Member-only story
People who tell you you can’t do sales are lying
How other people’s fears can limit you
Are you intimidated by sales or marketing because you’ve never been in these roles before ?
You’re not alone. Tons of people are.
My second ever job was in a tiny boutique consultancy firm as an engineer.
On paper, I was supposed to put together technical specs and manage projects from start to finish.
In reality though, we had no clients. We were starting from scratch. So I got lists from specialised databases and started cold calling.
I had no idea what I was doing. Neither did the 3 other engineers who had also turned into makeshift salespeople.
My french sucked (we were in France). I had a weird accent and kept pausing to find my words.
But we kept at it. We coached one another. We refined our pitch and we signed on clients whose projects we then managed.
I believe that the fact that we were the engineers who had to deliver on the projects made us even better salespeople because we weren’t trying to convince anyone. We wouldn’t have sold to people whose projects we knew we couldn’t take on. We just listened and offered reasons why we thought our services would be a good fit.
