Just the other day, I watched an episode of This Week in Venture Capital with Mark Suster.

At one point in the show, he had mentioned that at some point, a “young person” or aspiring entrepreneur should take up a role in sales as it’s a lifelong skill that will pay off in spades down the road in one form or another.

While I was on the fence and had iffy feelings about Sales as a profession and sales people in general, I’m leaning towards Mark’s sentiment towards Sales.

If I were to really pinpoint my “beef” with sales is that it’s highly uncomfortable.  Just thinking about it gets me a bit flustered.  Maybe it’s the high rate of rejection.  (Who likes being rejected?) or my aversion to failure - whether it’s cold calling, prospecting, lead generation and the like, it’s all so foreign to me.  You need balls of steel, persistence, and hungry to make money and deliver value.  Strangely enough, despite the uncomfortable sentiment towards Sales, that’s what also has me so intrigued and excited to learn about the sales process in general.

An element of being a kickass salesperson is being “fearless” and having a rock solid confidence and belief in oneself that you will prevail overall.  I think that’s just a condition of the people you surround yourself with as well as the material you absorb.  Not to toot my own horn, but I think I’m a pretty good connector and “relationship guy” and have a strong network of mentors.  But that doesn’t quite cut it.

I need to dive into Sales and work in it to learn more about the all the nuances of Sales - as an artform, as respectable profession and as a science.

Outside of doing “biz dev” while I was doing Transforming for SickKids and a bit of freelance for TeamBuy in terms of “real world” experience, I’m slowly going through Neil Rackham’s “Spin Selling” as well as a the Sandler Sales Institute audio course.

Let’s see how this goes.