It helps to reframe the issue. "Selling" yourself is distasteful for many, because it smacks not only of loudness & brashness, but of straight up lying.
Look at this instead as a problem of knowledge distribution. In the extreme case, you do absolutely brilliant work, but tell nobody - how would people in charge of promotions/funding know you did that work?
That's the first step. You need to let people know your work exists, otherwise they really can't reward/recognize it. (Or really, in the extreme, you need to let them know you exist as the very first precondition).
The next step is the fact that you are the person who has likely spent by far the most time on the problem. You intuitively understand why this is an incredibly important problem, and why the solution is really, really good. I guarantee you that the people around you don't. How would they? They've spent much less time on it than you have.
And so part 2 becomes educating others on the problem and on the solution.
So, no, you don't "sell" yourself. You publicize and educate. It's still incredibly hard, but it captures the core of what's actually necessary much better. There's no need to be loud & brash, to paint everything in the brightest possible colors, but there's a need to communicate.
If Einstein hadn't written a paper on special relativity, he would (obviously) not have been recognized for it. And if he hand't communicated his insights very clearly and crisply, he wouldn't have been recognized, either - several people before him spelled out some of the insights, but in a much less clear manner.
So, don't "sell", just let people clearly know what you do,and why you do it. Looking at it from that angle has helped me tremendously getting over the "selling is gauche" issue.
> "Selling" yourself is distasteful for many, because it smacks not only of loudness & brashness, but of straight up lying.
Selling is often conflated with trying to trick people into doing something they don't want to do. This is ultimately counterproductive. Selling is helping others get what they want, and in return you get what you want.
Some types of selling are like that, but it would be incorrect to say that all types of selling are like that or that some salesmen don't consistently rely on straight up lying. Some bad apples spoil the basket.
> it would be incorrect to say that all types of selling are like that
I didn't say that.
I did say it was counterproductive. Making a career out of selling means you're going to need repeat customers, and customers don't return when they realize they were hoodwinked.
People who sell me what I want make a lot of money off of me because I keep coming back for more.
How many cars do people buy in a life? How many houses?
Sales has earned a slimy reputation. Slapping the word in front of hard, earnest work to brand it as something better than it is, is lying.
Clear communication has nothing to do with sales because sales has nothing to do with anything other than making a sale. Real problems and real solutions are motivated by more complex worldviews than “profit good”.
> Clear communication has nothing to do with sales
It certainly does. It produces the best kind of sales - transactions that work well for buyer and seller.
> cars
I asked the prof who taught my accounting class about his career in used car sales. He said you could tell a good dealer from bad by how long he'd been in business. A good lot will last more than 5 years, because by then he'll be running on repeat business rather than running out of suckers in the community.
> houses
I've moved around Seattle a bit. I only deal with one agent now, because she's honest and reliable, and I recommend her to anyone who asks. Real estate agents rely heavily on recommendations from satisfied customers.
> Real problems and real solutions are motivated by more complex worldviews than “profit good”.
I'm pointing out that the path to great profits is not by lying - it's by building a track record of satisfied customers. And that's how the best salesmen operate.
Consider insurance salesmen. I gave all my insurance business to one Charles Kern, who was very old school in that he always personally went way out of his way to take good care of all my insurance needs, including claims. His prices were higher, but were damn well worth it. I was very sad when he passed away, and have not found another agent since who was like him, and I'm correspondingly less loyal to them.
I have a similar relationship with my business accountant, who I've been using for 35 years. He's expensive, but he's earned my loyalty and I don't hesitate to recommend him to others. (And I started doing business with him from a recommendation by a friend of mine.)
Or, how many telecoms or ISPs you have to choose from in your area? How many banks? Very few, and at least where I live, every one has sketchy people doing sales (particularly over the phone). You can only jump around so much, I bet it averages out for everyone - for each customer telecom A loses because of sketchy sales tactics, it gains a different one that run away from the sketchy sales tactics of telecom B. Meanwhile, they keep pushing win-lose deals on people and rake in the profits.
Here's an incomplete list where I've seen dishonest sales, and expect that the entire market category is thoroughly corrputed by such:
- Cases where you buy something very rarely (like cars or houses).
- Cases where there isn't much choice in the first place (banks, telecoms, ISPs, but also SaaS products).
- Cases where there is a steady flow of new customers, and repeat ones are unlikely (lots of e-commerce, in particular on big e-commerce platforms).
Most of sales are like that. The very very small minority is about actually helping people. Then, a lot of people are about manipulating and stretching truth just slightly beyond breaking point. The rest straight lies.
Almost nothing I repeat-buy is sold to me by a salesperson. Is there marketing? Sure. Salesperson? No. In fact having a salesperson involved almost always means it’s something unwanted or unpleasant (door-to-door window salesmen, cars) and I’m inclined to avoid them and shop on my own if it’s an option—I figure if a place is paying salesmen, I’m paying those salesmen if I buy from them, and I’d rather keep that money, and besides I don’t want to spend my time playing Which Pop-Sales Book Did You Read Last with Jim and his “salesman of the month, April 2013” plaque and mass-produced golf art.
B2B sales are different but incentives there aren’t the same as for individuals—I might take more sales pitches in private life if someone was paying me to do it, it wasn’t my money on the line, and so on.
Yeah, ads, shelf placement. Marketing. No interaction with a salesperson. I take them as a really strong signal to walk away from whatever they’re selling. Ditto any direct communication that appears personalized. Cold calls. Hell even unexpected calls from my bank trying to sell me something or “check in”. No, no, no if you’re talking to me you want something and there’s nothing I want to give you so, bye, and even if I think no maybe I do want that I’ll just hang up faster because you’re (maybe) a pro so I can’t trust any of this—if I didn’t initiate the communication, I don’t need it, so, bye.
