Dress Your (Living) Room

Oh dear.

We are sadly getting used to being lectured from a particular pair of workshy elitist trustafarians from their $14MM LA mansion on the ills of ‘privilege’.

Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Their shameless ability to curry news coverage continues.

The latest intervention supports a talent show contestant.

On the face of it, a rare laudable specimen.

Except you wonder, given their stream of media hijackings, whether this is really all about them. All about promotion of their brand. Their “values”. And the poor hopeful performer a mere momentary pawn.

Such screenshots as above of take-the-money-and-run Meghan Markle blanketed my media.

Her own zoombomb of the tv show.

There must be some selling steer from how her room is dressed for the occasion.

Happily, the world’s most-read English-language online news site, the Daily Mail, provide this useful guide as to how said celebrity surrounds herself.

When we are on Sales video calls, we are not (I hope) conducting them from our sofa.

Yet what we have in place in the frame that prospects see cannot be overlooked.

What we have alongside us can be of vital importance.

It too projects our ‘values’.

I recommend creating a mini office space.

Your own ‘cubicle’.

Complete with whiteboards, flipchart sheets and graphics tacked behind you.

Not everyone has the luxury of such spare-room set-up though.

If you are constrained to a non-officey space – kitchen table or counter perhaps being the most common alternative – then you must look behind you too.

How can you make the scene you inhabit for the call as neutral as possible?

Have something in there that draws the eye, and your prospect might well spend more time wondering what it is, why it is there and what it says about you, than on thinking about what you are saying.

You do not want that.

Plants, candles, art, bowls, books, cushions.

They all say something.

And in the case above, are deliberately cultivated to do so. Perhaps even by an expensive ‘lifestyle consultant’.

We don’t have access to such luminary, but we can influence how we come across on video calls.

What is in your frame?