In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner explores “positive haunting” - the art of saying something so clear and accurate that it changes how people see their own behavior.
Have you ever heard something that stuck with you because it exposed a truth you couldn’t ignore? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner explores “positive haunting” - the art of saying something so clear and accurate that it changes how people see their own behavior.
She explains why being helpful and informative isn’t enough in relationship marketing, especially early on, and why real impact comes from smart comparisons that reveal what someone has been missing all along.
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist. And in the 15 plus years I've been doing this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence.
Because the reality is, the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is way more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
I've got a question for you. When was the last time someone said something to you that you just couldn't shake? Not in a bad way, but in a way where days later you were still thinking about it, where it kind of rewired how you see things.
You just couldn't unsee, you couldn't unhear it. When something like this happens, I call it positive haunting. And it's one of the most underused tools in relationship marketing.
Why Being Generally Useful Isn’t Enough
Right? Because most of us are trying to be helpful, we're trying to put out tips and frameworks and how-tos, we're trying to be public, we're trying to help people get the information that they need, and at the same time, in an ideal world, if they're the right person, get them to buy from us. Right?
But here's the thing, especially in relationship marketing, when you're out there being helpful, when you're putting out tips and frameworks and kind of in teacher mode, that's not really what we need to do to get people to move along to buying. Again, I'm specifically talking about relationship marketing here. Because all of those tips and tricks and teaching, I call that being generally useful.
And here's the deal, generally useful doesn't move the needle when it comes to getting people to making a buying decision. It doesn't help people remember you in a really authentic way that has the impact that we want to have when people are meeting you in marketing. Again, it just doesn't make them hire you or hire you at any kind of pace that's useful for both of you.
Right? Because when you're giving people generally useful information, maybe they go try and implement it, or they hear it from a million other people, and it just doesn't land. So what does land?
What does get people to take action? Saying something they can't unsee, which is what I call doing some positive haunting. Right?
What Positive Haunting Really Is
And that's important when you're a relationship marketer to understand that difference when you are meeting somebody for the first time. So when they're first coming across you, I'm not saying that you never teach in your marketing, but when they first come across you, you want to teach in a way that is not just generally useful. You're not just putting the information out there, and instead you're thinking through, how do I actually make this information stick?
Right? And I'm going to talk about that and get into some more details about how we do that. But before I do, I want to remind you to not overthink this.
When I start talking about how do you find messaging that positively haunts, that makes people stick, we're not talking about being the smartest person in the room. You don't need to be Einstein to figure this out. Right?
This is already built into what you believe. You already know something that your audience doesn't. You just need to learn how to say it in that way that haunts.
Okay? But before I get too far, let's back up and talk about why this is important when you're relationship marketing. And what exactly is positive haunting?
So positive haunting is when you say something with enough impact that people can't get it out of their heads. And again, that's an important goal, because when we first meet people, you want to say something that sticks with them. You can't be generic in that moment or everything kind of falls apart.
Creating Impact At The Awareness Stage
Why does it fall apart? I've talked about relationship marketing before those three stages, awareness, engagement, sales, right? And at that awareness stage, what is the goal?
Well, if you've seen the visual, when I talk about relationship marketing, the goal is to have a ton of impact that you think of yourself kind of at the top of the mountain and you're kicking off the momentum of a snowball running downhill, meaning the most work you do in marketing, the most impact you have is at that awareness stage. And then as we move down into the engagement and sales stage, things just get a lot easier. Right?
And so how do you have that impact moment? Again, it's not about being generic, but it's also not being shocking or controversial, or again, like having to come up with a new theory of relativity. It doesn't have to be any of those things.
It just needs to be something that is true in a way that people haven't thought about before. And usually this is something extremely obvious and they just haven't seen it yet with their own eyes. And a lot of times we do this by providing some kind of comparison.
And this is all a little bit hard to explain. So I'm just going to give you an immediate example. So you have it in your head.
How do I positively haunt people? Right? I'm going to out myself.
I positively haunt people when I talk about relationship marketing versus traffic marketing. There's a reason I do that when I first meet people, because most people consider traffic marketing to be all of marketing. Like they don't think about it that hard, right?
So they just hear marketing and they think about all the things that they always see publicly in terms of content, et cetera. And so marketing to the majority of people is 99% traffic marketing. And a lot of them are frustrated that their marketing isn't working.
Using Comparison to Create Realization
So I get up there and I point out that there is an entire world of marketing that they're not considering, right? I put up a continuum and I say, hey, the left half of this is relationship marketing. The right half is traffic marketing.
But I'm guessing that the only thing you think about on the left side is it's most extreme version, aka getting referrals because that's the most extreme version of relationship marketing. And then I point out that they skip that entire left side of the continuum. And when they don't want to rely on referrals anymore, they over-correct all the way over to the traffic side of marketing because in their brains, that's the only marketing that exists.
