How You Sell To Me Shows How You Will Sell For Me…

As I clean out my inbox, texts, social messages, I often ask myself the question, “Do they actually ever read what they are sending me? Do they care about how they are representing themselves? Are they establishing the impression they want?”

Your inboxes probably look the same as mine. You are inundated with people who have perfected outreach and engagement. Endless offers of, “we can find more leads, we can build your LinkedIn presence, we can bring you more opportunities, we can be your outsourced prospecting……”

You probably have them memorized. To them personalization is a name, the company name—and sometimes they get it right. Then it goes on to, “companies like yours are struggling with their outreach [or insert what you want]… we connect you with your prospects with highly personalized, relevant, timely outreach……”

“Hmmm….. is this an example of that highly personalized, relevant, timely outreach…..?”  

Then they cite an outrageous performance number. One of these companies keeps saying, “In the past year, we’ve delivered over 250 million highly targeted messages…..” I suppose the 118 messages they’ve inflicted on me in the past 40+ days are part of that count…..

They promise of offloading all this work, doing all our outreach enabling us to double, triple quadruple our business.

And they finally top it off with “….and if we fail to achieve these goals, we will offer a full refund, so there is absolutely no risk!”

And they have their sequences, I suppose demonstrating the sequences they would offer in their outreach programs for our company. These sequences are usually, “did you get our last message….” I mentioned the company who has reached out 112 times in the past 40 days. Each week they offer, “Act this week and get this…..” But I get it week after week, so apparently I can act whenever I want to act, but why would I choose to?

When I get these “offers to grow my business,” what I am thinking, “If this is the way they are representing themselves to me, do I want them to be representing my company in the same way?”

We all act the same way. We are repulsed, we never respond, we shift these messages to our spam folders, we mute and block them in our social channels. Yet somehow they never seem to understand, they just send more…. I suppose by the end of this year, this one company will brag about over 400 million highly targeted messages–up from their current 250m.

Let me shift from my whining about these meaningless outreaches.  Let’s look at another example.

Let’s look at how we present ourselves when we look for new jobs. The single most important “product” each of us has to sell is ourselves when we are competing for a new job. Having been involved, directly or indirectly, in hiring thousands of people, I pay a huge amount of attention to how people “sell themselves” for the job.

Are they constantly focused on pitching their “features, functions” and bragging about their past “customers(jobs).” Is what they are talking about even relevant or interesting to me?  Have they done their homework, are they asking relevant probing questions, are they building the case for why they are different and we should hire them?  How do they handle the meeting?  Do they follow up afterwards?

Clients often ask me to participate in a final round of interviews for key roles.  They go through long presentations of what they’ve done, how they have consistently over achieved their goals.  They seldom ask, “What is most important to your client in their hiring decision?  What are they looking for?  What are the three biggest challenges I might face in this role?  How will they….?”

What should you take away from this?

Every interaction is a “product demonstration,” and the product is you.

How you represent yourself demonstrates how you will act in working with me, how you might represent me and my company.  Is it the way we want to be represented?

How you present yourself in an interview, tells me how you will work in the organization and with our customers.

Every conversation or interaction tells others who we are and what we care about.  If we don’t care about the people we are engaging, why should they ever care about responding and engaging?

Afterword:  This is an outstanding AI generated discussion of this post.  Enjoy!