Why You Hate Sales & Marketing (+ What To Do About It)

“Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.”
~ Rumi

Over the past few years of business coaching, I’ve met many brilliant and gifted business owners whose resistance to selling was crippling their business and their ability to grow. In this piece, I aim to shed light on where that resistance comes from and how to overcome it to make your business a success.

The premise of this piece is based on the following statement. Take a moment now to consider what this really means to you.

You hate sales and marketing because of what you believe sales and marketing represents.

We live in a world where sales has become synonymous with deceitful practices in marketing and advertising. Where selling is a game of persuasion and manipulation. It’s everywhere, it’s on our televisions, our computers, on the streets, on the sides of buildings, on our trains and buses. EVERYWHERE we look we can see intrusive, manipulative and dishonest marketing and advertising practices designed to get us to buy, buy, buy. We live in a world that prioritises profits over people and for people like you and me, this hurts to the core.

As a consumer, we feel overwhelmed because every which way we turn, somebody is trying to get us to buy something. Most often, things, that many of us as conscious changemakers know in our hearts that we don’t even need. Clutter that only serves to weigh us down and keep us from enjoying the present moment in all its glory.

It, therefore, makes perfect sense that when it comes to our own business, and the point at which we need to engage in sales or marketing, that we feel such huge resistance. As conscious business owners we absolutely don’t want to contribute to this dysfunctional system of selling people things that they don’t need, in ways that feel inherently dishonest. We are not prepared to make people feel the way that we so often feel when we’re being sold to.

So whilst I get the logic behind this thinking, there are two things to look at more closely here:

1. You are not selling things that people don’t need. (How do I know? Because it’s unlikely you would be in my…