Actually, I take that back: recruiters sell to me quite a bit. Though they’re trying to convince someone else to give us both money, not me to give them money, so that’s a bit different in that I’m not purchasing anything they’re “selling”.
Before I moved to a smaller town, there was a grocery store I bought regularly from due to optimal location and relatively middle-level prices. I was pretty sociable back then, and befriended some employees. This eventually led to them warning me about buying meat on certain days - turns out, they were forced to wash stale meat with detergent to erase the bad smell, and sell it as fresh. I recently confirmed it with one of the ex-employees, turns out their manager actually opposed that, but this was forced by the higher ups in the management of the whole shop chain.
That, and bunch of other stories (some second-hand, some first-hand), essentially ruined my trust in regular small business.
Did you continue to buy from them? I doubt it. Do you recommend them to others? I doubt that. Such practices tend to not work out well in the long term.
I've been investing in stocks ever since my first job. I've done reasonably well, and I focus on companies that focus on making their customers happy - and they do better than average long term. That's great salesmanship.
Only bread, cheese and processed products in original packaging, so I guess this proves your point. But they are doing fine to this day, because there's only so many people you could tell (for various personal reasons I didn't want to pursue anything serious, like ratting them out to safety inspectors and hoping they didn't bribe the local inspector, like a certain bookstore I know of... but that's another story), and people tend to stick to their local grocery stores anyway (price and location sensitivity).
For what it's worth, despite that I'm now distrusting businesses by default, I try to compensate for that; if there's a store or service provider that I feel treats me fairly, and I don't see any obvious signs of deception in their overall business practices, I tend to stick to them despite cheaper options available. I feel fair business should be rewarded, and I do my best to put my money where my mouth is in this area.
> It helps to reframe the issue. "Selling" yourself is distasteful for many, because it smacks not only of loudness & brashness, but of straight up lying.
But a lot of people who get the promotions and funding are straight up lying. Selling yourself is distasteful because you can't compete with the dishonest, you don't want to play that game.
Counterpoint: smart, interested, thoughtful people want to hear your ideas. Judging their judgment in advance, assuming they’ll all be swayed by brashness and unsupportable claims, is really to discount their intelligence. A failure to reach them, to inform your peers, to share and collaborate on ideas due to misplaced humility, to expect someone to entirely bear the responsibility of seeking us out, is almost equally arrogant as the brash salesman.
You can compete with the dishonest. Just because many liars are sellers, doesn’t mean all marketing is lying.
Exactly. This kind of lying is like return-oriented programming attack. Technically you didn't lie to them, didn't inject them with malicious payload straight up - you just crafted your input to guarantee their mental process generates the malicious payload (the lie) for them.
The other part of the framing problem is pushing through your internal critic. Impostor syndrome is very real and very difficult to overcome.
We're exposed to brilliance from others all around us, but we only see our own repeated failures. But that's a very biased sample. Others also stumble. But those stumbles are invisible. Likewise, your own past success is likely to be drowned out by the noise.
> educating others on the problem and on the solution.
I have had positive results due to this a few times. Though I was not "selling" myself, but product of some company at retail stores. I had never done that before so didn't know anything about "selling". Hence I did what I thought was acceptable to me i.e. educate customers and explain the solution, the only additional thing I did was to understand the customer's requirements first. That helps in calibrating the message for specific audiences.
> Look at this instead as a problem of knowledge distribution
I personally found this to be helpful. I find it more comfortable to document and present internally to my companies than to the public at large. I've tried blogging, but it feels pointless. At least with internal presentation, I hear positive feedback from it. Maybe it is just that one person six months later who messages me that I saved them days of work.
"It helps to reframe the issue. "Selling" yourself is distasteful for many, because it smacks not only of loudness & brashness, but of straight up lying."
I think a lot of folks think franchise auto dealers or traveling Hoover reps when they think about "selling". I've always found that sort of "get someone to give me their money for something no matter what" process is better equated with "hustling".
I have a few great relationships with real salespeople through my work, and for them it's about lining up their products with the people that truly need them for the price the products need to sell at.
I've tried to learn that as a lesson for self-advocacy and network building as well. I actually don't mind a cold call on LinkedIn from someone where our work might really benefit each other.
Austin Kleon wrote a great book "Show Your Work!" discussing this approach of sharing, communicating and exchanging creative ideas. He frames the problem in a similar fashion and brings all kinds of nuanced aspects of the issue into the discussion.
Look at this instead as a problem of knowledge distribution. In the extreme case, you do absolutely brilliant work, but tell nobody - how would people in charge of promotions/funding know you did that work?
That's the first step. You need to let people know your work exists, otherwise they really can't reward/recognize it. (Or really, in the extreme, you need to let them know you exist as the very first precondition).
The next step is the fact that you are the person who has likely spent by far the most time on the problem. You intuitively understand why this is an incredibly important problem, and why the solution is really, really good. I guarantee you that the people around you don't. How would they? They've spent much less time on it than you have.
And so part 2 becomes educating others on the problem and on the solution.
So, no, you don't "sell" yourself. You publicize and educate. It's still incredibly hard, but it captures the core of what's actually necessary much better. There's no need to be loud & brash, to paint everything in the brightest possible colors, but there's a need to communicate.
If Einstein hadn't written a paper on special relativity, he would (obviously) not have been recognized for it. And if he hand't communicated his insights very clearly and crisply, he wouldn't have been recognized, either - several people before him spelled out some of the insights, but in a much less clear manner.
So, don't "sell", just let people clearly know what you do,and why you do it. Looking at it from that angle has helped me tremendously getting over the "selling is gauche" issue.