I sent sales emails

For the first several years of being a paid coach, I prided myself on having never sent a single sales email.

Even when I told people about my programme at my free webinars, I did it in such a shamefaced, hurried way that an attendee once sent me an email afterward explaining how to pitch properly.

I was lucky that people liked my writing and content enough that I got away with it.

But people working with me were getting wildly better results than they’d gotten from anything else they’d tried. And I started to realise that people looking to escape their talent struggles simply did not know the amount they could change using the tools and approach I offer.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the only way for them to know was for me to tell them. Possibly even more than once.

And, also unfortunately, the word for telling people why they might want something you have to offer is selling.

To say I resisted this conclusion would be a massive understatement.

I didn’t want to be a sleaze ball. I didn’t want to travesty my sacred newsletter with shilling. I didn’t want to be like the other girls coaches, flogging my wares under a thin guise of content.

The problem was, I also wanted to help more people to escape internal resistance. I couldn’t do that if they didn’t understand why working with me would be different.

I hated that this was the choice I was facing. So rather than making it, I complained about it. I threw a mental tantrum so prolonged and infantile that I think my business coach wanted to fire me as a client.

But eventually I got tired of having a tantrum. I was ready to move on. Finally, I thought, well, a sales email is at bottom a genre of nonfiction writing, and I’d mastered a lot of those in my time. How hard could it be?

As I quickly found out, the answer was: so fucking hard.

It wasn’t hard because a sales email was an impossible piece of prose to construct. It was hard because trying to master the genre surfaced every deeply shitty thought I still had about myself in relation to social dynamics, popularity, visibility, authority, winning vs. losing, failure, money—you name it.

Writing those emails was one of the most confronting things I have ever tried to do, and it resulted in some of the deepest memory reconsolidation work I’ve done with my own coach—and frankly that’s saying something.

Eventually, though, I wrote and sent a series of emails explaining which people I thought would benefit from working with me and why. Yes, some people unsubscribed. But more people booked consults. More people signed up so I could help them. More people got amazing results.

Even though this was exactly what everyone had been telling me would happen, I was astonished.

This is when I started to figure out that many of the messages I’d internalised about talent and selling were probably wrong.

I think most of us think about selling as the opposite of talent.

Sure, in a pinch we might think of selling be a sort of talent in itself, but mostly it’s seen as an undesirable one. It’s slime-y and pushy and obnoxious. It’s fundamentally a sort of sham, blowing something up bigger than it actually is.

To be clear, these versions of selling actually exist, and they do indeed suck.

But here is all selling really is, at bottom:

Enabling people to see the value of what is being offered.

As that definition makes clear, selling does not have to be a sleazy endeavor at all. It doesn’t have to involve lying or blowing smoke or any sort of pressure. It doesn’t even have to involve money. If you’ve ever tried to persuade a friend listen to some new band they’re dubious about, you have experience selling.

At bottom, selling just means doing your best to communicate value to people, who can then decide if that value is actually relevant to them.

But that doesn’t mean selling isn’t still terrifying as hell. Think about the definition I just gave:

Selling is enabling people to see the value of what is being offered.

Almost every word is a potential minefield.

For one thing, consider the whole concept of ‘other people’. Horror show. I mean, have you met other people? Did you go to middle school? Do you remember being picked last for kickball?

Then there’s the ‘value’ part. When it comes to our deepest ambitions and skills, most of us spend at least half our time convinced we’re actually talentless hacks. And now we’re supposed to make a case for our value?! As our flawed, unappealing selves? To other people?

Finally, we have offer, which is maybe the worst word of the whole definition. When you make a case for the value of something created from your talents, you’re specifically inviting the world to make a judgment of that thing. You’re saying, Hey, check out this piece of my soul—do you want to reject it or what? Let me know!

Nightmare.

Here’s the thing. All of that is true.

But also: the nightmare aspects are precisely why I think it’s so important for talented people to grapple with what selling actually requires of them.

Next week, I’ll tell you why. See you then.