We will acknowledge that our fear and misunderstanding of selling has contributed to our preference for the pitch. We will embrace sales as a basic business function that cannot be avoided and so we will learn to do it properly, as respectful facilitators.

~ wwp ~

It is time for us to address our fear and misunderstanding of the basic business function of selling. We recoil from the “s” word because we see selling as the distasteful act of talking others into things. We see it as the act of persuasion. And while we are comfortable with our role as persuaders in a marketing sense—putting our clients’ messages in front of groups of their desired customers—we bristle at such persuasion in the intimate setting of sales, where the interaction is more human and the product we are selling is us.

If we are any good at what we do, we believe, then we should not have to talk people into hiring us.

A Tale of Two Salespeople

We have all been the customer in situations where the product or service we were presented with was not the best choice for us. In some of these situations we were aided by the respectful, considerate salesperson who also saw the poor fit between our needs and his product and so, appropriately, steered us away. But it is not this salesperson that we remember when we consider the necessity of selling our own services. For we have also been in these situations, but aided by another salesperson—the person for whom the transaction was all about him and his need to sell us his product. This second salesman sallied forth, intent on getting the sale, leaving us feeling violated and angry.

Perhaps the motivation of this second salesperson was rooted within his forceful personality. Maybe his incentives were aligned solely to sell to us rather than to help us. Maybe he was a victim of poor training, suffering from a misunderstanding of what it means to sell. But it is this second salesperson—the one at ease in the discomfort and adversity he created—that we conjure up when it is time for us to sell.

The Two Functions of Business

Making things and selling things are the two basic functions in business. For our business to succeed we must succeed at both.

It is true that if we are exceptional at the first we may experience times in the life of our business where merely being adequate at the second will carry us, but over time all things will revert to the mean. No matter how good we are there will be times when we are required to sell. We can wish this away, we can continue to avoid it, we can hide behind the pitch and kid ourselves that as marketers we are taking a more noble path to the same goal; but the truth is that until we embrace the fact that we are salespeople too, and we learn to master this craft as well, we will not achieve the success that we desire. We cannot be in business without embracing selling. We must, therefore, overcome the stereotypes and learn to do it properly—professionally.

Here, too, the pitch has not served us well. We have used it as a tool to avoid selling. As painful as it may be to give our thinking away for free and to act like puppets in the client-driven buying cycle, sometimes it is far easier to suffer the ignominy that at least allows us to practice our craft (even if for free) than to conjure up the sleazy salesperson and try to talk someone into hiring us.