Raj Girn: Hi everyone! Welcome to another exciting episode of the ‘Transform Your Confidence’ podcast, a place where we bring you into our inner circle of recommended leaders, experts, and thought leaders to garner their insights of knowledge and techniques that are working today with the goal of levelling up your repertoire of expertise so that you’re always set up to win.
In today’s show, we will be focusing on Branding & Marketing with the theme of The First, The Best, Or The Only – How To Build A Brand That Attracts The Right Customers Every Single Time.
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Raj Girn: I’d like to begin by first of all, inviting you to subscribe to our YouTube channel at The Open Chest Confidence Academy to view all video versions of the show and also search Transform Your Confidence wherever you receive your audio podcasts, so you never miss an episode, when we launch them every 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month. Please remember that and hit the notification button just in case you don’t remember.
In today’s show, we will be focusing on Branding & Marketing with the theme of The First, The Best, Or The Only – How To Build A Brand That Attracts The Right Customers Every Single Time.
My guest today is the dynamic Isabelle Mercier, a two-time TEDx speaker with over four million views. She is a branding and marketing expert, thought leader and keynote speaker who has worked with big name legacy brands like Rogers, HSBC Bank, A&W and IMAX to name a few. I cannot think of anyone more fitting to pick the brain of, to see what’s working in today’s unpredictable economic climate.
Please welcome to the show Isabelle, super happy to finally have you on.
Isabelle Mercier: Well, I love your energy – I’m totally thrilled to be here, thank you. And this is, it is an important conversation to have, because the world is changing fast and being able to offer what you offer, what each of you offer in a way that people go, where have you been all my life? That’s a conversation worth having in my book.
Absolutely, Isabelle. So, let’s just jump right in. For anyone who hasn’t yet met you, first of all, please share where it is that we can send them right off the top, because I love what you’re about.
Well, thank you. My website, to begin with, leapzonestrategies.com. There’s two TEDx talks that are on the website, and I have a variety of different online programs, ‘Build To Rock’ being one of them, The Speaker’s Edge being another, and they’re all geared towards really helping with confidence. But I’m also on social media channels, and I’m very active as well. I do answer questions and all of that, because that’s part of my brand…
Absolutely. And Isabelle, on social, how do people find you? Is it your name? Is it your brand name?
Sometimes on LinkedIn, it is my name, Isabelle Mercier-Turcotte, but mainly on all channels, it’s mainly leap zone or leap zone strategies. Thank you for the clarification.
Absolutely. So, let’s set the scene for everyone, Isabelle. Can you share your story as to how you became one of today’s pre-eminent experts in branding, marketing and positioning? Let’s tell that story before we get into anything else.
Well, I’ll tell you what, weirdly enough, my career started at about nine-years-old. My dad is in radio, advertising and television, my mom in hair, her whole life. And so, in my household, asking & you shall receive didn’t exist. In my house, it was better pitched smartly to be even considered, you know? There I was at nine-years-old, I couldn’t just say, mom, dad, I don’t wanna swim anymore twice a week, I wanna go dancing four times a week. I had to pitch it smartly and it had to make life better for everybody. It could not just be what was in it for me.
So as you can imagine, going from two extra-curricular to four a week, obviously there’s more money involved, there’s more taxing involved for the moms out there, for the parents out there. And so I had to think about everything smartly up front. So the difference in money, I said to them, I actually have three new babysitting clients, which I’ll pay the difference. And taxing, we go from two to four, but you’ll go from to zero because my friend Genevieve’s mom is committing to doing all the taxing.
So if I heard, and for all the parents out there, if there’s a, if you hear ‘we’ll see’, what does that mean? It’s a delayed no, right? It’s, I wanna say no to you, but I don’t wanna deal with the tantrum right now. But that’s the thing is when my parents said we’ll see I knew I missed something. But when they looked at each other and went basically, where do I sign on the dotted line? I knew that I had taken care of all aspects, and everybody was winning in this equation, which we’ll see happen every day in business, you know?
‘We’ll see’ means, I’m not convinced, I am not sure. You haven’t hit the nail on the head for me yet, right? And so, but that’s basically how my career started because I was put in this situation of you better pitch smartly to make sure that it makes sense, to make sure that my parents would say ‘we would be ridiculous not to say yes’. And then of course, I grew from there and I’m basically able to help myself but others pitch pretty much anything. And, of course, I only work with people who are doing amazing things in the world because that gift could be used in a variety of different ways but I choose to use it for the better of course.
I only work with people who are doing amazing things in the world because that gift could be used in a variety of different ways but I choose to use it for the better of course.
I love that. So how did you parlay that initial skill that your parents taught you without knowing that they were teaching you, into a career? Like where did that bridge come for you?
Yeah. And it, it kind of built from there. And as a dyslexic human being, doing things in school was really challenging for me. And I’m in my mid-fifties. So, you know, back 50 years ago, let me tell you, schools weren’t as progressive as today. There’s still a way to go today, but then it was a lot less progressive than today. So, I always had to position things in a way that would avoid making me look less than, because of my disability. And it just grew from there.
And of course, as I started my career building a branding agency, it was on the visual design side of the branding agency. But we, my partner and I, I’ve been with my business partner, Margarita, and life partner, by the way, as well, for 33 years. There should be an award for that actually.
