Salesmanship without Tears

With the recorded Women’s Enterprise Network interview that I mentioned yesterday now behind me and the panel I’m on at the 2008 COSE Small Business Conference coming up tomorrow, I’ve suddenly realized that public speaking works a lot better for me as a way of promoting my company than does networking at receptions or buttonholing people in elevators.

I’ve become convinced over the last few months that there’s very little point in trying to promote a business through ill-fitting means. If I can’t sell my enterprise naturally and enthusiastically, no one’s going to believe me anyway, so I figure I might as well stick to the tactics that I enjoy and that make me feel I am, and appear to be, a confident champion of my business.     

I’ve been a public speaker and performer since the age of six and even though I do get stage fright – sometimes badly – I would Always. Much. rather address a roomful of strangers from a podium or stage than have to engage each one of them in cocktail chitchat, or worse, persuade them in 30 relentless seconds that my business is better than the best thing they ever imagined, including a bathtubful of hot fudge.  

Some people are really really good at light chatter and/or sales pitches and manage to be likable, persuasive or both while doing them. I don’t think I’m one of them. I love deep discussions with people I know and respect. I thoroughly enjoy bantering with the witty. But put me in a situation where I feel required to inflict myself and my spiel on the innocent, or exchange bland pleasantries with people I don’t know and will likely never see again and I feel as if I turn into a one-person sitcom of awkward artifice and embarrassed misery. 

Mary Tyler Moore, without the laughs.

Delivering a talk or participating in a debate is entirely different and makes me feel like a much more worthwhile human being. Here I have a topic to explore and an audience that has gathered on purpose to hear about it – I can joke around or drive home a point without feeling guilty, because what I have to say is at least part of why my audience has come to listen.     

So what forms of lobbying for Geniocity.com am I best at? 1) Writing, of course. I’m a career journalist. 2)  “Interviewing” the people I’m conversing with – I’m experienced at this as a reporter and it should work better, whenever I’m with someone I would like to have support my business, for me to ask good questions and listen, rather than rattle on nervously about myself and what I do. 3) Addressing a crowd; agreeing to guest talks, panels, interviews by other people and the like will get me and my company’s name in front of the public in ways I can be proud of. 

So my message here is that I believe you have to go with your gut about how you communicate best. Yes, I do practice being effective in the scenarios I like least – that’s just sensible self-preservation and eventually, I may even get good at it, if not happy with it. But I know what my strengths are and from now on, I intend to play to them as much as possible and not feel guilty for turning down an occasional promotional opportunity that might advance Geniocity’s name, but would make me want to gnaw my own arm off to escape.

Political partying

Last night, I went to a fund-raising event for a local politician who’s running for re-election this fall.  Being of the journalist persuasion, I’ve attended such things in the past only as a working reporter for a major daily, so finding myself there as a private citizen with my business cards in my pocket felt a little odd.

But not that odd, as it turns out – the crowd was made up pretty entirely of members of the arts community I’ve covered and known well for years and I quickly discovered that it’s fun to network with people I already know and like a lot, but who haven’t necessarily heard about my new business yet.

I’m capable of making myself converse with roomfuls of total strangers, but I don’t enjoy it much. Ok, that’s an understatement - generally speaking, I’d rather unstop toilets all day than walk up to circles of people I’ve never seen before and engage them in chitchat.

So while I realize that the point of networking is to expand the number of people who know me and my company, it sure was nice to walk into a party and realize that I was never going to be able to catch up with all the people I wanted to talk to before the evening ended. 

It’s also clear that politics offers a great way of connecting with the people likeliest to share the ideas and value the mission my business champions. I have to believe that supporting candidates and issues would be a good guerrilla-marketing strategy for any business that wants to be – or at least doesn’t mind being – associated with certain philosophies and positions.

So I had another V-8 moment in my ongoing self-education as an entrepreneur. Only one problem: Political support costs a lot more than a can of juice.

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Doing what you loathe. I went to a networking event last Thursday and I had a good time.

That doesn’t sound too remarkable until you take into consideration that I want to go to networking events about as much as I want to climb into a fully tubular, lightless water slide with no glasses or contacts on and drop at about 90 miles an hour through wet, plastic, enclosed airlessness into a deep tank where I know I’ll thrash about blind and disoriented until I drown.

I agree that this sounds curiously pathological. I can’t explain how it is that I became a journalist and now an entrepreneur when the thought of having to talk in person to people I don’t know can send me into a coma of pure dread. It’s like trying to be a doctor when you pass out at the sight of, oh, not even blood. Maybe saliva.

Of course, it’s only certain situations that make me feel that way. Loud cocktail parties. Big receptions. Man-on-the-street interviews. Occasions where I have to inflict myself on people who are just minding their own business. Events where I have to make polite, empty chit-chat with slight acquaintances or outright unknowns whom I can barely hear above the noise and who have nothing more in common with me than a vaguely humanoid shape and sweaty palms. 

I would rather stay home and scrub out the rabbit cage with an old toothbrush. Any. Day.

My idea of a great gathering is a small dinner party  where I already know at least four of the six people present and all of us are ready to get into a three-hour-long discussion about environmental policy or arts-based economic development or, at the very least, why “Young Frankenstein” is a better comedy – by far! - than any contemporary drivel like “Zoolander” (with maybe the exception of the underwear-removal rumble scene).    

And yet, for reasons unknowable, I have chosen occupations that absolutely require me to mingle.  Maybe it’s the same psychology that compels people to jump out of airplanes or eat blowfish for fun.

Whatever. The point is that, after I’ve spent hours or even days in leaden apprehension of one of these mass encounters, I usually end up having a much better time that I feared – just as I did on Thursday. As the guest of a nice new business friend whose graciousness I simply could not allow myself to affront by squirming spinelessly out of her invitation, I managed to walk into the party under my own power, breathe without a paper bag and meet several interesting, potentially helpful people.

It was great. Now if only I could just keep reliving that one networking event, like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day” (still not as good as “Young Frankenstein”) instead of having to steel myself for the next scary roomful of strangers.