YOU sell it! Passing the buck is the #1 avoidance technique.

”I do this or I do that, but I don’t sell. I’ll do it, but you sell it for me, okay?”

How many times have you seen this? Here – YOU sell it!  It is what 98% of people on earth expect. They don’t mind doing the work as long as they don’t have to sell something. I know, I am one of them. I am slowly but surely curing myself of this avoidance tendency.

Let us look at my own career as an opera singer. I never sold anything. I had agents to sell me, all I did was sing. Somebody else sold the tickets. I was happy to sing as long as I didn’t have to worry about selling tickets. But, looking back on it, if I had been a better sales person, I would have had much more success as a singer.

When my wife and I met, we decided to do a big concert, she is an excellent pianist and musician, and we were working in the same theater at the time. We wanted to do the first ever mainstage recital in the theater’s history, and really, it wasn’t such a huge thing to do, but you had to mobilize enough people to fill the seats. But, we had the entire force of the theater behind us to help us, and we could practice all we wanted at the theater. These are part of the perks of being in a theater.

So, we actually began walking around town, placing flyers in mail boxes, posting posters and telling everyone to get people to come because we promised it would be a great concert with awesome music and a lot of fun. 

The theater only seats around 700 so it wasn’t  a huge theater, but 700 was a big number in terms of a recital that is not a part of an season ticket. So, to get permission to do the concert on the main stage at all was a huge sales job in itself.  I am proud to say, I was a good salesman on that point. But, I didn’t really do enough to fill the seats. 

Luckily, we were able to have others help us get groups into the theater and in the end sold 200 tickets!  Now, you could say, that 200 made the place only a third full, but that attendance record has yet to be broken in the history of that theater. We still sold twice as many tickets as they had ever sold before and it was a successful concert to boot.

But, more than that, our annual concerts after that were always sold out. We had made a mark, but what kind of mark would we have made had I been a good salesman?

Being a good marketer and salesperson is vital to being an artist. Especially in the beginning you have to go out and identify wants and needs in the marketplace and service those needs. What does it mean? It means, when a business or concert company want or need to have a concert it is also the responsibility of the artist to help sell it, which really means, standing behind their own art and behind the business or company who wishes to sponsor you.

The idea that you can be truly successful and push the duties of sales on someone else, is really bogus. All sales is to effectively portray a belief in what you are selling, in this case yourself. If you can’t sell yourself, your talents and your abilities, then it means that you suffer from an attitude of inadequacy. Sales is an opportunity to reinforce your belief in yourself. It is the highest level of self talk.

So, don’t push  the responsibility of sales on to someone else, because that isn’t good for you. Be proud and believe in yourself and what you want to sell. False humility helps nobody. It limits your possibilities, it cheats society of something valuable and it ultimately tears you down inside because what you are really saying is that you don’t stand up for yourself.

Let’s stop being mice. Mice hide in their holes and come out to get a scrap of food and crawl back in their hole and are happy and cozy to stay in their small little world. They don’t contribute much to society, they get theirs and that is all.  We need to be stallions, proud of ourselves, confident and eager to show the world our strengths and majesty, which in fact is who we truly are.

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