So when I point that out with a visual and I point out that they've just kind of been missing a whole half piece of the marketing equation, then for people for whom relationship marketing is correct, they have a real sudden realization, right? They look at that and they're like, oh, oh no, like I've been screwing this up because suddenly they realize they've been doing traffic marketing when they needed to be doing relationship marketing. And now that they've seen it, they can't unsee it.
And that's the feeling we're going for, right? We're going for that moment where every single time now, now that they've seen it every single time they go back and they partake in more traffic marketing and it doesn't work again, they're going to remember me and they're going to think, oh, I really need to figure out this relationship marketing thing. That's what I'm talking about, about positive haunting.
Again, I'm not figuring out a new theory of relativity. I am just pointing out the obvious that nobody else has pointed out to them before, right? We all kind of start our businesses and we just start going a million miles an hour.
We don't always stop and think, are we going in the right direction? This by the way, is the whole idea of sequence over strategy, right? If you were to do proper sequence over strategy, we would have taken a minute before you started marketing to think what is the right marketing for my business model, but we rarely do that.
Examples Of Positive Haunting In Practice
And that's normal human behavior. I'm not criticizing anyone for that. I'm going to point it out, but I'm not going to criticize you for it.
But the consequence of that is when you don't do that, you just start charging ahead with all of the public facing marketing that you see. And then I come along after you've been frustrated for a year or two years or for six months, however long I come along and point out, oh, you skipped a step, right? You didn't know that relationship marketing was a thing.
And so you're going to remember me because I'm going to provide that comparison, right? And so you can see what you're doing now and I've pointed out how that's a bad decision. And so every time you repeat the behavior, I'm going to be the little angel on your shoulder or devil on your shoulder, whichever way you want to think about it, pointing out that, that is not what you should be doing.
Right? So it's like the best positive haunting has this quality where people almost want to argue with you at first, and then they're going to realize that you're right. And that's that moment of like, wait, hold on.
Like, damn it. She's right. That's what we're looking for.
Because when we get that reaction, we're not getting, let's put in a comparison here, right? We're not getting that kind of smile and nod that you get when you are doing generally useful content. When you just start teaching without a comparison point and without kind of an unveiling of an aha, you're just going to get a lot of people who are like, oh yeah, that makes sense.
I need to go start and try it and thanks for telling me how to get going. Like a lot of smiling and nodding, but then they're going to forget it. The second they leave the room, if you don't set up that comparison, if you don't set it up in such a way where they are going to feel uncomfortable, but they go back and do their old behavior again.
Bringing It All Together
Now, sometimes we have to be careful about this, right? Depending on your industry, I want to be very, very clear that the point here is not shaming anyone, right? So these can be lines we need to really watch, especially if you're in like health coaching of any kind or activity based coaching, workouts, all that stuff.
We don't want to shame people. That's not what this is about. Instead this is about making sure that they understand the consequences of their actions and that maybe they just haven't taken time to ask that first question first, right?
They've skipped a sequence over strategy step and have just gone flying ahead with whatever the kind of common path is because then we can stop and say, okay, did you forget something? Did you forget that you might be relationship marketing? And that's the piece that really helps them kick off at that awareness.
Okay. So let's talk about kind of how this shows up in practice, because remember our ultimate goal is for you to have enough impact at that awareness stage that you can kick off the momentum we need in relationship marketing. So let's talk about a couple of other examples.
Like I told you about the example that I use with relationship and traffic marketing, but how about a business coach or productivity coach, or a lot of other coaches that we see, right? The general useful version that we see of content and you're like, this is the most extreme version of it. Kind of the click bait is like here are five ways to improve your productivity.
And we've all sat through those things. And I'm not even saying that they're not useful because you can sit through those and you're probably going to smile and nod and you're going to say like, yeah, that's a good tip. I should do that.
Blah, blah, blah. But we've heard it all before. And there's no contrast.
There's no kind of calling out of our current behavior. So it's just like, let me be useful, right? Here's five ways that you can start improving your productivity haunting.
What might a positive haunting version of that be? It might be something that's more like, you know, most business owners think they have a time management problem when they actually have a decision-making problem and see the difference there. Like different coaches solve this in different ways, but here are five ways to improve your productivity.
What this person is probably saying is that you have a sequence over strategy problem, right? Because if they're saying most business owners think they have a time management problem when they actually have a decision-making problem, the rest of that conversation is going to be about ask yourself the right questions before you start going and doing things. Stop being busy and instead start doing things in the right order.
Sequence over strategy, right? And that stuff that we remember more effectively because if I'm not being efficient with my time and I'm frustrated about that, I can go do a bunch of time hacking things, right? But if I'm not working on the right stuff, none of that matters.
So the first step of being more productive is only work on the right things. And that is going to be in my mind because if I'm somebody who's not super clear on what I want or I'm not super clear on what's working, but I'm frustrated with how I use my time and then I hear someone say, oh, they think you have a time management problem. You actually have a decision-making problem.
