Tag: Philip Dodson

Not selling is the new selling

Posted on by philipdodson

IMG_3820

I have spent most of my life building businesses either for others, or my own.

I have mainly been focused on the sales/business development and marketing, and having spent a long part of my life selling, I know realise that less and less people want to be sold to.

The businesses that I like to be around and to buy their ‘stuff’ from, are the ones that do not sell.

Selling has evolved in most cases into a manipulative, often a very cynically driven process, that feels like you are simply being dragged into their sales funnel, for processing, before they move onto the next fish to trap in their net. Sure many have got really good at dressing this process up as something more ‘genuine’. Often overlaying their promotions with joyful tunes and fluffyness.

The reality is, it is simply a process, driven by making the revenue numbers look good and is just another part of the bland, homogenised industrialised system. Their is very little to choose between one bland entity or another, other than the latest sales offer.

The truly genuine businesses are interested in inspiring people with their story and are interested in building relationships with their customers or potential customers. They are only interested in speaking with the right audience, the ones that will become the true advocates of their business, the ones who will share their values and cause.

They want to make it easy to buy from them, as they make it easy to connect with them, and they want to get to know you. They want to build a bond, a trust and they want to keep that relationship going.

It is all about a clear message, it is all about businesses inspiring the right audiences to follow them. But the moment you choose the sales approach, you are choosing to simply create a commodity to sell to satisfy a need of others.

Choosing not to sell, means that you have decided to create a meaningful product or service, that will inspire people to want to join in and to become part of your journey, part of your community and that will never need any manipulative sales techniques to trap or keep customers in.

That’s why I am here at the Copass camp, because the people who founded Compass fundamentally have done it based on inspiring, based on values, building a community and not on selling.

That’s yet more evidence as to why coworking is the future of business and it is all about people.

Coworking is not a physical space

Posted on by philipdodson

coworking

I rarely blog about my actual main daily activity, which is not colouring in or watching Netflix, despite the rumours, although I do enjoy some daily art.

For those who do not follow me on social media, won’t have noticed that the normal stream of dog, cat and food pictures, have been replaced with pictures of sunny volcanic islands in the Atlantic. I am at the Copass Camp in Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands, for a 10 day working/living together event.

I was talking about this idea of coworking not being the space recently with Bernie Mitchell and a student studying at LSE, who is doing a dissertation on coworking, that coworking is not about the physical space, it is about the people and the community that you build.

I am coworking currently, thousands of miles from home at Hub Fuerteventura, with people who share a common connection, it is not about where you do the coworking, it is about the people and whether or not there are shared common values, goals, causes, that will keep that connection going either physically or virtually.

Some coworking has already turned into a commodity, just another desk space at a price, a real estate product/service, that can be marketed and sold in the same way that any product or service can be.

The real coworking in my opinion can be perfectly epitomised by Indy Hall run by Alex Hillman, this is a story of community and not the space. It has taken a long time, but then the best things are worth taking time to create.

What I have realised in my current business, is that the ‘why’ of what I do, which is all about creating a alternative world based on people and values, not just for a tiny few, but for all, had separated from the ‘what’ I do, run a coworking space.

So I have founded the New World Project, with a small and growing group of people, to do exactly what my ‘why’ is and that will be by coworking with many of them often not in the same physical space.

The community is the coworking, the physical space is where the people of that community physically connect.

For those who need a real estate solution to satisfy a need for desk space, then there are and will be plenty of solutions available, but I question whether that is really coworking and not just a remodelled serviced office.