Oh my God, I think that’s fantastic. But isn’t that just how women are, Isabelle, being that we’re nurtured in our DNA, I feel that we realize from the beginning of a relationship, at least in my experience, that we know that who we are today is not going to be who we’re going to be tomorrow. And that’s the enjoyment of being in relationships, is rediscovering ourselves and each other, right?
Absolutely, and I mean, we grew up together, obviously, we were 18 when we met, and now we’re in our mid 50’s. So, you know, that’s a lifestyle, so I’ve been with this woman longer than a life apart, right?
Love that.
But you’re right, it is much like business, it isn’t re-commitment, constant re-commitment to who we are, what we stand for, and who we want to become. This woman makes me want to be a better woman and I make her want to be a better woman, you know? So better human, actually, I should say.
Yes, absolutely, it doesn’t matter. I mean, gender doesn’t matter. What matters is what you do with who you are and with others, right? At the end of the day, like, hopefully we finally get there.
So right, because I am not gay and my wife is not gay. We are, we fell in love with a soul and I can 100% say that if we weren’t together today, I don’t know if I would be with a man or a woman. I know I would with a great soul, you know? But that was at 18, I didn’t even know what was happening there, you now? So that was, that was challenging.
We actually talked about that in our joint TED talk together. So my 2nd Ted talk, I delivered it with Margarita and we talked about business strategies that help businesses grow, but that same token also can help relationships grow and whether it’s a couple in a relationship or any type of relationship, mother, daughter, brother, sister, those strategies, and so we talk about that in our TED talk.
Yeah, you know, I am so excited now to watch the second one. I’ve watched the first one, but now I want to watch the second one because it’s really interesting. Oftentimes people are, you know, what are the skills? What am I learning? What are the tactical things? And they don’t realize that the biggest skill to learn, especially in business, in life in general, is the art of relationship building, that really is what we’re doing in life. Whether it’s with ourselves, right? Or whether it’s with any other person or business opportunity that may come about, and I feel that’s what you’re sharing here.
Totally, and the relationship, you hit on something really important, the relationship that we have with ourselves first, I mean, you can’t give what you don’t have, you know? So, it is about, and this is what I love about having been with the same person for 33 years. We have witnessed each other grow. And let me tell you, it hasn’t been all roses and unicorns, right? Obviously. There’s been a few times that very close calls of letting, letting each other go. We grow together, and that’s part of one of the strategies. But that fuels confidence, that fuels really being witnessed as human beings. Have you ever watched the show “Alone”?
I haven’t.
They drop 10 people on different parts of Australia, for example, and they have to survive on their own for the longest. And the last woman or man, last human standing wins. But as I watch the show, what they miss the most is the human interaction. Is being witnessed and witnessing others greatness, good, bad or ugly, right? And I tell you, this is the, even beyond my mother because I haven’t lived with my mother for so long.
This woman, Margarita, is the one that knows the most about me, my brilliance, my genius, my pitfalls, my blind spots. I mean, this woman knows it all about me and it is about relationships. It’s about your relationship with yourself, your relationship with others, your relationship with things, right? Your relationship with energy.
Margarita works with horses. We work with horses here at our retreat center. Let me tell you, energy can tell you a lot. I remember years ago, Margarita said to me, Isabelle, you don’t know what it’s like to be at the receiving end of your energy. I thought you’re absolutely right. I don’t know what that feels like. And the horses reflect that for me on a constant basis. And this could be a whole different podcast and just talking about energy and all of that. But, relationship with each other, with ourselves, with each other, and basically business is about making life better. It’s about solving problems that others haven’t solved or haven’t solved the way you would like to solve them. And that is part of a relationship, of course.
Yeah, absolutely. I love that answer. And it actually just brings me to another question I want to ask you, Isabelle, can you share some highlights from your career looking back? You know, maybe there’s just one thing that comes to mind, where some of what you’re saying has really stood out as a success story for you. Now, this could be a client thing or this could be a personal thing.
I have a couple of things that come to mind for sure. One that links directly with confidence. I was asked to propose a big project with a company that said to me firsthand, we do not have a budget. We don’t have a project. We have so little money to do this project. Can you help us? And instead of having the confidence to ask, ‘what is the budget?’, I assumed and I reflected, not reflected, what’s the word I’m looking for, projected.
I projected my limitations and my understanding of what is a small budget for me, as opposed to having the confidence of saying, all right, let’s talk about budget. Let’s talk about what is small to you. And by shying away from. Going in that corner of the relationship. I quoted, I lowballed because I was like, oh my God, I want to have this project, but they said it a thousand times that they don’t have any budget. So, I proposed without knowing, and then I lost the project. Why? Because I was too low.
They said to me, there is no way that you can provide the quality that we’re looking for, for this little. Now, talk about learning, right? Unbelievable, because I thought, wow, what has this taught me? One, it taught me that when you have confidence and when you’re not afraid of going into all corners of a relationship or of a brave conversation, another thing we talked about in our second TED talk, brave, not being afraid to have brave conversations.
