Lessons from 55 BC

For Cicero, one of Rome's most famous orators, rhetoric included five canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. His De oratore contained practical advice on each. To improve one's memory, he counseled using the method of loci. He illustrated the device by retelling the famous story of Simonides of Ceos.

Simonides was a poet who made his living composing lyric poems for noblemen whose idea of fun was to eat roasted goat, drink red wine, and listen to raconteurs wax on about their virtues in front of their friends. One evening, Simonides was performing for one client, a man called Scopas. The man must have been an undistinguished sort, because Simonides ran out of material halfway through the performance. Knowing he had a time slot to fill, he turned his praise to the twin gods, Castor and Pollux. His thought was that by talking about the two gods, it would elevate his client Scopas by association.

As the evening drew to a close, Simonides took a bow only to have Scopas stand and wag his finger. “I'll not pay for this,” he thundered. “It wasn't about me. It was about the gods.”

Simonides stood frozen. Only after a minute of silence did he manage to say, “I tried to sing of your handsomeness and good wisdom….”

“I am a fair man. I'll pay for half the poem. Get your gods to pay the other half.”

The room exploded in drunken laughter at Scopas' cleverness, and Simonides began to relax. Not his most profitable night, but at least he hadn't been beaten or worse.

Just as he was packing to leave, a messenger ran into the hall and whispered something in Simonides' ear. Two men apparently were asking for him outside. Simonides begged leave, walked out to the patio, and looked around for the men but couldn't find them when suddenly, he felt the earth under his feet shake. A line of potted plants toppled over and crashed on the tiled floor. Then the entire house shook and collapsed on itself.

Servants and neighbors came running to help, but there was nothing to be done. The dead, including Scopas and his friends, lay mangled under heavy building stones. Relatives filed in to locate their loved ones, but were unable to identify the bodies. Simonides was called to help. He looked at the mass of rubble and then remembered the table and who was sitting where. It had been Atticus at the left, Cassius next, with Scopas in the middle. Soon he had the bodies sorted.

Cicero called this mnemonic the method of loci—the method of places. He said to remember a series of facts or statements, place the chain of items in a series of imagined places. It makes remembering them easier.

To this day the method of loci is used by world champion memory competitors. Clemons Mayer used this method to memorize more than one thousand numbers in half an hour at the memory half-marathon. He constructed a mental trail around his home with three-hundred stops and “stored” numbers in each spot. To recall them, he thought about the series of places and the numbers came back to him. Ed Cooke, another memory competitor, describes how he thinks of crazy places—he says the odder the better—like parts of his dog's sleeping cushion. Once he has the sequence of places down in his head, he can remember anything he wants by associating what he wants to remember with the different places.

Endel Tulving, a native of Estonia, emigrated to Toronto after World War II, escaping the annexation of Estonia by the Soviets. There he studied experimental psychology and eventually earned a doctorate from Harvard.

Tulving liked to demonstrate to his students that memories exist even if we cannot recall them. He'd shout out a random list of words—pencil, cloud, clock, run, yellow, rotten, fever—in rapid fire. Then he'd ask his students to write down the words they could remember. If he said twenty words, the best in the group would get ten. Then he'd ask the students if the words they couldn't remember were lost forever? Most thought they were. To which he would turn to a student and say, “What was the color on the list?” Inevitably, they would smile and say “yellow.”

Tulving believed that memories lived in boxes, but in order to retrieve those boxes, you had to have an access route to get to them. He and his research assistant designed a large-scale memory test and found that unaided, participants could recall 45 percent of a list, but if you cued them by asking them not just to recall anything that was on the list but a specific item—like what the color or writing utensil was on the list—the success rate jumped to 75 percent.

How Clients Remember You

The typical consumer is overwhelmed by unwanted advertising, and has a natural tendency to discard all information that does not immediately find an empty slot in his mind.

—Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning

When do you think Ries and Trout made this claim? 2015? 2010? 2000? 1990? Would you believe 1969? Even before smartphones, the Internet, email, social media, or the 24/7 news cycle, they saw we were already overwhelmed with too much noise. Fast forward fifty years. Consumers feel besieged by an unrelenting onslaught of advertising messages.

