Sell Without Being a Salesy Weirdo: 10 Simple Steps

17 min readJul 12, 2021

I hate selling because it makes me feel icky or sleazy.”

That’s something you often hear from someone who doesn’t necessarily consider themselves a salesperson. The reality is…we’re all in sales.

Whether you are trying to negotiate a raise, get the kids to go to bed, or want to get colleagues to work with you on a project, it’s all about how you are able to influence.

But influence is not about manipulation or tactics.

When I think about sales, I imagine a wonderful interaction between a buyer and seller where we help them solve a problem in exchange for a price they feel good about. And as long as you’re not selling crap, this exchange of value can be great for everyone.

It’s when we get weird about it, that things go sideways…

Think about the times you’ve encountered salesy weirdos in the wild and know how they make us feel. You also probably have caught yourself being weird when you tried to make a sale, right? I know I have. But hold on. Being weird is okay. Embrace your amazing, unique, weirdness and we can celebrate what makes us all individual and be weird together.

When I talk about being a “salesy weirdo,” what I’m saying is that you become someone you’re not. The weirdo factor is the reason you feel icky or sleazy. At a deep level, your mind and body are in conflict and subconsciously, these competing forces make you feel bad.

Usually what we see in the real world is that people put on their”sales armor,” adopt new identities, and create sales personas that are in conflict with their true self.

And customers can always smell their sales breath.

Even when you’re not in sales, learn how to sell

Again…everyone sells.

When you reframe your selling skills to be more of life skills, you start to see how they can impact every aspect of your life.

I recently got an email from a rep I worked with for a client. He didn’t cut it in sales, but realized the power of what we worked on together.

“Hey Joe,

Just wanted to circle back after all this time and thank you again for your help. I didn’t exactly close more clients, in fact I realized sales outreach wasn’t really for me. However, it did help me a lot in selling to existing clients and generally approaching prospects. Ultimately, it got me in front of the right people at [BIG COMPANY] and they recruited me for a full time position. Even better, I negotiated the highest compensation package of my life while being the most casual and authentic about it.

So thank you! I overcame the sales weirdo barrier.”

I loved this message because he and I had only done a sixty minute session three months earlier, but it stuck. And it helped it get clarity, have fun, and influence something important to him.

Being IN sales sometimes isn’t for everyone, but learning HOW to sell is.

Being a Salesy Weirdo is normal and common

The term “salesy weirdo” came from a sales call review I was doing with one of my clients where we listened to her call recording with a prospect. The rep, Jessica, was always so awesome to talk to and our role plays were loads of fun. But then she got on the phone and became…a weirdo. She stumbled over her words, said things she normally wouldn’t, and made the prospect uncomfortable. Once we spotted that and worked to un-weirdo her, everything changed. She became her true self, sold like a human, connected quickly & easily, and absolutely smashed her sales targets.

Over the years, I’ve noticed it happens everywhere and the weirdo factor is something that’s become easy to spot for both me and my clients. We see it in emails, text messages, social media posts, on sales calls, and especially in private messages on social media. It’s everywhere!

The good news for you is that when you de-weirdo yourself, you will stand out from all your competitors immediately.

It’s time for you to break the cycle.

But…selling is not easy.

Sales comes with it’s own inherent set of challenges that cause us to adjust who we are as people:

We often focus too much on achieving targets
We get busy just doing too many things that are not helping us sell
When you are in charge of selling, you can be judged publicly for performance in front of your peers
We put pressure on ourselves internally and are squeezed externally
We are only as good as our last report
Reps struggle to remain calm on an emotional rollercoaster
We wrestle with the balance of being too pushy or not influential enough
We’ve heard horror stories about others and don’t want it to happen to us
And much more…

Sales takes a special set of skills, but if you’re not Liam Neeson, then you should remember that , you actually have to juggle three unique mindsets:

Elite athlete,
Clinical psychologist
Systems engineer

And if you’re a freelancer or small business owner, this is compounded because you have to do all the things you are gifted at for your business as well as be able to sell. It’s a big responsibility and absolutely understandably stressful.

When faced with this type of responsibility and possible rejection, the natural way to handle it is to go into protection mode.

Here’s the secret…the reason you can see bad selling is that it’s being done by amateurs. Professional selling is hard to spot, because the professionals don’t look like they’re selling. Selling is very similar to a performance like acting, because you can always spot the bad performers.

Salesy weirdos are a lot like poor actors — you know em when you see em.

The Four Salesy Weirdos

You may be wondering how to spot a salesy weirdo or perhaps which one you might be.

As you read through the descriptions, look for how these characteristics appear across your communication with customers, colleagues, and perhaps even friends.

Here’s a killer diagram I made:

Salesy Weirdo #1: The Hyper Happy!