It opens doors, assuming it is the worst enemy of business, honestly. We make so many crazy, stupid mistakes because of assumptions. I will never do that again. I will always go deep into conversations so I can know, even if it’s bad feedback coming our way, there’s no such thing as bad feedback. There’s such a thing as understanding what the experience has been about. And if you don’t know, then you can’t do anything about it. I’d rather know and be able to smartly deal with it than not know.
Relationship with each other, with ourselves, with each other, and basically business, is about making life better. It's about solving problems that others haven't solved or haven't solved the way you would like to solve them. And that is part of a relationship, of course.
I totally agree with you. Oh my God, this just brings about so many different directions I can go with this. But what I want to do, just because of your area of expertise, just because of the climate that we’re in right now and just because of how technology is booming out of so many ways of doing things, I want to set a ground zero and then ask you some questions on that.
That ground zero is this, Isabelle. And this really is important because I get this asked by every single client that comes my way. So I feel it’s something that although I feel, you know, is totally obvious, it really clearly isn’t. So let me do some definitions with you. For those who don’t know the difference between let’s just say branding, marketing, and positioning, your definition based on your experience.
Thank you for asking that, because it is massive. In fact, these three buckets get lumped into the bucket of marketing all the time. Marketing cannot do its job well, if its positioning isn’t right. So branding is about how your brand, how your experience leaves people feeling. It’s a feeling, it’s an emotion. A lot of people think money is the driver of the world. No, envy is the driver of the world. People want to either solve problems, right? They want their problems solved or they want to tap into an opportunity for growth.
So branding is who you are, what you do, what makes you different, what you deliver better than anyone else, what problems you solve better than everyone else, and how that is making life better. How that is leaving people feeling?
Positioning are the reasons as to why people would choose you, regardless of the price. So I work with companies or individuals that are usually in a very commoditized industry. There are millions of coaches. I work at an engineering firm right now. Let me tell you, nobody, no builder in the world gets up one morning and says, I want to spend the most amount of money today on engineering.
When you’re in a commoditized industry, meaning price is bottom line, and why would people still choose you, or why would people say, ‘I will be a fool to do business with anyone else but you, regardless of price.’ Now that is because of how you leave people feeling, it’s because of what you promise that is usually not delivered in your industry or in what you do, and it’s also your X factor, tt includes the tipping point that gets people to go, where the hell have you been all my life?
And when people say, when I work with clients, they eventually say to me, ‘my clients asked me if I’ve bugged their house.’ I’m like, good, because that’s what you want. You want clients to go – Oh my God, I feel like you’re speaking, I feel you heard my conversation at dinner last night. That means you’re really understanding what biggest top of mind problems your clients experience and others have promised to solve the same thing, but they’re not solving it. So, you’re solving it better. And the X factor is the reason that as to why they would, they would choose you.
Now marketing, if I could remove the word marketing from the dictionary, you know what I would replace it with? I would replace it with which conversation do you want to be the leader of? It’s about leading, being the leader of a certain amount of, not amount, a certain kind of conversation. And it’s about educating and making life better in your educational-based marketing, which is the most economical and most powerful way of marketing, by the way.
But it’s deciding what you want to do, which conversation you want to lead and why? And then being out there saying it like it is, making, I was with a client not too long ago in Montreal and I’ve had to say to them, you can’t stand out and blend in at the same time. Because in order to stand out, you need to take a stand. If you are not clear about what you stand for, you’ll stand for anything.
And being the leader of a conversation means you’re clear about the stand that you take and you’re clear that you are going to piss certain people off. If you don’t piss someone off at some point, it means you are not innovating, right?
So branding is about how you want to leave people feeling, positioning are the reasons as to why people are choosing you instead of someone else, and marketing are the actions you take to be the leader of that conversation. And if people say, people say to me, Isabelle, can you help me spread the word? That’s a marketing question. My answer is, of course I can. What is the word to be spread? That is a brand positioning question. You know what I mean?
You are speaking to me, sister. I love everything about this. So let me then take this into a situation. So generally speaking, when would one incorporate branding or marketing or positioning in their client acquisition journey? So perhaps you can share the order in which to incorporate each of these. With what the desired goal for each would be, because that’s the other thing people don’t know, which one comes first, second, and third, and how to leverage that order.
People go into, okay, I need a website, I need a brochure, I need something visual. And of course, the visuals are important. Is a logo important to a brand? Well, of course without a logo, you know, a logo is a visual reminder if people should trust you or like you, right? But people go to the surface, either they need a campaign or something, but, or SEO, oh my God, I have a client that spends a lot of money on SEO. But SEO is designed, and I will answer this more succinctly in a moment.
Yeah, you were designed to bring a lot more people’s eyeballs, like people to your website. But if your website isn’t designed to capture and create action, you are throwing your money in the garbage. Marketing is the last equation. First, you need to understand what your brand does, what it does better than anyone else. And so branding and positioning go hand in hand, and you can jump to the design and the campaign, but that is very short-lived. It has no substance, and you’re going to look good for a while, but people are not going to say yes to you.
And if you were, if there’s three quotes side by side, and you are the most expensive out of these three quotes, and there’s no tangible reason. Tangible reasons, compelling reasons as to why they should choose you. It doesn’t matter how much marketing you do. If you can’t ‘in’ the sales conversation, if you don’t have clear tipping points that position you as the obvious choice, you’re wasting your time and money.
