My first sales role was as a founder, which was like learning how to swim by jumping into a river wearing winter clothes.
I was running a mission-driven media company that produced long-form content, and I sold sponsorships to fund it. Launching and running that publication changed my life, due in no small part to the lessons it taught me on cultivating a healthy relationship with sales.
I secured six sponsors for the magazine’s launch, and the fanfare around our splashy entrance generated significant sponsorship interest that sustained us for a while. But once the momentum slowed and things were humming along, sales became something I dreaded (and dutifully avoided).
The challenge was that I felt personally identified with the sponsorship I was selling, and every time someone declined to purchase a sponsorship, I felt personally rejected. I asserted that the world needed what we were producing, and I went to the market to validate that assertion.
Another challenge is that I took myself and my work Very Seriously, which left little room for creativity and fun. Work felt like work.
Things changed when I shifted from being consumed with my feelings of worthiness to inhabiting a place of generosity. When I treated money like it was scarce and unavailable to me, it was elusive. When I treated it like an abundant resource to attract, sales became more of a game with a scoreboard than a quest for survival.
This shift in perspective helped me get clear on what I was selling, which was the opportunity to be a part of something meaningful and worthwhile. When I exuded the confidence and power of the mission, my value proposition shifted from focusing on metrics and subscriber growth to the story my buyer would share with their spouse over dinner.
Being in alignment with the power of my mission also led to some weirdly awesome things happening: when I spoke with a prospect about sponsorship, he was excited and assumed the pricing I sent was per month (it wasn’t monthly pricing), and said he’d like to start with three months (as it turns out, it was monthly pricing). That was a fun email to forward to my advisor.
Ultimately, I parlayed my insights into a mission-driven career at the intersection of my passions: facilitation and public speaking, empowering people to more deeply inhabit their humanity in relationship with others, and serving as a coin-operated spokesmodel for the cause (sales).
The result was millions of dollars in sales activity that I mastered, looked forward to, and helped others unlock their brilliance around.
The shift in perspective changed everything.
