Our Thought Leaders CEO, Lisa O'Neill, was explaining to our comms marketing team about the precious commodity that is our students' attention. She was using 'over emailing' as a case in point for the discussion. I liked the tone she was voicing and the underlying operating mindset of how precious someone's attention is.
Internet marketers have some seriously dodgy angles on this. Techniques like intentionally omitting a link so you have to say 'oops here's the link' or 'sorry I messed up' as if this leapfrogs a legitimate communication and fakes intimacy. And it works if you grind enough numbers through the system.
Marketing Authority Seth Godin communicated the need for a shift from interruption to permission many years ago in his greatest piece of work (IMO), Permission Marketing. For me it boils down to earning the right to engage with someone and treating it as something sacred.
At the heart of what we teach in the Thought Leaders Practice Curriculum and something we encourage all students in our Business School to adopt is a Generosity Marketing mindset. With a generosity mindset you are interested in creating the conditions where people choose to buy what you do rather than you interrupting and manipulating them in the name of sales. You still reach out and invite people to engage with you, indeed you do this all the time, not just between 10am-12 noon on Mondays. In this way you are always selling, but really you are always putting out invitations to buy. It might seem semantically subtle, but it's not, it's a fundamentally philosophically different approach to business development. In short: You share, they pay attention, you invite, they choose. It's true you can never sell a secret and it's also true that if you convince me to buy something I don't want, all you end up with is buyer's remorse.
Treat the moment people buy as something truly special, sacred even.
So how do you make sales more sacred?
The answer; be generous.
And know this; generosity can lead people to take advantage and be greedy. Keep giving, some will and some won't. But don't hold back, just keep giving. Watching for those who take and take and take and those who thank. The 'takers' gunna take anyway, but the 'thankers' become those you serve more impact-fully. They become the work you love, with people you like, the way you want.
And when what we are selling is you 'giving generously' is a smarter play than pestering.
If you want to learn more about Thought Leaders Business School, join us at our next discovery session.
If you've thought about attending one of our discovery sessions but haven't managed to make it yet, you can watch the replay of our last session here.