You know, I totally agree with you there, Isabelle, because the other part of this is your client, your consumer, your audience, depending on what your goal is, because they’re all different things. They’ve done their research. Like they… they’re informed individuals, right? So if you don’t get your part right, all of what you just talked about, then you are going to fall flat on your face and you are going to waste a lot of money, time and energy on doing things that actually don’t translate over into the goal in mind.
So I want to ask you that piece because oftentimes people don’t order, right. So I just want to emphasize that and I’ll give you an example. When I work with a client on whatever that thing may be, and oftentimes for me, it’s like the building of confidence, right? So I look at why does that person need confidence? Like what do they need it for? Like what is that emotional attachment? What will they gain if they get confidence?
And if they don’t get confidence, what will they not get? So it’s that you know how people only look at one side. To me, it’s, like, no. You gotta look at it all because what you can get is like a dopamine hit, right? It’s like, boom, I get it, boom I get it. But then if you don’t look at what you could lose, which is the bigger fear, then how are you going to create the mindset of accountability to do the things you need to do to get to where you wanna get to? I kinda want your comments on that.
Branding is about how you want to leave people feeling, positioning are the reasons as to why people are choosing you instead of someone else, and marketing are the actions you take to be the leader of that conversation
Well, to begin with your, your 1 billion per cent, right. First, people don’t buy coaching. They buy the result of coaching, right? No one buys a gadget for the gadget or a thing for the thing or an experience for the experience, they buy the results of that experience and what you’re saying here is, and I, in my language is there are risks for saying yes, but there are costs for saying no. And there needs to be, you need – as a leader of your own business – you need to understand what the risks are.
In other words, what are the potential objections as to why someone would be in their own way to work with you? If you feel like your clients are better or your prospects would be better served with you rather than someone else, then your job as a leader and as an entrepreneur is to get rid, is to answer all the objections that could stop your prospect from choosing you and make a mistake. And it’s to address those things in a way that they will feel like you, oh, she does get us. Wow, it feels like she’s bugged my house, right?
And then you need to be very clear about what is gonna happen. What is the cost of saying no? And there needs to be more cost of saying no than risks of saying yes. And if your offering is $10, obviously, the emotion behind the buying is a lot less than if your offer is $100,000, right? The more you offering is of a big investment, the better the answers you should have in this equation here. Otherwise, people are going to go to the lowest amount, right?
You have to realize that you know what you do differently in your business. Your prospects that are not educated in your field, when they look at two proposals and one’s cheaper and it sounds kind of as good. What, why would they choose you? And you can’t use, we’ve got the right, the best people and the best thing. They don’t know, they don’t you. If a client chooses you again, well, that’s probably because of other things that connected with them.
But for prospects to choose you, even if you were more expensive than your competitors, you better have good reasons as to why they would choose you. Right. And that’s all part of being able to address the risks of yes and the costs of no, and being able to share, I get told, oh, I’ve worked with consultants before and nothing, I never got what I was told I was gonna get.
And I say to that, well, that stops here because here’s my promise and here’s why I can guarantee you that the results that I’m telling you that you’re gonna get and that you want, you’re going to get them. Because I have a tool, I have a process, and I have a tool. And most people have processes and tools that don’t have names. You know, T-fal didn’t come out years ago going, oh, we created yet another non-stick pan. No, they went, we have the best non-stick pan, and we’ve invented Teflon.
Now, we know that Teflons are not that good for your health. The point here isn’t what’s good for your health or not. That’s not part of the conversation here. What’s part of the conversation is they didn’t just say, oh, I have a process. And by the way, if you’re listening to this and you think you don’t have a project and you have a service-based business, which by the way is the hardest business to be in, right?
Selling a service and your service on top of it is a very challenging business to begin with because it’s usually intangible. Coaching is intangible. So, your job is to make my job, my job is to make the intangible tangible by asking my clients, what is their process? I don’t have a process. Yes, you do. Let me ask you, what do you do here? Then what do you do? Then what do you do? Boom, boom, boom, and suddenly we have a process.
Now the next step is to name that process so it has brand value and IP, right? Intellectual property. In the end, you’re selling the result of something. You better know what you stand for and what makes you different in order for people to make it to make it a no-brainer for them to say yes to you instead of making a big mistake and go with a lesser, lesser expensive, less of an investment with someone else but that you’d serve them better, you know? That makes sense, right?
It makes so much sense. You are just totally preaching to the choir here. I’m telling you, this just all makes sense to me. So I want to take this to another step because this is another thing that comes to me and I can’t think of anyone that can answer this better than you, Isabelle. If a person or company is looking to create a brand presence and use the full deck of what is available in today’s world to acquire clients, what process would that entail when working with you?
Well, it starts by assessing the needs, right? Assessing where they’re at and where they wanna be and looking at that gap to begin with. From there, it doesn’t matter if you’re a 100-year-old established company or a solopreneur getting started. I always start with the same process, which is getting together for a couple of days and figuring out some really important ingredients together, and really looking at what we believe in.
