I've found there are two types of people in this world when it comes to sales.

There's a minority of people who enjoy selling. Who get a buzz from sales meetings and love doing them.

If you're in that category, this email isn't for you.

This email is for the majority of us who see selling as a necessary evil. Something we know we need to do to get clients, but we wish we didn’t have to. Or that it wasn’t so painful.

Back when I worked for Gemini Consulting in the 90s we had some excellent sales training. They took people like me who were uncomfortable selling and taught us techniques we could use to help clients get more clarity on their problems, see the full impact, and motivate them to do something about it.

Armed with those techniques and targets for $1m, $2m and eventually $5m+ of consulting to sell, I got pretty good at it.

But I never enjoyed it.

When the pressure was off, I reverted to type and avoided sales meetings. That rarely resulted in good things happening.

So over time, I discovered two “solutions” to selling.

One is attitude adjustment. Try to become more like the people who enjoy selling. Tell yourself that if you can do things to help people then it's your duty to sell them those things. Remind yourself that timid salespeople have skinny kids and other such clichés.

That never worked for me. but it might work for you. It's the underlying theme behind pretty much all the “sell without selling” training you see so much of these days. It simply relabels selling as helping and teaches you the same techniques salespeople use under different names.

I found a different path worked best for me.

Instead of trying to make myself enjoy and get good at the type of sales meetings I had, I found that I could change the type of meetings I had so that I enjoyed them. 

What I mean by that is that if you only ever have “sales meetings” with people who are already 90% ready to buy and just have a few remaining questions, those meetings are radically different to when you meet with a colder prospect and have to sell them.

All that clever questioning technique to draw out the client's problems or goals isn't needed if they've already done that themselves. All that exploration of the impact of their problems so they realise the importance of making a change isn't needed if they've already done that for themselves. All that positioning of your solution and why you're better than your competitors isn't needed if they've already done that for themselves.

A lot of sales techniques you learn talk about how sales is about making sure there's a good fit between what your clients need and what you have to offer. The truth, however, is that if you examine those techniques, they're not really about genuinely finding out whether there's a fit. They're really all about trying to convince the client there is.

But if the client is already pre-sold and already wants to work with you but just has a few outstanding questions, then your conversation with them takes on a different tone. It really does become about making sure there's a good fit that works for both of you – since you don't need to convince them of anything at that point.

Is that type of meeting pie-in-the-sky?

It is for most people because they don't have enough high-quality leads. And they don't do enough to educate their potential clients before they speak to them, so at their first meeting or call the client is still relatively cold and there's still a lot of convincing to do. So a traditional sales meeting is needed.

But if you have a marketing system that produces a surplus of leads: people who genuinely need what you have and see that you're the best person to help them. And if that system nurtures your relationship with them so that they trust you and believe you'll be able to help them. Then there's no convincing needed in your “sales meetings”. It becomes a genuine discussion about whether working together would be a good idea.

For me, that's the best solution to selling.

Sure, some people you speak to will be warmer than others.

But the better your marketing system works, the less hard you have to work at selling.

For people like me who find selling uncomfortable, it's a much better solution than trying to fix our mindset and become masters at something we don't really want to become masters at.

So if you find selling uncomfortable, I'm going to suggest that the solution for you probably isn't a training course on how to sell better (even if it's being pitched as “sell without selling”).

The solution for you is probably to learn how to generate more high-quality leads and nurture them so that you don't need to sell (so much).