When you first think of what a sales persona might be, I bet this one comes to mind. The overly eager and enthusiastic (and perhaps even creepily nice) extrovert. We can smell these ones coming a mile away, but because they are so energized and in your face, you might mistake that for sales confidence. You might think that’s the energy you need to mirror to succeed. I mean they are talking to lots of people. These are also the people who write with exclamation marks through all their emails!!!! If you think sales is only for extroverted people, you’re missing a big opportunity and may shoot yourself in the foot if you try to be someone like this if you’re not naturally a human jet engine.

Psychologically as customers, when we encounter these hyper-happy people, our instincts kick in and our reptilian brain tells us something’s not quite safe here. Many potential prospects are put off because the interaction feels high pressure, their words don’t match their energy, and subconsciously we know something’s not right. If you want to show energy or make more of an impact, work on your tonality in a strategic way. FYI, introverted people often make the best salespeople.

Salesy Weirdo #2: The Robotic Pro

Sales is all about confidence, right? You need to know what you’re talking about and sound smart to impress your customers, so the biggest mistake most people make is to become an…expert. The robotic sales pro weirdo essentially decides that if they know everything there is to know about the product, then the customer has to say yes. And that those who don’t say yes are just not the right fit. This is the ultimate way to avoid rejection which is why it happens all the time. People do not buy on logic, they buy on emotions, and it’s your job to influence them by tapping into the part of their brain that gets them excited. You do this by telling stories, by personalizing the experience, and by influencing. This requires you to (sorry to say) work on your craft and rely on more than just logic.

If you’re a robotic salesperson, you most likely are relying on perfect pitches, elaborate emails, and pre-designed templates for everything — and you use the same process for everyone. What you may notice is that only a handful of people say yes, but there are a large number of others who you thought should say yes, but didn’t. Sorry to say, you might just be an “order taker.”

Work on building genuine conversation, asking questions, and practice empathy. Otherwise, the prospect feels sold to and can only respond from a place of logic, making it impossible to connect to that limbic system in the brain and the emotions needed to take action. When we create a space for human dialogue, our prospects will open up more, take time with us, and you can create opportunities to increase your conversions and deal size. Stop rushing to solve problems — instead, focus on what your prospect needs and be more human in your conversations.

Salesy Weirdo #3: The Sneaky Snake

Have you ever been sold to and felt that they had a hidden agenda? You smelled that commission breath and your gut told you this was all for them, not you. Professional selling has been around a long time, some of the earliest sales training resources I have are from 1924. If you’ve heard of probing, closing, and handling objections, you know some sales techniques. People are tired of being sold to and manipulated, and in today’s world, the key to success is about building trust.

Please stop trying to hustle, close, or trick people into buying. These are what I call “sales bros” and exactly who I’m on a mission to stop. Selling is about serving, leadership, and connection. It’s not about coercion. You probably know what it feels like to be on the other end of the sneaky tactic, so work extremely hard not to do that to your customers.

Salesy Weirdo #4: The Pleaser

If you consider yourself not a salesperson, you are potentially this weirdo. Don’t get me wrong, these weirdos struggle for the opposite reason of the others — they try to not be salespeople. I’ve worked with hundreds of people on my teams that are amazing individuals, but struggle to sell because they don’t want to risk being abrasive or someone they’re not. This weirdo enters the sales world with a complete misunderstanding of what selling is, so they reject many of the notions of how to sell.

They refuse to do effective follow up for fear of being pushy
They’ll resist asking for the sale because they feel the customer should naturally just make the decision to buy
They don’t ask deep enough questions or challenge effectively because they don’t like being intrusive

What a pleaser weirdo misses is that the focus too much on what they are doing to the customer rather than what they can do for them. The easiest fix is to learn who exactly they help as customers, how they help them, and learn how they can tell the ultimate story to prospects. When they see potential customers have an opportunity to win, then it’s time to make them happy. Tell them how they can win. If they don’t call you back, call them and help them work through challenges to get to the purchase. If you truly want to serve your customers, you can do it through leadership. Often, pleasers will get an ah-ha when they learn that a prospect buys from a competitor because a purchase was made, just not with them. Pleasers don’t want to be seen as pushy, but need to learn how to create excitement that spurs action. If you’re a pleaser, it’s time to learn how to sell with value and stop making excuses.

10 Simple Steps to Sell Without Being a Salesy Weirdo

If you’ve seen Glengarry Glen Ross you’ll know the ABC’s of selling — “Always Be Closing.” Watch it here if you haven’t seen it. Alec Baldwin gives an amazing performance of everything I despise in sales. The whole idea of you doing something to someone else goes against the true nature of selling. The sad thing is that many CEOs still believe this is a sales gospel.

