How to get over your sales phobia
If you want to sell more of your products, you must master two things: The thing you are good at and sales.
Hi friends,
A couple of months ago I found an email course I built for a company and never released. It wasn’t their fault, either. This one was all on me. The company that commissioned me asked for a different course, but when I went to write it this came out. Needless to say, we parted on less-than-ideal terms, but I still think the course is a good one, so I’m releasing it here for you to read, with some editing of past me so it reads better.
I’m much better at working to spec now, but past me was a bit headstrong and obstinate. I recommend you additionally read these articles to add context to this course.
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Even though it’s critical to a business’s success, most people hate the idea of selling their products. They fear people will hate them, find them annoying, and turn away from them. More importantly, they believe selling is “gross”. This is especially true for Grasslands.
Today, I’ll hopefully show you how to overcome those mental blocks and see sales as not only an integral part of your success but also a fun way to build an engaged audience that loves your brand. Keep in mind as you read this that I’m a Tundra, so I have an unnaturally high affinity for standing up and seeing “Did you know you could buy this?” YMMV.
*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 8,500-word article, then go to this website.***
Do I have to, though?
No. You absolutely do not have to learn this stuff. However, if you don’t occasionally remind people they can buy things from you, then there is almost no chance you will be able to build a critical mass of customers to make a go of it.
But maybe you don’t really want to make a go of it, and that’s cool. Maybe you finish this article and go “Yup, I hate every word of that and I’m never gonna do it.”
Then, at least you can stop beating yourself up about it. The first step to overcoming a problem is recognizing it exists, and fear of sales is a prominent problem for nearly everybody I’ve ever met.
Recognizing the problem and deciding not to do anything about it lifts a huge weight off your shoulders. It is a solution in and of itself.
That said, I would contend that the biggest thing holding people back from achieving the level of success they covet isn’t their ability to make something cool, it’s the ability to find people to buy that cool thing.
Usually, they can make something cool just fine, but they’re petrified about talking about it. They are petrified of people hating them, laughing at them, and shunning them. They’ve put their heart and soul into making something, and the idea that somebody won’t like it paralyzes them.
Does that sound like you?
If so, then you’re in good company, because I’ve never met somebody who didn’t have a little bit of that going on deep down in the bowels of their soul.
Even the best salespeople have it. Heck, I have it right now as I’m writing this piece. I worry that you aren’t going to like this article, that it won’t be filled with enough value for you, and that you’ll hate me for it.
The thought of it makes me bristle, but I soldier on anyway. See, I was right where you are not long ago.
What makes it so much harder is that I know it will turn some people off. At least a dozen of you reading this right now will unsubscribe and write me off forever. I hope that it magnetizes more people than it turns off, and it helps build a deeper bond with those who are already in my orbit.
It took a ton of inner work to get there, y’all and it’s still hard every time I hit publish, but it was so much harder before I started the type of work I’ll talk about in this article.
I used to be horrible at sales. By 30, I failed three companies, all because of my own hubris and inability to realize that sales were an integral part of the game.
After my third company went under, I didn’t have the money to try again, so I had to get a job.
At the time, the only job I was qualified to get was in sales, because there are pretty much no qualifications in sales except to sell things. They’ll take anybody for a commission-only position, which was where I started.
At first, I was as bad at sales as I was at running a company. I bounced around to a lot of sales jobs in those first years until I eventually landed at one that showed me how to sell and why selling was important.
It changed everything for me. I went from a terrible salesperson to the best salesperson in the company almost overnight and rose from salesperson to sales manager to running my own office in just a few months.
Then, I started my fourth company, Wannabe Press1, and this time it didn’t fail. In just a couple years we went from making a few thousand dollars to six figures a year and it all started because I overcame my fear of sales and marketing. We’re almost ten years on from it now and I still make a good living from it to this day.
A very smart person once told me that to be successful as a business, you must be good at two things: the thing you do and selling it.
Business success is a function of both.
The two questions…
I have two questions for you. These questions can change your opinion of sales right now. I’ve seen more light bulbs go off after asking these questions than any single thing I’ve ever said in my life.
Are you ready? Here they are.
Do you think you are a good person? I’m not talking about Mother Theresa, Gandhi level good, either. I mean do you generally feel you do the right thing given the option? Do you help your friends and family? Do you watch for pedestrians when you drive? Do you generally do good in the world when given the choice?
Do you think the things you make can change lives? Again, I’m not talking about earth-shattering changes here. I don’t expect your products to light the world on fire and create a global revolution that will bring about an era of global peace. However, do you believe that you can bring even a moment of joy into a person’s life with the things you make? Do you think it can help somebody in a moment of darkness or add to a moment of great joy?
If you answered yes to both of these questions then you are under a moral imperative to tell as many people as possible about your products.
This is not a choice.
If you are a good person, and you believe your products can change lives, then you must tell as many people about them as possible so you can change as many lives as possible.
