When I saw the interview of the two Dragon’s Den celebrities talking about Introverts in business, I was both thrilled and disappointed.
Thrilled because the discussion of personality preferences is really quite main stream these days. Disappointed because the short clip eluded to Introverts needing Extraverts to sell their wares.
In light of David Chilton and Kevin O’Leary opening the door to strengths and weaknesses that each person brings to the table, remember that we can all be successful in any endeavour that we have enough passion for. But we may not all do things the same way, and one isn’t necessarily better than the other.
Susan Cain is a celebrity Introvert. In publicizing her new book, Quiet, she did a fair amount of what we would call passive marketing. As a self-proclaimed Introvert, she didn’t engage in the outgoing and in-your-face techniques to get publicity for her book. So does this mean she needed an extraverted partner to get her book on the sales charts?
No.
There are introverted sales techniques and extroverted sales techniques, and there is room for both. I’ll bet that if you were to get Susan Cain into a room and get her talking about the power of an Introvert, she’d talk your ear off and you’d be quite taken aback by the amount of passion and drive she has about her topic. You see her display the passion and energy that Chilton is talking about.
For those of you who have Introverts on your team, don’t make judgments about what they can and can’t do. There’s more than one way to sell a cat.