How to sell without feeling sleazy
Sales is a muscle you train. When I launched Salmon Labs and had my first prospective client call, it only took me 20 minutes of blabbering to go for the ask. It's like I was 15 again, asking my crush to walk her to the bus.
The good news? They were very gracious (the client, not the crush) and put me in touch with their team. Boom, founding client. But that feeling of shame, of asking to get hired, knowing full well that was the sole agenda of the meeting? That stays with you. It takes time, and reps, to shake it off.
It's easy to feel sleazy
Last week I organised a private panel with Salmon Crew members Liz Hatherley, James Sandrini and Victoria Gates-Fleming to tackle some of these questions together. Liz put it perfectly: "it's easy to feel sleazy". Great hypothetical t-shirt material. But the feeling is definitely real.
Positioning. Pricing. Promotion. Handling objections. Closing deals. Protecting margins. None of this is "strategy's job", except it always was. By being shoehorned into "doing the thinking", we got obsessed with how to do our discipline, but at the expense of how to sell the discipline.
We're no different from product people we love to criticise for "not getting brand or comms". They're not idiots, and neither are we. It's that neither of us were trained or incentivised that way. Change the incentives and habits, and you start changing what someone values and practices.
For many of us, the incentives are now there. We sell, or else. We can get out of our 'product myopia' and learn to not only get good at doing strategy, but also at selling strategy. But we need to put the reps in.
You may be an introvert and think this doesn't apply to you. Fair. It's not a blueprint for everything you need to do, but a menu for things you can do. Pick what works best for you. It's the only way to do anything sustainably.
Help over hustle
If I say "salesperson", what do you think of? Someone who repeats your name endlessly, because that's how their playbook said you build rapport? Someone who hands out business cards at an event like a coked up slot machine? Someone who spams you with '100 pre-sold clients a month'?
Here's an alternative. Someone who shows up by being helpful. By taking interest in what you're interested in, sharing useful things, or being generous with introductions. You remember them for the upfront value.
Brand building, for businesses and individuals, is not about shouting how great you are. It's an intellectual seduction act, often done outside of public feeds, one person at a time. This is harder than bombarding people with content, but that's why it stands out. Hot take slop is a commodity.
Write for prospects not peers
This doesn't mean writing or sharing perspectives is pointless. Edelman says 60% of decision makers pay a premium for thought leaders. Question is, how do you get seen as one? First, you get over the hurdle that people don't care if your post slops. Second, know what's worth writing about.
Poets don't stand out by writing to other poets about poetry. They focus on writing good poetry. It's not a perfect analogy, but it tells us that our product (strategy) is not the brand (when we want clients to think of us).
So what is our brand? What our clients might be into. Write about the categories you're interested in, audiences you think are misunderstood, brands who are doing well or could be doing better. Don't write to preach or impress your peers. Write things that help clients move their things on.
I guarantee you they're not interested in the real definition of an insight.
Why people call you
Different audiences buy different things. Our expertise is no different. You can both be known for one thing (e.g. making the complex feel simple) but also many things (through brand, comms and content strategy).
This means you have a central thought of how you deliver value, but different ways into how you can do it. Nick Parker used to have a website page called "6 reasons people call me". It's a great exercise for us all.
The reasons people call you are your Category Entry Points. Sometimes, it's as simple as "I need to write a communications strategy". Simple problem, simple solution. Other times, it's messier. "I need to get my creative and media agencies to get along better and don't know how".
Same value, same, discipline, much more precise reason to buy an expert.
Interview past clients or colleagues. Ask them what it was like to work with you. This will give you a variety of perspectives, but also patterns. Those patterns are your CEPs. Mine are: speed, energy, clarity. So I run with it. And depending on who I speak to, I lead more with one or another.
Contain multitudes
The typecasting dilemma is real when you're a strategist. Do you position yourself as a generalist, or a specialist? If you're a generalist, do you risk clients not knowing when to call you? If you specialist, are you typecast?
Stop overthinking it. Find something people can identify with and see if you can sell that. It may be an idea (strategy is a team sport), a method (workshops), or a vertical (financial services). Can't sell that thing? Pivot.
A more complex answer? Have multiple ways in. Your value should be single-minded, but how you express that value can and should change. If you're a brand and content strategist, you can introduce yourself as:
A content strategist who gets brand (if speaking to a content lead)
A brand strategist who gets content (if speaking to a brand lead)
Same offering, different framing. Learn how to adjust your positioning as you go, and get comfortable with this being the reality of sales chats. This detracting your value. It's packaging that value in more effective ways.
You may think containing multitudes may feel confusing or unfocused for prospects. I'm not saying pitch five things to every new client. I'm saying that, depending on who the client is, lead with the most attractive thing.
Recognition or recall
When you write what clients want to read, and know what your CEPs are, you start building memory structures. 81% of B2B purchases are for brands people knew of on day one. Like it or not, you're playing the long game.
The job of writing, or listing why someone should call you, is simple: to build recognition, or recall. No one ever hires someone off the back of a particularly good LinkedIn post. But this helps people get recognised when clients are in market. We answer to names that feel familiar.
If you write consistently about a discipline, vertical or area of expertise, you get remembered as "the XYZ person". The problem is this takes time, discipline, and commitment. It's not performance media. That comes later.
