As we approach the end of the school year, students are anxiously awaiting the start of the new jobs they have lined up or in some cases looking more intensely for a job as classes wind down and graduation day approaches. This reminds me of a topic that comes up periodically and that I cannot say enough about – We are all selling, all the time. Every day we meet someone new, have a discussion with a colleague, talk to a stranger on the street, it really does not matter, we are selling. Never is this more true than when looking for, or starting, a new job. I can understand that you are thinking; we are not selling “all the time”. OK, maybe that overstates it slightly but not by much. Let’s consider a very basic goal of any interaction – we want to be perceived as credible. Thus, at the very least we want to “sell” our credibility to the person on the other side of the interaction. Admittedly, a better word might be “persuade” than “sell” but since one of the definitions of sell from the Merriam Webster dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sell) is “to persuade or influence to a course of action or to the acceptance of something” I think we are safe.
My point in all this is that every time we have a discussion in the workplace, we should be trying to create an environment where our perspective is understood and accepted. So often I find that during conversations, even with employees or students who should care about how they are perceived, there is a real lack of understanding regarding how they come across to others. If one considers that you are always trying to enhance your credibility and ensure that you are progressing in your job, then this is a problem. It has to become second nature that you consider how you are perceived by others. You always want to be perceived as credible so you should be “persuading” others of your credibility and professionalism in every interaction.
Of course, there is the hard-sell and the soft-sell! In general, an aggressive hard sell technique when you are trying to sell yourself as a credible, talented professional is probably not the best approach. But you need to have an awareness of the fact that every time you speak, each of your gestures, every facial expression and certainly your tone of voice, is being perceived by those around you and impacting your credibility and the openness others have to your ideas. This puts a different light on how you advance your career on a daily basis. We have to face the fact that if we are not able to intuitively and effortlessly be a credible and persuasive professional, then we are not optimizing our career opportunities. In some sense it comes down to the age-old term that I use all too often on my blog – self-awareness. For those of us for whom self-awareness is not our strength, we need to work hard at developing the habits of reading our environment, taking cues from those around us, and consciously, objectively assessing the impact of our words, expressions, and actions on others.
One more point and another reason this idea of selling came up (again) for my blog is because of the “flip side of selling” (i.e., “the buying side” or perhaps better stated as “being open-minded”). All too often I have been in meetings where people were trying to defend a position rather than trying to understand what the person across the table was attempting to convey. If you are trying to sell your own ideas at the exclusion of others’ ideas then it is most likely not optimizing the interaction for the good of your organization. In fact, selling your credibility and professionalism is dramatically enhanced by having an open-minded attitude and listening with intention. So perhaps this blog should be titled “Sell and be Sold” rather than sell, sell, sell.
So although we might not want to be in sales, we are. Think about how you create empathy with those around you and ensure that you are perceived in a credible, professional way in order to optimize your career opportunities. If you do this enough, it will become a habit and you won’t have to keep thinking about it even as you become effective at doing it.
