Funny story.
Back in my radio days, one of the shows I was in charge of was a morning radio team.
And this particular morning team had a regular feature where a couple of psychotherapists woud come on each week.
When I say a “couple”, I mean it. They were actually a COUPLE, and they were both actually THERAPISTS (can you imagine the dinner table conversations?).
Anyhow, I knew this couple only as characters on this particular morning show. “Judith and Jim” was how I knew them. And I knew only their voices.
Fast forward a few years later.
I had left the radio business, and was at an Internet Marketing seminar.
During one of the presentations, I noticed this couple sitting near the front, and I noticed they were asking lots of questions. And their voices sounded familiar. And their names were… Judith and Jim.
We connected for the first time in person, and we've been friends ever since. (Okay, so it was “funny” as in “coincidence” and not funny as in “LOL”).
To continue my story…
I discovered that Jim and Judith ventured into online marketing just four years ago. Along the way, they had to overcome their technical deficiencies and learn to make friends with their computer. Even more so, they had to, in their own words, “open our minds to an entirely new way of being in the world, a whole new and very different mindset-a marketing/business mindset”.
But there was a problem. As they attended lots of marketing conferences, they felt something was wrong.
According to Judith and Jim, “We always felt a sense of displacement, a feeling of not belonging, of somehow being outsiders.”
As they connected with people at those same conferences they learned that others had the same complaint. And they noticed a pattern: All those who voiced this kind of discomfort were service providers, care-givers, change agents of some kind, men and women who had dedicated their lives to helping others-heart-to-heart.
“It became clear that there was a segment of the Internet marketplace that was not being served,” says Judith.
Jim chimes in, “That segment is peopled by soft sell marketers-all of us who are care-givers and life-change artists as distinct from accumulation artists whose focus is money first and foremost.”
And now these two friends of mine have written a book on the subject of soft sell marketing for service providers… and for people who don't like hard-sell approaches. I recommend you get a copy of The Heart of Marketing.