‘It’s that place of, you know, because it’s your business and your livelihood, having to say, “Come and buy my thing because I’m great. I’m great at it. Look at me, look at all these great things I can do for my clients.” And oh my goodness, that’s difficult.’
Jenny Procter is living proof that you don’t need to shout to get the right kind of attention. It can feel pretty lonely, being an introvert in the famously extrovert environment of a corporate marketing department. But setting up her own business meant Jenny was free to set her own rules, and the fact that her book, Marketing for Introverts, won the Business Self Development Book of the Year award is proof that her approach is welcomed by others, too.
Whether it’s the quiet power of a well-crafted blog post or the paradoxically introvert-friendly nature of video marketing, Jenny’s insights on how introverts can rewrite the marketing rules are as practical as they are reassuring.
I’m an off-the-scale extrovert, and we discovered, hilariously, that we have at times both secretly envied the other’s MBTI profile. But whether you’re an introvert, an extrovert, or something in between, you’ll find something worth listening to in this episode.
Jenny on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennyprocter/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge GIFT EDITION: https://pi-q.learnworlds.com/course/proposal-challenge-gift-24
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Jenny Procter, who is an experienced marketing consultant and host of the Marketing for Introverts Podcast. As an introvert and a small business owner, she believes that everyone can find a way to market their business and get more visible in a way that suits them. She’s also the author of Marketing for Introverts, which was named Business Self Development Book of the Year at this year’s Business Book Awards.
So first of all, yay!
Jenny Procter: Hello, Alison. Thank you for that.
Alison Jones: Congratulations. It’s lovely to have you here. I didn’t actually hook up with you at the Business Book Awards, I didn’t see you there, but did you have a good night?
Jenny Procter: I did have a good night. I went in with absolutely no expectation at all. So it was, yes, it was fabulous to come away with a shiny, shiny trophy that looks like a book. How exciting.
Alison Jones: Marvellous. And those trophies are, they’re beautiful, but also they’re impossible to take pictures of, aren’t they? They just sort of reflect the room back at you.
Jenny Procter: And fingerprints all over them.
Alison Jones: Hey, it’s fine. It’s a beautiful, beautiful trophy. Brilliant.
So, well, congratulations on the win and welcome to the podcast.
And I just, yes, I was really fascinated reading your book about your kind of lightbulb moment of identifying your own introvertism. Tell us about that.
Jenny Procter: Many introverts that I speak to, you know, there are a number of different ways that people come to that realisation, but there are some common themes and my story is that I always knew that I didn’t quite fit in certain situations. So whether that was at university, when everybody else wanted to go out and, you know, go clubbing a lot and I just needed to stay home sometimes, not every night, but sometimes.
And then moving into a marketing career and marketing teams are very often kind of creative, enthusiastic, buzzy, energetic kind of teams. And I didn’t quite fit that mould and I’ll be honest, Alison, the phrases you know, ‘shall we brainstorm that’, ‘let’s have an away day’, anything that involves working in open plan offices, all of those just didn’t feel like my ideal working environment. They just didn’t suit me.
But you kind of, you go along with it because that’s, you know, that’s the rest of the world, that’s how the world is working. And you think it’s just me, I don’t quite fit in this environment, but I’ll push through.
And then probably late 30s, 40 maybe, I was doing a master’s degree and we were studying personality profiles. And I was in a room with mostly men, mostly kind of corporate employees and I was in the public sector at that point. And having done the personality profile, I think we were sort of studying the academic relevance or something. It wasn’t just a kind of Cosmo quiz moment, but we were studying them and I came out as very, very kind of hard on the introvert scale.
And virtually all the blokes in the room were extroverts. And I thought, ah, this is why I don’t quite fit because I am, you know, extreme introvert. And that was the kind of the moment I had a proper name for that slightly uncomfortable feeling.
And it took a lot longer than that to realize that that was, you know, a good thing. And I could, you know, I could work how to use that in a positive way. But that was certainly the moment where I had a name for that uncomfortable, I don’t quite fit feeling.
Alison Jones: It’s so interesting. When I did, when I met MBTI, it was part of my MBA and I had literally the opposite experience. I’m kind of off the chart extrovert. And I felt slightly ashamed of this. I felt like it would be much more interesting to be an introvert.
Jenny Procter: Oh, that’s interesting.
Alison Jones: I felt like a sort of puppy going, you know, talk to me.
So I’ve always, I harbor this sort of, introvert envy. And I don’t know if that’s just your kind of natural MBTI, I want what they’ve got.
Jenny Procter: Yes.
Alison Jones: Just seems to me that introverts are, you know, deep thinky sort of people.
