Are You Sales Phobic?

Alas, the cure is to sell more often.

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In her first years as an entrepreneur, Merri Mai Williamson followed the Glengarry Glen Ross dictum: "Always be closing." A refugee from corporate HR, Williamson packed 90-hour workweeks with countless sales calls after starting Application Researchers, an employee background-check service in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was great at it, too, landing her fish about half of the time.

Too bad she couldn't stand sales. "Just presenting my business plan to my friends for practice was painful to me," says Williamson, who manages a staff of 300 (most of them contractors) at her 12-year-old business. "It's not that I wasn't confident or that I thought I wasn't capable," she says. "Some people feel comfortable with sales. I'm not one of them."

Leadership and innovation are the glam aspects of entrepreneurship. But the job description of many founders also includes a whole lot of selling. Entrepreneurs must sell investors on their ideas, employees on their workplaces, and customers on their products, value, and reputation. Perpetual pitching is dandy for happy extroverts who salivate at the scent of each new lead. Others, though, rate the process somewhere between distasteful and ulcer inducing.

Part of that aversion is cultural. The term salesman has long been shorthand for "slick," "obnoxious," and "integrity-challenged." An analysis of movies and television shows from 1903 to 2005 found that "the salesperson character personifies some of society's most despised characteristics--greed, deception, distrust, and selfishness," according to Katherine B. Hartman, a marketing professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. That's an unfair generalization, to be sure. But it's tough to shrug off a century's worth of stereotyping and view sales as a noble pursuit.

Aversion to sales is a type of social anxiety, explains Larina Kase, a Philadelphia psychologist who often counsels the sales phobic. "Almost everyone has normal amounts of social anxiety from time to time: speaking jitters when giving presentations, the worry they won't look their best when talking with key business partners, or feeling nervous about making cold calls," Kase says. "The anxiety may be uncomfortable, but it doesn't necessarily stop people from doing important things." One of the best ways to get over such anxiety, she suggests, is simply to sell more often. (Social anxiety should not be confused with social anxiety disorder, a condition that affects roughly 7 percent of the population and greatly interferes with a normal social and work life.)

Selling frequently may help people for whom sales aversion reflects a temporary anxiety. It will not help when the obstacle is something more fixed--specifically, the entrepreneur's personality. Introversion is rarely the problem; true shrinking violets rarely start and lead their own companies. But entrepreneurs are used to calling the shots, and selling transfers decision-making powers to someone else: the buyer. Also, good salespeople are good listeners. Some entrepreneurs don't like that role. They would much rather talk about their favorite subjects, such as themselves and their companies.

Selling also requires facing two universal undesirables: uncertainty and rejection. CEOs, arguably, are pretty comfortable with uncertainty. Still, "the nature of sales is that you're always doing something different, and you don't know what the outcome is going to be," says Lou Schachter, an executive at the Real Learning Co., a sales training company in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Furthermore, when it comes to rejection, entrepreneurs are especially vulnerable. They take those inevitable losses hard because the product or service in question is their own. "When you're selling something that's really important to you, that makes it feel more risky," says Kase. "When you're selling someone else's product, you can detach from it."

In coping with rejection, professional salespeople have another advantage over entrepreneurs besides emotional distance: seasoned support. Good sales managers motivate their teams and suggest explanations for rejection that teach a lesson. (For example: Spend more time making sure that the customer has the sales volume to support your services.) That helps salespeople isolate the problem and raises their confidence in future success. Entrepreneurs, by contrast, may have no source of bucking up, advice, or perspective. "When I was cut from the first round of a request for proposals, when I wasn't even given an opportunity to give an in-person presentation…it really cut me off at the knees," says Williamson of her early days. "And since I was the chief cook and bottle washer, I didn't have anyone else to cheer me up, to tell me we're great, or good, or even fine."

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