How to Start Building #3: Why a Sales Skillset is a Business Superpower (Classic)

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We are dropping a mini-series all about how to start building. We're focusing on the mindset of an entrepreneur and the skills you need to go from idea to reality. That means instead of just one episode, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to miss, plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. 

You're listening to a classic episode right now, number three in the series, but make sure you catch today's new episode as well. In today's classic episode, I am examining our perception of sales and why any modern business pro needs to take their sales or storytelling skills seriously and to the next level. Let's hop into it. 

The #1 career skill

Sales is the number one career skill, and it's not even close. I feel full conviction in saying that. And the reason I feel full conviction is because I feel like we've been taught our whole lives to think of sales as a second-class skill. Memes have been made out of snake oil salesmen. People frown upon sellers being only focused on money and nothing else. When you hear the word “sales,” what do you think of? For many of you, it'll be someone with a headset in a boiler room style office, or a spam call or trying to sell you on a free trip to the Caribbean or a scene from Wolf of Wall Street. It was the same thing for me in college. When I went to the University of Michigan and I was in the business school there, sales wasn't explicitly frowned upon, but it was just never talked about. There was no sales class in our core curriculum. The most sought-after jobs weren't sales jobs, they were investment banking or consulting jobs.

And if anyone ever said that their job was in sales, they would get a classic, “Oh, that's awesome” in a disingenuous, high-pitched voice from other students. But if there's one lesson that I have learned from building a business over the last five years and advising dozens of people on their careers, no skill and I mean no skill is more important than sales. Everything that we did to get Morning Brew off the ground was sales. We had to sell our first employee on taking the leap from a steady corporate job to join a no-name startup. Think about how hard that is when you don't know if your business is going to be around next week yet you're, you're trying to convince someone to bet their livelihood on your company. We had to sell investors on why they should put their hard-earned money into a business that was started by two unproven college students. I was 21 at the time. Austin was 19. We didn't even have a business model yet. We hadn't made a dime yet. We convinced 28 people to invest $750,000. We had to sell our first advertisers on why they should pay us to get in front of our audience when there was zero proof that it would work. Imagine going to Discover Card, who is our first big brand, and trying to explain to their CMO, why advertising with a no-name business media company who is trying to take on the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, or The Economist was a good idea.

We had to sell readers on why they should choose Morning Brew to read over other existing media outlets that had way more brand legitimacy that literally had been building their businesses over the last century. And then we also had to sell readers on why they should share Morning Brew with other readers when there was no money in it for them. You know, our referral program has been wildly successful. We've gotten over 300,000 people to convince their friends or family members to sign up with their unique link, but we've never paid a dime to these readers. We've paid them in swag, in bottle openers, in Sunday editions of our newsletter, but that's a really hard sell. Without sales, we would still be on the ground-floor as a company.

And quite honestly, I would probably be back in finance. I probably would have already quit Morning Brew because the traction wasn't nearly enough to pay the bills of living in New York City. So why is it that we don't give sales the respect it deserves? I have a hypothesis. I believe that sales has a branding problem. If done improperly sales can be ugly. It can involve someone being pushy, an employee being pushed to the limits trying to hit their daily call number. A person getting a seventh automated email from a company that they literally just bought one thing from online. But that's the exception, not the rule.

Sales by any other name… 

Unfortunately though, social media, media broadly, and our peers talk about exceptions and not rules. And the focus on the ugly, bad, pushy side of sales has heard its reputation over time. But the other reason that I believe this is a branding problem and nothing else is because there are other words, there are other jobs, that we use that basically mean sales. They're basically synonyms, but those words are adored by the masses while sales ends up being hated. Take the word “storyteller,” for example. We have been taught to love that word. Steve Jobs is so loved, not just for his vision for Apple, but for his ability to storytell at the annual event what new things the company had coming down the pipeline. The Beatles aren't just famous because they can play instruments well. They're famous because their words create stories that people learn to love. Oprah Winfrey is a great storyteller. Casey Neistat is a great storyteller. Tim Ferriss is a great storyteller. But storytelling is just a euphemism for selling. Steve jobs was selling computers and phones. The Beatles were selling records and concerts. Oprah was selling views and books. Casey Neistat was selling his daily life. So what's the difference? Honestly, very, very little. Sales has been branded as something that is pushy, that is greed-based, and that is a cringe-worthy experience.

Storytelling has been branded as almost poetry of sorts, words that create a movement that you gravitate towards. But the actual difference between these two things is far smaller than the descriptions that I just provided. And just like storytelling, I have another word for you. The word “negotiation.” This word has benefited from the same positive branding as storytelling. When we think of negotiation, we think of it as an art, on a TV show where the FBI agent or president is on the phone, talking down a terrorist and we celebrate when they're able to do it. Books like Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, who's a former hostage negotiator, have become bestsellers.

Why is that? It's because negotiation, just like storytelling, is viewed as an art form that is beautiful to watch. But at the end of the day, storytelling, negotiation, and sales are so incredibly similar despite how different society treats them. And know what's the most ironic part? You know how before I was mentioning that in business school, the most sought-after skills were things like Excel and finance, because the most sought-after jobs were investment banking and management consulting? The ironic part about this whole thing is that as you grow in your role as an investment banker and become senior, or you grow in your role as a management consultant and become a partner, your sales abilities only become more important.

You need to sell in new businesses to bring in as clients you need to sell your boss on people you need to hire. You need to sell employees on joining your practice within the larger firm. Simply put, to be a skilled professional in 2021 is to be a good seller.

 So now I want to put it to you. How much time have you spent thinking about sales and, more specifically, how much time have you spent honing your sales skills, or if you'd rather me call it storytelling or negotiation skills? Now that you understand how important it is to be a good seller and storyteller, if you want to be a good professional, how are you going to actually take this and act on it?How are you going to become a better seller in 2021? 

Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter with your ideas, how you want to level up your sales game. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founder’s Journal. If you enjoyed, please let others know who you think would enjoy as well. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next episode.