Once I'm back at my desk repeating those behaviors, I'm going to remember that and I'm going to wonder how do I make better decisions? And I'm going to call that person up and find out and hire them to teach me how to do it, right? Here's another example from my own work.
And when I talk about networking all the time, I could say networking is important for your business. Everybody says that. Like we have to have networks, right?
What do I say instead? I say instead something along the lines of you're not being strategic with your network or you're treating your network like a contact list when you should be treating it like a strategic asset. Or I will say in a sequence over strategy way, I will say I need 20 minutes of your time to think through what the goal is before you go out and network.
Totally different impact because I'll call out people's networking behavior. And I will also tell them why they hate networking. I'll say you hate networking because you never ask yourself any questions prior and you just go to these events with this general idea that, oh, I'm supposed to meet people.
And that's really not effective and it's painful and it makes you spend hours in small talk. So that's why everybody hates networking. If instead you flip that and you get proactive about who you want to meet, number one, you usually don't have to go to networking events anymore because you can just go meet the people you need to meet under your own terms.
But you're also clear on what you're doing. So if you do end up at an event, you know exactly the types of people you're looking for and you can quickly filter the ones you're not and move on from them. So it's a totally different impact, right?
When I hear networking is important for my business, I want to go crawl under a desk somewhere and never come out because I never want to talk to anyone. But if you start telling me why networking is terrible for the vast majority of us, I know some of you enjoy it. But if I offer a comparison of why networking is terrible for most of us and say, I got an easy solution, you're going to remember that, right?
So that's why we need to think through how to deliver the information in a way that's going to stick with people. So these things have totally different impact, right? We just want people who are not just nodding along.
You're questioning why you've been thinking this way and realizing you need to think in a different way. And as I pointed out a few times, the key is some comparison. You're not just talking at people, telling them what to do.
That has its time and place, you know, kind of being in teacher mode. But the time and place is not when you first meet people. Instead, when you first meet people, you want to show them that gap between what they're doing now and what they could be doing instead.
And then, again, a reminder, like you don't need a completely original idea. You just need to point out something obvious that people have been missing, right? Again, like sequence over strategy.
This is not revolutionary. I am just pointing out that most people sit down at their desk and start launching into activity right away, and they don't take 10 minutes to actually ask, should I be doing this? And we see that show up in relationship versus traffic marketing when I can say, hey, you skipped a step.
You never decided if you should be relationship or traffic marketing. You just sat down and started traffic marketing because that's what you see everyone else doing. Again, I can say that in networking.
I can say, hey, you skipped sequence over strategy because you're just out here saying yes to every Zoom meeting request that you don't want to do, hoping that you're going to find a needle in a haystack, right? And you skipped the step of giving me 30 minutes to actually strategically think this out so that you could actually say no to all those calls because you know where to go find your people. That's positive haunting, is giving them that comparison to their behavior so that, number one, we can all kind of have a self-deprecating moment of like, oh, yeah, you got me there.
But also when you go back to your desk, they're going to remember you. And, again, why you want to do that is because that's how it kicks off the impact that you need to have when you meet people if you are relationship marketing. When we talk about that, and we've talked about it on other episodes here, we're kicking off like we want to have momentum working for us.
And so we've got to have a lot of impact. We've got to get a lot of buy-in right away when you meet people. So it can't be generally useful.
Instead, you have to kick off some momentum so you've got that snowball running downhill and working in your favor. So that's why all of this is important. That's why I care about positive haunting because if you don't positively haunt, you've made your job harder in relationship marketing.
And so, again, from a sequence over strategy perspective, we want to spend the time to think through how can I set up my messaging so that people pay attention. Okay. Here's what I want you to do.
I want you to go back and think about your work, think about the clients you've helped, and think through like, hey, how could I look at the problems that I solve and look at the things that my clients think before we get working together and find that positive haunting moment? What are they missing? What's the obvious thing that they're missing?
And I want you to give that a try. Right? I want you to go out the next time that you're meeting people, whether it's a one-on-one introduction or whether you're talking to five people or whether you're on a podcast interview, and point this out.
Start pointing out some comparisons and see if people react to you differently. See if their eyes light up. See if they have a moment of self-deprecation where they're like, oh, gosh, you got me.
You called me out on that. Wow, I'd never thought of that before. And then you know that you're on the right path versus if you just kind of see people smiling and nodding and saying, gosh, you know, that's a great reminder, then you're probably not getting it.
Because then you're probably being generally useful. So go out there, have some fun with this, and, you know, check back in with me. Tell me how it goes.
Tell me if you're finding that messaging. And as always, thank you for being here. If you haven't yet done it, please subscribe and even rate the show wherever you're listening.
It makes a huge difference in others being able to see it. And I just so appreciate when you do that. And everybody else appreciates it when they're able to find that information.
And in the same vein, if you have a friend who's struggling with some of this stuff and might be helped by it, please pass this episode along. I would really appreciate it, and I'm guessing they would as well. And in the meantime, my friends, I will see you back here in two weeks' time for another episode.