Are You Sales Phobic?

Like leadership, salesmanship was long considered innate. Academics and others spent decades trying to isolate the traits that make the difference between a Ron Popeil and a Willy Loman. They came up empty. "There is no such thing as a natural born salesperson," says Evans, who is also the editor of the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management. Instead, studies from the 1990s associated strong sales performance with thorough preparation, extensive knowledge of customers, and other things that can be taught.

Of course, learning to sell and learning to like to sell are two different things. An aversion to selling may not affect the bottom line, but nothing sucks the joy from life like doing every day the thing one disdains. To some extent, that hatred can be overcome by cognitive therapy, says Bo Forbes, a psychologist and management consultant in Boston. In cognitive therapy, people identify negative thoughts--those they perceive as limiting their performance--and reframe them. So, for example, if the problem is fear that a sales call won't result in a sale, the entrepreneur would learn to treat each individual call as an interesting exercise and ultimately to bolster his confidence for the next round. He would try to see any individual rejection as part of the routine: a discrete, inevitable setback that can improve the chances of ultimate triumph.

You don't need professional assistance to try this technique. Beth Zimmerman is one entrepreneur who did it on her own. As principal of Cerebellas, a Long Beach, New York, strategic planning consultancy that has worked with companies such as Motorola (NYSE:MOT) and Western Union (NYSE:WU), Zimmerman was less worried about rejection than put off by the reputation of sales. "It conjured up all kinds of negative associations for me, with ugly types of selling," she says.

So Zimmerman mentally reframed the process. She tells herself that she's "not pushing used cars, not selling things that are unseemly." In fact, she no longer considers what she does as sales at all. "Instead of selling, I think of it as listening to the challenges that my customers face and providing them with a way to help solve them," she says.

Another proponent of the rose-by-any-other-name-smells-sweeter approach is H. David Hennessey, professor of marketing at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Hennessey, who teaches a sales skills class to M.B.A. students, counsels them to think of selling as helping people, "just like a doctor, a fireman, or an EMT."

Of course, the decision to tackle a boss's sales demons should be considered in light of the company's real needs. "Most entrepreneurs have the sense that they need to be independent and do it all on their own, and if the objective is to get over the sales fear, that's great," says Kase. "But if the objective is to expand the business, then it could make sense to consider hiring people to make the sales calls."

Unfortunately, not all entrepreneurs have the resources to hire salespeople--especially early in the life of their companies. Others shy away from mental reconditioning as a solution. For those who doubt they can change themselves, the challenge is to modify the sales process to make it more palatable.

Williamson, for example, attended seminars and workshops to address her anxiety, but they didn't help. So four years into her company's life she completely changed strategies. Why should she have to sell, Williamson mused, when she had a product that was compelling enough to sell itself? Out went the sweaty-palm cold calls and fruitless responses to RFPs. Instead, Williamson sent out 1,000 letters to prospective clients offering a free trial of her background-checking service. "It was a gamble," she says. "Quite a few of my mentors warned me that I would lose more than I'd gain."

The gamble paid off astonishingly well. Every single company that took Williamson up on that first offer signed on as a client. The free trial became Williamson's primary strategy; word of mouth grew and the need for cold calls dropped significantly. Still, she does have to sell occasionally. "Although I have gotten more comfortable over the years, I still get nervous when I have to stand up and sell to an individual," she says.

Though the natural born salesperson may not exist, hatred of sales may be bred in the bone.

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