I wish I had nothing to sell you

Reflections on sales and marketing on the heels of “a launch”.

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Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

I know I’m struggling with something when I turn to language in desperation. If I call this something else it will become something else. Like, waking up at 3 am with perimenopausal night sweats isn’t “hell”, it’s a power portal of detoxification and an opportunity to write in rare silence. The unending piles of laundry aren’t soul-sucking tedium, they’re touch points into presence. That’s not grey hair, bitches, those are sparklers! 

I just finished what is commonly known in the wisdo-tainment online business sphere as “a launch”. I don’t like straddling a rocket of stress or abandoning my family for professional hoopla, so I call it an enrollment period.

Doesn’t enrollment period sound sane? Like, there’s this thing I do and people can come to it and pay me money and I help them. Sweet little value exchange happening over here! See my shingle? Come on in!

Will I solve every damn problem you’ve ever had? No, I won’t promise that, because I’m not in a launch. Will I skip meals, snap at my husband and sign my self-worth over to sales metrics? Nope. I’m not in a launch. 

A launch carries a vibe of urgency and intensity. It makes weird ass promises of eternal salvation, to the person launching if they “do it right” and to the folks being blasted to the moon with false scarcity, upsells, downsells and omg this offer will never be this good again FOMO. There’s much in the online business world that I’m legit allergic to. Like, can’t get close to it without breaking into hives of disgust. It’s the sales strategies or influencer tactics whose ethics chafe my soul. 

But even when I call it an enrollment period, even though I’m intentional about values and ethics determining what I promise, how I price and the kind of sales strategies I engage, sending 3 sales emails in one day still makes me wonder if I’m an asshole. Also, it’s effective. 

I was going to do a Black Friday Sale right after this here enrollment period, but last week I got a two-day migraine and took that as body gospel that I should take a seat for a minute. A lesson I’ve learned this year is if anyone says in a planning meeting “this might be too much, but…” It will be. I am the anyone who says these things. It absolutely will be too much. Any hint of too-muchness is absolutely one hundred percent correct because even things that don’t seem like they’ll be too much ahead of time, inevitably, are also a little too much! 

So pivot away from Black Friday. I’ll probably do a Solstice Sale, which is far more on brand even though I’m at a point in my career where I loathe the term on brand. 

I’m not an industry hater. Do I sound jaded? Maybe I’m just off-gassing after spending most of my creative time on sales emails, which is fine and also annoying and also strangely and wildly joyful. 

Now that I’m not selling something, and have the bandwidth to write about other things, I’ve decided to write about my experience of selling. Here are three truths about sales and marketing rippling through me. 

I wish I had nothing to sell you. 

Do I really want to live in a commune where money doesn’t exist and we exchange our labour and gifts as sacraments? Probably not. I love people, but not that much. I’m all for doing the nuanced work of creating healthy collective attachment in community, but do I want to expend my active listening capacity with seven salty roommates writing a manifesto about how we load our communal dishwasher? notachance. 

But do I love the way we’re living? Where everything and everyone is a commodity? Where even our children regard themselves as a brand? Where consciously or not, we seem to collectively believe that wealth acquisition will save us from existential terror? Where buying and selling happen faster and more frequently than my complaints about this relentless laundry situation? No, I do not. 

I wish I had nothing to sell you because what I sell I’d do for free and I’m so sorry I just wrote that, what a twerp thing to say. But it’s true. I’m #blessed. Although maybe not that #blessed since I’m not being bankrolled and can’t offer what I do for free #pleasepayme. But because I’m in love with the delivery of what I do, marketing and selling feel like this extraneous noise, a funnel draining my creativity and time. Zucks, don’t come at me with ads about email funnels just because I wrote the word funnel! 

I just want to write. Or coach. Or teach. Or perform. One part of me (which I’ll contradict in the next section) doesn’t want to have to sell my writing or my coaching or my teaching or my shows. It’s less about my time and more about feeling like those fish in the net in Finding Nemo. 

You know that scene where all the fish have to co-ordinate to get free? Swim down, swim down! I know it’s important not to conflate business with capitalism or selling with extraction and manipulation. But there’s so much extraction and manipulation and people are tired. 

I wish I had nothing to sell you because there’s so much we need to get free from. 