“Always Be Closing” is BAD SALES ADVICE

Don’t be a closer, be these five things instead:

#1 — Always be PRESENT

Years ago I realized that the only thing that matters in sales is the person right in front of you — in person, on the phone, or on the other end of that email or video. All day you have an ongoing series of moments that give you an opportunity to make an impact. What do you choose to do with those moments? Make eye contact with your prospects and maintain the connection with them. Personalize your emails, and be present in all your communication. Sales reports have numbers, but every number represents a human — an opportunity to learn to connect more effectively. Each day is a series of moments that you can create.

#2 — Always be CURIOUS

The best salespeople know how to ask questions. The masters know what to do with them. It’s not important just to ask a barrage of questions to your prospect, you have to take the time to really care about what they’re saying. You can train reps to ask questions on a script, but high performers know how to tend to their prospect’s conversation, make them feel listened to, and then reframe the discussion in powerful ways. You need to be insatiably curious about your customer’s world and make sure you fully see their problem before you can offer to solve it.

#3 — Always be GENEROUS

An overused quote, but still a perfect one is always Zig Ziglars, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.” Even though you may have seen that on hundreds of powerpoint slides and motivational sales posters in the sales office, this quote should be ringing in your ears every single day. I want you to think about how you can give VALUE in every interaction, in every email, in everything you do. Ask yourself, “is this for ME or is it for THEM?”. You can do this by creating videos, articles, and resources you freely share with your prospects and customers that solve their biggest challenges. If you help someone win for free, they stop to imagine how much more value you have when they get serious with you. It also helps you rethink your sales approach and win the long game.

#4 — Always be CHALLENGING

Pay close attention to this tip as I’ve seen people execute it poorly. A great book for everyone to read is “The Challenger Sale” by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon. Being challenging doesn’t mean being difficult, but rather it demonstrates your ability to deeply care about your customer by being brave enough to show them new ways of thinking. If you can get them to think differently about themselves, they will think differently about you. Forget about building relationships in the beginning and instead focus on earning the relationship by helping the customer win. Even if it means you need to push back on their opinions. You can do this in a sales conversation by saying this like, “I know you’ve said that this is your problem and you want us to help you by doing these things. After listening to what you’ve said, I’d like to throw some other ideas at you because I actually think your real problem looks like this. Are you open to exploring that?” If you only provide answers they already know, you minimize your true value in their eyes. Do your customers call you for your unique input on any of their decisions, even if they aren’t ready to buy?

#5 — Always be PERSUASIVE

Let’s be clear — being persuasive is NOT closing. The ability to persuade is how you make your vision a reality by transforming the opinions and actions of others without coercion. When done right, you will be highly effective at getting people excited to commit to taking action. If you are weak at persuading, you might get some compliance, but most likely met with resistance. When you influence people, you can do it from three approaches:

Logical: Use facts and figures to demonstrate the ideal way forward
Emotional: Connect your ideas to their sense of well being or personal story
Cooperative: You collaborate on achieving your goals together

If you want to be a trusted sales advisor to your customers, constantly develop your ability to influence and persuade. Communicate clearly, demonstrate strong leadership, have a vision, and motivate others to win. You’ll find you become less weird and definitely will feel less like you are selling and more like you’re leading.

#6 — Always be SYSTEMIZING

Sales is not a magical artform. In fact, for those who are top performers, sales should feel like just doing your job and sometimes even be boring and repetitive. When I work with high performers, they aren’t ever looking for more to do. They aren’t trying to hit a massive win or find the latest and greatest tool. They want to know how to streamline what they already do and find the small tweaks to make it easier to sell faster and with less complexity. What happens after three to six months is that they are ahead of their targets and have this feeling of guilt because they aren’t working as hard as they used to. It’s all about systems, baby! As you progress through your professional sales journey, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to identify everything you do that is repeatable, and create a process. Look at the tools you use and find out how to streamline your day. In sales, you have to ask yourself, “Is this helping me get more customers?” If it isn’t, you might need to remove it from your system. One of the things I love helping my clients do is create repeatable best practices, so they can win more by doing less. Following a solid system will always help you stop winging it and getting weird with customers because you are more confident, calm, and consistent.

#7 — Always be TESTING

Similar to #6, you should adopt a testing mentality in everything you do. The most common thing I run into with new sales teams is when I ask them how their sales process works, and they say “it depends…” or “sometimes…” My answer is always, “What does it depend on and what are the sometimeses?”

You have two types of competing thought processes in your mind. You’ll often either think like a lawyer or a scientist. As a lawyer, you take your conclusion and work very hard to prove it right. As a scientist, you look at the information (good or bad) and work to learn from it. In sales, it’s very common to think like a lawyer and get stuck doing the same thing over and over. I challenge you to think like a scientist and see your processes, results, and systems as your own sales laboratory. Everything in front of you should be observed, evaluated, and improved upon through testing. If you have an idea of what might work (hypothesis), try it out on the next twenty sales calls (experiment), and then determine your findings from the data and conclusions. This is how you make small, incremental changes that add up to big returns in sales long term.