Jenny Procter: Well, yes, obviously we are, we are fabulous, but, I’d never, I suppose because I spend such a lot of time talking to introverts, I’d never heard that. Nobody’s ever said that to me. Oh, I’m an extrovert and I want to be an introvert. So thank you for that. That was an interesting point.
Alison Jones: Yes, I’m not sure. I mean, I’m good with who I am. You know, I don’t particularly want to be different. It’s just that I have this sense that it’s somehow morally inferior being an extrovert. I don’t know why.
Jenny Procter: And that’s, as an introvert, and those I’ve spoken to on the podcast and for the book and so on, that’s exactly the feeling that introverts have, you know, there’s something wrong with me, somebody said to me, I thought I was a rubbish human being. I thought there was something wrong with me.
So yes, isn’t it funny? It’s oh, it’s nice to know it’s not just you, isn’t it, always everybody is feeling slightly, slightly like an imposter in the environment.
Alison Jones: And I think that’s part of what you’re saying in the book, isn’t it, as well, is that it’s not binary, there’s lots of different traits that across and condition and qualify. And I was absolutely blown away really by this sort of taxonomy of introversion that you set out in the book.
So just tell us a little bit about the different types of introverts there are and particularly what you are.
Jenny Procter: I mean, I think there’s lots of different models of introversion and you can kind of cut it a lot of different ways. I would say that I can be fairly sociable, you know, people say to me, well, you’re not shy. You know, no, I’m not, I’m not shy. I mean, they’re different things.
I can be chatty and sociable in a workplace, but actually my, you know, how I do my best work, where I retreat to when I’ve done my peopling is, you know, is a kind of quiet space. It’s not a coincidence that I work from home, you know, in a pandemic when everybody went home to work and I thought, well, I’ve been here for a decade already, thanks very much.
So yes, I would call myself a sociable introvert, yes. But there are lots of different models and different academics who’ve put together kind of different ways of looking at it. But I think, the kind of common thing is that how do you recharge your batteries?
You know, we can all go to work, we can all sit in meetings or go to networking events or, you know, whatever it is our professional requirements are, but what do you do after that? Are you the person who goes home and sits very quietly?
So let me give you an example, Alison. Actually, I was at the Business Book Awards with a very good friend of mine, Kate, who is an extrovert and it was quite a big evening. There was lots of peopling, lots of chatting. And what did we do after that? I went home and had the quietest weekend of my life. I did not leave the house. I think I may have quietly cleaned the bathroom. Kate went to Ibiza partying. So this is, yes, this is the difference. This is how we, it’s how we recharge our batteries. And for me, I just had to be in the house on my own all weekend.
Alison Jones: If you ever, ever feel the need to clean a bathroom to recover, by the way, you know…
Jenny Procter: No, I got over that quite quickly, but I hear you.
Alison Jones: But marketing is an interesting case, isn’t it? Because there are many, many jobs in which it’s possible to be an undisturbed introvert and that’s an absolute superpower. Marketing has, as you say, this reputation for party people and brainstorming and lots of sort of activity and lots of relentless marketing and shouting about what it is you’ve got to sell.
How do you do that as an introvert?
Jenny Procter: Well, and particularly and where my kind of interest and enthusiasm for the subject came from was, you know, you can work in a corporate marketing environment and be an introvert and it’s not super comfortable, but you can do it. If you are self employed, if you run your own small business, particularly a service business that is based on your expertise. So I’m thinking about you know, accountants and pensions advisors and surveyors and architects and, you know, those kinds of people, people who’ve spent a long time studying their expertise. So they’re deep experts in what they do and they step out of the kind of the practice, business structure of what they’ve trained in to do their own thing.
And then you have to talk about yourself because you’re expert. You can’t say here’s my thing, buy it, because the thing is the expertise in your head. So it’s that place of being, you know, having, because it’s your business and your livelihood, having to say, come and buy my thing because I’m great. I’m great at it. Look at me, look at all these great things I can do for my clients. And, oh my goodness, that’s difficult.
And I, you know, I found that quite difficult initially you know, in my own marketing consultancy. So I thought I bet I’m not the only person. So yes, so that was where it came from. Not kind of corporate marketing per se, but that sort of small business, small service business marketing background.
Alison Jones: So how did that glimmer of an idea, that kind of, huh, this is my lived experience. I’m dead sure it’s other people’s lived experience. How did that translate into such a beautifully structured, by the way, book?
Jenny Procter: Well, thank you very much. I will, we’ll come back to where I got the inspiration for that beautiful structure, because you might know the inspiration behind that, but it started off as a number of conversations thinking, if that’s my experience, I bet it’s other people’s experience.
