SHINE, DON’T SELL

I had a meeting this morning with a woman representing a parachurch organization who wants to partner with our church on a project. The meeting started with her pulling out a bunch of charts and statistics and reading each one verbatim.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz……..

I interrupted her.

“This is all great information, but you don’t need to “sell” me – just talk to me. Tell my why you believe in what you do.”

It kind of threw her off at first, but then she began to just talk. The “script” was thrown aside and I finally begin hearing something interesting. She became excited – and it was obvious that she believed in what she was saying. And it was then that I took interest.

Sometimes we oversell our ideas. I used to do it all the time when I was in sales. We oversell because we really want people to “buy into” what we have devoted our lives to. We oversell because we are afraid of rejection so we think that if we just keep talking or throwing out stats and charts that people will hopefully believe what we are saying. After all, we want people to know that we’ve done our homework.

But more effective then “pitching” an idea is letting your passion and belief in the product/organization/etc… do the selling for you. Tell stories. Share why you believe in it. Discuss why you have sold your life out to it. Tell stories. Did I already say that? Stories have the ability to cast vision in an incredible way.

Shine, don’t sell. Nothing wrong with charts and stats – but nothing will impact your audience or market more than “eyeball” time and belief in your product.