Sales for Entrepreneurs - Become Your Company's Chief Sales Officer

Ultimize. The moment you start a business, you acquire a title nobody gives you a badge for. Chief Sales Officer. Also Chief Evangelist, Chief Marketer, and Chief Explainer of why anyone should care about you or give you money. You can't delegate it. You can't outsource it on a starter budget, and you can't skip it. And here's the sentence that should worry you. The second you tell yourself, I'm not a marketing person, or I'm not good at sales, you might as well fold up the business right now. Now, I know how uncomfortable that is because I lived that discomfort when I was a kid. I was the worst at selling. Every year, my junior high school ran its magazine subscription fundraiser, and I was the worst kid at selling subscriptions. In Boy Scouts, we sold peanut brittle to raise money for the troop. And I was the worst kid at selling peanut brittle. The worst. I dreaded knocking on doors. I dreaded the asking. If you told that kid he'd someday earn his living by talking to people, persuading people, he'd have laughed at you. But I got over it. I had to. And you have to as well. Here's the reframe that changes everything. Selling isn't tricking people. It's not being sleazy or manipulative. Selling is communicating Why you're good, why you're special, why you're unique, why you're valuable, and why someone should hand you their money instead of keeping it or giving it to someone else. That's it. So the real question underneath all your sales anxiety is this: do you believe your offer genuinely makes people's lives better, or don't you? If you don't believe it, no sales technique on earth will save you. And frankly, you shouldn't be selling it. But if you do believe it, then staying quiet isn't humility. It's a failure to help people who need what you have. Let me put you in a scenario. You're at a neighborhood gathering and someone mentions their company's website is a disaster. Customers constantly complain they can't find anything. You happen to build exactly the kind of clean, simple websites that fix that. Version 1 of you. You nod sympathetically and say, that's frustrating, and change the subject because you don't want to seem pushy. Version 2 of you, you say, that's actually what I do. I rebuild confusing websites so customers can find what they want in 1 or 2 clicks. Want me to take a look at your site this week? Version 2 isn't pushy. Version 2 is useful. The person has a problem. You have a solution. Saying so is a favor to both of you. Every day, version 1 moments will present themselves. Your business lives or dies on whether you become version 2. Between those moments, practice the raw material. Say your one sentence out loud in the car, in the shower, before bed, until it stops sounding like a script and starts sounding like the obvious truth about what you do. The reason most people flub the version 2 moment isn't cowardice. It's that they've never actually said the words out loud before, so the words come out wobbly. Repetitions at home buy you smoothness in public, and smoothness is what makes the offer sound like help instead of a pitch. And keep score honestly. At the end of each week, ask how many times you actually said your sentence to a real person. Not how many posts you drafted, not how many cards you designed, but how many humans heard the words. That number predicts your first customer better than any other measure you could track. Now, the other side of this coin. If you truly can't get there, if after real effort you still refuse to communicate your own value, then hear me with respect. Forget about starting your own business and go be an employee where you can focus on one task while somebody else does the selling. There's no shame in that, but there's no third option. When you start a business, you do everything, and selling sits at the top of the list. For the tasks you genuinely can't do, you'll work extra hours at your day job to pay someone else to do them, but nobody can believe in your offer for you. So here's your assignment for this week. Find one version 1 moment and turn it into a version 2 moment. One conversation where instead of staying comfortably silent, you say your one sentence, the customer-focused sentence you've already written, and follow it with an offer to help. That's it. One rep. Selling is a muscle, and the worst peanut brittle salesman in the troupe is living proof that the muscle grows.