I say ‘we’ because now I’m part of your team, for example, right? So what do you believe in, what problems do we solve? What are the risks of yes, costs of no? What do we promise? What is our X factor? And there’s about 10 ingredients that are super important. And once you know that, first of all, your confidence goes through the roof, because…
You can actually answer all these, like the dreaded, simple yet dreaded question of what do you do, right? Like, what do you do and what’s different about you? This is where people bend it. But being able to answer that properly, then from there, we look at who the clients are? Who are the ideal clients that we want to call upon, and that we want them to be aware that we exist because we are born to serve them.
From there, we look at what’s their biggest pain in the ass? What’s just their thorn, their bleeding artery? What is that? And then we look at where these people are? Because people ask me, should I be on social media? Should I have this? Should I do this? Is it LinkedIn or is it – well, that depends on who you’re wanting to reach, right? And sometimes I’ve worked with a company that does kitchen cabinet manufacturing. They only work B2B, business to business. Sorry for the acronyms. I just want to make sure that everybody understands, business to business.
So they’re not, they didn’t want to do billboards and all these things, but I thought, no, we need to do billboards because your brand isn’t known. Your brand is only known in this slice. But if you want to sell more to different showrooms and stores, you want to have mom and pop going into stores going, do you carry this brand, right?
So sometimes it’s about going, a little wider than some other times. Sometimes it’s about going narrow and deep, but ultimately it’s about understanding these ingredients so that you can have the proper resonating messaging and then creating creative campaigns or creative subjects, creating an avenue for you to share your genius, for you to have a platform, to be the leader of a certain conversation.
But that’s the pathway. It’s getting together, figuring these ingredients, giving you a document called the True North. And the True North is literally the ethos of your brand. You’re gonna hire based on that, fire based on, acquire clients based on that, fire clients based on that. I have let go of clients that were just not in alignment with my ethos as we learn more about working with one another.
I always start with the same process, which is getting together for a couple of days and figuring out some really important ingredients together, and really looking at what we believe in. I say ‘we’ because now I'm part of your team.
Absolutely. I love that. I loved that. So let me ask you this. Maybe a better thing to ask you is the ‘how’ rather than the ‘when’. How do you know what tools to use? Because there’s so many tools coming out every single moment of every single day. Am I asking the right question or am I not asking the right question? Is it about the tools because we’re being trained to think it’s about the tool? Or is it about something deeper? Yeah, and knowing the connection of what to use you, know what I’m saying, right?
Yeah, we first need to understand what we’re trying to achieve and when we want to achieve this, because then we need to work backwards from there, like any project. If you need a brochure, I need to know first, when do you need this, and is there an event that you were like, what is the reason? What’s the context around when you need those by?
You know, there are things that I do in my work that will take two years to pan out in terms of massive results. And there are things that are gonna pan out in terms of results tomorrow, right? But it depends on where we’re going with all of this. So based on where we’re going and by when we wanna be there, then we look at what is the best strategy or best strategies and what are the best tools to help us effortlessly deliver on that strategy.
That is the perfect answer right there. So what we’re doing is we’re decluttering our brain from the noise of the things and the gadgets that keep coming out and we’re staying with our ‘true north’ which is why that true north document is always so important.
So let’s talk a little bit more about that True North document. If a client has an existing brand and is looking to either reimagine it or completely rebrand it due to some sort of a pivot that requires them to go either in a reimagine or the way to a rebrand, what process would you take them through if it’s different from creating a brand from scratch?
I would do the exact same process of phase one that I’ve talked about, spending time together, figuring the ingredients. Sometimes it’s elevating existing ingredients. Sometimes it is creating a pivot because there’s a massive gap in the market and there’s untapped opportunities there, right? But then from, we first reimagine internally, that branding is an inside job. It’s an inside job first.
Then after that, it’s an outside job in keeping the alignment internally but also going externally and bridging that gap, right? So sometimes when I work with an organization that works or a small company that they’re not coming to me for a rebrand they’re coming to me for clarity for a way to better explain what they do, to grow and get more clients. But in that True North phase we realize that their True North is here and their visual brand is here.
So now the visual brand needs to be elevated. There’s a company recently that I worked with where their visual brands and the company name brought more confusion to the market than anything else. So by doing the True North, we realized that yeah, this has to be renamed, it has to, but sometimes it just has to be tweaked a little bit. And, but the tweaks that are being made internally and externally, visually and culturally, bring the most amount of impact because sometimes it’s about tweaking the dials, but it’s about which dials do we need to tweak?
Branding is a journey, it’s not an event. A lot of people, when they say we’re rebranding right now, they mean I’m redesigning the look and feel. It’s so much more than that. It’s an everyday journey. There’s not a week, Raj, that I don’t invest time on my brand and on my business, every week and every sixth week, 6, 12, 24, Margarita and I don’t have any meetings, don’t have anything with clients and we solely work on our business. And that’s a brand journey. And I’m not a massively huge company by no means, you know, we’re a small team by design and we mean business.
Absolutely. And you know, and that boutique enterprise is something that a lot of people don’t understand what that means. They think it’s about size when it’s actually about high touch. And that’s the big difference. So I want to ask you this, because I feel this is something that a lot of people just get on the bandwagon about and they feel, okay, so I need to create a marketing plan.
You know, that word that you and I don’t like. I need to create a marketing plan because that is what is going to help me get more clients because that’s what the person thinks. See in my mind, we live in a world today where you can’t actually ever create a marketing plan, because as soon as you do, something else comes along in technology that refutes the plan that you just made.
