Last month, I attended the award ceremony for the Mass Challenge Competition in Jerusalem. An amazing event, it highlighted ten champion commercial start ups in front of an audience of close to a thousand people.

If there was one word that was repeated throughout the evening, it was the phrase “impact”. How can the participants challenge and change their target community? The videos and speeches dutifully drove home the point, repetitively.

Since then, I have not stopped thinking about this word “impact”. It is incredibly obvious, and yet very powerful. So I applied it to several of my clients in business coaching and mentoring sessions. For example: –

1. When approaching investors with a presentation, I asked what they that will say within 30 seconds that will force the listener to respond: “Wow, I must be a part of this”?
2. When selling  professional services – health, accounting, computing, etc – I questioned how their smile will ensure that the person signs up immediately without further pesky questions over the price and timing?
3.  When talking with colleagues and employees at work, I urged my customers to consider what will motivate them to go the proverbial ‘extra mile’.

I can hear some of you asking: “Well is this not just my elevator- pitch?” In a sense, yes…but not only.

Too many of us glibly find a five line throwaway and hope that does the trick. The other person is expected to be impressed. What I am suggesting here is that those precious words strike the person in such a manner that they have to consider a change of approach. It becomes a ‘no brainer’.

Let me describe a case study, which I was involved with not so long ago. My client showed me a video, which she had created. Great idea, but it was boring and failed to highlight most of the leading strengths of her team. Awkward!

So, we discussed her positives, coated them with two emotional stories for flavouring, and guess what? People are beginning to listen to her. She is looking forward to recruiting some new customers of her own. She even left my Jerusalem office with a smile.

So what is it that you do that really make a difference on your target community, and how well do you carry out that task?