SagePresence

What Exactly Does SagePresence Do For People, Anyway?

As partners in a still-young company, Dean and Bill and I find ourselves again in the midst of a conversation about what exactly it is we do for people. After seven years in business, on top of another two years of operating a screen-acting training program, we know we've helped a tremendous number of people and organizations, but the question remains: What exactly is it that we do for people?

It's tough to nail down because it's so darn unique. Everybody knows that plumbers fix your pipes and bookkeepers maintain your financial information. And everybody also knows that filmmakers... well, make films, right? So what's that got to do with helping professionals and businesses?

Well, a lot, actually.

Filmmakers don't just make films, we make films that speak to audiences and make a difference for them. So we understand the process of designing messages that connect with audiences in a meaningful way. Which means that we can not only design messages for clients, but we can teach them how to create their own messages that speak meaningfully to their audiences. We can direct them to deliver their message from the heart, which allows them to reach the heart of the people they speak to.

So, clearly, presentation and public speaking represent a big part of what we can help with. And since Dean and Bill are both powerful public speakers themselves, it seems like a natural niche for us to rest in. We encourage entrepreneurs, consultants, and professionals of all stripes to build their careers by representing their areas of expertise to audiences. We work with professionals at every level who are asked to speak at company meetings and conferences. And we help sales and non-sales professionals alike win jobs and new business in sales pitches and interview situations.

This last one led us to realize that people don't require a large audience to feel the need for more stage presence. Many of us (me included) feel "on the spot" when a handful of people are listening, or if only a single decision-maker is focusing on us. So it's not just formal presentations and public speaking events we help with, we also help people win others over in sales conversations, speaking with the boss, interviewing for a job, serving customers, and networking with strangers.

This is why we call our flagship program "One Day to Greater Influence." It's not just about public speaking. It's not just about sales. It's not just about persuasion. It's about connecting with people on a meaningful level, speaking their language, and honoring your message by delivering it with the power it deserves.

I've been thinking a lot about influence lately, and a movie-inspired metaphor has popped into my head about the nature of influence. So many movies -- "A Christmas Carol," "Our Town," and "Ghost" to name just a few -- portray the afterlife as being conscious of the living world but being completely unable to influence anyone or anything in it. So it's occurred to me that a measurement for how alive you are (Dean would probably call it "livingness") is how much you influence people and things in the world. I know that when I compare my life when I was a corporate drone, when I was spending all my time in front of a computer, with my life now when I'm spending all of my time talking to people face-to-face or over the phone, I can recognize a vast qualitative difference. And by the same token, when I compare my moments in conversation when I'm just chatting versus trying to make a difference for the other person, I feel an enormous difference in how alive I feel. And when I think about some historical influencers -- John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi -- I recognize that if you have so much "livingness" when you're alive that you go on influencing people after you're gone, that you can achieve a kind of immortality, and that, in a sense, you can be more influential than those people who choose to just stay at their desk and keep to themselves.

So I guess that's an argument that SagePresence gives people more life (or livingness). But maybe that's just a bit too abstract to be easily communicated in a marketing statement. So let's go back to Influence.

Part of the reason Influence has been at the core of how we talk about ourselves is that we believe it's what everyone wants, whether they know it or not. But we recently took a survey from our clients, asking them what they were after in working with us, and what they actually got from working with us. We got several useful answers, but the biggest a-ha we got from people was that they wanted -- and got -- more confidence from their work with us. They wanted to be more confident in their ability to represent themselves, their ideas, their wares, their offering, their products and services.

This was a great a-ha for me in particular, because (a) Watching people unfold in our programs to truly be able to represent themselves with power has always been one of my favorite things about what we in SagePresence get to experience, and (b) I've always mentally vaulted from confidence to influence because I've wanted to reach out to both underconfident people who can't get out of their shell far enough to influence them, as well as overconfident people who are so much about exhaling all over people that they are accidentally pushing them away and failing to influence them in the way they want.

So clearly we've been appealing more to the former category of underconfident people, people who consider themselves introverted and shy. We provide answers to them that they love and can apply in their lives and at work that truly make a difference for them. We love working with them, and I'm sure there are a lot of them out there.

And that's where we've landed -- for now, at least. I can confidently say that confidence is the thing. SagePresence brings confidence to you in all of your interactions and presentations.

Who Can Use SagePresence?

It's amazing how often we talk to people about what SagePresence has to offer, and they suggest a fit for a population of people who fall outside of our primary target markets. Here are some of the suggestions we've gotten recently:

* Lawyers. It's so important for them to create convincing arguments, make meaningful connections with judge and jury, and deliver their arguments in an authentic way that speaks to people's emotions and leads them to a particular conclusion.
* Medical professionals. They need to be able to speak to patients and families in a way that bypasses technical jargon and raw data and cuts to the emotional truth at the core of their message. They need to be able to listen and be with the emotions of these people, connecting with them in a meaningful and important way.
* Nonprofit organizations. In order to raise funds, they need to tell the story of the benefit they bring their target population, and they need to be able to do it in a way that engages their authentic feelings so that people are inspired to play a part in that benefit.
* Displaced workers. They need to be able to represent themselves powerfully while networking and interviewing. They need to be able to talk about the benefit they represent to hiring organizations. They need to make first impressions that instantly win people over.
* Front line workers. Receptionists, customer service people, tellers, cashiers, wait staff -- They all work in an environment of emotion. People come to them in a particular mood, and the job of the front line worker is to respond in such a way as to make the most positive interaction possible with whatever they get. They're charged with neutralizing negativity and leveraging positivity, and SagePresence is a powerful tool in that mission.

The interesting thing here is that we've worked with people from all of these segments before, and we've given them exactly what they needed. The reason people see a good fit is that they are a good fit. They need what we have to offer, and they benefit tremendously from it. And we welcome them all.

The thing we've discovered is, when you're working with universal human skills, your potential market is the entire human race. But you can't market to the whole human race, you can't shotgun yourself that diffusely, you have to pick a sector or two that really calls to you so that you can focus your efforts. This way, everyone else that shows up as a client is icing on the cake!

So, you might be asking, who are our target markets?

Well, for one thing, we want to make a difference for professional women, career-oriented women who are motivated to move forward in their careers and want to build their momentum.We want to help them recognize that the core skills and strengths they most likely are restraining are their greatest career assets.

We also want to help displaced workers in the film industry, particularly in Hollywood. We've made a profound difference for a lot of people looking for their next position, and we want to make that difference for workers in the industry that we love the most.

We want to help new leaders in medium to large companies hit the ground running by helping them present themselves with power and grace to the population of their organizations. We want to help them win their new team over and help them design their vision for where to take their team.

Finally, right now we're very focused on organizations that want to strengthen the position they hold in their industry. We've transformed individuals, we've transformed teams, and we've transformed small companies. Now we want to apply what we know to help a larger organization transform how it speaks to itself and to its clients by working with them from the top down to create its story and empower everyone to represent that story in a meaningful and authentic way.

So if any of these descriptions brings someone to mind that we should speak with, please send me an e-mail (see right). And to everyone who has ever recommended anyone to us in the past -- whether they've fit these descriptions or not -- we thank you all from the bottom of our hearts. We truly, madly, deeply appreciate referrals, and we will passionately work with anyone who wants greater influence.