When Al Ries and Jack Trout first made this claim, the average American consumer was exposed to about five hundred ads a day. By the early 2000s, this number had grown to an estimated five thousand ad messages a day. Today, marketing experts estimate that many among us are exposed to as many as ten thousand ads a day. Ries and Trout remind us that our brains hurt at five hundred. At some point, advertising becomes meaningless, or worse, background noise.

With this blizzard of information swirling around us, most of it is discarded as useless. But we do remember the pieces of information that are relevant, which we store away by putting them into mental houses that can be cued and recalled.

Clients Have to Understand Who You Are

In order for clients to buy from you, not only do they have to be aware you exist, but they also have to have a good sense of what you do. If they don't, they can't build a bridge from you to the problem they have now or might face in the future. Put another way, they won't remember you because you don't live in a box that has a strong access route to it. They aren't associated with a “place” in Cicero's words.

We have found that consulting and professional service providers who are well known to the world they want to impress do two simple things:

• They niche themselves and become known for that niche.
• They articulate what they do, who they serve, and how they're unique in a short, pithy sentence—the so-called “elevator pitch.”

Do these two things well, and people will not only understand what you do, but they will remember you later when they need help or when someone asks them for a recommendation on who is the expert in a field.

Patrick Pitman is the founder of E-Business Coach, an Austin-based digital consultancy that specializes in building e-commerce platforms for businesses. Patrick discovered early on in his career the value of specialization.

When there's a really clear association in your mind between a person that you trust and the problem that they can solve, it makes it easier to refer you. For the longest time, my business was based primarily on referrals. Referrals happen when there is a clear association in someone's mind. When they come across a problem, your name comes to mind. So, I think that specialization is important because specialization is where referrals come from.

To successfully niche, understand there are metacategories that we carry around all the time. They are “first,” “best,” and “biggest.”

Who is the biggest cola company? Coca-Cola.

Who is the fifth-biggest cola company? Don't know.

Who was the first president? George Washington.

Who was the twenty-first president? Don't know.

Who is the best online retailer of shoes? Zappos.

Who is the ninth-best online shoe retailer in the United States? Don't know.

It is as if without knowing it, we are subconsciously memorizing vast amounts of random pieces of information by following Cicero and Tulving's advice. We can recount Coca-Cola's name because it lives in a room. Recall the room—a room called “the largest”—and Coca-Cola's name floats to the surface of our mind's vast pond.

This sounds easy, but it is not. Kris Klein, the founder and managing partner of Lenati, a marketing and sales strategy consultancy based in Seattle, says:

The first thing in selling consulting services is to create a point of differentiation. But not to be so different that people don't understand what you do. We played around for a while with the idea that, “Gosh, we needed to create a new market. We need to create something new.” We were so small that we needed to be different than everybody else in the market in order to create a point of differentiation. And the reality is, that was a huge mistake. We failed miserably trying to do that. Our language was dissonant to people. They couldn't understand what we were doing well: we clearly weren't articulating it well. And they struggled to find a moment to buy.

To niche ourselves, we need to decide what we are good at and then define it—by geography, company size, or another quantifier—and then practice a succinct pitch in which we can truthfully say:

• We were the first firm to protect multinationals from cyber attack.
• We are the largest cybersecurity firm in North America.
• Gartner rates us as the most effective cybersecurity firm in the United States.

Want to be remembered? Find a category where you can be number one.

Shrink the Pond

Jackie Kruger runs marketing for the Minneapolis-based accounting and financial services consulting firm CliftonLarsonAllen. “I always tell my practice leads to ‘shrink the pond.’” We love that phrase. Better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in an endless ocean of near competitors.

When it comes to expert services, being undifferentiated is death. “Our company is the largest cloud-based HR software integrator for midsized accounting and law firms in the Southwest” is far better than, “We are a one-stop IT shop that helps clients design and build technology solutions.”

It's old marketing advice, but timeless. Shrink the pond until you dominate your niche. Tom recently spoke with a top-25 accounting firm about business development.

“Where are you looking to grow?”

“We are focused on $500 million to $2 billion revenue companies.”

“What are some projects you have done recently where you did a really good job for the clients?”

“We have worked with two mining companies to help them install state-of-the art enterprise risk-management systems.”

“That is a niche you could own. You could be the largest accounting firm focused on serving the mining industry.”

“We did a good job for those companies.”

