I’ve done a million cold calls, they have called me the sales GOAT and said I was born on the sales floor. But I’ve always hated sales. Nearly every day I hear the same thing from founders and small business owners, “I hate sales, you just do it all for me.”
A top global salesperson said to me once, “Jamie, you’re an anomaly. You aren’t motivated by money, or cars, or houses, or boats, or prestige, or women, or anything, except being the absolute best salesperson in the world. Only the competition of the game interests you.”
Every career advice column ever written tells you to love what you do. Find your passion. Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. It’s all dogshit advice. Crocheting tapestries for the local goodwill stall doesn’t pay the bills. Hard work, deals and the daily sales grind do.
Nobody loves sales. Not really. Not the good ones, anyway. You don’t love a hundred rejections in a day. You don’t love that at a party, when asked what you do, you get that condescending sneer like they just stepped in something, and a hasty retreat. You don’t love the follow up nobody answers, the deal that dies silently after three months of work, the client who ghosts after you’ve already done the proposal, the pitch you nailed that still loses to a cheaper, worse option. Nobody loves that. Anyone who tells you they do is either lying or selling you a lie, usually a two day course for the low low price of….
You don’t have to love it, the good salespeople know how to just get the job done.
There are moments of brilliance, winning a big deal is better than any other human endeavour, but the day to day is hard, unforgiving work. What you can love, if you’re wired for it, is being excellent at something brutally hard. Doing something that nobody else can do, despite the sneers.
Particularly in Australia, sales is treated like the bottom rung. The fallback career. The thing you do if you couldn’t make it in anything else. The crap a founder has to put up with till they can offload it. I remember working with one sales team that were treated like dogs by the whole company. A tiny island of hard workers, surrounded by a sea of useless master’s degrees, ineptitude, and pompous levels of asshole self ego, who constantly complained to us about how much work was on their plate BECAUSE OF US LOW SALESPEOPLE. So, I said to the sales team one brutal day, quietly, “just remember that while all these assholes are happy to lord it over us and tell us repeatedly how we can’t do their job, just remember, we could go to uni and learn their job. Not one of them, with a million dollars at stake, could get in the trenches and do ours.”
Sales demands more range than almost any other trade going. Sales is hard, brutal work, but it’s the grist to the mill.
No sales = no client = no company = no other jobs.
Sales is the difference between what we like to do, and what we have to do.
I vote sales teams globally go on strike for one single day. Let’s have a laugh as the vast majority of the working population not directly involved in client acquisition or outbound sales try to struggle their way through 1% of our work.
PS If you hate sales, business development or client acquisition passionately, Outsold can do it for you!
More thinking like this at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
