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Foreign. Welcome to Leading Organizations that Matter podcast about leadership and how we find impact, meaning and joy in our work. I'm Ray Spadoni and today's topic is Sell, Sell, Sell baby, sell. I have a lot of respect for those who professionally sell and for leaders who can do things like design effective marketing and business development approaches and processes that demonstrate a reliable return on investment associated with such activities. This is important to the success of most modern enterprises, even mission driven nonprofits. But all this starts and ends with trust. If you violate or diminish trust, then there's the door. Thank you very much. I'm always amused, in a weird sort of way, I guess, by all the junk mail during tax season that is designed to trick the recipient into thinking that it's an important tax related document. This trickery assumes the sender will increase the chances that the mail will be opened and ultimately considered by the recipient. But it's all based on a lie. The person who opens it to peruse the contents does so only because it seems important. If I myself get something that looks like an official tax document and find out that it's a laughably veiled attempt to get me to buy an extended warranty on my car or, you know, attend a dinner at a local restaurant to hear from a financial advisor, then I'm out. If you open with a lie, then I'll see you later. So what does this have to do with the leadership of nonprofits? I mention it here for two reasons. First, because we are all subjected to sales pitches constantly. I have received countless inquiries through LinkedIn and sadly, many of them are not that different from the tax season ruse. Only these ones are more subtle and I'd say more sophisticated. For example, I sometimes receive inquiries asking if I would be available to bid on a complicated consulting project, only to find out downstream that they are actually looking to sell me services. This is fundamentally dishonest. Another example is the vendor that describes a service as included and part of an existing service contract, only to be upsold to death during the actual sales conversation. Again, fundamentally dishonest. The second reason I bring it up is because many of our mission driven organizations need to develop business development sales marketing growth strategies and these include reaching out to potential partners, donors and customers. To them I say lead with trust. Start there, showcase your mission and your values by the very way that you begin a conversation that will say something about your organization and about you. I'm sure some of you are thinking that this is a huge statement of the obvious, but take some time to look around, particularly on certain social media platforms. There are so, so many pitches aimed at sparking our interest, capturing our intrigue, but fundamentally which are not truthful. That's a real bummer and it's not much to build off of going forward. Thanks for listening. Leaving a positive review and letting others know about this podcast will help a great deal. My mission is to help empower organizations that matter by supporting those who lead them. I offer coaching, mentoring and consulting services. You can learn more about me and my work@racepadoni.com. Sa.