fear of selling | Words For Hire

Caressing You Softly with My Song

February 20, 2009 by Karen Swim

Written by Karen D. Swim

All week we have been examining the topic of self-promotion. Why this topic and why now?

: Image by vividBreeze via Flickr

Why Self-Promotion?

We can hire people to sell for us or we can partner with others to cross promote products and services but none of this replaces the need for self promotion. Self promotion is sharing your capabilities with others. Whether you are a student, artist, CEO or employee, you must e able to tell others about your talents and abilities.

Our reluctance to self-promote is often rooted in false beliefs such as:

Self-promoting is rude and overbearing
Before we self-promote we have to know more or achieve more.
We’re not that special or we have nothing new to offer.
Self-promotion shows a lack of humility or modesty.
It is disrespectful. No one wants to hear us drone on about ourselves.
It is loud, obnoxious, and always unwelcomed.

Bragging versus Self-Promotion
Self-promotion is not shouting to the world, “Hey look at me, click my links and buy my junk.” Self-promotion is the ability to sell your ideas and your capabilities to those they can benefit.

Many of us have associated self-promotion with negative behavior due to deep-seated beliefs about what constitutes politeness. We have unfairly intertwined selling ourselves with bragging and they are quite different things.

Self-promotion need not be a hurricane. It can be a gentle breeze that softly lifts your hair as it whispers the notes of nature in your ear.

Why you should care?
Would you knowingly withhold information from someone who needed it? In addition to your unique gifts and talents, along your life journey you have collected a vast amount of knowledge and experience. No one has traveled the same exact path as you so it is unfair to assume that you have nothing special to share.

Our world has changed. It is bigger and noisier and wallflowers can get stampeded in the shuffle. In quieter times, the boss would notice your good work and promote you or the townsfolk all knew you and bought from you because of relationship. Today, we cannot keep track of who knows what as we struggle to categorize the daily onslaught of information. Learning to self-promote has become an essential skill set for our work and personal lives.

Self-promotion begins with a belief that we are capable. Your dreams will never come true if you don’t take the steps to make them happen. You may sing like an angel, but no one will know if you never open your mouth and let your voice be heard. So go ahead and sing just hold back on the bass.

How can self-promotion be of value in your own life? Is it a skill set that came naturally or did you have to work at it?

Sequins, Shimmies and Sasha

February 19, 2009 by Karen Swim

Written by Karen D. Swim

: Image via Wikipedia

Dr. Christiane Northrup has one and recommends it to other women. Beyonce has one who made her own album. David Bowie’s is famous. Miley Cyrus shares the spotlight with hers. Mine has been the cure for my fear of self-promotion.

Meet my alter ego, Sasha the sales champ. Not the multiple personality disorder, on the verge of a breakdown alter ego. A persona or role if you will that was the antidote to my fear of selling, boldly going where I could not.

My journey to finding Sasha forced me to take a hard look at my own fears. When I was an employee, my face brightened when asked about my job. I enjoyed what I did and was proud of my company. I never worried about being overbearing because sharing what you did was a normal part of getting to know others.

It was so easy when someone else’s name was on the shingle. What had changed? Me. I was emotionally attached to the product in a way I had not been in corporate. Selling had migrated from a routine business practice to a reflection of me as a person.

I needed distance and Sasha afforded me that space. An alter ego provided me the luxury of stepping into a selling role with nothing to fear. Sasha realizes that it’s her job to find other people to help. She believes in the company and knows that it is not overbearing or intrusive to talk about what “we” do. She is building two-way relationships and understands that part of her giving is letting others know what you have to offer.

When I tell Sasha my fears, she rolls her eyes and responds, “Duh, if you don’t tell people what you do, how will they know?”

We want to buy from people we know and trust. We also want to refer to people we know and trust. If we’re all too polite to let people know what we offer, how can we give and get support? My alter ego understands this principle. She has not allowed herself to be saddled with unessential emotional baggage.

My fear of selling was rooted in disordered thinking. Sasha allowed me to adjust my lens and change my perspective. Sometimes a little distance is precisely what the doctor ordered.

