Stop Being Afraid to Sell

By Dorie Clark

Early in my career, I was scheduled to speak at a conference about best practices in marketing. “You’re welcome to bring in your books to sell after your talk,” said my host during our planning call. “But some of our speakers don’t feel comfortable doing that.”

Let that sink in for a moment: the speakers were afraid to make their books available to an audience of (presumably) eager buyers. No wonder so many coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs struggle to make a living.

Too many of us hold ourselves back because we subscribe to an ideology that says “sales” is bad, and you don’t want anyone to think you’re “like a salesman.” So we stay far away from asking for business, or anything even remotely involving the exchange of a dollar (which is, of course, necessary to keep our businesses going).

I grew up with that philosophy, too. My mother would say the word “sales” with a note of disdain in her voice; there’s a reason that the curricula of most MBA programs feature a surfeit of marketing classes and very few on sales. The latter, in many people’s minds, still carries a trace of the seedy and unctuous.

But we’ve got it all wrong. Good businesspeople need to be good salespeople, and that means inspiring customers both to want your product and then giving them the chance to actually buy it. If you fall short on either count, you’re out of luck – and possibly out of business. I wrote about this more in a recent Harvard Business Review article discussing why many coaches and consultants fail to succeed.

We have to stop being so afraid that others will judge us that we take ourselves out of contention. That’s doing ourselves, and the clients who can benefit from working with us, a disservice.

Dorie Clark is a keynote speaker, marketing strategist, and executive coach who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You, Entrepreneurial You, and Stand Out, which was named the #1 Leadership Book of the year by Inc. magazine. Download her free Stand Out self-assessment at dorieclark.com/join.