Introduction

Yes, I'm in Sales

Why salespeople should own the title with pride, and why you don't need a degree in sales to be great at it.

My email is richard@rharris415.com. More on this later.

Sometimes sales kinda sucks. And I don’t just mean the hard parts of winning and losing deals. Sometimes it sucks simply because those who have never done it don’t know how to respond when they hear this is our career.

Heck, sometimes when salespeople tell others they are in sales you can hear the other person’s voice change, and their eyes quickly look away. Almost as if in shame. Doctors and lawyers frame their diplomas and put them on their walls. We don’t.

Most of us don’t even have a degree in sales. Out of the approximately 4,360 higher education institutions in the US—2,832 four-year colleges and 1,582 twoyear colleges—we found one source from 2018 that says only around 120 offer a degree in sales.

Here’s the good part: you do not need a college degree in sales to be great at sales. In fact, you don’t need a degree in anything to be great in sales. I would even say that you do not need a degree to be great at sales leadership. You may need to work on your math skills, but that does not mean you need a degree. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

And for those of us who do have college degrees, I’d be willing to bet that a huge percentage do not even have a business-related major. And I will go out even further on a limb and say a majority of us in sales never even considered sales as a career choice. We “fell into it.” Which makes it sound like some kind of black hole.

Well, I am here to say stop that fucking nonsense, own yourself, and be proud to say, “Yes, I’m in sales.”

One of the biggest ironies in sales was shared with me recently. I will paraphrase.

In sales, we are taught to be the agents of change, and it’s our job to get our customers to embrace the change because it will be better than the status quo.

Yet when it comes to changing ourselves as salespeople, we often know we can do better and be better, but we resist changing ourselves probably more than our customers resist.

This book is written for those wanting to get better. Maybe you are a sales rep at a horrible organization where leadership is dumb enough to think that oneon-one meetings are supposed to be all about sales pipelines. Or maybe leadership is too busy yelling “Steak knives!” to realize they have created a soulless culture because they want to tell their war stories about the time back in 2001 during the first dot-bomb. And deep in your gut you know there is a better way and you finally realize you have to care more about your career, because they will not—to them, your only value is your most recent revenue number.

Or maybe you’re a leader looking to figure something out. Find something new that is helpful and healthy. Something that will give you and your team the specific mindset and skills necessary to sell in the twenty-first century.

Everything you read in this book comes from realworld experiences, has been tried, and is still used daily. But it’s not some magic pill. You will have to adjust your mindset. You will have to challenge yourself to do something different. You will have to turn off your internal “excuse factory.”

Either you are willing to do these things or you are not. And no, trying something one or two times will not be enough. Rarely can anyone hit a curveball after getting instruction and then taking two practice pitches.

If you are unwilling to make yourself uncomfortable to become more comfortable, go ahead and stop reading and get your money back. Heck, you have my email address. I can’t be any more human than that, can I?

But if you want to be proud of what you do, if you want to say “Yes, I’m in sales, and I strive to be great at it,” then let’s go on this journey.