How Do You Describe How You Make A Living

I was asked in a surgery by a Canadian doctor recently what I did for a living.

I chuckled as I realised he expected me to trot out a job title, when in fact I described instead how I helped people.

To précis with one example, I feel it’s way better to say something like “I help big businesses avoid not selling any of their lovely new product”, rather than something insipid like “I’m a sales consultant”.

I’m reminded of the wonderful Simon Sinek Golden Circle, and a book I read not long back that recommends;

“The most important, most interesting, most critical fact to tell a customer, is what they’ll be left with after you’ve done your work.”

Around the same time, I came across a startup that last year bid for Webex online video conferencing.

As I surfed for background, I came across this delightful piece on 2.0 newsblog TechCrunch.

The issue was clearly the chosen name of the new venture being annoyingly (misleadingly?) similar to their tech blog.

At the foot of the article is a description of their business by the “founder & CEO”.

SalesCrunch is a sales training automation software (SaaS) company building tools that power on-demand sales training over any web-enabled device to help companies and their employees increase predictable sales productivity.

Whoa. Then I found their youtube channel description;

a next-generation online meeting platform, focused on applying science to the art of selling.

Double whoa. Slightly better. But still missing the mark. Even when they elaborate;

One single platform enables sales professionals to establish strong connections with customers, monitor engagement during meetings, collaborate with others across an organization, eliminate monotonous data-entry, and measure the efficiency of meetings like never before.

These are people in Sales, selling to salespeople. Yet the above list of ‘benefits’ seem too woolly, don’t they? Where’s the ‘crunch’?

I’ve not used their product, whereas I have of course used online meeting kit. Like we probably all have experienced in this space, the concept is great. Even Grandmothers take to tablet driven video calling immediately.

Yet these ‘corporate’ solutions still suffer from failing to fully marry the video with other functionality. Especially at the collaborative end, like working on whiteboards or annotating presentations and Props.

And in terms of take-up, I see plenty of people doing a cheeky Skype session from their ipad in the office, but am amazed at how, despite the video element, people spend most of their time not actually looking at the screen.

Any ‘pitch’ around their self-spoken bio would do well to incorporate how they progress beyond these points.

And the link to our own company is clear. Does your self-description truly stand out, or just sound like a load of indistinct jargon?