“Try that as a focus for your business development—calling on mining company CFOs, sharing with them case studies on how you have helped similar firms. You have a right to dominate that niche which will be more effective than just saying you work with big companies.”

The firm narrowed its focus, and their reputation for expertise in that niche grew. Soon, they were being invited to speak at mining industry panels, convening a best practices roundtable for mining CFOs that meets quarterly, hiring a retired mining executive as an advisor, and in general positioning themselves as the go-to accounting firm for global mining companies.

The rule is if you can't say you are the largest or best in a category, make your market definition smaller. Shrink the pond.

Specificity attracts. If you say you are the world's expert at Latin American food company audits, you will develop a name for yourself in that market. More importantly, when a Colombian mango juice manufacturer needs an audit, they will remember you are in the business.

The Bottom Line

Of course, being known as the largest oil and gas lease consultant in Texas or the best franchise attorney is good, but it is not enough. You also have to do good work. You have to back up your position in the marketplace with real expertise and then be able to own that statement of ability.

You succeed by being good with people, but you also succeed by being an expert in something. Generalists do not succeed in the long run. Eventually you have to figure out where you're going to become deeply knowledgeable, and you have to be able to show people that you have that knowledge. It's really hard for young people to figure what they want to specialize in early in their career, but the road to success, at least in our firm, comes from becoming a subject matter expert. You have to go deep.

—Ed Keller, Chief Marketing Officer, Navigant Consulting

Hone Your Elevator Pitch

If niching and its power to drive top-of-mind awareness (TOMA) is a critical stepping stone on the client's path to engaging with you, the journey is completed with a clear and compelling articulation of what you do.

• A statement of your niche.
• A statement of whom you serve.
• A statement of how you help your clients.
• A statement of how you are different.

Let's bring this all together into an elevator pitch.

“Thompson is the largest family law practice in Georgia. We help families solve problems and figure out a better path forward using our staff of professionally trained mediators.”

Thompson is the largest family law practice in Georgia. That's their niche. They help families. That is the statement of who they serve. They help figure out a better way forward. That is a statement of how the firm helps their clients. They use a staff of professionally trained mediators. That is how they are different.

And twice again, for practice.

“We're the nation's first and largest lead detection consultancy. We help public works professionals safeguard drinking water using the patented Potable Test System (PTS).”

“We're the oldest surf instruction shop in Maui. No one helps you catch a wave faster than the professionals at Rip Curl. Because old surfers know a bad day of surfing beats a good day at work.”

Tactics—What Works

The trick is to communicate what you do best to those you wish to serve. You can do that in the following ways:

• Shake hands. Wherever you go, one of your missions should be to make new friends. Meet people, shake their hands, ask them about themselves, and when they ask you what you do, be prepared with a statement that defines your niche and abilities in as few words as possible. “I run a consulting practice that helps plant managers reduce accident rates by using data to help them understand what gives rise to accidents. We are the largest such firm in California.” You should say that at an industry conference but also during cocktail hour at your wife's law firm picnic.
• Write. You should write to get your name out there, and at the end of everything you put your name to you should include a tag: “Jamal Blanc is a managing director of Clearview, the oldest marketing services firm in the Southwest. There he runs a practice focused on website design and SEO for B2B companies.”
• Speak. Same goes for speaking gigs. The reason to give a speech is so that you can include your biography in the program. That bio is not just a chance to stack up your jobs and degrees; it is a chance to tell people what you do. Give the speech and watch how people come up to you afterwards and share their interests and needs around that same topic.
• Cold call. If you read about someone in a trade magazine or see a link to a blog they have written, reach out and schedule time to learn more. When you chat, you'll have a chance to state who you are and what your interests are. Practice that moment. Be able to articulate exactly what you do and who you do it for.
• Target your advertising. Broad advertising has limited value in expert services. It is not that it doesn't have an effect; it is just that the return on investment is questionable. The exception to that rule is targeted ads that explain what you do. Tightly segmented ads in trade journals or at trade shows or conferences can be a great way of telling your story.
• Tune up your website. You probably already have a website, but does it communicate your niche clearly? Clients come to your site to better understand what you do. Make sure your website clearly articulates three things: what you do, who you serve, and how you're unique.

Clients buy because they have heard of you and they understand what you do, but there is more. They have to feel like what you do can help them. We call this interest.