An exclusive excerpt from the book Personality Not Included (Pages 274-275) …

1. Prove that it matters. Before you can get your business or your boss to agree to focus on personality, you have to find a way to prove that it matters. One of the most powerful motivating forces can be sharing a demonstrable penalty for not having a personality. Not having a personality makes your organization faceless. Faceless organizations have weak customer relationships, low loyalty, negative public brand perception and a host of other problems. Throughout this book are a collection of stories of brands that are using personality to build more positive customer relationships and stand out from their competitors. In many of those cases, personality is what makes the difference.
2. Associate with key concerns. Personality is closely linked with business topics that are getting a lot of attention today. Word of mouth marketing, social media and blogging, and authenticity in business are all hot topics. Associating the need for personality with some of these key concerns which your boss may already be aware of is a good way of defining why you need to focus on this element as well.
3. Highlight missed opportunities. In Chapter 6, we focused on identifying personality moments and learned that many of the best opportunities to demonstrate your personality come in the everyday interactions you have with your customers rather than during the customer acquisition phase that most brands spend the majority of their money on. Cataloging some of these moments in your own business and demonstrating to your boss the opportunity to focus on them for relatively low cost is a great way to illustrate the times where personality could be injected into your current interactions with customers.
4. Use competition for pressure. It is no surprise that the most undeniable motivating force is often what competitors are doing. If you can research and find instances where your competitors are using personality effectively to connect with their customers, this can provide great fodder for you to share with your boss about how you need to better incorporate personality into your business or risk being left behind by your key competitors.
5. Start small. Just like any sale, using personality needs to feel like an incremental and achievable element of your business rather than an overhaul. To this effect, it is important to let your boss know that there are ways of starting small. Perhaps your first step may be to conduct searched to find your accidental spokespeople, or craft a new history of your company that uses some of the lessons of the backstory. Either way, the point is to demonstrate that there is a way of doing small efforts that can add up to big results.