Skills are cheap. Passion is priceless.
Gary Vaynerchuk
“If you give people a good enough ‘why’, they will always figure out the how.”
Jordan Belfort
“If you don’t promote yourself, no one else will.”
Ryan Serhant
Sound familiar?
If you’ve spent any amount of time in business (or Sales for that matter) you’ll have heard inspirational quotes from people that have already “made it” over and over. If you’re not selling, closing, making money, then you’re not winning. Work hard and the work will take care of you. Hustle.
They sound true, and helpful even. As if, within these words and phrases, are the keys to the business kingdom and you only have to figure out how to follow them. You probably even have some favourites, I know I certainly do.
It can be fascinating, and sometimes amusing watching the strange shapes people contort themselves into trying to follow these truisms. Unfortunately, it leads to some real suffering and desperation among business owners and entrepreneurs when we take them at face value.
They’ll talk to huge amounts of people, throw money at marketing (or social media), buy scripts to follow, come up with elevator pitches, define arbitrary ideal customer avatars… then get frustrated when it doesn’t work. Entitled, even. Or they work harder and harder, assuming they’re just not hustling enough. Or they’ll conclude that they’re just not cut out for this selling thing and abdicate responsibility to an employee or platform to do it for them.
If their business survives, that is.
The problem isn’t the quotes and sayings.
The problem is how you’re interpreting and implementing them.
There’s a nuance to each of them, born out of years of selling and experience and doing the work to build the skills. Does that come across in a single quote?
Pff. No. That would be ridiculous.
The story can’t be simplified into one or two sentences, and when it is much of the magic gets left out.
(And of course, since we’re human you and I, we still look at these things and think “OH that’s the bit I’m missing”. It’s usually not the whole piece. But hey, we like answers!)
I have a quote like this.
A few years ago on a podcast I was asked what advice I would give to someone just starting out. It was pretty good actually, true, and it absolutely lacked all the nuance needed to make it work with any kind of aplomb.
Ready?
My advice to new entrepreneurs July 2017:
“Just be helpful. Be as helpful as you can possibly be.”
Heather Craik
Good, right? You can watch the podcast here if you’re curious.
But let me tell you right now, I did not mean run around and help people all willy nilly with anything they needed without giving any thought to your own resources, energy levels, needs, and business needs. That way leads to burnout and doormattery.
What did I mean?
That is a much longer story. It’s taken me a while to figure out what went into it myself – even though I’m the one that said it!
A huge chunk of it, I am fairly certain, is in really listening to the people that take the time to talk to you.
Email, social, messenger, comments, whatever – it all matters. Life is busy and full of distractions, when someone takes a moment to talk to you that’s a HUGE deal.
Hopping on a call with you, for a chat or to discuss how you can help?
THE JACKPOT.
Said entirely without dollar signs in my eyes. I honestly care a great deal less about the money side.
This is another human being saying to you “Here, I want to spend some of my finite time on this earth talking to you because I think it’s a worthwhile use of my time, and perhaps you can help me.”
If you can find a way to help them, they go away thinking to themselves (on some level, in their own words, duh) “That was worth it.”
A tentative connection is born.
Time spent with you is worth it.
They may then spend more time with you. Which gives you a chance to strengthen that connection.
When that connection is solid and strong? They’ll spend more time with you and be happy about it because they KNOW that time spent with you is worth it to them.
To me, that’s how you win.
Installing that connection and proving yourself worthy of it IS the entire game.
And proving yourself worthy of the time spent with you is made so much easier by deeply listening to what the person in front of you is saying they need help with and then figuring out how to help them.
Any time someone leaves your company – whether that’s after reading a facebook post or spending hours with you working on something – you want them to feel like it was worth it.
What that looks like in practical terms is going to vary a lot depending on who you are and how you do business. I could write for a long time on just this one concept if I went through and gave examples for every conceivable situation.
I’m going to trust you, the reader, to play with it and see what fits for you. Toss it aside if it isn’t what you need right now,
The store has resources to help support you in your helping. And if you want to spend more time with me, thank you and I appreciate every second.
You have to understand your own personal DNA. Don’t do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your own personal brand and stay true to it.
Gary Vaynerchuk