So I did what every sensible person was doing in 2020, in lockdown, which was I started a podcast. So I started to have conversations with other introverts, with business owners who were introverts, with marketing experts who, you know, also introverts. So lots of kind of conversations. And initially I think I had this idea that there were particular types of marketing that were better things to do.
So if you’re an introvert, do this, this and this, and those are the right things to do. And of course, the very first person I interviewed had done a TED talk and I thought, well, that’s not what you would naturally do as an introvert. So perhaps it’s more kind of nuanced and complex than that.
So yes, so the podcast kind of developed those ideas and conversations. And I suppose I came to the feeling that lots of different sorts of marketing are really good for introverts. You’ve just got to try and find your thing. Video, for example, doesn’t feel like it would be a nice place for an introvert to kind of do the marketing, but it’s a form of marketing you can do on your own, in your own space, in your own time, you know, when your energy is high.
So yes, that was kind of how the ideas sort of started to develop. And it took a little while from the start of the podcast to think, oh, this could be a book. It’s slightly embarrassingly too long before starting the podcast to get to the book. But so the podcast ran for about sort of two or three years before I even started to think about putting into a book form.
Alison Jones: So what was your original impulse with the podcast? Was it just to connect with people?
Jenny Procter: Yes and, as a marketing person, I say to my clients you know, content marketing is so important. And again, back to that service business, we don’t have pictures of our products. So how are we going to demonstrate our expertise? Blogging is great and video, if you can do that, that’s good.
And I wasn’t very disciplined about putting together my own blogs. But I thought I quite liked the idea of podcasting. I was listening to a lot of podcasts and I thought if I have somebody to help me with that, like external accountability. So I found a brilliant podcast editor, somebody who was kind of fun to work with and I kind of committed to creating a podcast every couple of weeks. And then I had that accountability. So I was creating my own content. So yes, that’s how that kind it started to grow as a body of, you know, work conversations, not quite research, but you know what I mean? That sort of background.
Alison Jones: It’s sort of is research though, isn’t it? You can’t help but have your thinking deepened and extended and yes, and there’s something really, there’s not that much peopling involved, is there? It’s something very intimate and one to one about the…
Jenny Procter: Absolutely. No, it’s a great way to, it’s a, you know, it’s a great medium for introverts to have really deep conversations, which is something we really like doing. So yes,
Alison Jones: …not wild about the small talk.
Jenny Procter: Can’t do the small talk to save my life. So yes, there was lots of really interesting conversations, really interesting people, which was a great, you know, great place to start.
And then, yes, then it became, Oh, then I need to write a book.
You must have this conversation with so many people who say I’ve wanted to write a book since I was a child. Is that a common thing? yes.
Alison Jones: very common bucket list thing,
yes.
Jenny Procter: yes.
Well, it was on my bucket list. This is not the book I anticipated writing when I was eight years old, but
Alison Jones: probably had more unicorns in it, the one you originally intended.
Jenny Procter: I think I was very kind of Famous Five inspired at that age and that didn’t translate into the book that I actually published.
Alison Jones: but that’s, I mean, you say oh, and then it became a book. What did that look like? How did you organize your thinking and take the material from the podcast and turn it into book form?
Jenny Procter: So I, I didn’t want to start from a blank page, couldn’t start from a blank page, but over a number of years I had written a few blog posts. I had, you know, handouts and downloads and presentations and things that I’d created in my business. And I had some of my podcast episodes had been scripted where I’d done them, you know, as solo episodes others, as I say, were conversations. So I copied and pasted. I spent quite a long time going through my laptop, copying and pasting almost everything that was relevant and dumped it all into a big Word file.
So I started there and then there was a lot of editing. And I am going to name Ginny because this was hugely inspiring, but I read, I came across Ginny Carter, who I know is one of your authors and somebody I was really indebted to and I read her book, Your Business, Your Book, and she came on my podcast as well, actually. And she was absolutely lovely.
So you said about the structure of the book, a lot of that is, you know, you don’t have to reinvent these things. There’s always somebody with the great advice. And for me, that was, Ginny and her structuring, and there’s a lot of post it notes going on as well.
So it was a combination of that kind of working out the structure with, you know, Ginny’s book as as my guide
Alison Jones: It’s a great guide to have,
Jenny Procter: It is, it is. And, you know, looking at what content I’d created. And then there were obviously lots of gaps and lots and lots of editing, but it is much easier to start I think editing, than to sit down at a blank screen and go, What should I write today?
You know, that’s hard.
Alison Jones: It is hard and it’s less likely to generate something really good than this building on that body of work that you’ve already done, isn’t it? But did you sort of surprise yourself with the writing? Did you learn anything about yourself through it? Will you do it again?