Have you ever created an alter ego? In what way did it help you? What did you learn about yourself?

Tomorrow we will examine specific changes that we can make to self-promote without triggering those internal alarm bells.

Crouching Lion, Hidden Fear

February 18, 2009 by Karen Swim

Written by Karen D. Swim

My own descent into full-blown fear of self-promotion began subtly. I was fine when presented with a sales situation, one in which there was a clearly defined prospect. Even cold calling did not bother me, as I somehow was able to effortlessly slide into sales mode. I had spent the better part of my career in sales and marketing or in roles that required the ability to sell.

Cowering Man

Yet, I was uncomfortable with proactive self-promotion that required me to raise awareness of my brand. A problem that may have been quietly tucked away as a quirk or minor weakness in the “good old days” came face to face with the reality of life lived aloud in living color and broadcast to millions of people. There is nothing like social media to slap you in the face with your weakness and magnify it like the trick mirrors in a fun house.

I watched in horror as peers blew past me on Twitter and created ravenous groups of fans on Facebook. I hobbled along like a one legged tortoise in a race against a herd of hares. Everyone else seemed capable of sharing their accomplishments, and telling the world what they did while I stood on the sideline waiting my turn.

I had good excuses. I did not want to bother people. People were being saturated with too much information. I did not want to come across as a know it all. I was going to be nice if it killed me. So, I didn’t invite people to friend me, I rarely promoted my blog, I never invited subscribers and heaven forbid that I should actually send a newsletter to the people who signed up for one. In other words, I did nothing.

As opportunities slipped through my hands my “politeness” started chipping away at my esteem. I believed that I wasn’t in the same league as those who self-promoted. I had a bad case of “not as-itis” – not as good, not as smart, not as credentialed. The questions came fast and furious: Was I too late to join the party? Was my market too crowded for what I had to offer? Oh gosh, why did X client hire me, this project is over my head!

Before I knew what hit me I was hiding under the table with a lion trying to avoid the stampede. Modesty had become a cancer that was affecting my job, and I had to find a cure.

I had scope creep and it wasn’t pretty. The scope of my fear had moved from self-promotion to my confidence in my ability to do my job. A job I had been doing on my own for nearly five years with 20 years of experience to back me. Shocked to my senses, I crawled from under the table and resolved to find the way – to the yellow brick road, Kansas, the Wizard (I already had the cowardly lion after all- I honestly did not care where I went as long as the Land of Scared was in my dust.

You may be tempted to dismiss your fear as a minor inconvenience but I learned the hard way that fear does not always stay in the box you have chosen. The fear of self-promotion in today’s world can cost you in opportunity, dollars and self-respect.

Stick around for the last two posts in this series and I will tell you how I drop kicked my fear like a kung-fu master.

Have you experienced scope creep in regards to fear? What did you do to overcome it?

Photo Credit: © Caraman | Dreamstime.com

How to Sing Like a Canary without Being a Blowhard

February 17, 2009 by Karen Swim

Written by Karen D. Swim

This post is the second in a week long series on Learning to Love Self Promotion. You can read the introductory post here.

Self-promotion is integrally entwined with negative emotions for many people. You may have been raised to cloak yourself in humility and view self-promotion as bragging. Or you may have seen the trait in others and found it distasteful or overbearing. To begin to overcome our discomfort and fears let us first define some terms.

Brag – 1 : a pompous or boastful statement 2 : arrogant talk or manner : cockiness (boldly or brashly self-confident)

Self – 1 a: oneself or itself <self-supporting> b: of oneself or itself <self-abasement> c: by oneself or itself <self-propelled> <self-acting>2 a: to, with, for, or toward oneself or itself <self-consistent> <self-addressed> <self-love> b: of or in oneself or itself inherently <self-evident> c: from or by means of oneself or itself <self-fertile

Promotion– : the act of furthering the growth or development of something ; especially : the furtherance of the acceptance and sale of merchandise through advertising, publicity, or discounting

We can therefore define self-promotion as selling yourself. You will note that by pure definition promotion is not inherently “arrogant” or “pompous.”