When you're in chats with prospective clients, the writing you produce can be something you reference or follow up with. You move them further down the funnel. But do it with tact. No one likes a bragging spammer.
Learn to distribute your writing in a sophisticated way. Posting and moving on is a waste of time because most people won't even see it once. Know how to repackage what you've already done. It compounds over time.
Long times and weak ties
Know your sales cycle. A founder I know offered an excellent rule of thumb. "Expect any deal to take a year from first contact to contract". Dentsu confirms this. Their figure? 379 days in 2024, up 16% since 2021.
Accept that this is a relationship game, but also a coverage game. Depth matters, but so does volume because it increases your odds of getting lucky. Reach and frequency are your friends in the game of attention.
Branch outside of your usual circles. If you mostly hang out with strategists, then lots of you will know lots of strategists. If you hang out with a Managing Director at a local B2B firm, chances are you're the only strategist they know. And if they need one of you, guess who they'll call.
Ditch the "s" word
Not every client will know what you mean by "strategy". They might not even think they need a strategy, but something else. So the job is to explain what strategy is, and why it's important, right? Maybe not.
An alternative? Don't educate on strategy at all. James pointed this out in our panel. If you're speaking to someone who doesn't speak the language of "brand strategy", or "communications strategy", strip it back to the bare essentials: what are you trying to achieve? How will you get there?
If you have an answer to the first, there's the role of strategy. You're helping them turn vision into reality by using budget and resources in a smart way to help them win. If you don't have an answer to the first, arguably that's another role for strategy too. Same result. Easier chat.
When you're in a qualifying conversation, don't under-estimate the power of playing back what you heard. Clients hire you because they don't have a capability, capacity, or perspective. Know which game you're playing.
Just enough strategy
When delivering strategy, know what "just enough" looks like. Most clients think our work is too complicated, bloated, slow, and expensive. We love showing options and exploration. Sometimes they just want the answer.
A former head of insight I worked with said it best: "don't tell me what you did, tell me what you found". It's wise advice for how we sell our own abilities to help clients make decisions. The point isn't to show off how smart we are, it's to unlock smartness in others. Your product is a decision.
A useful trick to add "just enough strategy" upfront? Diagnose what you observe. A simple "good, bad and ugly" framework will go a long way to get clients to listen to you. We all love hearing about ourselves. Use it.
Pricing pitfalls
I'm not a pricing expert, but I am expert in resenting people for paying me too little and then resenting myself for accepting in the first place. When you're self-employed, the reality of hustling for little pay hits you hard. And you realise you're either in the volume game or the value game.
The volume game is one where you juggle multiple gigs but never feel quite comfortable charging more for each of them in case the pipeline goes dry. The value game is where you start introducing changes to your pricing as you go, and normalising this for prospects as well as yourself.
Understand what the industry has decided is a normal rate for someone with your experience. Ask your peers what they charge. The first step in feeling "normal" pricing your work is to know what normal looks like.
Learn to apply progressive overload with each new project. The simple way to do this is to raise your prices (day rate or project) with every new gig, even if by as little as £50. This helps you feel more comfortable charging more, and helps you test the waters of how far you can go.
If clients aren't saying you're too expensive, then you're likely too cheap. Credit to Liz for sharing this. Someone pushing back on your price isn't a rejection, it's the start of a negotiation. Another muscle worth growing.
Negotiate deliverables and length. Avoid negotiating price. Reducing price can grow conversions, but also erodes your perception of value. Negotiating deliverables or length protects the perception of value, and makes the conversation not about your worth, but the client's affordability.
Have a "walk away figure". It gives you margin for negotiation but also options. Charging too little costs you twice: the margin on a gig, and the opportunity cost of finding more lucrative gigs. There's always a sacrifice.
Adjust your prices according to who you're selling to. Victoria has worked in the UK and the US, and the US market tends to pay more. Charge what will feel like a high margin for you, and great value for customers. This is the essence of globalisation, for better and for worse. Learn to use it.
Be a good boss
The head of planning who hired me at VCCP, and who a few years later walked me through how to get help after I called her in tears because of a depressive episode, is one of the best bosses I've ever had. Lots of what I practise today when working with others, I still owe to her. Thanks, Dana.
This was her advice when I went solo: be a good boss to yourself. You are now all there is in the business. Product, marketing, HR, coffee maker. It's easy to put it all on yourself, because it is. But there are two ways to cope.
Think about the best manager you've ever had, or wish you had. Do what they do for yourself. Good day? Congratulate yourself on an email. Shit meeting? Write the email you wish someone wrote to you. It feels cringe the first few times you do it. But you'll be gentler to yourself. And need it.
Find a community or peer group to help give you perspective. I built the Salmon Crew partly to help me with this, part to help others deal with it. There's more to it, but it's without a doubt a use case for many of us. And as more of us get economically displaced, I suspect this will only grow.
Go forth and sell
You don't need to become a Self-aggrandising Alpha Douchebag (SAD) to learn how to sell and not feel sleazy while doing it. These economic survival skills are the sort of stuff we should have been taught, just like someone should have taught us about index funds when we were 23.
I hope the above gives you plenty of ideas on how you can get started or get better on your own path. If you want to watch the full recording and connect with Liz, James or Victoria in our private community, come join us.
