I've spent many a day in my life training salespeople. Not retail, but business-to-business sales. Slick-suited pretty men and sexy women, silvery-throated lookers who used every trick to get the attention of some suburban white-collar man sitting in a committee being pitched to.
Often our salespeople talked about "value propositions," "return on investment," and "competitive advantage," while they flexed their biceps and showed their cleavage.
With pretty PowerPoint presentations of puerile rising graphs in the latest fashionable colors, dressed in the just-a-little-too-short skirts and too-tight-around-the-padded-shoulders jackets, they flattered and mesmerized, adding a bit of titillation to the dreary existence of the mid-floor corner office decider wannabe.
Their audiences—often the faceless committee members, each with a pen poised like a sword ready to strike—are enticed not just by the prospects of higher margins or improved efficiencies, but by the polished allure of the presenters. It’s a theater of the absurd, a spectacle where every pixel of the PowerPoint slides and every line of the pitch has been optimized for maximum seduction.
The format of the sale has changed, but the same sex and fear are pushed. Now they have added a bit of that Ronco-dicer-slicer-but-wait-there-is-more-two-for-one-almost-out-of-stock, to their Facebook, YouTube, tweets.
Sure it's different. But no, it's not. Same massaged message, new medium.
Influencers often don't realize they are salespeople being programmed for someone else's lunch. Rather, they think of themselves as famous, popular, trendsetters, or content creators and are too vapid to realize they lost out on a hefty commission for a few cents on each impression reward.
They operate in a borderless world of Instagram filters and TikTok dances, peddling products with the casual swipe of a finger. Their followers, loyal and impressionable, hang on to their every word, unaware that they’re mere pawns in a meticulously orchestrated game of digital manipulation.
No comments:
Post a Comment