How to Sell Without Being “Salesy”

Have you ever said to yourself, “I don’t like doing sales because they leave me feeling… pushy, slimy, sleazy, manipulative…” etc.?

When you’re doing sales, do you experience them as something that doesn’t feel good – to you or the person you’re selling to?

This is very common, and it’s one of the main reasons that I teach sales.

Your sales conversations do not need to feel slimy, sleazy, or manipulative – in fact, they really shouldn’t. High quality sales conversations come from a place of service.

To recap: Your job as a salesperson is not to get someone to buy what you’re selling: it’s to help them make a clear decision about what’s next for them. If part of what’s next for them aligns with what you offer, then it’s your job to sell it to them.

As with any learned belief or deeply ingrained thought pattern, the more consciousness you bring to it, the more you can shift, grow, and improve your results. If you’re stuck in this, “Sales make me feel sleazy and manipulative” program, here are three truths I want you to reflect on:

1. Sales are happening all the time.

When you go to the grocery store and you choose a certain cereal and put it in the cart, you choose it for a reason. Somehow you got the idea that this cereal was the one for you. That’s a sale.

When you were twelve and you convinced your parents to let you have a sleepover at your friend’s house, that was a sale.

When you go out to eat with a friend and they insist on paying for dinner, and you let them, that’s a sale.

Sales are everywhere – and this truth can support you in normalizing and relating to sales in new ways. Get curious – where else do you see sales happening today? How do you experience each sale? Which ones do you like, and which do you dislike? Which are explicit and which are more implicit? Look through this lens for the rest of your week and study how this POV shifts your mindset.

2. Everyone is a spender.

In our society, everyone is a spender. There is a financial component to literally everything in our lives. Everything we do, everything we eat, everywhere we go, there is a financial component. (Even those who mindfully decide not to handle money for spiritual or religious reasons – such as nuns or monks, for example – are financially supported by a person or organization who is handling the money.)

We LOVE buying stuff.

This truth has nothing to do with access or privilege – I know this from experience. When I was working with low income youth in NYC public schools, I watched my students struggle to afford good food, hack ways to avoid paying for the subway, and come to school with shitty school supplies. Yet every week they came in with the latest kicks, hats, and cell phones. #spenders

They put their money where they had a sense of urgency and authentic desire.

All of this means one thing:  we love being sold to. We love being sold the product, service, or solution that we truly desire. We just like it done skillfully, in a way that feels good to us.

So master sales – so you can do it skillfully for others.

3. Sales only get a BAD reputation when they’re done BADLY.

We don’t even notice most of the sales in our lives – but the ones we notice are often the ones that don’t feel good, the ones that feel pushy, the ones where we end up buying something we don’t even want. These are “bad” sales. Unconscious sales. Manipulative sales. Immature sales.

The important distinction? “Bad” sales are not ALL sales.

As in Truth #1, sales are happening all the time, and when the sale is useful, effective and efficient, we don’t even notice it! We don’t blame the guy at Old Navy who tells us the pink looks better than the green – as long as we like the pink. We don’t ridicule the doTERRA folks – as long as we enjoy using the oils.

Too often, we tend to think of sales as limited to the experiences we’ve had with people who are not that good at it. Or, people who are using sales to manipulate – the telemarketer who doesn’t even seem interested in who we are before asking us to buy, or the cheesy TV ad with the low budget production.

But when people sell to us in a way that makes us feel good, we’re happy. We feel we’ve been helped, not sold.

If you worry about coming off as pushy, salesy, or slimy, what you’re really worried about is being BAD at sales – not the sales themselves.

Really generous, simple, loving, powerful and empowering sales happen all the time. They feel so good we don’t even think of them as transactional. And guess what: spiritual entrepreneurs are often some of the most masterful at “good” sales because they are so dedicated to helping others. Their consciousness turns the sale into a service.

In the world of spiritual sales, all this is important to integrate. If you approach a sale attached to getting a “Yes,” then you are selling to make yourself feel good and you’ll end up manipulating the person you’re speaking to. You are selling and wanting to be liked – a codependent and ineffective combo. If you manipulate in order to make a sale, you put the person you are talking to in a victim role. This is not service. But if you bring consciousness and integrity to your sales practice, you will empower your client every single time.

So how are you feeling about sales right now? Are you getting curious? Tell me more.

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