A good friend and colleague visited the blog and came back with an interesting question: why did I post my personal kayak experience? Then I realized that, in spite of what I wrote, my kayak post had a lot to do with marketing - and not just marketing the kayak companies I mentioned.
Very often when we are in "business" mode, we fail to show up. We have all developed public personas that let us hide behind what I like to call "the plexiglass screen of professionalism." The people on the other side of the screen can see and hear us in a slightly distorted way, but they cannot touch us and we cannot touch them. By putting more of ourselves out there, we make it easier for the people we want to be in touch with to actually reach us. This means sharing some things about passions and experiences that we have outside of the office, as well as being open about what excites us in the work that we do.
Have you ever noticed how hard it is to resist smiling when someone smiles at you? Or how it's nearly impossible not to have some kind of gut response when someone around you is excited? This can be annoying when we are being talked at, but it can be completely irresistible when we are being invited into a story and the person telling it has a deep connection to it. I've just started working with a new client who is in a field that could be very dry indeed - estate planning. We have been dancing around how to present what she does in a way that will turn people on. This is not an easy task, because in addition to being dry, her work centers on one thing none of us like to think about: death. But I got my client to start telling me about some of the people she had helped - and the transformation that had been wrought in the lives of several families. I have to confess that my eyes were not dry. Moved as I was by the stories, I was equally moved as I listened to this highly educated, polished professional start to show up in a fully genuine, open-hearted way. It was pretty amazing and I got a much better sense of how I could help my client market herself because I understood how her clients might connect with her.
If you're part of a professional service organization, your biggest differentiator is not your credentials or your chain of successes; it's the fact that nobody does what you do the way that you do it. So letting people see what moves you - even if it's a moonlight trip by kayak - serves only to give people a better sense of how you might do what you do. And that can be irresistible.