Acting and Sales Parallels

     So fun fact, when I am not going to class, or doing homework, or sleeping, I spend a lot of my time doing… theater! I am not in the spring play (which will be on next weekend and you should go see it!), but I will be in Children’s Theater (in April), and all this acting and sales concepts has got me thinking; there are an awful lot of parallels between theater and sales!
     Perhaps one of the most obvious; acting is a form of non-sales selling. I talked about this in my last post regarding auditions, but actually acting is a bit different. Instead of trying to sell yourself to a director, your aim is to sell a character to your audience. You are not your character, and the audience knows this, and yet they come in willing to suspend their disbelief. However, you have to sell the character to them; bad acting is evident when the actor cannot sell their character and story to their audience.
     You guys could probably guess all that without having to read it. But the really interesting thought I had (that hopefully will not be less interesting when I read this again in the morning) was that acting and sales also both have the same focus: the client (or audience). As Coach DiDonato said in his lecture, there are three people in a sales relationship: the seller, the buyer, and the product. Or, for acting, the actor (seller), the buyer (audience), and the product (the production). And in both experiences, the seller should be focused on the buyer, not the product. A product is great, but an actor should recognize that everything they do is to give the audience the best experience they can.
     All this to say, acting with an audience-focused mindset instead of a self or product-focused mindset can create a more positive experience for both parties; just like in sales!