The Double Edged Sword of Demonstration

The Client Letter
September 17, 2013
The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 68 Degrees
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Attraction through demonstration. That’s pretty much what I’m about.

Tactics come and go. New marketing strategies fade in and out of effectiveness.

But demonstration of value is a tried and true way to attract.

My demonstration “tool” of choice is the Platform. A blog, a newsletter, an e-letter. Some regularly repeating (consistent) offering of value to the world.

If I didn’t lose you by revealing my “business building secret” as being little more than smart hard work, then let’s move on…

The Platform is how I “demonstrate” and it’s what I teach to others.

So you might think that if you don’t have a Platform or other marketing tool like that, that you’re not demonstrating anything to the world.

But you are.

Demonstration, as it turns out, is a double edged sword.

When that client sends you an email and you respond 2 seconds later with a response, you’ve just participated in a pretty compelling demonstration.

The question is, what have you demonstrated?

You’ve just demonstrated that you will respond to a client within a few minutes with no prior notice.

Let me rephrase that:

You have just demonstrated that your agenda for the day is affected moment by moment by the agendas of others.

This is neither good nor bad, by the way. That’s not the point here. I’m not here to tell you how to live and work.

The point is that you want to become aware of how the actions you take and the words you say are perceived by others. And aware that everything you do is demonstrating something.

If it’s not demonstrating what you intend, then you might want to make some adjustments.

Look from the outside in and ask yourself what your prospects and clients are seeing. What are they perceiving based on what you are doing?