Andy Warhol famously said that he was deeply superficial. I like to believe that I am the opposite of that. And even though our industry has a reputation for being shallow, I feel like most creatives don’t relate to this quote. And that is why it is so hard for us to sell ourselves, because we are afraid of sounding fake, egocentric and self-centered.
A couple of months ago I wrote the post ”Are Creatives Sales-Challenged?” about the challenges of selling yourself as a creative. At the end of the post I encouraged everyone to try and do these four things as an exercise to make you feel more confident when talking about your business:
1. Know your business to the last detail.
2. Believe in yourself.
3. Find out what others say about your business.
4. Speak of yourself in the third person.
So I decided to put them in practice myself to see how that changed the way I promoted my services to others. If you have been following my blog you know that the first two points are basically what I have been praising and putting in practice for a long time so I skipped straight to the third one. I went ahead and asked for client recommendations and took out some keywords from the things that they said about me:
- creative
- easy to work with
- understanding
- patient
- good eye for detail
- talented
- enthusiastic
- motivated
- committed
- organised
- hardworking
- professional
- honest
- clear
Then I tried step four and put all those keywords together in a phrase talking about myself in the third person as if I were recommending a brand to someone else:
“Grey Pistachio is a creative and talented photographer with a good eye for detail and a commitment to bringing your brief to life. He is clear and honest and patiently takes the time to understand your brand and your vision. With more than 20 years of experience managing projects, he is a hardworking and organised professional and his motivation and enthusiasm make it really easy to work with him.”
Not bad, right? I know that it’s still a work in progress but I went from not knowing what to say about myself to a whole paragraph on the benefits of working with me just by asking my clients what they thought about me. And by putting everything in the third person I didn’t feel like an egomaniac while talking about myself.
So now that I have all these selling points that I didn’t even know that I had I can go out and better promote myself. Not as a fake sounding elevator pitch but more like the strengths that my brand has. I will keep on working on this exercise and will definitely write my findings on future posts.
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