Who?

Nice to meet you.

I never thought of myself as great at sales—the slick closing techniques, the pushiness verging on aggression, all that hair gel. Standard approaches that salespeople have used for decades just never felt right to me.

So I stopped using them.

But it took me a few years to find my own way. I started in sales in 2000, as a telemarketer trying to get people to join a membership club. The company wanted me to hook potential enrollees by telling them they’d won something, usually a cruise or a set of pots. People were skeptical, of course. Their first question was typically: “What’s the catch?” I’d answer them from a script. The purposely misleading responses made me feel horrible.

After a year of that, I moved on to other jobs—primarily wholesale bridal sales at internationally known companies based out of New York City. I naturally fell into sales patterns in those roles that better fit my personality. I enjoyed talking to people, hearing their needs and frustrations, and finding ways to uncover what was important to them.

When I had an outstanding sales year using my own strategies, I told myself that I’d lucked out. When it happened again and again, I figured it was because my clients liked me.

After a decade of this, I discovered that my approach to sales wasn’t mine alone. Eventually, I learned that what I’d been doing—listening closely to people’s needs and pulling back the curtain on the sales process—had a name: trust-based selling.

Trust-based sales came so naturally to me, in fact, that my career has evolved into training others in this form of selling. Sales for non-salespeople, I like to call it.

My goal now, after 20 years of sales success stories: to do my part to eliminate the distrust of salespeople. There doesn’t have to be tension between the person buying something and the person selling it. Too often salespeople make the process harder on themselves by perpetuating that conflict. I not only want to change the buyer-seller relationship; I want to shift sellers’ perspective of their own jobs.

It’s not an easy goal. But neither was telemarketing.