Business is not a competition of who is the smartest person in a classroom. Check clearly, business is about who understands the needs of potential customers and can provide solutions for them, optimized over value, pricing and other factors. While you might have made A+ in the classroom exam, in the exam of business, new skills are required, and that A+ cannot be transferred automatically from classroom to the market.
That demands reality and humility by understanding that to win in markets, you must make efforts to understand the customers. Unfortunately, customers are moving targets unlike your handouts or course textbooks!
Then, after you have built that product, you must also communicate what that product does, if you hope to have the ability to convert those customers to paying ones. Be clear, concise and do not try to be super-clever as you plot how to explain what your product does. Indeed, you do not have to make yourself seem “important”. How can you wait for that client for extra 30 minutes? How can you smile when the customer tells you that your product makes no sense? How can you feel engaged when the client shows no interest?
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One line: forget yourself and focus on the outcome. That is how you get that A+ in the market: perseverance, dedication and absolute commitment to the strategic goal.
In business, your objective is one thing: customers must understand your products so that they can open their wallets. And as you do that, show uncommon composure because business is built on “addition”: we are not friends, but let us forget that, after this transaction we can return to being “enemies”, but right now, for the sake of business, let us close this deal as friends.
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Some even bear grudges in business, as if they are attending village meetings. The only worthy competition in business is being peerless in customer experience, because it’s customers that sustain a business.
Many in our climes are not actually in business, it’s just that there are no viable alternatives, they have more of disgruntled customers than happy ones, a perplexing state of affairs.
The first sign of knowledge and capacity deficit is the inability to explain the very thing you offer in clear and concise manner, it is never meant to be a competition in confusion.