Self-promotion is necessary to make others aware of your capabilities, or offerings. You may be immensely talented or have a top-notch product or service. However, it is possible to get bypassed for opportunity simply because you did not speak up.

Have you ever watched an “expert” on television and realized that you could have provided the same information? Has someone else held a position that you were entirely capable of performing?

Imagine that someone you love has the voice of an angel. When they open their mouth to sing, the sound is so beautiful that it moves you to tears. Further they love to sing and dream of one day singing on a world stage. One day you and your loved one are at a coffee shop and a well-known music producer walks through the door. As you wait for your order, you overhear him telling the barista of his dilemna. He is putting on a local show and his lead singer has taken ill. Without a replacement, he will have to cancel the show. Do you tell your loved one to make his/her talent known or do you encourage them to keep quiet because self-promotion is an unattractive quality?

I’m going to take a wild guess and assume your answer was “Are you kidding me, I’d tell them to sing their hearts out right there in that coffee shop!”

So, why do you feel okay about self-promotion in this instance but not others? In our example, there was an expressed unmet need (opportunity) and your loved one had a solution. Not only was it okay but there was a benefit for the producer (prospect). It’s hard not to feel good about offering value to another person.

Not every sales situation is this transparent. If it were, self-promotion would be as easy as offering a band-aid to someone with a cut. We have to uncover opportunity and we do that by actively seeking people we can help. We share what we have to offer to others. They may not need what we’re selling today, but when they do, don’t you want to be the first person that comes to mind?

Were you associating self-promotion with a negative connotation? When you remove that emotion does it help remove some of the barrier for you?

Photo Credit: © Brunoil | Dreamstime.com

SELL Is Not a Four-Letter Word – Part IV

July 10, 2008 by Karen Swim

Guest Post by Brad Shorr

This is the final post in our 4 part series.

Fear Number Four – Fear of Rejection

This is the Big Daddy, the one everybody talks about and the one that derails countless sales careers before they ever start. Though I am not a psychologist, I’ll venture to say we are all permanently saddled with a fear of rejection. It’s in our bones. It might comfort you to hear that some sales people I know who seem completely impervious to rejection are, in fact, more sensitive to it than the average person. So if we cannot eliminate the fear, what can we do to minimize it and not let it get in the way of our selling?

First, don’t kid yourself into thinking you can avoid feeling rejected when you are rejected. You will. But following this sage sales advice can make all the difference in the world: hope for the best and prepare for the worst. If you are prepared for being rejected, if you know it may be coming, you will feel it less deeply and for less time when it arrives.

Second, the worst is never as bad as we think it will be. Anxiety leads us to build things up in our minds far out of proportion to their actual significance. The more we fear rejection, the more nightmarish our visions of rejection become. A prospect who does not care for our offering is not likely to slice us to pieces with a machete. More likely, the prospect will say, “No thank you,” and everyone simply moves on.

Third, reflect deeply on the advice we have all heard: it’s not personal, it’s business. Even highly successful sales professionals have a hard time remembering that just because someone says “no” to your product, service, program, or idea, they are not saying “no” to you as a human being. And here lies the Catch-22. The more of ourselves we put into our selling, the more successful we become. However, the more of ourselves we put into selling, the more it hurts when we are rejected. There is no getting around it. But I can tell you this much. Having experienced rejection thousands of times, and having performed innumerable autopsies on failed sales efforts, I have learned that in very, very, few cases does the salesperson’s humanity, if you will, cause the failure. As a matter of fact, surprisingly few rejections are caused by weaknesses in the seller’s offering. More often than not, “no sales” occur because of indifference or issues completely unrelated to the salesperson or product.

Fourth, and most important, although we cannot eliminate feelings of rejection, we can learn what customers expect of us, sharpen our skills, and greatly reduce the number of times we experience rejection. Presumably, that is why you are reading this – to gain a fundamental understanding of how to approach prospects, uncover their needs, present your ideas, sell your ideas, and make rejection and all these other fears complete non-issues.

