Enough with the Sales Ick

Does the word sales give you the ick?

Yeah, you’re probably not alone. 

But what is it about the word sales that puts people off? I’ve been thinking about it and believe it comes from two different directions. Together, they can make things feel really bloody icky.

The first ick is the ick of doing sales. It’s that heart-in-the-mouth, sweaty-palm moment of picking up the phone, starting a new conversation at an event, or walking into a room and trying to sell something to someone who hasn’t overtly requested it.

The second ick is saying “I’m in sales”. It’s that momentary flinch that happens when the word “sales” is named out loud. That moment when  “Is this a sales call?”  feels like an accusation. And what has this led to? Well, take a look at the whole plethora of job titles that are sales but don’t say sales. Does that really make sense? 

Rocking the headset way back in 2011, while everyone else was on the desk phone.

Sales is hard

There’s no way around this bit. A career in sales is hard. It is not glamorous, it can be a slog, and it can absolutely grind you down. If you go into a sales career, you have to grow a thick skin quickly, because you are going to get told no repeatedly. Some days it will be a polite no, some days not quite so polite. If you can’t find some mental fortitude, sales will chew you up. There have been many times over the years when I’ve felt like I put in a lot of effort for no return. 

But (and you knew there was gonna be a but) just when it feels like you’re screaming at the abyss, something will come back in. A “no” from a few months ago or a “not right now” turns into a “hey, can we have a chat? Things have changed.” Some of my biggest clients and best advocates spent a long time politely saying “no, it’s not the right time.” Persistence paid off. And that, my friends, is just a little window into the sales roller coaster. The highs outweigh the lows. Seeing deals go through, travelling on-site to see the effect it has had on the client, watching people progress in their careers as a result, seeing new tech get adopted, and seeing projects succeed – it’s all good stuff!  

But when you are at the bottom of the lows, it all feels a long way off, so how do you actually get through the hard part? Well, for me (and I can only speak from the perspective of my own career here), it all comes down to one mantra: go niche and go deep. 

Why niche and deep is the way forward

There are compounding reasons why I wholeheartedly think this is the only way to go. By going all-in on a specific industry niche. It tilts the odds in your favour. 

Firstly, it kills the truly cold approach. I don’t mean cold in the sense of “we haven’t spoken before.” I mean cold in the sense that there is no connector between you and the prospect. When you are embedded in an industry, you are orbiting the same world. It’s a matter of attending similar events, working with similar clients, seeing the same project challenges, and having prior knowledge of the steps teams can take.

There is a thread to pull at here. I believe this is the route to turn something properly cold into just a bit warmer, so it feels a bit less icky.

Secondly, building that knowledge in a niche creates confidence. Not a performed confidence, but real confidence born by having a greater degree of understanding. You know a certain amount about the industry. You understand its ecosystem, know the language, and have a sense of typical timelines, life cycles, and processes. This isn’t a front, nor is it an overstatement of knowledge. This is about creating genuine understanding, and it can foster empathy with the prospect.

Connected with this is that you start to see the patterns. You know what actually matters to the person in front of you. You know where your value really sits. Very quickly, you will have taken people from problem A to solution B before, and you can talk through that experience with firsthand honesty. 

Know the market, know the product, and you are suddenly streets ahead.

Learning an industry is an investment

I’ll be honest with you. Without niche and depth, I think I’d die a death, make cold approaches. If I was tasked with blindly working through a directory of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, whoever was listed, switching gears from call to call would be an absolute disaster. Chapeau to anyone who’s out there doing it and doing it well.

For me, deep and niche beats broad and shallow every time.

There is a practical reason for this mantra. Learning an industry from scratch takes time and is frankly exhausting. I know this because I’ve done it more than once. I started my career in corporate travel, then moved on to B2B IT and Tech. The middle part of my career was in FinTech and digital financial marketing. And for the best part of the last decade, it’s been in Renewables.

Side note: We took a conscious decision early in the life of Make the Break to go all in on Renewables. That decision was, without doubt, the best one we could have made and provides the team with a real sense of ikigai.

