Practice Marketing for Introverts Pt III

You’re Already Marketing

Those great client skills of yours? Listening, reflecting, connecting, empathizing, assessing, diagnosing, prescribing and teaching? They’re the hallmarks of exceptional salespeople. The ability to truly connect with another person, understand their problem and provide the perfect solution? That’s all sales and marketing is. You learned it in school, and you’re doing it all the time, but no one ever told you. So I’m telling you right now: you’ve been marketing all along. You just need to get comfortable with the idea of expanding your audience a little.

But How?

Here are a few tips to ease your transition.

1. Start Gradually

You’re not going to change overnight. Commit to some small changes, or one big move per month or quarter. You can find a massive list of marketing ideas here. Pick just one to focus on that’s a small stretch for you. Get it done, and repeat.

2. Don’t Sell. Solve.

If the idea of “selling” is making you feel squishy, that’s good, because selling isn’t what you need to do. Your job in marketing your practice is to connect with others and solve their problems. Your job is not to sell, it’s to solve.

You can never sell anything to anyone. All you can you is create the circumstances for people to sell things to themselves. So think of yourself as connecting, sharing, educating and solving. Not selling.

3. Engage With the World

Clients don’t have to come from information sessions, speaking gigs, media interviews and article writing. They also come from being at the gym, or a mom’s group, or at the hairdresser. They come taking classes, hanging in coffee shops. From art galleries and movie theatres.

The hardest way to find new clients is to never leave your house or office. Just get out there and engage with the world.

4. Use the Buddy System

Despite all this, it can be, beyond a doubt, nerve-wracking for the less-outgoing to…well, go out. If you’re going to engage the world, there’s no rule that says you have to do it alone. Find a buddy, and get out there. Introverted, extraverted – doesn’t matter. Moral support comes in many shapes and sizes.

5. Focus on One-On-One Interactions

Even though you might teach, or speak to groups, or show up a cocktail parties and open houses, all the good stuff happens one-on-one. Think of crowds as opportunities for a series of monogamous marketing efforts, not a pitch to a pack of rapt listeners. You don’t have to captivate a crowd. Just connect with one person.

6. Don’t Be Distracted By the Easy Stuff

There’s an enormous trend right now toward web-based marketing, especially social media. There’s a good reason for it: it’s a viable way to reach a lot of people.

The pitfall for introverts, however, is that the web is just too easy. It offers the (questionable) promise of riches and practice growth without getting out of your pyjamas, and for those of us who are a little shy, that’s too good to pass up.

So don’t pass it up. You’d be crazy not to use some of this technology to your advantage – just don’t fall into the trap of using it as your only advantage because you’re too scared to do anything else.

In a nutshell, let’s remember the words of Winnie the Pooh, who sums it all up far better than I ever could have:

“You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”

(Source: Practice Marketing for Introverts, by Dan Clements)