Why everyone is a sleazy salesperson

Occasionally, I will hear people say something like “I’m just not good at sales.”  Lies, I say!  If you have survived long enough to express a disdain for selling, and are not living in an off-grid cabin in the northern Ontario woods by yourself, you have closed hundreds of sales in your lifetime.  

You have convinced your friends to exchange their time for your company, and vice versa.  You have convinced your girlfriend to come out to the baseball game, in exchange for watching “Bridesmaids” for the 4th time with her (you are also not a very good negotiator).  You have convinced Starbucks to extort $5 from you in exchange for a unicorn horn shaving spice latte (ie coffee, milk and sugar).  

If you are in any kind of contact with other human beings, you are almost definitely selling all the time -- no matter how subtle.  If you are uncomfortably gazing upwards at the ads on the subway, you are silently selling people on “please don’t make eye contact, please don’t talk to me, I hate people, WHY IS THIS THING STOPPING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TUNNEL AGAIN GOD DAMMIT!!!!!AFSHDFUOHFOEHFJ”  (Or maybe that’s just me....)

This is the concept of “non sales selling” put forward by Daniel Pink in “To Sell is Human” (2012).  He found that most jobs in the modern, western world involve motivating and negotiating others to do things.  This type of sales is masked in fancy titles such as “Human Resources”, “Senior Marketing Director”, etc.  Globalization and automation have made pure manual labor jobs virtually obsolete (you still have to sell your employer on hiring you).

Even when you are all by your lonesome, you are selling to different parts of yourself.  “Should I indulge in this clickbait, feminist outrage porn, or keep scrolling down my Facebook news feed for greener pastures…”  Sometimes the part of myself that likes to be angry closes the calm, zen part on going deep in this hellish internet rabbit hole, sometimes vice versa, for better and for worse.  

In my opinion, everyone needs to have some sort of sales education to be financially independent in today’s world.  And the best way to learn is by doing!  It is relatively easy to get a entry level sales job without experience, especially if the position is pure commision (and you’ll get a side of learning emotional regulation).  

Or just be more conscious of when you are engaging in non sales selling.  Eg when you are trying to convince someone of your position on a political issue, be sensitive to what strategies work; what metaphors are effective in communicating my perspective?  What type of language is most effective in persuading others, or at least convincing them to listen?  What type of socratic questions are most thought provoking?

I deplore the negative stereotypes surrounding the profession of sales.  I wish to invite everyone to open themselves to the joy and abundance of accepting the fact that we are all varying degrees of sleazy salespeople all the time, and that’s okay!  

In fact, it can be one of the most enjoyable parts of contributing value to the marketplace, if you want it to be.