I know that might sound silly, or hyperbolic, but it’s absolutely the truth. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.
I’m not a famous author, but I have a loyal fanbase, built from traveling the world with my books and spreading the message of my work.
I can’t tell you how many times people have come up to my table and thanked me for writing a book because it helped them in an hour of need. I saw the joy in their face when they talked to me about the book, and the sincere gratitude in their eyes as they spoke.
What would have happened if that person hadn’t seen my book? What would have happened if I wasn’t there for them when they needed me?
I don’t know for sure, but they wouldn’t have had a positive experience with my book, that’s for sure. Their life wouldn’t have been changed for the better because of me.
That would have been horrible for both of us.
The truth of the matter is that what you do can change lives. The better you are at marketing and sales, the more lives you can change.
And you are obligated to change those lives if you can.
That’s the trick about sales.
Sales isn’t about selling, it’s about finding people who need your work in the depths of their soul and showing it to them. Here’s a passage I wrote about it from a recent article.
I call this “soul resonance selling”, which is about finding people who resonate on the same frequency of weirdness as you, and it’s much, much harder than pain point selling.
Imagine a book vibrating with the same frequency as your body, and simply touching it sends a jolt through you. That’s what I’m talking about with soul resonance selling.
We have to bake that resonance deep into our work so that it calls out to the right people.
There are lots of people I don’t like, but I listen to them because they are geniuses at solving certain problems.
I do not follow any fiction writers, memoirists, or creative non-fiction writers that I don’t resonate with, because why would I?
There are infinite books out there, and I don’t need yours…except that I do need to feel seen, and soul resonance selling is about showing people they are seen in a deep and meaningful way.
This creates much more loyal fans of your work, but it’s also a higher-order need.
You will get rejected…a lot.
That last bit should have gotten you motivated to talk to all the people, every single one of them in the entire universe.
For about three seconds.
Then, the butterflies in your stomach fluttered and you dropped back down to Earth, right?
It hit you like a ton of bricks.
Because…if you have to talk to everybody, doesn’t that mean you’re going to get rejected by just about everybody? Doesn’t it mean people are going to hate you?
Well, I have bad news and good news.
The bad news is that yes, you will have to talk to people, a lot of people. The good news is that almost none of them will hate you.
Most of them will nothing you.
They won’t care about you at all.
Cheery, right? The creeping dread that most people don’t care if you live or die isn’t a comfortable one, is it?
The good news is that there is even more good news.
The good news is that this happens to everybody. Almost nobody cares about even the most famous person you can imagine.
Think about Stephen King. There isn’t a more famous author than Stephen King. He set the bar for success not only with his books, but also with his movie adaptations, for the past several decades.
He sells about 2 million books worldwide every time he releases something, like clockwork. That’s a massive number, right?
However, there are around 2 billion literate people in the world, which means 1.98 billion people don’t buy his books.
Some might hate him, but most…just nothing him. Stephen King doesn’t factor into their lives at all.
Or think about The Walking Dead…
…the smash hit television show racked up about 12 million viewers an episode at the height of its popularity…
However, there are over 200 million adults in this country. This means 188 million people just…didn’t care enough to watch.
I know that seems depressing, but the depressing part only exists if you look at who doesn’t care about you. The trick is to focus on those that do.
Any network would kill to have a show with 12 million viewers.
Every author would love 2 million book sales every time they launched a book.
Those are phenomenal numbers, but they come with a ton of rejection.
If we focus on the rejection, we’ll always be disappointed. However, if we focus on those who love our work and spend all our time finding more of them, then the rejection doesn’t matter.
In fact, the more fans you get, the more rejection you face, and that’s a good thing.
Because it’s not about those people who don’t care.
It’s about the people who do, and every time you find somebody that doesn’t care about your work, you are closer to finding one that does.
Rejection is a certainty in life, no matter what you do. The real trick is understanding that rejection just gets you closer to acceptance with the right people, and that’s what it’s about in the end; connection. Here’s a bit more about that from the same article I referenced above.
However, if instead we start thinking about that rejection as simply failing to meet the conditions necessary to convince somebody to buy, it stops being about the money.
Now, it’s about the connection. Now, it’s about the journey. Now, it’s about discovery.
If somebody loves my work, they will likely buy if they can, but buying isn’t the goal. Seeing the value is the goal. Even if they see the value, not everyone can or will buy. Some will, though.
That’s a game I enjoy playing. I love that kind of puzzle.
The “buy my book” constant promotion puzzle is exhausting, but the thought exercise of building the conditions as such so that people see the value is a fun game for me.
If you can make that mindset shift, then people who don’t buy aren’t rejecting you. They simply haven’t met the conditions necessary to buy.
Even people who buy your other work have conditions to buy your future work. It’s incumbent upon us to develop a strategy to meet those conditions.
But the money isn’t the point. The connection is the point.
If we don’t make that connection between the buyer and the product, it is a failure of our marketing, not of our work.
Who is gonna buy your work?
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