In the final weeks leading up to Responsive Conference, I hit an impasse.
Since the beginning of 2024, I’ve written a weekly article about selling.
I love sales, selling, and persuasion.
But I was doing a lot of sales. In those final weeks, I was taking 15 minute calls 10 hours a day in order to sell tickets to the conference.
And I lost interest in writing about sales.
I didn't lose interest in the discipline required to get into a cold plunge every morning. Or in how to train my dog. Or in negotiating international travel with family.
I lost interest in cold call scripts, what sales people do wrong, or talking about the brute force approach of selling tickets to a conference – as incredible as Responsive Conference 2024 turned out to be!
Why selling?
Sales is tactical and measurable. Success is binary, determined by whether someone buys.
Nine months ago I wrote an article titled “Selling Snafu” and listed out the reasons that I was writing a newsletter about sales. Today, I wanted to revisit those reasons.
Support the people you love
One of the proudest moments of my adult life came when my father started exercising. Through gentle persuasion, my father changed his behavior.
To change behavior for yourself or someone you love, know what kind of reinforcement what works for them.
Each of us benefits from a mix of positive and negative reinforcement, from the carrot and stick. As I've told all my athletic training partners and many ex-girlfriends, if you want me to change, praise me. Give me positive reinforcement, and I’ll jump through hoops. Berate me and I shut down.
This is a form of selling, but better described as behavior change.
Authentic persuasion
Whether as a kid selling pumpkins or in negotiating complex family dynamics, I have always been fascinated by the intersection of persuasion, authenticity, and human psychology.
Unfortunately, sales has come to mean inauthentic persuasion. We learn to pressure and bully people into doing things that they otherwise don't want to do.
I'm interested in authentic persuasion; in aligning someone else's interests with my own and providing them a solution to accomplish their aims.
Courage to ask
Asking for what you want is hard. As a result, even those who did it well, usually do so with pressure and urgency. Most of the rest of us just don’t ask!
I set out to write about selling because most people I know and love would benefit from developing the courage to advocate for what they want.
When those of us who are nervous to advocate begin to do so – when we are courageous – the benefits are enormous.
What is selling?
As a result of the thousands of conversations between June and September, we sold out Responsive Conference. The event was a big success.
But I’m mostly uninterested in tactics for cold calling or the precise scripts needed to close a deal.
Snafu is still a newsletter about selling, but with a slight modification. This newsletter is about changing the behavior of a single individual – yourself, someone you love, a specific consumer, or within your organization.
It turns out that selling is just another way to say behavior change.
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3 things I’ve loved this week
Quote I’m considering:
“It takes a long time to learn to play like yourself” - Miles Davis
Law I’m fighting with: Parkinson's Law
Parkinson’s Law states that the size of a task will expand to fill the time allocated to it.
I’ve been finding this especially true with writing. I carve out 2 hours each morning to write this newsletter (and future books?), but I increasingly find that that time gets overridden with mundane chores like breakfast, walking the dog and answering “just one email” before getting back to writing.
For more on procrastination and discipline, read this.
Rabbit hole I'm exploring: Cro-Magnon vs. Neanderthal
Some weeks ago, I picked up Clan of the Cave Bear, which turns out to be a very well known book about a fictional Cro-Magnon woman who is adopted by a clan of Neanderthal.
I'm not on the forth book in the series, The Plains of Passage. (Note: mature readers only! There's a lot of sex.)
But these books have led me down a research rabbit hole about the differences between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon people. For example, most people of non-African descent carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA, but why only non-African? What kinds of tools did the Neanderthal use?
For a primer, read these Wikipedia entries on Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon.
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Support Snafu
This newsletter is free and I don’t run ads. But I do spend dozens of hours researching and writing about selling each week. Here’s how you can support.
Give me feedback - feedback is a gift, and I'd love hear your thoughts about this newsletter. What do you like? What don't you? Just respond to this email and let me know.
Thanks for your support! It means the world.
Until next week,
Robin