Giving a name to my sales anxiety

I think a lot of sales anxiety among geeky folks is driven by the stereotype &quot;alpha male smooth talking sales guy&quot;. I sure did, but then I learned that that&#x27;s actually a very bad salesperson in many cases.<p>If you sell technology, then the last thing you want is to convince people to buy something they don&#x27;t actually need. You shouldn&#x27;t really want to convince people of anything at all - you should want to learn what they need and, if they&#x27;re sufficiently interested in what you have to answer that need, answer their questions about it.<p>I run a service (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;talkjs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;talkjs.com</a>) that makes it easy for developers to build a chat feature into their apps&#x2F;sites. We do a lot of sales. Nearly all sales we do is &quot;warm&quot; - people find us, show interest (eg by signing up for a free trial) and then the process starts. I found that this sales is <i>a lot of fun!</i>, because:<p><pre><code> * I get to talk about code with other engineers * They have a problem our product very well may solve * There&#x27;s no convincing. Just clarifying, exploring </code></pre> I did, sometimes, make the mistake of going down the &quot;smooth talker sales guy&quot; road. It&#x27;s an easy trap to fall for because it&#x27;s so deeply culturally ingrained that that&#x27;s what salespeople do. I got excited and started overselling, or bragging, or both. None of the companies I did that with became customers. My guess is that by doing the smooth talk and not the nerdy engineering talk, they lost trust in us as a technology provider. And fairly so.

I saw a talk from Megan Macedo recently where she suggested a new rule to apply when promoting something:<p>&quot;You aren&#x27;t allowed to persuade anybody of anything&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s great advice because you can&#x27;t really convince people of things anyway unless you have a lot of time or a lot of money.<p>When you don&#x27;t have to worry about changing people&#x27;s minds selling becomes a lot easier.

I love sales, especially when the product isn&#x27;t what they are looking for. I will never try to sell someone something they don&#x27;t need but I will find out what they do need and how to help them get it. Even if it isn&#x27;t what I have to sell.<p>You never know, they might need what we have or tell someone else about the experience.<p>At the end of the day, it&#x27;s about the experience.

For me, realizing sales is part of the honest value I’m providing was a real game changer. It’s not about closing the deal. It’s about having something of real value, and honestly educating potential customers on when they should consider buying and when they would not be a good fit for the product.<p>This is just as important service as building the product itself. And what the article describes as sales anxiety can be an asset. Introverts are more likely to be in a position of listening and not just pushing the product to do hard sales.<p>The book “To sell is human” really changed my perspective, as the author makes the point that the best sales people primarily want to serve others, not just trick people into buying something they don’t need. Good sales is about communicating and matching up needs to value in an honest fashion. Not “ABC”

&gt;it’s like social anxiety, but for approaching strangers with a request<p>So... the same as regular social anxiety? The underlying &quot;rationalization&quot; (guilt for bothering people, fear of rejection) together with the proposed solution also seem pretty much the same to me.

According to my inner arm chair psychologist, at the root of all anxiety is fear. What do you think you’re afraid of? Shining a spot light on whatever the beast is that your mind has created, is usually a good way to deflate it. But don’t be mad at your mind for doing this, it’s only trying to protect you.<p>You nailed it when you alluded to there being people who your product can truly help, and therefore appreciate your reaching out. By focusing on whatever innate desire you truly have to help your customers, you can silence the self-doubt.<p>I have a lot of opinions on this as I work professionally with developers to help them “figure out sales” and sell their product into companies. Feel free to reach out if you want to talk.<p>nick@validsignal.com

When I was doing cold calls my Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria was so overwhelming. Once I figured out what it was it really helped me overcome it. Kudos to the author for finding his

It&#x27;s nice to see a fellow Bulgarian on HN :) Good luck with your product!

I think you got the markdown formatting for links backwards in paragraph 3.

My wife founded a startup and in the beginning had &quot;sales anxiety&quot;. Then she became and outstanding (B2B) sales person and recently sold her startup successfully.<p>She now helps other founders with (B2B) sales anxiety.