Shrinking the ick

Put all this together, and for me, the ick is long gone. When I speak with prospects now, I have some understanding of their world. There’s often a common bond, and with it, some real experience to bring into the conversation. We are a long way from running a script here.

That said, I think it’s important to call out that doesn’t mean I get it right every time. I still fluff calls. I still occasionally throw up and show up. I launch into the monologue. I realize I’m talking at someone rather than with them.

Yes, even though I have the odd head-in-hands moment, it is mercifully rare these days, but it’s not completely a thing of the past. One of my early bosses, when I was but a young sales pup, used to say, “You can’t be a superhero every day.” That is so bloody true. You can do all the prep, run all the processes, use all the tools, and it still might not go well, and that’s just the job. 

Oh me, I’m not in sales

The first ick is about the difficulty of doing sales. The second is about the shame of admitting that you do it at all. This can show up in a couple of different places. 

We’ve all experienced that moment when someone asks, “Is this a sales call?” What’s interesting about that moment is the implication that sales is something to be batted away.

And what about dodging the word sales and job titles? There are all sorts of things out there now, from relationships to growth, rev ops, development, strategic, and so on. Can’t we just call a spade a spade?

Let’s just take a simple one: the account manager. On paper, that title can mean a lot of different things. It can be a commercial role with a target on its back, right the way through to a role that manages a single key client and its project deliverables over an extended period. From the outside, it can be really hard to know which end of the spectrum we’re operating at. That’s not great, but the part I think is really bad is that, internally, it can be a very blurred definition as well. What is expected of this person? Are they supposed to generate upsells? Are they out and out generating new contracts from existing clients or is their role part of an expert delivery team? And has it been well defined at the start? Does it change over time as business pressures mount? I’ve seen it. Very good delivery people suddenly feel the pressure to do sales, but they’re not salespeople. It doesn’t end well. 

Wouldn’t it make more sense to be clear at the start that this account manager role is commercial and to seek the right skills to match? 

Fully branded up in 2023, doing the exhibition hall thing with Sennen.

Sales is good! 

Almost every business needs sales to survive. Every talented engineer, coder, designer, and creative within a business with dedicated functions depends on someone to bring in the deals that pay for their good work. Big projects, business milestones, Christmas bonuses, all the good stuff – It starts with a sale.

Why does sales have this stigma attached to it? Is it because of the shiny suit? Is it a whiff of the Wolf of Wall Street? (you already know where that link goes.) Is it a bad experience from others? Maybe it’s just guilt by association with large-scale cold calling and lazy automated outreach.

(Seriously, if I get one more LinkedIn DM saying how much they like my work with attached vagaries, I’m gonna scream.)

What’s even harder is it’s not socially acceptable to go on the offensive if someone asks, “Is this a sales call?” Imagine if the reply was “Yes, what’s the problem with that…?”

Let’s be honest, that is probably not gonna land all that well.

But my underlying point stands: I think we need to be proud of sales careers, and we need to look after our salespeople better. (Yes, you’d expect me to say that but I mean it.) 

Take that same designer mentioned earlier. What if they go freelance? One of the first things they will need to do is make a sale to get their business off the ground.

I find it incongruous that sales is the one career where you only get paid properly if you’re performing at your absolute best, and then the targets shift. What was good last year becomes frankly mediocre this year. In a weird way, by making it harder for top performers, it disincentivises effort. (But let’s leave commission structures for a whole other article.)

On the hunt for new projects in 2026, not an ick to be found.

So where does that leave us – still feeling icky?

I think we need to take a bit of pride in our craft and care about it. To do well in sales, I believe it’s very important to learn about the industry and not try to skate across multiple sectors. I think we have to have a bit of mental fortitude and accept those not-right-nows as part of the process and not as evidence that we’re doing it wrong. And I would dearly like it if sales was seen as a peer of other disciplines across a business. I’m not asking for special treatment. I’m just asking for fewer sighs and stopping with the eye rolls. 

The sales ick doesn’t need to be a fact of life. It isn’t one that should be carried around forever. It is but a construct and not a particularly useful one at that. 

Let’s chuck it in the bin.