Sales is only sleazy if you let it
There is one analogy which helps unpack the current situation many strategists have when it comes to maximising their market value. And that is, ironically, that of the product engineer. Let me explain.
When you work with, say, a financial services business, or an automotive business, you have broadly the 'product people' and then the 'marketing and sales people'. They interlink, but their specialties are different.
Product people know the craft of what it takes to do something really well. Marketing and sales people then have the job of turning a product into a positioning, and codify ways in which it becomes 'buyable' by customers.
In this sense, strategists can be understood as being trained as engineers of their own product (be very good at doing strategy), but rarely trained as marketers of that product (be very good at selling strategy).
But in the current economic and job market armageddon, we all need a greater sense of control over what I call 'economic survival skills'. In simple terms, assume fewer people bring you fewer opportunities. Which means you need to get considerably more adept at creating those yourself.
The problems begin once you start thinking about "doing sales", and your mind immediately creates a few instinctive associations. Sales, for lack of a better term, feels really fucking sleazy. We want nothing to do with it.
Because sales feels sleazy, we quickly get into mindset problems. We're afraid of doing it. We're ashamed of doing it. We feel weird asking for things. But we also get into method problems. It feels weird to do cold outreach. Do I need to now become "that LinkedIn person on DMs"?
I too had, and have, these annoying questions all the time. Which is why, a couple of months ago, I invited strategist and advisor James Sandrini to elucidate me, and a few others, on how to sell without feeling sleazy.
What a relief it was. James brought useful ways to think about sales, and to put it to practice. The workshop is available for Salmon Crew members (upgrade here), but I decided to share some follow-up reflections today.
Let's go through a few broad areas which I find fascinating and useful.
Positioning is what plus who
Because of a mix of quiet ambition, attention spans and deep insecurity, I get bored very quickly when I'm on holiday. So, while I was in Portugal recently, I got up to speed on David C Baker's work on expert positioning.
One useful and highly practical way he talks about positioning yourself is to answer two simple questions: what do you do, and who for? I won't get into the nuances of vertical and horizontal positioning here, but let's stay with this broad principle. Positioning is what plus who. Nice and simple.
I like this because it helps you get to a simple articulation of what your value is. For example, James talks about being a brand and commercial advisor for experience economy businesses. It's very clean and 'sellable'.
After reading David C Baker's work, I decided to articulate the value I bring as 'strategic clarity for smart people'. I articulate it in this way because my business is part consulting (strategic clarity for smart brands) and part community (helping people find strategy clarity together).
Time will tell how commercially valuable this is, but it gives me enough specificity to talk about the problem I solve (you're not short of ideas, you're short of clarity on what to do first), and it allows me to stretch that into a range of specific products (community, workshops, training, etc).
In time I may also want to specialise in specific verticals, as this allows me to go further into specific problems that fewer people can solve and therefore my advantage is clearer. Time will tell what's effective.
But for now, let's stay with this. What's your version of what you do, and who for? Start there and the rest feels considerably less sleazy. But that's just the start. Then you need to find a way to get it in front of people.
Ask for perspective not projects
At the risk of sounding like the most boring person at a party (which I probably would be anyway), I've been interested in how people build their own pipeline without becoming annoying "just following up" auto-bots.
James' advice here is that you need to intentionally carve out time for pipeline development, as much as you do for project delivery. This time can be occupied by a range of things, but what matters is that you have a broadly workable system, which inevitably will change with time.
That system may involve having a table of people you want to contact, where they work, and the last time you spoke to them. This is the extent to which I have a 'lead gen' model. What matters is what happens next.
First, the nature of what 'contacting someone' means is quite important. I've not found yet much success in reaching out with an update of what I've been working on, and how I could help. It just feels too 'about me'. What works instead? Asking if I can get people's perspective on a topic.
This has a few benefits:
I get to research something I'm working on, which facilitates future product development or marketing materials. More on this in a bit.
I get to ask them questions which inherently uncover some of their problems, which helps me understand where they might need help.