#8 — Always be ETHICAL

I can imagine that for many people the terms sales and ethics don’t go together. That’s because the salesy weirdos might be ruining it for ya. Everyone has their own set of ethics, but I urge you to actually sit down and write what you stand for. When things get tough, what are your non-negotiables? Will you take shortcuts? Will you sell something you don’t believe is right, just to make your sales targets? Or will you focus on building credibility by being accountable, truthful, and addressing challenges head-on?

You should have a set of guiding principles (regardless of where you work) that are the backbone of how you’ll treat every lead, prospect, and customer with respect, fairness, and integrity. If you agree with me that you should play the long game in sales, then your ethics will be the driving force to that future success. You may have to stand your ground sometimes in the short term to get there, but it’s worth it.

#9 — Always be INTERESTING

You wanna know a secret? Your customers want to enjoy their life. They want to have fun, and they want to be successful. Over the years, working with hundreds of sales reps, this comment comes up as an excuse: “They’re just not interested”. Hey, I’ve said it myself! It’s not that they’re not interested, we’re not being interesting enough. We need to get interesting.

What are you doing to be chasable in the mind of your customer?
When you send them emails, are they excited to hear from you?
How are you making your sales approach completely about them, their needs, and their world?
How are you demonstrating that you are fun to work with and someone they would want to connect with, regardless of the sale?

No matter how great your script or offer is, it’s never what you say…it’s how you say it. Make the time they spend with you or the message they read something they actually want to do. Treat them like they are lifelong friends and they just might be.

#10 — Always be LEARNING

Everyone should be committed to lifelong learning, especially in sales. If you aren’t doing something every month to grow, you’re missing out — not just on your sales targets — but on life. Whoa, heavy stuff man…If you want to accelerate your success like a sales rocketship, build a process for continuous training for yourself. Don’t wait for others to train you.

Let me explain the difference between a learning and non-learning mindset. A non-learning mindset might learn their sales playbook, do a bit of pre-call planning before a sales call, do the call, and move to the next person. A learning mindset will have a plan of a skill you want to test during this call or this week, have done some research on how to improve that skillset, practiced it, then reflected on how effective it was. If you’re a new sales manager, you should go buy a handful of books on sales management and come up with your process you want to apply with your team, but be willing to learn from it rather than simply tell them what to do. When you have a learning mindset, you will always be curious and find unique ways to present ideas. You will easily un-robot your weird sales approach and every sales call you do, you have an opportunity to learn from — even if it’s one small thing.

Some say they don’t have time to develop. You don’t have time NOT to develop. Learners get better, faster. Weirdos stay the same. It’s that simple.

What YOU can do today to un-weird yourself

Okay, that all should make sense, but the question is, “who do YOU want to be when selling?”.

At the end of the day, you have absolute control of what you can become. What will you do about it? What steps will you take each day to set yourself on the path to true sales leadership?

If you want to sell at the highest level, it’s going to take some effort and persistence to get into a true sales groove, especially if you’re already a long-standing weirdo.

What can you do each day to get better?

Become a master at asking killer questions, shutting up, listening, and reframing
Personalize your approach as much as possible
Reviews your sales calls constantly and ask for help
Develop insights about your product, your customer, and the industry so you can demonstrate your thinking and better lead customers to your offer
If you run a sales team, work on more coaching activities rather than just management activities
Make sure you are focusing on your TODAY goals, but not forgetting about the TOMORROW vision for yourself and your business
Build systems and repeatable processes so you don’t try to wing it every time — especially with outreach and follow up
Don’t let being busy be an excuse for scheduling time to grow and develop
Give yourself permission to play more and have fun

Let’s do some sales coaching.

Of course, you could work with a sales coach (like me) to help unweird things you might not be seeing. I spend most of my day helping people tweak small parts of what they’re doing for a big impact.

I work with reps of all skill levels, CEO’s, sales teams, and even other sales coaches and consultants to help them find the edge. I speak sales, I “get” salespeople, and we achieve results quickly.

If you want me to take a look at your sales calls or messages, let’s set up a time to share some ideas and see if it makes sense to spend more time together.

BOOK HERE

About the author:

Joe Girard is a Sales Coach and Consultant who lives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Basix has worked with him on a number of projects mainly because of our shared values and beliefs around sales. His insights on the psychology of selling definitely helps his clients sell more and have fun. All without being Salesy Weirdos. You can find Joe at ChangeGrowAchieve.com