Jenny Procter: Well, would I do it again? I’m not sure about that. If I have another idea that needs to find its way into the world, I might. There isn’t one at the moment, but never say never.
I mean, honestly, I’m, you know, I’m a single parent and I’m a marketing consultant. It looked like carving out moments, but I think maybe I had an idea that I would sit Carrie Bradshaw style in my, you know, my loft apartment with my Apple Mac and it didn’t work like that actually.
Really it looked like, you know, the kids going off to their dads for the weekend and me sitting down at six o’clock on a Friday night and writing you know, keeping going, some months without writing anything at all because there just wasn’t the time. So it was, yes, you have to be very practical, don’t you, and fit in writing around other things very often.
Alison Jones: And I think that’s one of the challenges that business book authors face is that they are, kind of almost by definition they’re business people and they’ve got the full time job and it’s got to fit around that, which I think is a joy sometimes because actually the thinking that you do when you’re writing feeds into the conversations that you have when you’re working and there’s a lovely sort of synergy there when it works.
Jenny Procter: Yes, absolutely. That’s true, but also slightly frustratingly, sometimes you’ll be doing something in a work context and think, oh, I’ve written about that and what I’ve written is not right because I’ve just spent, you know, the last half an hour demonstrating it in a different way.
So, but yes, you’re right. They do kind of fit together in that way.
Alison Jones: and that in the moment is really frustrating but actually in terms of getting a better book,
Jenny Procter: yes.
Alison Jones: I mean,
Jenny Procter: Yes. Yes. Yes, absolutely. So you kind of, I suppose, you know your stuff because you’re living it and doing it every day.
Alison Jones: I think it is harder in some ways than, you know, taking three months off in a beach hut and writing, but I think
Jenny Procter: I’m here if you want to test the three months off in a beach hut, I’m absolutely here for test driving that way of writing a book. That sounds like fun. I can’t remember who I was reading who said, you know, I went and booked an Airbnb and stayed in an Airbnb for a month.
And I thought, well, you clearly don’t have two kids.
Alison Jones: Yes, yes, there’s a lot to love about that, isn’t there? But you can, you can snack, you know, I’ve done the old Airbnb for the weekend thing, and you have to write because you’re paying to go to write.
Jenny Procter: Yes.
Alison Jones: You create a sort of obligation for yourself, which is quite useful. And you can immerse yourself in a way that it’s very hard when you’re just kind of carving out the odd hour here and there.
yes.
Jenny Procter: Yes. But, you know, the odd hour here and there can also build your book or you can go back in and edit a chapter in an hour. And I think it’s, I was going to say it’s prioritizing it and that sort of, you know, that whole, we all have the same 24 hours in a day thing really annoys me. So I don’t want to go down that route necessarily, but there were some days where I thought, well, I’m going to start just by half an hour on the manuscript and then I’ll move on to my work, and sometimes that half an hour would stretch, and sometimes that was enough.
So yes, you just got to keep going, but it did take a very long time. It probably took, from the moment I said, you know, copying and pasting all that work into the one document, to saying, here is my finished manuscript, was probably two years, you know, it didn’t come together quickly, and there was a lot of time where I thought, I’m not really a writer, because it’s just a file on my laptop.
You know what I mean?
It’s not, yes, I didn’t feel like a writer while I was writing it, if that makes sense.
Alison Jones: Oh, it totally makes sense. I hear you, I see you. Yes.
Jenny Procter: Thank you.
Alison Jones: Will be a lot of people listening and nodding. yes,
Jenny Procter: Because that sort of followed me all the way into the awards. And I was sitting there thinking, everybody else in the room is a real writer and I am just, I don’t know, I’m just not,
Alison Jones: somehow it’s different when I write. Yes,.
Jenny Procter: Yes, yes.
Alison Jones: Less serious, yes, okay. And as soon as you say it out loud, you realise just how bonkers that is.
Jenny Procter: Yes, yes, yes, as I said it then I thought, oh.
Alison Jones: Now Jenny, I always ask my guests for their best tips. So for somebody who is at the start of that two year journey, or however long it’s going to take them, what would you say?
What did you wish you’d known then?
Jenny Procter: I mean, I think as I said, it’s not starting from the blank page. You know, what have you already got? What have you already written or produced? Or, you know, have you been training on something that you can start with those training slides of, you know, what is the thing? Because if you, sitting down at a blank screen is not helpful, but if you are writing a book about your business or related to your business, you will almost certainly have that material somewhere. So start with all those things.