And so, and what is the goal of the marketing plan is data points. So what I say in my head is if I want to garner information about my client, I need data on them, right? So it’s not a marketing plan I need. It’s a strategy plan. Because when I switch that in my hand, then I know that strategy means whatever it takes. So it’s not just about the small mind of the marketing. Whatever that word may mean to you, but the big wide world of possibilities in terms of strategy, your comment.
Absolutely right because it is about first understanding where we’re going, by when we want to be there, who we want to who we wanna be there with in terms of partners, but in terms of collaborators and clients, and most importantly, why? Once we know that, then we need to look at what are the best actions. What are the strategies and what are the best actions that we can take? That I can take as an individual if I’m a solopreneur, or that we can take as a team.
And by the way, the marketing team in a larger organization, it’s not their role to build a brand and build awareness. That’s everybody’s role, not just the marketing department, right? It’s a unifying role. And so once we know that strategically, then we can approach it with smarts and street-savviness and go, okay, what’s the best way to get there? It could be connecting with influencers. It could be on a lot of podcasts. It could be creating a TED talk. It could be social media every day, being the leader of conversation. It depends on what we want to achieve, you know, and what we want, what is needed in order to reach the goal.
And that is not marketing, a marketing plan will say, hey, here’s what, this is the type of communication, the frequency of communication. Here are the KPIs, the key performance indicators that we’re gonna keep track of to see if we’re doing well. And that doesn’t mean that’s not important. Of course, it’s important to know what we’re doing, is this getting us closer to our goal? Or is it, because sometimes there’s initiatives that take a lot of time. For a little reward. Well, we need to keep track of that to know, but it’s not about a marketing plan.
It’s about a strategic plan, a strategic communication plan, both internally with your team members. I have a client that is a delivery company, a small delivery company. How many salespeople do you have? How many drivers do you have? 89. So in my world, I said, you have 90 salespeople. No, no, no. We can’t, they are not going to like us. They’re not salespeople I said, no but I’m assuming from the brand foundation that you have, I’m assuming that you want to make life better. They’re like, yeah. So what we did is we created little money, the company name and then money, a hundred-dollar bill, a $200 bill at $300 bill.
We figured out that when they acquire a client, they have a client for a minimum of 10 years. So would you not wanna lose a little money upfront to gain a client for 10 years? So you don’t get to know these things with a marketing plan, you get to these things by understanding the client, understanding where we wanna be. So their role now became, every driver had money in their cars. Wherever they delivered, they looked in the system and saw, is the company that we’re delivering to, are they a client?
If not, they would go in and deliver the package and say, hey, we are this, this and that. Here’s how we make life better. Here’s $200 of delivery on us to give you an opportunity to get us to try us. Guess what happened? Mean like, honestly, they went from one salesperson doing sales calls and trying to convert clients to a bunch of people, brand ambassadors now that are making life better, spreading the love and spreading money around and converting clients and prospects into clients while making life better while having fun.
So their sales before were like this, their sales now were like this, what did that cost them. I don’t know, a couple hundred bucks, plus a little training for their team, but you don’t get to create innovation, innovative ways of business development by simply sitting down and crafting a marketing plan.
Branding is a journey, it's not an event. A lot of people, when they say we're rebranding right now, they mean I'm redesigning the look and feel. It's so much more than that. It's an everyday journey.
What a great way to answer the question that I put forth. It’s an excellent, excellent example. So I wanna ask you this, a lot of what we’ve been talking about requires a growth mindset, right? And it also requires the ability to adapt quickly, like that resilience. What are some markers you would recommend people consider when tapping into these skills? Because without them, how successful can you be in the long game, right?
Mindset is everything. There’s a poster right behind me that says that, right? Mindset is everything, and having a growth mindset means that you’re looking, you’re curious, and you’re looking at every pitfall, every success, everything that happens in your life as an opportunity to elevate and grow. I just wanna make sure that beyond what I’ve just said here, I just want to make sure I understand your question. When you say, what are markers? Can you give me a bit more of a context for that? What do you mean by that?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So when you look at the growth mindset and resilience skill set, these are two things that you need in order for the long game, right? To just keep moving on. So whether it’s personal, whether it is business.
In your experience, have you seen any other markers in addition to those two that you feel helps people. Move on consistently without kind of, you know, that let’s go up and then way we fall down and then let’s up and way we fall down. So creating that kind of consistency because outside of a growth mindset and having that adaptability ability, is there anything else that you would add to that list?
Yeah, you know, I would think I would want to say for me anyways, that fear or feeling outside of my comfort zone, seeing those things as an invitation versus a roadblock for me has gotten me to experience my first TED talk, for example. That has never been on my bucket list and now I have to go figure out. I was asked three years in a row to do this.
And I thought, no, I don’t have time. Cause it, let me tell you, it is not for the faint of heart. It’s a lot of work to create 12 minutes of goodness. You know, if I had an hour to deliver something it is way easier than 12 minutes, right? But at some point I asked myself, my goal at the time, this was 15 years ago, my goal was to reach a million, impact a million people. And then this opportunity came three times and I said no. And then I thought, why am I saying no?
