What’s Wrong With That?

Photo courtesy of creativecommons.org

I read a recent rant in a blog written by a well known blogger who shall remain nameless (because I don’t feel like promoting him).

In the post there is a lot of rhetoric about doing how this blog is the only place where the truth is spoken without commercial consideration. The post talks about how self-serving a number of other web sites and businesses are, and how this blog is all about things for consumers, how wrong others are for accepting sponsorships or selling things to their core customer base real estate agents), blah blah blah.

I have to admit, I don’t get it. Almost everyone is selling someone something. Whether its a kid selling their parents or a wife selling her husband, it doesn’t matter, we’re all selling stuff. But the question is why would you condemn someone for doing what you do?

So real estate coaches write articles for news media and magazines about what they think agents should do. And those articles help establish the writer as an expert of some sort. Isn’t that what we do when we blog? I looked at this multi-author blog and saw 30 contributors. All of them were selling someting, and all of them were writing to establish themselves as a person to provide a service either in the real estate industry or to the real estate industry. In fact, the author of the post offered a prize for finding an egregious example of what he was typifying as poor business. The prize, a DVD set he was selling, was created at a conference he hosted , where I am told, sponsorships had been obtained. In other words, this gentleman chose to operate in the same manner as the other people he was castigating. In other words, if he did something it was OK. If someone else did it , it was reprehensible.

In this case, the people who comdemn the sales efforts of others are , themselves, salespeople. So what makes them better, aside from some unwarranted sense of superiority? You might not like someone else’s approach to business, but that doesn’t make the business bad. It doesn’t even make their approach bad, it just makes it something you don’t like or choose not to do.

I have always defined selling something to somone as “helping them to do something in their best interest that they moght not have done if the salesperson were not present”. Or another definition that I think works is “making the value of a product or service exceed the cost. ” In either case, its not about technique, and what works for one is not to be despised by another.

I would suggest in the future, that the pot should refrain from making comments about the kettle’s dark exterior.