If you’re in business, you’re in sales. They say that nothing happens unless someone sells something. Even if you have no business development angle to your role, you’re selling yourself. You’re selling your arguments, your values, your opinions, your advice, your excuses, your ideas and your thoughts.

If you want to rise to the top of almost any profession these days, it will really you’re your cause to be good a selling. It’s hard to make partner in a professional firm, take up positions of responsibility in the bank or move up the ranks in an organisation just by being good at what you do. You must develop that dimension to your offering where you’re bringing in business and creating opportunities.

It will help you to be a profit centre more than a cost centre. You may not be a natural seller. But you can be more persuasive. You can be more ‘clued in’ to what makes people buy. You can make an effort to learn more about sales. You can understand more about why emotions make people buy and cold-hearted logic and common sense are what they use to justify afterwards.

After two years selling private medical insurance for a major healthcare company, I knew I wasn’t a natural sales person. And I knew that wouldn’t change. So I learned to be better than I was at what I could, and that’s when I became successful. You have to be absolutely brilliant to make it merely by being good at what you do.

Just making yourself 10% better at selling takes the pressure off being brilliant all the time. Never forget you’re in sales!