I’m not gonna impact a million people by sitting behind my computer coaching people one-on-one, right? So why am I saying no. And then of course I figured out that I was a little bit of a chicken shit. That going, yeah, I’m mainly dyslexic and preparing for it now. Since then, I’ve been speaking on many large to small to large stages. To me, by looking at it as an opportunity to grow versus a roadblock or a fear or a stopper, I feel that in my life, every time I’ve done that, I’ve elevated. I’ll give you another example.
When I was young, probably, I don’t know, I wanna say 15 years old, I had to write a 30-page paper on audacity. Oh my gosh, let me tell you, writing a 10-page, a 30-page paper, now this is years ago, no chat GPT, no Google, none of that, right? Plus add to that, a dyslexic human being. I thought to myself, oh my God, this is the end of me. I’m gonna be, I’m going to get laughed at. And then we had to present it, and so I thought, how can I, how can we face this challenge? So I thought to myself, what if I demonstrate audacity instead of writing about it? And so here’s what I did, Raj.
I numbered a 30-page document and I had a cover, a beautiful cover that said, audacity is dot, dot, and then I gave 30 blank pages and then the last page said dot, dot.. ‘audacity is this.’ And I thought, I’m just gonna hand out a blank document because I’m gonna actually live that audacity. Now, when I got my papers back, obviously there was an F minus and A plus and everything in between. And the teacher knowing me, knowing me really well, he knew that I had swept that one out. And the learning that I have had from that, this was no- oh, she was lazy. She did this on the lazy.
He knew that I had swept that out like crazy. Plus, two days before it was due, guess what he said to the class? He said, and remember, this paper is worth the totality of your semester. And I thought, oh my God, so I talked to my mom that night. I said, mom, I think I’ve screwed it up. I think I literally screwed up my whole semester. Here’s a beautiful lesson from my mom, still about confidence. She said, Isabelle, If you were on a diving board 20 feet in the air right now and you were midair, what would you do? Would you commit to your dive or would you belly flop?
And I thought, no, I would commit to my dive. She’s like, this is the day, if you’re on the diving board right now, your feet are off the diving board. Now it’s time to fully commit and live with the consequences of your actions. Own them though. Branding is about owning who you are. It’s not just about knowing who you are, it’s about owning it. I have a mohawk on my head. And I work with small business owners, all the way to big corporations, who a lot of people say, you can’t work with corporations with – I have a skull on my shirt.
And I go there fully being me. And it works, why? Because I own it. So when you’re able to own, the good, the bad and the ugly. And you’re able to learn from it and take fear and hesitation into transforming that into curiosity and an invitation to elevate. Who is this situation calling me to become? That’s in my opinion, that mixed with a growth mindset and resilience. I mean. You can’t go wrong with that, you know?
Absolutely, so I gotta ask you this. What was the grade that he gave you?
Ended up with an A+, and I had to stand up and really explain my rationale and position why I did this and how many sleepless nights I had through this and what I’ve learned. And, but then it also came with a warning for everybody else to not pull a shenanigan just like that, just because, you know.
Oh my gosh, what a fantastic story. You know, for all the women out there who lack confidence, therefore may not step into making decisions quickly or making decisions that they rightfully deserve to make, what would you say to them?
You know, people say to me often, Isabelle, yeah, but it’s easy for you. You were born confident. No, no, no my dear friend. Confident, the confidence that I have fluctuates – the confidence – and the more I go outside my comfort zone and the one of the things that I was, why I did not do, I didn’t say yes to a TED talk initially because I didn’t wanna screw up as a dyslexic person.
It’s very hard for me to learn a script by heart. I’m doing a little detour there, but it’s all connected. And my biggest fear was to flub in front of thousands of people. Guess what happened on that stage? I flubbed and I did not remember where I was at. And that was over death. Literally, it was flubbing on a TEDx stage, then death. And I flubbed on the TEDx stage.
What did that do? It allowed me to see that I dealt with the situation really well. It’s taught me to trust myself that I know what to do. And if I screw up and I do not know what to do well in the future, I will. So I’ve been, I put myself in situations of lack of confidence every single day, I have to say. It only gives me more confidence. When you face your fears, what does it do? You grow wings, right? And I would say, don’t think you don’t have confidence because confidence gets built over time as you do the things that you fear the most or that stresses you out the most.
Mindset is everything, and having a growth mindset means that you're looking, you're curious, and you're looking at every pitfall, every success, everything that happens in your life as an opportunity to elevate and grow.
Amen, you just like that was the mic drop right there, Isabelle. So let me loop us back as we get ready to close off, even though there’s so much more that I could ask you.
So you’re going to have to re-invite me back, Raj. We’re going have to continue this conversation.
Yes, because there’s so much more to talk about. But let me loop us back to the episode’s topic, Isabel. Let me just remind everyone what that is. The First, The Best Or The Only – How To Build A Brand That Attracts The Right Customer Every Single Time. I borrowed your tagline there Isabelle for the title because I thought it was brilliant. Can you explain this? And then share how to build a brand that attracts the right customer every single time. Yes. The holy grail.
Being, building something, building a brand, of course you want it to be in the right hands, right? And helping the right people. In order for you to do that, you need to think, what can I be the first at? What can I be the best at? And what can it be the only at? When you mix the three, whether it’s a service business that is intangible that you need to make it tangible, the process is the same.
