How to succeed in business as an introvert

In this article entrepreneur Michael Shreeve provides an interesting “Introvert’s Guide To Success In Business“.

The cliché of a typical entrepreneur still is something like an alpha-type salesperson who’s always on the phone, in sales meetings or otherwise presenting and selling his or her product. While it’s absolutely true that as an entrepreneur you always have to be selling to succeed there are many different approaches of doing so.

Don’t do things that don’t work for you just because you feel obligated by some trite cliché image of what an entrepreneur should be like. If you don’t like selling on the phone then don’t do it. Do what works for you and what you feel comfortable with. People don’t seem to particularly like alpha-type salespeople anyway. Have you ever heard somebody say: “Taking sales calls and sales presentations is a really great part of my work.” or “I just love car salesmen.”?

From both my personal experience and what others have to say about this somebody who instead listens to what customers have to say and what their problems actually are is much more likely to succeed in sales. Because listening and trying to understand instead of trying to be understood first pretty much describes an essential trait of most introvert people, introverts might in fact not be inherently bad at doing sales at all. Quite to the contrary.

Moreover, as an entrepreneur – introvert or not – you should always ask for help if you need it. Not everyone is an exceptionally gifted salesperson. However, there are plenty of those out there who’d be eager to help you with selling your product or service. Same applies to customer support, marketing and pretty much every other function in business. Drawing upon others’ services certainly costs money but business in the end is all about doing the things you can do exceptionally well (which is also called your USP) yourself and leave everything else to the specialists. Business is about differentiation, focus, providing value and running an efficient operation. A jack-of-all-trades / master-of-none will inevitably fail at this.

Finally, the key takeaways from Michael’s post are these quotes:

“The best way for you to run your business/venture/organization/whatever is the way that keeps you motivated, energized, and focused.”

“Business is personal. It’s your ideas put into action. It’s art.”