Like most women, I’ve been selling my whole life. It all starts when we’re children and we work out who to ask what from, how to get a yes from a parent, a teacher, a friend. Along my journey, I transitioned from operating on instinct to formal sales training, and I’ve learned how the rules for selling are different for men and women.
I started my career as an interior designer, and when I was in college I asked my mentor what were the best classes I should take, expecting to hear color theory or space planning. What she told me was to take psychology, as much as I possibly could. So I did. I took a ton of psych classes. Intro to psychology, sociology, psychology of personal relationships, etc. It wasn’t until I started working in interior design that I understood how intimate of a business it is, and because I took all those classes, I was able to better understand my client’s decision making process and it helped me make their experience smoother. That was my foundation.
When 2008 crash happened, it was rough for me. Interior design is a luxury industry. First thing to go, and the last thing to come back when the economy crashes. I found myself in timeshare sales, which I consider my first official sales job. Interior design is sales, and I had to sell both products and my services, but I wasn’t really turning a no into a yes, most of the time. My clients already knew they were going to buy something from me as soon as they started working with me. I didn’t really need to change their mind, just steer them in the right direction. I was always a top seller, but I operated on pure instinct. When I was hired to sell timeshare my manager said “Welcome to the NFL of sales”, and it was. Timeshare sales are gnarly, but they taught psychological sales training twice a week, and that layered on top of the psychology foundation I already had. I went through all the levels of that training twice a week for three years. We had experts from the CIA come in to teach us how to read and manipulate body language. I have now been weaponized. In a sales call or an argument I am a heat seeking missile.
I’ve been in places in my life where I’ve had to pick myself up and handle whatever was at my doorstep, because no one else was doing it for me.
I’ve had to learn on the job and I followed men’s advice and I could see men doing the same thing and it worked and I did it and the prospect got angry. I didn’t close the deal, while watching my male colleagues close deals all day long. I had to figure out why it didn’t work for me, and how to do it differently.
I’ve learned that these natural thought processes are a huge asset when it comes to sales and I want to help women develop their skills where they don’t have to figure it out for themselves, they can learn through my trial and error how to get the sale, how to close the deal, without that icky feeling.
