If you’re very good at what you do but hate the bit where you have to sell it, you’re in good company. I meet plenty of business owners, senior managers and team members who are perfectly comfortable talking about their work, right up until the moment the conversation starts to feel like “sales”.
Usually, that’s because they’ve got a picture in their head of what a salesperson looks like. Pushy, slick, over-rehearsed and always looking for the close.
Nobody wants to become that person. The good news is you don’t have to.
Start with whether you believe they should buy
Before you worry about sales technique, scripts or closing, there’s a more basic question to answer.
Do you genuinely believe the customer will be better off buying from you than keeping their money?
If the answer is no, you shouldn’t be trying to sell it. But if the answer is yes, helping them make that decision isn’t something to feel awkward about. You’re helping them solve a problem, improve something or get a result they actually want.
That change in mindset matters because customers can tell when you’re unsure of your own value. Price starts to feel uncomfortable, your confidence drops and you begin hoping they’ll somehow talk themselves into buying. They normally don’t.
Trust comes before the clever stuff
If you’re not a trained salesperson, you probably spend far too much time worrying about what you’re going to say. Your prospect sitting opposite you is usually thinking about something much simpler: can I trust this person?
Trust gets built in fairly ordinary ways. You listen properly, you do what you said you’d do and you don’t rush the conversation because you’re more interested in getting the deal over the line than understanding what they actually need.
People are very good at spotting self-interest. They notice when you’re waiting for them to stop talking so you can get back to your pitch, and they notice when every question seems designed to steer them towards the answer you wanted in the first place.
Once that happens, the conversation gets harder very quickly.
Ask better questions
The easiest way to make selling feel less like selling is to spend less time thinking about what you need to say and more time working out what you need to understand.
What are they actually trying to achieve? Why does it matter to them? What’s stopping them getting there at the moment? What happens if nothing changes?
Those aren’t clever sales questions. They’re just useful questions to understand the prospect’s needs.
The temptation, particularly if you’re technically good at what you do, is to hear the first sign of a problem and immediately start solving it. Someone tells you what’s going wrong and, before they’ve finished, you’re already explaining what they need.
Ten minutes later you’re halfway through a presentation they didn’t ask for.
Your expertise is valuable. So is knowing when not to use all of it at once. Diagnose before you start prescribing.
Reliability is boring, which is why it works
If you say you’ll call at 10am, then you must call at 10am. If you promise to send something after the meeting, you must send it. If you state a time when you’ll turn u, that’s when you must turn up!
None of that sounds like advanced sales training, which is probably why it gets overlooked.
Small failures of reliability damage trust surprisingly quickly. If somebody is considering spending a meaningful amount of money with you, they’re paying attention to how you behave before they become a customer because they’re assuming that’s probably the best version they’re going to get.
Fair assumption.
Doing the basic things consistently will usually help you more than learning a clever closing technique.
Confidence doesn’t mean knowing every answer
Another thing that makes people uncomfortable with sales is the fear that they’ll get asked a question they can’t answer.
You will. Everyone does.
Confidence isn’t knowing everything. It’s knowing you’re good at what you do and being comfortable enough to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”
Trying to bluff your way through a question you can’t answer doesn’t make you look confident. It usually does the opposite, and it can undo a lot of the trust you’ve already built.
Customers don’t expect you to know everything. They do expect you to be honest and helpful.
Look at where the objection came from
If you hear the same objection repeatedly, it’s worth looking at the conversation that happened before it rather than immediately learning a better response.
“It’s too expensive” is the obvious example.
You could practise half a dozen clever ways to answer that. Or you could ask yourself why customers keep reaching that conclusion.
Maybe the value wasn’t clear enough. Maybe you didn’t understand the problem properly. Maybe you moved to the solution too quickly. Or maybe it genuinely isn’t the right fit.
That’s useful information. Arguing harder isn’t.
Try one thing
The next time you’re in a sales conversation, don’t try to sound more polished or more like a salesperson.
Ask one more useful question than you normally would, then give the other person enough time to answer it properly. And truly listen to what they’re saying, and understand what they want and need.
