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Being Interesting

By: Dave Brock

 

Being Interesting

Millions of people hours are spent every day confronting the issue, “How do we get our customers to be interested in us?”

Marketing spends millions in content strategies, overlaid with all sorts of promotion programs. Sales looks for insights or provocation. Together, marketing and sales looks for provocative prospecting messages and approaches. In the escalating volume and noise of digital/social platforms, being provocative or even outrageous seems to rule.

All focused on the concept of being interesting to our prospects and customers.

In reality, being interesting isn’t that difficult. To be interesting, we have to be interested.

We have to be curious, learning about our customers as enterprises and individuals.

We have to learn about their dreams, challenges, opportunities, strategies, goals, aspirations.

We have to take the time to get to know them, to listen, hearing both what they say and what they don’t say.

We have to listen to the people they are listening to: their customers, markets, competitors.

We have to learn to see/hear things first through their eyes/ears, not through what we may want them to see/hear.

By being genuinely interested in them, we connect more effectively.

Related Article: 8 Tips for Effective Listening

More importantly, by being interested in them, we begin to discover the things they miss, where they might be blind/deaf to the things they should be seeing or listening to.

It’s at that moment, we become interesting to them.

At that moment, we become interesting because we care. We help them discover what they may be missing, what they may not see, how they might grow, improve.

It’s pretty simple, we don’t need to spend millions in all sorts of programs, or look at how provocative we might be.

Being interesting starts with being interested.

Published: December 31, 2015
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Source: Partners in Excellence

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Dave Brock

Dave Brock is the founder of Partners in EXCELLENCE, a consulting and services company helping to improve the effectiveness of business professionals with strategy development, organizational planning, and implementation. Dave has spent his career working for and with high performance organizations, ranging from the Fortune 25 to startups, including companies such as IBM, HP, Nokia, AT&T, Microsoft, General Electric, and many, many more. The work Dave does with business strategies is closely tied to personal effectiveness of the people in the organization. As a result, Dave is deeply involved in the development of a number of training and coaching programs.

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