If you hate selling, your marketing needs to work harder.

Becoming a founder means getting comfortable selling yourself, your services, and your brand, whether you enjoy it or not.

The more interesting question is what selling yourself actually means.

I’ll tell you what I don’t think it means.

As someone who has spent pretty much my entire career with the word “marketing” somewhere in my job title, I have been sold to more times than I care to remember, and the issue has never really been sales itself.

It is cold sales.

It is accepting a LinkedIn connection request and, approximately two seconds later, discovering that the person you have just connected with has apparently conducted a complete strategic review of your business and is already very confident they know exactly what you need.

Since becoming a founder, those messages seem to have become even more relentless. Leads, leads, leads. Apparently I urgently need more leads, someone needs to redesign my website, and there's always someone who can transform my pipeline, despite knowing absolutely nothing about how I am actually trying to build my business.

Maybe I don’t need more leads. Maybe I don’t want to redesign my website because I don’t primarily use it as a sales tool, but as a place where people can validate what they have already learned about me elsewhere. Maybe, just maybe, I already have enough clients right now, and my priority is doing brilliant work for them rather than filling the top of a funnel simply because somebody has decided that more must automatically mean better.

That is the bit that bothers me.

There has been no conversation about what I am trying to achieve, no question about what is working, no understanding of what my priorities might be and quite often very little evidence they have read anything beyond my job title before deciding that their particular service is the answer to a problem I may or may not actually have.

I spent years working as a Director of New Business alongside my marketing roles, so I know exactly how difficult that side of business can be, particularly when you are trying to create interest where there may not yet be any, build relationships from scratch and somehow judge the moment when a perfectly pleasant conversation needs to become a commercial one.

Sales is a tough gig, and I have never been particularly comfortable with it.

When I started StoryOne, I knew that becoming a founder would mean getting much better at actively selling myself, something the introvert in me has never been overly comfortable with. The advantage of becoming a founder with a marketing background, though, is understanding that marketing can often be a much more powerful way to sell yourself than simply asking people to buy.

I have not once coldly dropped into someone’s DMs to tell them their positioning needs work, emailed founders to explain what I think is wrong with their website or approached businesses with an unsolicited diagnosis of everything I could apparently fix for them.

Instead, I have openly shared the things I know.

I have talked about storytelling, positioning, marketing, and thought leadership; shared examples of brands communicating brilliantly; explored what businesses often make unnecessarily complicated; and written about the problems I spend my working life helping clients solve.

Rather than telling people they need my expertise, I have given them the insight to decide that for themselves.

StoryOne is now six months old and, during that time, I have worked with nine different brands, three of which have become weekly retainer clients, and not one of those brands was approached by me.

That has probably been the biggest lesson for me.

The work has come through people reading something I have written, seeing work I have shared, being recommended by somebody who understands what I do or following StoryOne long enough to recognise that the problem I keep talking about is the problem they are trying to solve.

By the time we talk, I am rarely trying to convince them that clearer positioning matters or explain why a stronger story could help their business.

They already understand that, so the conversation can start somewhere far more useful: what are they trying to achieve, what is getting in the way, and am I actually the right person to help?

For me, that is where marketing becomes commercially powerful.

Good marketing is not simply the content you put around a business while the supposedly serious business of sales happens somewhere else. Done properly, it is doing a huge amount of the selling before the sales conversation ever begins, allowing people to understand how you think, see the value of your expertise and recognise their own challenge in something you have written without somebody appearing unexpectedly in their inbox to explain all the things they are apparently doing wrong.

That does not mean sales disappears.

There are still proposals to write, scopes to agree, fees to discuss, and those slightly uncomfortable moments when I have to say a number out loud and resist the overwhelming temptation to immediately explain why the number is extremely reasonable and perhaps offer to paint their hallway while I am there.

I am getting better at that bit.

What I have stopped assuming is that being good at selling myself means becoming good at cold selling.

I have spent more than 20 years helping businesses use marketing to make people understand why they matter, so it's not particularly surprising that the most effective way I have found to grow my own business is to do exactly the same thing.

If you hate selling, the answer may not be to force yourself to become a completely different kind of salesperson.

It might simply be to make your marketing work hard enough that the right people understand why they need you before you ever have to tell them.