I get a chance to talk with potentially qualified leads, but without it feeling like pressure on both ends to 'work on something'.
Now, for this to be commercially effective, in most cases you want to do this not just with peers but also with potential end clients. In my case, I'm not super strict about this because my community product is for peers too.
But either way, I've found this is a much better way to begin what you might call a 'soft sales process', whereby you're simply looking to nurture potential leads by learning from them and understanding their realities.
The other part of this, which a more experienced founder recently shared with me, is to assume any conversation will take one year to lead to a deal.
I find this to be a healthy assumption because it respects the nature of trust-based work, reduces the pressure to sell and makes the exchange more meaningful and therefore far more memorable for all involved.
If you think it feels sleazy to sell, imagine being sold to at first contact. Right? But if you follow the principle of mental and physical availability, sustaining some of these conversations can be a sustainable, albeit longer, game that can work. But you need to be intentional and committed to it.
Consistency unlocks craft
I'm a firm believer that quantity eventually yields quality, but perhaps a more tangible way to think about this is that consistency unlocks your craft around anything you do. In other words, you don't need to 'be really good at sales' to do sales, you just need to practise to see what suits you.
The more I have the perspective gathering conversations I mentioned earlier, the more comfortable I get with being inquisitive, holding space for others to share what's on their mind, and spotting opportunities.
Most of the times, what people struggle with is something you can't really help with, for a variety of reasons. They already have an agency. The timing's not right. They're too busy to actually solve it now and it's less costly to live with it for a bit longer. These are all valid enough reasons.
But under this thesis, there will be times when someone says, for example, "oh I wish my team could level up their comms strategy game by a few percentage points", to which your answer could be, "would you be interested in talking about hosting a training session on this?".
To ask the question is really fucking awkward in your mind, but the more you do it the more comfortable you get with asking. And the more comfortable you get with the answer. Either it's "yes let's talk", "no I'm ok", or "I would but I don't have budget right now". You also get more ok with the idea that, 90% of times, the timing isn't right. It's not about you.
This also means that the game of pipeline development is partly about relationships, but partly about coverage. You want, as per How Brands Grow, to reach a large base of potentially light buyers who might buy you once, rather than try to grow by simply trying to capture a few heavy buyers who could maybe, possibly, hopefully, buy you multiple times.
The statistics are on your side if you work with a large enough base.
Work with what's there
The other area where consistency unlocks craft is in how you can use these conversations to develop future marketing materials. Someone who does this quite well is Sarah Watson on LinkedIn.
She's an ex-agency boss and now executive coach whose content approach could be described as "on the go diary notes". A lot of what she does is not about establishing vague authority, but demonstrating specific experience.
So she'll often start posts with things like "I'm hearing more and more from clients that XYZ, here's what I typically tell them". It's a low maintenance way to market yourself by working with what's already there.
I suspect that, if you spent a few minutes looking into all the conversations you already have, you could probably start sharing a bit about what you're learning and that's genuinely useful for people. And if there's one thing I've learned about writing? What's obvious to you is not obvious to others.
So at the risk of sounding pretty fucking obvious to yourself, don't be afraid to practise writing more consistently before you think of it as a craft. In my experience, the consistency unlocks the craft. It's a long game but it can pay off. And at the very least it's better than doomscrolling!
Best to stop there otherwise this will become the poor man's version of a New Yorker piece that could have been 30% shorter. There's plenty more I was going to get into, namely the wise advice Tom Morton gave me about "being buyable at different prices", but that needs its own thing really.
But I will leave you with this simple thought. All those struggles and doubts? You're not alone. Doing this workshop with James, and seeing members' response, has convinced me you're really not. And things feel a bit less lonely once we start learning from, and with, other people like us.
If my thesis around 'economic survival skills' is true, learning how to sell without feeling sleazy is only going to go up in importance for many of us. We can't predict the future, we can find ways to be prepared for it. So let's.
Ps. Want to access James' workshop and learn more about how to sell your services without feeling super sleazy? You should join the Salmon Crew.