We need to coordinate and swim down. Spending so much of our time buying and selling and reinforcing the systems that keep us from having the bandwidth for organizing, volunteerism, activism and community care makes me sick with rage. 

Selling is sacred

Sharp left turn here folks. I really love selling things I believe in. I LOVE recommending things that alleviate suffering and cultivate connection, joy and pleasure. This is power!

When I DON’T conflate business with capitalism. When I remember that there are plenty of things we can sell that don’t end up in the ocean or landfill. When I’m connected to the power that having money and resources can give us to enact change and co-create the kinds of lives and communities we want to belong to, I’m solidly anchored in the sacredness that is selling. 

Selling, marketing, shingle hanging, word spreading, rooftop shouting, this is sacred work. At the risk of sounding like a spiritual materialist, the capacity and willingness to give language to what we have to offer, to value it enough to give it time and energy to rise above the noise so that the people who need it can find us, this is an act of reverence.   

One of the most impactful lines anyone said in my What is Leadership? Podcast that I abruptly abandoned once I decided I needed to write more, was this: “I want to liberate money from its misery.” It made me cry. It struck such a chord because of the narrative that money is the root of all evil. It’s not. Greed and corruption have a shrewd PR rep. 

I love the idea of taking money back. Liberating it. Letting it be a tool for exchange. A resource for distributing instead of hoarding power. In this way, I want what I sell to tell the story of the value of that exchange and to carry with it an ethic of care. And I want what I purchase, who I purchase it from and why to vote for the kind of world I want to live in. Buying and selling can be a conscious, intentional and sacred act of community contribution, resource sharing and appropriate withholding from that which we want to deny power. 

Selling is simple.

One of the best sales lessons I got was from selling drugs at Woodstock in 1999. 

There’s a Netflix documentary about that concert because it literally went down in flames. I haven’t been able to watch it yet, the event was kinda traumatic. I was almost crushed unconscious in a mosh pit, which wasn’t the scariest part of that weekend. 

Before the fires and riots and assaults start, fun is had. The friend I’m with and I decide we can help pay for the criminally overpriced food and water by buying and selling weed. Nothing to see here folks, just a coupla underage Canadians selling drugs in New York State. 

Collective Soul has just finished playing, our shrooms are starting to sparkle and my friend is sulking in a corner. “What’s with you?” I ask. 

“No one is buying my joints.” He’s a sad little sack of self-pity. I’m 18. I don’t know much about business or sales, but he’s obviously doing this all wrong. I take the grass and start walking through the crowd. 

“Joints! Five bucks each. Five for twenty!” Through sweaty, dehydrated bodies. Past frosted tip bros chanting for Rage Against the Machine. Past raver girls with embroidery thread woven through their hair and around their wrists. “Joints! Five bucks each. Five for twenty!”

Doesn’t take long before I have a mitt full of sweet American cash. This is our new game, my friend sources, I sell. 

Whenever people tell me (often coaches) that the market is saturated or that selling is complicated, I think of those days. If I can sell out weed at Woodstock, where it’s everywhere, you can get clients. Selling is as simple as offering what you’ve got to people who want it. Yes, I understand that there are a lot of conflicting approaches on how to do that and make it work, but many get lost in that complexity and abandon what is simple and accessible. There may be others doing the same so you can be the fastest or the smartest or the cheapest or the best or the most authentic or likeable. You can be the most charming or strategic, simply lucky or in the right place at the right time.

But what doesn’t work is hiding out. No one is going to come over to a sack of self-pity sulking in the corner and ask to buy your drugs. They might offer you some though! And you might think you need to buy their stuff instead of getting up and putting yourself out there. I’m not knocking sad-sacks of self-pity, these are apocalyptic times, get by how you must. I’m just saying it’s a terrible sales strategy. And if you’ve got the goods, please go find your customers. 

My fervent wish, especially as I share this on Black Friday, is that we use our resources in regenerative ways. We sell things that serve a real need, not manufacture need in order to sell things. We purchase from people and organizations who will use it to feed and build up their families and communities, who care about seeing the rising net we’re in for what it is. Who, even if imperfectly, are co-ordinating to swim down and get free.  

I’d love to hear if and what about this piece resonated with you. What’s your relationship with selling or being sold to? What are you working to free yourself from? I’d love to know!