This story took place in June, which was only three months ago, but – in the ongoing mid-pandemic/mid-lockdown predicament we find ourselves in – it feels like 1,064 years ago…
I’m a member of multiple Facebook groups – some intended for freelancers nationally, some intended for small business owners in my local area. Most (if not all?) of them have strict ‘no self-promotion’ policies though – the idea is that you go in and help people, not sell to them. As it should be.
In one of the groups, someone posted a post simply asking a question – I can’t remember the exact wording, but it was something along the lines of: “What aspect of sales do you struggle with the most?”
Now, given that I’ve written a book giving advice to people who struggle with sales, you could say that my interest was, uh, piqued! I added it to my ‘Saved items’ and hit the “Turn on notifications for this post” button. I was interested to see the replies and comments – and to paraphrase the mighty Aerosmith, I didn’t want to miss a thing.
Funnily enough, my friend Jon (who I recently interviewed about his experiences freelancing) left a comment about his fear of sales and also kindly name-dropped and recommended my book (aww).
Then: something weird happened. A few hours later, the post was gone. I couldn’t find it in the group when manually searching for it, and it was gone from my Saved list. I also couldn’t find any past notifications in my Notifications tab. I was baffled.
I messaged Jon about it – as I knew he’d commented on it – to see if he knew what was up. He did:
“They were promoting a course. ‘Take part in my free online course to build confidence with sales.’ Goes against the group rules I think.”
Hahaha. Uh-oh. BUSTEEEEED.
The irony here is that someone asked people what their sales fears were – and then went on to hard-sell them something. Absolute yuck.
Not only that, but their post was deleted, and (presumably) they were also banned from the group as a result. They blew their chance to get known by up to thousands of freelancers by going straight in with an ulterior motive and the hard-sell.
So what should they have done instead? Well, there’s a few things:
- They should’ve checked the group’s rules. In this particular group, in the group’s description, in big bloody capital letters, it says: “DO NOT POST SALES PITCHES OR SELF-PROMOTION, unless asked.” And so, if you go into the group and do a sales pitch or self-promote then, well, it’s not gonna end well. Additionally, this group has a dedicated weekly thread where people can safely self-promote themselves – the individual could’ve posted in there instead.
- They could’ve played the long game. Sales and networking done right (in my opinion) is a slow-burner. It takes time. In this instance, they could’ve just offered advice in response to people’s comments, and then if people messaged/emailed them asking for more advice, then they could’ve considered (gently) mentioning the sales course. Would it result in fewer people finding out about it? Arguably, yes. And would it take longer (and take more work) to get people onboard? Also yes. But that person would be able to keep contributing to the group over time: creating more posts; offering advice on other posts; and so on.
A quick side-note: as a non-salesperson, I don’t feel like it’s my place to suggest that my way of selling is better than that person’s – after all, they could be an expert sales coach. But their approach in this particular instance was definitely off. I mean, if it results in being banned from a Facebook group, then it can’t be the way to go.
Whatever the case, one thing is clear: do not sell your sales course by selling it in a salesy way in a non-salesy setting. Try saying that sentence five times after a few cocktails – I dare ya.
