Book review: Selling without selling

Without being a sales person or having any professional trace in this domain, I found a couple of inspiration for my daily professional, academic and even personal journeys in this book Selling without selling. The title in itself is an invitation to open the book and I didn't wait too long until I lost myself for a couple of hours into the comfort of my couch.

Don't expect nothing spectacular from this book. There are many simple reminders we have to deal generally in our social life: control the body language, keeping a medium to high level of social interactivity, use a positive vocabulary, think and observe twice before intervening in a conversation, care and relate to your audience. It might be easy and at the beginning of the book I was about to leave the lecture as convinced that it is nothing new I will learn out of it. But, in fact, although there were well-known ideas and practices, I realized that I didn't use them in a coherent way. Or that despite the fact that practicing some of the advices, the connection with other aspects of my PR and communications activities are rather superficial.

Overall, an easy but useful lecture for a lunch break or for a cloudy Sunday morning!

On customers, sellers and digital "body language"

I attended recently a webinar on using social media to increase sales. I am not into sales and my chances to ever get into it are very slim, but I am extremely interested about the general process of interaction and communication between customers and clients in the new 2.0 world.

What I've learned about or remembered is that:

- the customers have more control over the products and are imposing their own demands - we are buying faster than the sellers are developing;

- information is vital and your brand is not only what you say it is, but what people says it is - social media is very important and the discourse provided on various tools - Twitter, Facebook, youtube - is providing at a great extent the image of your company and the content of your brand;

- for sales, YouTube is very important: setting up an account and posting a smart, not exclusively expensive, video about your product is a good idea for attracting more customers;

- Twitter is helpful in offering various coupons for the existing or potential clients;

One of the conclusions of the webinar, going beyond the strict domain of sales is that social media requires new skills: as, for example, the ability how to find the best key-words, or how to read a link. The expression of the week was: "digital body language" - I am still thinking about how to better use it.