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Still Afraid of the Sales Monster Under the Bed?

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I was still afraid of the Sales Monster Under the Bed when I was 32.

I was 6 years into my career in management consulting.  It was becoming clear that the road to advancement no longer lay in more expertise. Instead, it lay in what was euphemistically called “business development.”

I was no dummy. I knew what “business development” meant: the dreaded Sales Monster.

Business Development, the Euphemism

You know something’s wrong when people cloak a supposedly reputable activity in the passive voice. If they couldn’t even look you in the face when they said “business development,” it proved they really meant “sales.”  Blech.

I knew I had to do business development.  But what was it?  And what was the least horrific way to go about it?

You know the list:

  • Write white papers
  • Write articles
  • Network
  • Go to industry association meetings
  • Make cold calls
  • Explore existing client relationships
  • Do mailings
  • Send holiday cards.

Holiday cards felt a little intrusive. At least white papers relied on expertise. The other steps were too horrible to contemplate.

The Sales Monster

In retrospect, my fear of sales was self-fear, aided by the intangible nature of professional services.  Lawyers, accountants and actuaries, I later found, all suffered from the same malaise.

It just all felt so personal. I had joined consulting because it seemed a meritocratic society of the intellect. The implied promise was I’d get rewarded for being smart.

That promise was being broken. Suddenly it was personal. Clients weren’t just buying expertise, they were buying me. Or not. That wasn’t just unfair, it violated my belief that content mattered.

Worst of all, of course, was if they didn’t buy. It was hard to rationalize a loss; it meant, ineluctably that They Didn’t Like Me. I understood Sally Fields’ Oscar acceptance speech very well.

Vanquishing the Sales Monster

It took me 15 more years to realize that every thought I’d had about sales was wrong. And it was more a process than an epiphany.  There were a few books along the way that helped:

But it was more life experiences than books that changed my view.  If you come right down to it—I had to grow up.  I had to develop and change as a person in order to understand the keys to sales.

I had to recognize the ultimately paradoxical nature of sales: the best way to sell is to stop trying to sell, and to focus instead on helping others get what they wanted.

Learning the Truth

You cannot learn this truth by reading this blog. Or by reading any book or article. You probably won’t learn it from anyone telling you.  It seems to me that we all learn things the hard way—from our own experience.  And my experience is that hard lessons, negative examples, bad experiences, are better teachers than good ones. Sad but true.

But sometimes, someone can say something in a way that makes it click for you.  It can pull together your own learnings and make a light bulb a little brighter. And that can help a lot.

So, here’s my own Top Twelve list of ways that I found to say something that I found meaningful. I hope one of them can turn on a little light bulb for you.

12 Insights on Trust-Based Selling
    1. Closing the Book on Closing
    2. Handling Sales Rejection Without Becoming a Narcissist
    3. How Sales Contests Kill Sales
    4. I Can’t Make You Love Me If You Don’t
    5. Sales, Narcissism and Therapists
    6. Selling Professional Services
    7. 10 Myths About Selling Professional Services [pdf]
    8. What Clients Really Want
    9. What to Say When the Client Says Your Price is Too High [pdf]
    10. When to Ditch the Elevator Speech and Take the Escalator or the Stairs
    11. Why Nobody Cares About You (and You Should be Glad They Don’t!)
    12. Why Should We Buy From You?  Good Question! [pdf]

If you’d like more help in vanquishing your own sales monster, you can also consult my book Trust-Based Selling (as the Trust-Based Selling print edition or the  Trust-Based Selling ebook for Kindle).

If the Sales Monster still lives under your bed, remember: it doesn’t have to be that way.