last year because I felt that was the sweet spot. I could bring in my old turnaround CEO experience and do a few offers around it. And now, now it sounds lame so you need to bring something else. So, that’s also clarifying your message. It’s not just once you do it for your business and you’re done.
Dolores Hirschmann:
Yeah, absolutely. So, the communication strategy, it’s a fluid process. It’s always revising. In the core message clarity, well, there’s part that is an external messaging to talk to people, but there’s also, on the internal clarity for the entrepreneur, there’s something that I call your foundational value proposition or your foundational core idea. And that doesn’t need to be neither sexy nor engaging, but it has to be clear inside of you so that you can have a filter to all the ideas that pop in your head, to all of the projects you pursue, to all the partnerships you explore, to all the programs you want to build, right? That internal foundational gravity is critical because then you can have this kind of measuring stick and say, “Okay, saying yes to this, does it align with my core foundational idea or doesn’t?” And so, it’s kind of an internal clarity for an external clarity. And I find that a lot of people who come with messy messages, we need to work inside first.
Sigrun:
I love it. That’s a perfect ending to our interview. It’s inside of you, your core message, and that’s the one you need to find. That’s the most important one. Yes.
Dolores Hirschmann:
That’s the most important. That’s the one that you feel the elephant is stepping on. And once you find that and you allow it to flow, the copywriting will come.
Sigrun:
Yeah. Dolores, it’s been a pleasure, and I know we’ll be in touch. We’ll not let so much time go past and hopefully one day we’ll meet again. Maybe not in Phoenix, Arizona, but maybe somewhere else in the world. Thank you for coming on the show, Dolores.
Dolores Hirschmann:
Thank you so much, Sigrun, for having me.
Dominique:
Go to the show notes at sigrun.com/425, where you will find a link to John’s book plus all the links to Dolores Hirschmann. Thank you for listening to the Sigrun show. If you enjoyed this episode, let Sigrun know that you listened by tagging here in your Instastory or your Instagram post using her handle, @sigruncom and the hashtag #sigrunshow. See you in the next episode.