Connecting with your inner positive Spiv

Well. here I am sitting at my desk avoiding the windy M1 motorway and my friend Judith at the Money Gym ( www.themoneygym.com) has touched a nerve by asking questions about marketing and selling. So this post is all about Selling v Marketing. (Before you marketeers start writing to me, I know selling is part of marketing). This post is intended to prompt you to think about your relationship with selling, buying, promoting the things you value in life and self-marketing. To think about the language that you use about what you have to offer. It’s about thinking. Thinking about what has influenced you. What had influenced the way you describe yourself, how you sell yourself, how you sell your team, how you sell and tell your life experience, and how you sell or promote your family. Not literally, we are not talking 21st Century slavery here! It’s about how we use language and symbols to promote and declare to the world who we are, what we are, what we are worth (not necessarily in terms of money- I mean worth in terms of all types of wealth and abundance) and who the people around us are too.

I LOVE marketing and on the whole, aside from the odd creative blip I’m generally quite good at it. I didn’t know I loved marketing until 6-7 years ago when I did my MBA and thought "What is all the fuss about?- this is easy and I've done it all the time in my HR career- Selling jobs, selling management ideas, selling new ways of working, selling in new reward schemes, selling redundancy even !" This was selling ideas, selling “this is necessary”, selling exciting opportunities for change, selling; “ we need to develop, we need to expand, we need to downsize, we need new blood, different skills, different thinking” –whatever. But I wasn't really selling or was I ?.....

I was influencing change and marketing a notion/idea. So where does the relationship marketing, influencing and promoting a notion become selling then? I don’t really know. I think we generally do what works.

In my career work, I do a little session on "shameless self promotion" which is really all about the 4 PS of marketing. When clients understand self-promotion and start practising it, the results can be very powerful. (You can learn more about this soon when my upcoming e course is launched together with the “career and a life” website in April). I'm all up for self-promotion, and have a firm belief that we coaches and deliverers of people products owe it to our clients to be good at it. People who progress quickly in organisations and who develop the careers they want are generally really good at self-promotion. Self- promotion is not the same as arrogant bragging. It’s not about the explicit, in your face  "look at me I am wonderful" types. These people are generally boring self-publicists, and often, believe it or not, lack self-confidence. It’s about relationship marketing and developing links, networks, talking about what you/can do/want to do with passion and confidence. I love relationship marketing. Most days I can talk for England about what I do and what the people I know and rate do well too. I love making connections and selling in others where people have a need they are looking to fill. The "I can't do that but I know a man or woman who can".

I think it helps that I am a great purchaser and in the past have been a great spender- I know what hooks me and so to some extent I have learnt to avoid some of those hooks. Not entirely true- I have just learnt to moderate the activity of behaving like an overly enthusiastic fish reeling in on a hook. I choose the hooks I am swimming towards more consciously and with greater care these days

However, when it comes to the word SELLING- I am a jellyfish cast adrift in a sea of shark infested water. I avoid it with a passion and actually don't do direct selling at all in my business these days. When I have ventured into direct selling by getting others to do it for me with telesales or follow up calls I haven't found it produced anything at all for me. Not because of the people I had working on it for me (they are fab and masters at their craft ), but because I think (and therefore project) that what I run is a relationship based business and that business grows through relationships. People/organisations on the whole, buy me or the people that do associate work with me because they meet and LIKE us. They like what they get, it fulfils their need/want/pain, we do a great job and they find us congruent with what we say we are and what we do. Because of that, they buy again.

I'm comfortable with the up sell and the anticipating of a client's needs to sell to them before they even know they want (need) something. But as for the persuasive- "I have this and I'd like to talk to you about it- here I am, buy me/my product, buy., buy .buy whether you want one or not”- that’s just not me. It doesn’t fit with how I promote and present myself. I am much more of “We do this, we have this, we can solve this, we can help with this, Do you want it or not?”. A former coach of mine, Chris Barrow, taught me that rather blunt, but useful rule of thumb. I like to modify it a little where we can’t meet a need articulated by a client with a little of the “We don’t provide that, but as part of my service to you, I can recommend 2 or 3 people who do provide that and who I rate as being good at what they deliver”. Fundamentally, I know what I am good at, what value I add to clients, which needs/wants I can meet and those wants I really enjoy satisfying for and with clients. I am clear about the various offerings I have in the tool bag.

I know I can sell. But in my experience, I have generally practised the art of selling for someone else's benefit and for causes I feel passionate about. When I worked in the voluntary sector I was great at selling because it was about selling for someone else's benefit. I grew up in a fund raising family- my mother's legacy was sending numerous disabled children on holidays and trips to Lourdes. (St. Bernadette was a marketing gift if ever there was one- apologies to all you un lapsed catholics out there). So I had done it all by the age of 10- Christmas fairs, door to door collecting, rattling boxes, baking, knitting, writing letters to MPs and tapping relatives for every sponsored whatever. As a senior manager, I was more than comfortable talking, selling to prospective funders with my "tales of woe and want" for people who were due a decent service to run their lives like you and me and couldn't do it on their own. I argued and persuaded for better deals around; money, standards of service, policy- whatever we were promoting as an issue at the time. 
In my youth, all of my Saturday/holiday jobs were selling. I worked on a market stall, in retail stores and in copy shops. These were all interested buyers who knew what they might want but needed help either in making a choice or in having things introduced to them that they hadn't spotted- I can do that.
   
Yet- I can't recall ever "selling" my consultancy and coaching services in the commonly understood definition of selling and sales.      

I think our ability to sell is associated with our family experience of selling. My grandfather was what one might call a spiv- A very good spiv, he could sell anything. He continued to sell long after he no longer needed to because it became his passion. Had a great line in earrings that he taught his grandchildren to make and he would sell around valentines day and xmas at around 800% profit. The kids got paid too, so although he was not averse to child labour, he paid his helpers well and they grew up with expectations of getting paid the right rate or better for the job. Interestingly, most of us have always retained this as a core value and all of my cousins are either entrepreneurs or do what I call “careers with rates” (accountants, lawyers, consultants).   

If you ask anyone in my extended family about my grandfather they will say 
“ He would sell anything, and did “. This was often out of necessity, because he had 8 children and they grew up in a working class neighbourhood in the north of England in the depression of the 1930s and then of course WW2. They were poor, proud, and for the most part, very happy. He sold my grandmother's washing line once, or rather rented it to the housekeeper of local landed gentry. They needed more drying space when they had a house full of guests over the summer and my grandparents had a huge garden with a very long washing line and 2 drying mangles (think early tumble dryers requiring significantly more effort). To him, this was an earning opportunity not to be missed, and he didn't.

So, I know that my inability or lack of passion for selling is because I associate selling with necessity and "having to" and "need" (the clue is in the language throughout this blog posting as you see). Selling was something my father moved "away from" and avoided for years and never encouraged us to do because "it was a bit spivvy". So that's it, I am currently attached to my history- I can only do it out of need - preferably someone else's. I am definitely a closet spiv- I see an opportunity and I'm off and in there most of the time. I love promoting what I do because I am passionate about it, that gets clients in the door and they come back- The relationship management marketing works for me. 

How about you?

What is your attitude to self promotion, to selling, to marketing your wares, promoting your family, your team, your organisation to the outside world? 

What values are you passing on to those around you around selling and work and their worth?

What motivates you to sell, to promote, to market and is that selling towards a goal or purchasing away from something you don’t want?

Till next time…

Marie x

Comments

[melly]

Great post. It's interesting to know that building self-confidence can be as easy as ABC. Interestingly enough, www.confidencebuildingcourses.com offer good tips too. Might be interesting to check it out.