selling is not my strength

In my four decades plus of owning two businesses, I have always sucked at sales. I can do it at my own pace, but I’ve never been a salesperson. I find it hard to take my personality and move it into selling someone. And I have learned my own style of sales, and what fits me.

And it wasn’t just during my years of owning a business.

My first entrepreneurial experience was driving an ice cream truck. Yes one with those with annoying music. Of course, it wasn’t that hard to sell ice cream, but when a small child would follow me around and just stand and stare at me I would end up giving them one. Plus I had the munchies a lot and ate away most of my commissions.

There was the time I sold vacuum/carpet cleaners door-to-door. First time out I was with the owner’s son, and he was not happy when I told a potential customer that not only I understood the it was rather expensive, but I refused to try and talk her and her husband into buying it. When I returned to the office, the had boss heard from his son the terrible job I did of selling and told me that I “needed to cram the sale down the customers throat”. I told him to shove the job and I quit.

Or going through the entire process of almost completing what was needed to get a real estate license and realized towards the end it wasn’t for me, because it was all sales all the time.

Over the years as things changed, and I moved online more, well, I learned that my sales was all about being transparent and honest, not the hard sell.

In the end, there are so many other times I failed as a salesperson. But I rarely failed as a human.