Woman Entrepreneur = Sales Woman

One morning I was enveloped in a conversation about childhood moments. The woman I was speaking with brought me back in time to when catalogs from stores like Sears were sent to homes encouraging sales. We remembered how exciting it was to circle items to purchase with our “play money.” Of course most girls don’t have access to real money at the tender age of ten unless they had the chutzpah to become sales girls early in life.

As our conversation deepened we shared our young sales selves with each other. The woman I was speaking to found funding for her purchases by putting herself out there to perform money making tasks after watching generations of her Native American family members do the same. I became a door-to-door sales girl in my neighborhood offering to iron clothes, tend to unruly grass growing in neighbors sidewalks and polishing silver. I suppose my tenacity to work hard at an early age came from my Italian immigrant grandparents.

I bet if you looked back on your life you would recall memories being a babysitter, newspaper delivery person, lemonade seller, high school year book advertising sales person or camp counselor where you needed to present your best teenage sales self to land a job. We don’t often envision ourselves as saleswomen but really during our entire life we have been in sales in some way, shape or form. We didn’t need to become a woman entrepreneur to suddenly develop into a saleswoman.

I think this point is important to remember because every day we wake up and open up our businesses we are saleswomen. Yes, we are entrepreneurs doing our trade but we are equally saleswomen. No one tells us when we begin our companies we need to embrace sales to succeed. Instead people tell us to focus on the marketplace making unique products or services; but to land our first paycheck we must sell. We always have to sell.

I encourage you to go back into your childhood or young adulthood to reminisce about your own sales experiences. Consider what made you a good sales person young was it your charm, a need for your service, your price or maybe someone needing your skills? Did you just land these jobs or did you go “knock on doors” like me and our Retreat sales presenter Robin Cortese? Did you have more guts to ask for work back then when rejection hadn’t played a role in your life yet? What lessons can you glean from your younger sales self today to make you pick up the phone when you are done reading this inspirational passage and bring in money?