And yes, you know, the structure, as we’ve said, the structure is I could have gone off on all sorts of random tangents but you’re trying to keep the, and this is a very marketing kind of thing, but trying to keep the reader in mind, you know, what do they need from this? How do I need to kind of signpost them through my content?
Yes. So all of those, all of those things feel like kind of useful to bear in mind.
Alison Jones: Yes, and that point about thinking about your book, not just as an author, but as a marketer, because it’s all about how it’s going to be used by the consumer. It’s all about how you frame the ideas and stuff. Yes, that’s genius. Yes, love that.
And I think your point about don’t start from a blank page is really helpful because it’s so intimidating and don’t also, I think the opposite pit to fall into is taking something that you wrote three years ago and used to think and sort of sticking to it too slavishly.
So I think it makes a great springboard.
Jenny Procter: Okay. yes.
Alison Jones: Don’t sort of, you know, you can use it to think forward into your topic rather than just thinking about repurposing stuff that you’ve done in the past.
Jenny Procter: That’s, yes, that’s a fair point, because you need to bring some, just for your own interest and enthusiasm, I think you need to bring something new to it as well, don’t you? Otherwise, it sort of feels stale almost before you’ve published it. So, yes, yes, all good points.
Alison Jones: And I’m going to ask you also to recommend us a book. I wonder if I know what it is, or it might be something different. I don’t know. What book would you recommend that people listening should read.
Jenny Procter: There are so, so many. I can see your bookshelves, you can’t see mine, but they are, you know, equally weighted down. So, this is going to come as no surprise to all your introvert listeners, but if you haven’t read Quiet by Susan Cain, it’s not a very easy book to kind of share in front of a screen because the typography is white on white, but Quiet by Susan Cain, it was published in 2012, so I’m not sharing anything particularly new there, but it is It’s brilliant.
It’s not a kind of easy, kind of snack in a weekend kind of read. It does take, it takes quite a lot, but that is a brilliant book. But from a marketing point of view, and if you’re a business owner thinking, yes, I know I need to, you know, create content for my business, but I don’t know what, Marcus Sheridan’s book, They Ask, You Answer. is also really helpful. And actually, when you’ve produced all the blog posts and all the content that Marcus Sheridan has suggested that you do, and he’s very kind of detailed in why that works and how that works and what you need to be writing about, then you have the basis for your own book, don’t you?
Because actually, if you’ve written all the blog posts in that way, then you’ve got that body of work to start with. So there’s two. Is that cheating? Sorry.
Alison Jones: Well, it’s three really, because there’s Ginny’s as well. No, but..
Jenny Procter: There is, absolutely.
Alison Jones: Yes, we do love the recommendations. And Marcus Sheridan has that fabulous quote about good content being the best salesperson in the world, doesn’t he? which I love.
Jenny Procter: Yes and there’s a great, I’ve got a bookmark in it, but the percentage of people who have already made a buying decision before they get to your website. So, you know, people aren’t going to pick up the phone. Sorry, not before they get to your website, before they contact you.
So I think 70 percent of people, I won’t be able to find the quote now, but 70 percent of people I think is the number of people who’ve already made a decision about working with you based on your content before they contact your business. So actually, if you’re thinking, why do I need to bother with, you know, great social media posts or great website content?
That is why, because that’s what people are making a decision on, not the conversation they have.
Alison Jones: once they’ve picked up the phone. yes. yes, so it’s such a profound point.
And Jenny, if people want to find out more about you, more about the book, more about the podcast, where should they go?
Jenny Procter: I guess the best place to find me is on LinkedIn, but you need to look for me it’s Jenny Procter with an E. You’ve got to spell my name right first because I don’t spell it in the normal way and I appreciate that’s not always easy and there are some great Jenny Proctors out there but they are not me.
So Jenny Procter with an E, find me on LinkedIn.
Alison Jones: Alison Jones here. I mean, I,
Jenny Procter: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Alison Jones: But don’t worry because I will put that link to your profile up on the show notes at extraordinarybusinessbooks.com along with the transcript of this conversation. So people can access the content anywhere they like and they can go straight to that link.
Amazing. Thank you so much and I’ll put the link to the podcast up there as well.
Jenny Procter: Thank you,
Alison Jones: But great.
It’s been such a pleasure talking to you, particularly delighted that Ginny’s book featured as well, because I think it’s such a great book. And yes, you kind of want to sort of press it into everybody’s hands really, don’t you? So that’s…
Jenny Procter: yes,
Alison Jones: Nice when people do that job for me. Yes, everybody should read it. Marvellous.
Well, congratulations again on the win, Jenny, and thank you so much for your time today.
Jenny Procter: It’s been a pleasure, thank you.
