AI is Not a Game-changer for Introverts
Some cheerleaders for AI suggest it can bump introverts over their barrier of reluctance when it comes to marketing and sales. But the core diagnosis in that view is wrong.
According to an article in Kiplinger’s magazine, professional services firms finally have a tool to solve one of their most stubborn challenges: introverted accountants, consultants, architects or engineers. These high-level, experienced professionals need not only to apply their know-how for clients but also to consistently bring in new business. Yet they are reluctant to sell. Artificial intelligence (AI) can solve the problem by identifying the needs of new and potential clients, thus reducing the role of guesswork and the odds of rejection, says the article.
For decades before concentrating on the topic of introverts, I helped scores of smart, self-employed people dissolve their aversion to marketing and build a thriving practice. I also ran surveys probing the reasons for a recoil against marketing and profiled successful introverts who had circumvented supposed marketing “musts.” The Kiplinger’s article notes that firms have tried incentives, penalties, education, mandatory goals, fancy technology and training, for little or no effect. Given my interviews, conversations with clients, surveys, observation and other research, I predict this AI idea will fail as well, because it relies on false assumptions.
According to the article, fear of awkward conversations and fear of rejection cause the problem. No, not exactly. It’s not fear, I believe, holding back introverts from certain promotional activities they’re tasked to do. It’s a different emotion – revulsion. It’s deep revulsion against a way of treating other people as we do not like to be treated.
Conventional marketing advice for professional service providers mandates cold calls, cross-selling and other tactics that introverts often feel are interruptive, nosey, pushy or arrogant. As consumers, we introverts prefer to be in charge of the buying process. We loathe receiving phone calls from anyone trying to sell to us. We hate it when someone tells us what we need before listening carefully to us. Unless we’ve been wandering around in a store feeling baffled, we even get annoyed when a salesperson asks, “Can I help you?” And when we’re told at work that we need to get aggressive in selling, we dig in and resist doing to others what we strongly dislike being done to us.
The Kiplinger’s article envisions a scenario where AI presents an introverted financial advisor, let’s say, with the name and contact information of someone who has unexpectedly come into money, along with a well-crafted script for the call or email to them. Let’s suppose further that AI has calculated an 87 percent chance that the potential client will respond with something like “Yes! You could be the answer to my prayers. Let’s talk!” I would argue that the introverted financial advisor would probably still not willingly make that call or send the email.
In that scenario, AI has not eliminated the “Yecch” factor in the psyche of the introvert. And even the email, which might seem to avoid the direct pushiness of an uninvited phone call, raises the specter of inauthenticity, another trigger for marketing reluctance. From many conversations with introverted clients, I discovered that the feeling “This is just not me” about a recommended action often keeps them from following well-meant advice. And if they do something they strongly feel is alien, the ensuing interactions may not go well. Embarrassment and continued reluctance about the overture get in the way. Better data and on-target scripts from AI won’t eliminate the reluctance.
All in all, if a professional firm holds onto the paradigm that somehow, somehow, somehow introverted partners and associates need to just do the outreach and make the ask, the problem will remain – AI or no AI.
In my work with introverted self-employed professionals who did conquer the barrier of marketing and sales, three elements were key. One, they identified client-attracting activities that they felt comfortable with and that had produced clients for them in the past, such as having casual one-on-one conversations at conferences, answering questions in online forums or writing an informative brochure to be placed in colleagues’ offices. (These lists never included cold calls or cold emails!)
Two, they switched from an approach of hunting for clients to a strategy of attracting them – for instance by slowly building a reputation as the field’s top expert on something or the go-to person in their local area. Referrals gradually and inevitably follow.
And three, they changed their mindset from marketing as asking for business to marketing as creating the conditions for people who are intentionally seeking help to find them. Operating with a different paradigm of marketing than what underlies the Kiplinger’s model, introverts who are good at what they do can happily prosper without AI.
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