What do I stand for? What are the things that I wanna solve better than anyone else? What is my brand promise? And a brand promise has to be what your clients want that they don’t get. And then when you promise to deliver on that, and then it’s about your X factor amongst other ingredients, but these three, the other one is your energetic intention. How do you want your brand to leave people feeling? I, at leap zone, my whole team, we wanna leave people on fire and unstoppable.
Do I succeed at that every day? You better believe it. Do I fail at that everyday? Yeah, and I know it because I can, I see what, when I’m not creating that, therefore I can realign, right? So on building your brand, your culture, and your positioning based on first vester only, and then spreading the word by being the leader of a certain amount of types of conversations. That is how you resonate with people. That is, how do you spread the word that actually resonates and that gets people to go where the hell have you been in my life?
And you can’t do this on your own, by the way. This is what I do for a living. And I can’t do that part for me because I’m in it. When you’re in the pickle jar, you can see the calorie label, right? You have to have someone be me, be you, be it someone else. You have someone to help you figure those things out in a way that it’s someone looking at your business that’s not in it, that doesn’t have all the baggage and all the limitations and to help you. Because when you have the right verbiage and the right ingredients, to begin with, your confidence is gonna go through the roof.
And of course, you need to.. uh, the word I’m looking for here is continue to fuel that confidence through mindset, through um trusting and knowing and one day a coach of mine said, uh, that I thought that was brilliant he said because you know when people say oh why is this happening to me you know then the next level is why is it happening for me the next level, Raj.
This why this is happening from me anything we create is happening from us it’s not happening to us it’s not happening for us it is happening from us meaning we are creating what we want so might as well work on our mindset constantly work on what we want and spend a hundred percent of our time refining whom we are being called to be. To be able to deliver our genius, and always thinking on, from the perspective of, let’s elevate, let’s continually be better, And let’s continually make life better with our brand. And I think that might sum it up quite well.
Absolutely. Any final words that you want to leave everyone with any words of wisdom, any, anything that perhaps I didn’t ask that you feel people should know before we close off, Isabelle?
I think I would say in relation to our conversation, I have many, many, lots of tattoos, but one of them says, happiness is when what I think, what I say, and what I do are in harmony. And that is what branding is all about. Branding is about you becoming more you, owning more you. Making life better with more of you and so happiness and success is when what I think say and do are in harmony and that happens moment by moment, day by day, learning curve by learning curve.
Absolutely. I agree with you. Oh my gosh. Isabelle, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your insights. So much more, as I mentioned, that I want to chat with you about. So you definitely have to come back on.
I’m promising you that it’s let’s figure it out and we will for sure.
Absolutely. I want to remind everyone again, how to hang out with you online, how to find you for the, you now for all the work that you do if they, if, if any of what you know we talked about today kind of makes sense to people out there, I want them to be able to find out more about how to work with you and your team.
Yeah, leapzonestrategies.com. This site is a gold mine of free tools and ways to apply what we’ve talked about today. Absolutely free, and of course, you can learn more about our retreat center that we have on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, and all our programs are listed there as well.
I’m happy to connect on social media as well, I’m on LinkedIn. TikTok, Instagram, you name it, I’m on there. And most of all, for those of you who want to learn in addition to what you’re doing with your clients and your community, Raj, if you know you’re being called for more and you want to take your brand and your confidence to the next level, I have an amazing program called The Speaker’s Edge.
And it’s not just for people who want to speak for a living. It’s people who need to be able to pitch their ideas better, and anywhere there’s communication and being able to really resonate with people. So you can at leapzone.lpages.co/the-speakers-edge/. I can send you links of all of that, Raj, for your community. I would be thrilled to welcome you into The Speaker’s Edge. It is a game changing program.
Oh my gosh, so please do send me all the links. I wanna make sure that we’re able to add that to wherever it is that people will be able to get this in the captions. Absolutely want to support you with that. I love everything about this episode and everything that I’ve learned about you. I absolutely adore you, sister. You need to come and hang out with me when you come to Toronto, and I mean that. You and your lovely lady.
I cannot wait, honestly, I look forward to it. And if ever you’re in my neck of the woods, please stop by for sure, we need to connect. Your energy is infectious and the way you lead a conversation is very smart and very human. And I am now an absolute fan and I will be in your community forever.
Oh my gosh, I feel ditto about you, sweetheart. Thank you so much. So next time I will see you. But for now folks, if you would like to learn more about Isabelle and how you can work with her, hang out with her. You heard everything about websites, socials, everything. Please, please, please take the moment to go and do that. Do you actually have a newsletter or something where they can get regular stuff from you, Isabelle?
On my website, there are a few master classes that you can subscribe to, and that subscribes you into our tools and regular communication. Yeah, you bet.
Perfect. Thanks again, Isabelle. And I will see everyone next time with another insightful episode, just like this one. Transform Your Confidence, the podcast folks, you can go hangout with us on YouTube at The Open Chest Confidence Academy. You can also go to The OpenChestConfidenceAcademy.com to sign up for our freebies, our free newsletter. Be a part of our community.
And please stay connected with us on our socials at @The Open Chest Confidence Academy and theopenchestconfidenceacademy.com website where you can find out different ways that you can work with me and our team. See you next time.
