The hard sell (sale?) doesn’t work on me. It will have the exact opposite effect on me than desired. It will make me hate you in a blink of an eye.
Whatever you are communicating it will turn into Charlie Brown blah-blah and my eyes will not glaze over but rather turn into slits of annoyance.
Christine Comaford does that to me.
As I mentioned a couple of times over the past week, I attended a great conference (BizTech Day) for small business/entrepreneurial types on the topic of online marketing and social media.
Towards the end of the day there was a panel session called “Business 2.0 – How to run your business on the cheap.” The panel included people from HP, IBM, and Microsoft so I was instantly suspicious. I didn’t know that I should have been more concerned about the non-corporate people on the panel.
Too be fair the representative from HP, IBM, and MS were actually cool, they did not overly push their tools and offered tips and tricks that had nothing to do with their companies. And the moderator was decent and got a lot of good information. But every time Ms. Comaford would speak she would go into instant infomercial-voice. It was annoying.
However, I started to cut her slack because she seemed to be communicating some interesting stuff and talked about free tools and templates on her website.
She has helped a lot of starts, I get that. She’s is wealthy and has done well, I get that. She wants to help people, I get that. But why the hard sell?
She mentioned her site several times as well as her book, which is a NY Times bestseller. At the end of the session she said she was giving away the first 5000 copies of her book, all you had to do was go to her site.
When I got home, I went to her site and was immediately ambushed by a video that was so TV-evangelist-infomercial-used-car-salesman-in-your-face that I was instantly annoyed again. And you really can’t get to her site with free tools and template unless you buy her book, or rather pay shipping and handling – I don’t know how much that is because I never went past that page – yuck.
Not cool, so obvious, and I will never buy her book. Maybe I won’t be the rich person she guarantees me to be, but at least I will have my dignity!
P.S. If you like the illustration associated with this blog post, it was done by my pal Sean Pete, a struggling illustrator who has a site at http://itsnotart.com/. That’s not a hard sell, just letting you know 
Hey Andi,
If you click on the link to the far right on the home page (Entitled “Looking for the Old Site? Click Here) of RulesForRenegades.com you can access all of our free resources.
No need to buy anything.
Hope you use our cool free resources to build a thriving business.
Best,
C
P.S. Always take the high road. There’s never any traffic!
I’m sorry I just had to lol at the fact she actually came to post on your entry, the best part was that she wanted to remind you of the site’s address. I need to set up a google alert with my name too. lol. Sorry, I can’t help it.
I sent you an e-mail about a project of mine for which I am hoping to recruit, among others, Americans who lived in France for a number of years, and then returned to the U.S. I found you through a comment you had left on Reb’s blog.
Andi, we are kindred spirits on the hard sell. I break out into an “instant rash” when they start. The worst are the unsolicited phone calls.
I think I will do a post on this one.