Page 102 - How To Sell Yourself

Selling Yourself in Confrontation and Media Interviews 101 Give valuable information
To connect with an audience and get your message across, your information must be honest, positive, and caring.
Honest
If you make it a practice to tell the truth, to avoid exaggerat- ing or guessing (remember Al Gore “inventing the Internet” and a half-dozen other questionable achievements?), you never have to issue corrections, apologies, or retractions, and you never have to remember what you said.
Bill Clinton is an excellent communicator, but his entire ad- ministration was hindered and nearly brought down by his seem- ing inability to confront the truth.
If you don’t know the answer to a question, say so. But then volunteer to get the information and get back.
If you don’t understand the question, say so.
If there’s a problem, acknowledge it, and then tell us what you’re going to do about it.
Positive
Speakers and political candidates who bad-mouth the opposi- tion (in politics) or the competition (in sales) increasingly turn off audiences. If you’re the best, you shouldn’t need to put any- one else down. It’s hard to hear an accusation and not deny it, but a “what I do” is much stronger than “I don’t.” Try to eliminate the words do not from you vocabulary.
It works!
In my training session with the president of Volvo North America, when I got to explaining how to “translate the question into what it would have been if it were asked by a decent human being,” he responded enthusiastically, “Arch, you’ve just taught me how to play a new game. If this were tennis, I could beat McEnroe.”
A few weeks later he accepted an invitation to appear on the Today Show. The interviewer did the “gotcha” bit. She said, “Ev- eryone knows the automobile that’s manufactured today is piece of junk. Why are you involved in the manufacture and sale of junk?”