I’m going to lose some sensitive artists, but it has to be said: we are all selling something. Those who view salespeople with contempt are still selling something: contempt for salespeople. Of course, what they are really selling is the image of someone with too much rebel integrity for the world of commerce.

Usually someone else is financing their rebellion. They don’t have to get their hands dirty because Daddy already did. In college, we had the phenomenon of the “trust fund hippy.” The students who looked the most like homeless people were the ones with the biggest credit lines.

You can’t become a rebel icon without brilliant sales and marketing. Kurt Cobain reeked of indifference to commerce. You couldn’t pick him out of a line of Seattle panhandlers. But he was only able to project that image because he had a sales and marketing engine behind him.

When you have genius-level talent, you can have a Vedder/Cobain scorn for commerce while your handlers don the suits and ties. Geniuses get to act eccentric and leave the chores of moving product to their representatives.

But unless you’re a genius with good timing, contempt for sales and marketing is not only going to make you a hypocrite – it’s also going to make you broke. The coolest looking people in my town all have the worst jobs. These are the badass tattooed punks with tongue piercings and wallet chains. They don’t take shit from nobody man! Later you find them slouched behind a counter selling you some pre-ripped jeans. Dressing cool is one thing – figuring out how to work the system on your own terms is a whole other animal. You don’t have to look conventional to succeed – but you do have to master the rules of the game in order to break them. And you can’t learn the game folding shirts at The Gap or selling vintage punk memorabilia at a store you don’t own where the only perk is being able to wear torn fishnets.

You may be wondering how this rant fits into the flow of this book. Once we develop our so-called “assets,” we have to deal with the marketplace, and the marketplace has no patience for our desire to be “cool.” We still have to work a room. Unless we know something about sales and marketing, we’ll be stuck with “assets” that are either worthless or might as well be, since we have no ability to turn them into cash flow.

This book argues for an “asset mentality.” We’ve laid out a process for developing assets on the side, and we’ve attacked “false assets” such as 401ks and home ownership in the hopes of convincing folks who think they are set that they have work to do. There’s more to say about creating assets, but it’s mostly motivational crap about how to stick to it when the going gets tough. The rest is just getting it done. But once we get it done, we have a tougher nut to crack: establishing a market value and cash flow for those assets.

The power of sales and marketing is the abiding lesson of Apple versus Microsoft. It’s the cautionary tale of a vastly inferior product (early Windows) beating a vastly superior product (early Macs). The difference was marketing. Apple was happy with high profitability in niche markets. Microsoft relentlessly marketed a poor product and sold a ton. Microsoft then used the cash from its early success to drastically improve their product while rendering Apple a niche player. Microsoft also redefined the market from a personal computer market to an operating systems market. Apple didn’t want to make money on computers it didn’t make. Microsoft focused its marketing and product development of software and let other companies build machines. Of course, Apple has made some counter-moves, but it’s never threatened the dominance of the Windows operating system.

Unfortunately, most of us (including myself) are more like Apple. We want to live in a world where quality will eventually triumph. If we create something beautiful, people will come to us – or so we long to believe. There’s more great writing in journals and attic chests than you’ll ever find in a magazine rack. Publishing requires so much more than an act of creation. Most successful writers I know are actually mediocre talent-wise. But they all have two qualities: perseverance and a knack for making connections. And most of them have a specialty market of readers they understand. Creative talent is a “nice to have” and that’s it.

We want to climb by the merits of our work, but sadly, you can more accurately equate people’s success by their abilities to sell themselves. I’ve never met a skilled marketing and salesperson who really struggled to make money. That doesn’t mean I necessarily like how salespeople come across, but I’ve gained respect for how they always seem to land on their feet.

It’s also rare to run into companies with great marketing and sales teams that are going under financially. If your marketing people are brilliant and your salespeople can sell, business slow-downs are simply a time to reposition your services and give your sales team something else to sell. On the flip side, most of the business failures I have seen over the years were ultimately tied to weak sales or marketing. This is especially true for smaller companies where owners get busy running the business and forget about marketing and sales strategy. If you’re not building that pipeline, you’re headed for dry season sooner or later.

There are two reasons why people shun sales. One is because they don’t want to participate in the ugly business of selling in order to succeed. The other is because they don’t believe they can sell. “I’m not a salesperson,” they will tell you, as they write their own pink slips.

I’m not denying the phenomenon of the “born salesperson.” You know the type: they set up their first lemonade stand when they were six years old. A born salesperson can sell anything to anybody. I got a punishing lesson in this type of personality when I tried to sell theater tickets to cash-strapped residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the summer of ’86. I worked the job for a month and didn’t sell a single ticket. The workplace was one big table with a bunch of phones around it. One woman at the table was able to sell ten season tickets or more a night. She seemed to get sales just so people could get off the phone with her.

We look at people like that and think “I could never do that, so I’m not a salesperson.” Then we shut the door on improving those skills. It’s true that only a minority of people can sell anything to anybody. The rest of us can also be effective, but here’s the catch: we have to sell something we believe in. Successful salespeople have a range of personalities. Some have the gift of gab; others feel a pit in their stomach when they make a cold call. Styles vary; a passion for what they sell is the constant.

We cannot “take our assets to market” without sales abilities. We don’t necessarily have to sell our own work, but we do need to know enough about sales to manage those who represent us. I have friends who count on their agents to represent them. But before an agent took them on, they too had to be sold.

I am not the world’s best sales or marketing person. But I’ve gotten to the point where I can call anybody. I’ve also gotten better at marketing myself. Few people buy a product until they encounter it numerous times. The more you are able to make people aware of your product (branding), put them in a position to buy, and then close them on the deal, the better things will go for you. And this goes for activists as well as businesspeople.

It’s not selling that makes you corrupt; it’s what you sell that defines you. Who’s a bigger sellout – the band that sells its songs online, or the band that refuses to “sell out” and therefore spends their life playing in obscurity while working jobs they can’t stand? Sometimes the only way to avoid selling out is to learn how to sell something. As for those who think genius gives them a pass, I would reconsider.

I’m not going to argue that Journey are musical geniuses, but if they came along now, they’d learn a hard lesson about timing. So would Frank Zappa, and he actually was a genius. Skillful marketing helps you to change timing by changing the playing field. You do this by altering the perception in people’s minds about what they need. No one is knocking on my door asking for this book tonight, but if I market it well enough, I might be able to create a demand for it.

Just remember that marketing assets is every bit as difficult as developing them. To be truly successful, you need skills on both sides. This is the long-denied unity between the creative process (creating assets) and the business side (marketing and selling those assets). If you believe in the value of the assets you’ve created, you should have no qualms about selling them to as many people as possible. Money actually comes in handy. Make enough money and you can even buy your way into a presidential debate.

If that’s not enough to convince you that sales matter, let me close by saying that aside from musicians, the people I’ve known who are most successful at finding relationships are all salespeople. Salespeople are just comfortable with the “numbers game.” They are used to being turned down and don’t get hung up on it. If you don’t think that’s a useful skill, you probably haven’t been single in a while.

Want to buy Free From Corporate America or see reviews of the final published version from readers like yourself? The printed book is now available on Amazon.com with product reviews.

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