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Business Rule #30:
Let Your Work Speak for Itself
May 20, 2005
(PAGE 2 of 3)
My first sales job was selling advertising space in a chamber of commerce newspaper. In the course of a day, I routinely visited five or six potential clients, learned about their businesses, and told them about the benefits of advertising in the chamber newspaper. I was so green that I had never even heard of an “intangible,” let alone knew that it might be a tougher sell than hard goods. As I made my calls, clients not only bought ads, they noticed me. After a couple of months, I was averaging one job offer per day. If I had been inclined to accept a sales position with a different company, these were the kind of people with whom I would have wanted to work—people who appreciated that a young person could do a good job without any fanfare or boasting.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a real value to self-promotion. Confidence is usually a pretty good indicator of the quality of a person’s work. The boardroom bigwigs had a valid point: Kendra could have benefited from being more visible and vocal about her achievements.
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It’s a curious thing with advertising—everyone knows you’re going to say good things about yourself, your products, and your services. The obvious self-interest of the speaker makes most consumers suspicious of self-praise. What other people say about you and your products or services is more persuasive. That’s why endorsements and testimonials are so effective. A third party who sings your praises is more believable. This is true, even in the case of a paid celebrity endorsement—because a celebrity hand selects the projects and products with which he is willing to be associated.
Bad word of mouth caught up with Tana. She looked positively ill last week, as she watched the two teams heading into the boardroom. She knew that she was going to be judged by her staff and that, sure enough, it wasn’t going to be pretty. She didn’t want to hear what her “three stooges” had to say about her. Especially in comparison to Kendra, who had cried for joy over how her team had come through for her with flying colors.
Tana wasn’t shy about claiming credit for the curved shape of the Pontiac Solstice brochure. When she heard Trump admit that he had thought it was Kendra’s idea, Tana got downright aggressive about the value of her contribution. Unfortunately for her, her dog pound “woo woos” were more at home on the old Arsenio Hall show.
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Confidence is usually a pretty good indicator of the quality of a person’s work.