If these brief reflections are starting to put you more comfortable with the idea of being a sales person, you have taken the necessary first step. The most difficult part of sales – for that matter the most difficult part of any endeavor – is forming the proper attitude. And I say this not as a locker room pep talk, but because I’m trying to make a critical business point. The people to whom you will be selling are looking for one thing – value. Customers seek value in your price, value in your product, value in your service, and value in having a relationship with you. Customers see value when they see clarity and confidence.

Have you ever faced the fear of rejection in any professional situation? How did you overcome it? Please share your thoughts, solutions and ideas in the comments.

A big round of applause to Brad for so generously sharing these words of wisdom this week. Brad may include these posts in a book on selling, and you can say you saw it first here!

Brad Shorr Brad is a sales and marketing consultant who lives near Chicago, Illinois. His company, Word Sell, Inc., provides strategic consulting, sales training and coaching, and business blog and other online marketing services. Brad is a prolific reader and writer who is masterful at communicating even complex subjects with warmth and humor.

SELL Is Not a Four-Letter Word- Part III

July 9, 2008 by Karen Swim

Guest post by Brad Shorr

This is Part III in a four part guest series by Brad Shorr. Don’t miss the final post tomorrow.

Eye of Terror

Fear #2 – Fear of Appearing Stupid

Do you enjoy feeling like an idiot? Being caught off guard by a question you haven’t a clue how to answer? Stumbling over your words like a hapless rookie? Few people care to look foolish, yet inevitably we do from time to time when we sell. Unfortunately I don’t have any smart pills, but I can tell you a few things to help you overcome this fear.

First, prospects do not expect you to have all the answers. They only expect you to get all the answers. If you wait to sell until you have mastered all the facts and planned for every contingency, you will never begin. Every sales person in the world is missing some piece of information that might trip them up. You are not alone!

Second, prospects are people. Most all of them want to see you succeed, not fail. What happens when you are listening to a speaker who is struggling and completely off his game? If you are like me, you feel his pain and root for him to recover. That is how prospects will feel about you when you stumble.

Third, any prospect who doesn’t feel your pain, who roots for you to fail instead of succeed, is not a prospect in any meaningful sense of the word. You cannot build sales relationships with people who do not value them.

Fear #3– Fear of Disagreement

Some people thrive on controversy – if you do not believe me, spend a few hours watching cable news programs or reality shows and you will quickly be convinced. However, for us non-sellers, disagreement is disagreeable. I think because of that, we tend to be poor polemicists and go to extremes to avoid arguments. However, when we begin selling, we begin a dialog, and sometimes that dialog escalates into an argument. Now, when I find myself in an argument, my natural reaction is to do one of three things – back off, become overly hostile, or stammer incoherently. Since none of these reactions is conducive to effective selling, I’ve had to learn how to overcome my normal tendencies. If you are like me, these thoughts may help you handle being thrust into an argument.

First – and this holds true for every aspect of selling – put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. Even if what you are hearing sounds irrelevant or irrational, bear in mind what lies behind the prospect’s words are more than likely perfectly relevant and rational concerns. By focusing on the concerns rather than the words, your conversation will reduce tension rather than heighten it.

Second, spirited conversation around your offering is not all bad. They say the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. When I sold packaging materials I learned just how true that saying is. Brown boxes, by nature, were not very inspiring to sell – or buy. Most prospects could not have cared less about my brown boxes. So, when a buyer started arguing with me about my price or my quality or whatever – I got excited. Finally, I thought, someone who cares! Argument can be a sign of interest.

Third, listen! Diligent listening is arguably the most important skill a seller can possess. Often, the prospect or customer is more interested in blowing off steam or asserting authority than in actually engaging in debate. In such cases, the most constructive action you can take is to be quiet. Many an argument can be avoided entirely simply by resisting the temptation to respond.

Have you ever been tongue tied by the fear of looking stupid to a prospect? Has the fear of disagreement kept you from selling success? Don’t let fear keep you from commenting. 🙂