Over the last few years I’ve been going to a whole bunch of networking events and meetups – fun, helpful and very enlightening.
But meeting people IRL also revealed a sad truth: people just really don’t know how to sell themselves.
"SEO man, you should do SEO. How are people going to find you if Google doesn’t know who you are?"
"Oh, Adwords are the thing, you definitely have to do adwords".
"Events! If you want your business to grow, you absolutely have to host events."
The problem here isn’t that these people aren’t right: it’s that they are, and they're trying to convince me of it.
Each time you do that, no matter how right you are, you lose people’s interest and buy-in.
In the instances I recently experienced, while I liked and respected those people, the only thing they achieved is that I didn’t want to continue on the topic, and didn’t want to hear what they had to say about it. It’s called psychological reactance, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to trigger.
You just can’t go through life telling people what’s best for them and hope your good ideas will get picked up – and you ain’t going to have a fun or easy time selling your stuff, if you try to convince people of the merits of your approaches or ideas.
Of course I can’t really fault these people: they’re not sales professionals.
But, they all run a business, and if they want to keep running their business, they’d better learn how to have conversations that make a buyer want to buy in.
And for that, really all that’s required are two things:
First, have no good ideas for people.
And secondly: ask questions.