Sales came last in my path, after production, project management and several entrepreneurial experiences. I arrived with many prejudices and have lost almost all of them. The biggest was that selling meant talking. In my experience it mostly means listening — and continuing to listen after the signature.
Today I work in sales at an Italian tech company. What we sell is complex, cycles are long, several stakeholders are involved and decisions rarely depend on one person. In that setting, sales as an exercise in persuasion — the version portrayed in films and closing-technique manuals — has limited value. What works is slower, less spectacular and rooted in the quality of the relationship.
Listening is the difficult part
Listening looks easy because it appears passive. It is not. Listening during a negotiation means resisting the urge to fill silence with your proposal, refusing to finish the other person's sentences with what you would like to hear, and noticing when an answer is genuine and when it is merely polite. Most mistakes I have made in sales were listening errors: I heard what I wanted and built a proposal around a need that did not exist, or existed in another form.
Photography taught me to look before taking a picture. Sales taught me the auditory version of the same rule. Before proposing anything, I must understand the context, and that context is not found in the brief. It appears in what people say when they believe they have finished answering.
Questions are worth more than answers
If listening is the posture, questions are the tool. A good question does two things: it gives me information I did not have and shows the other person that I care about their problem rather than my quota. Bad questions are immediately recognisable: they steer the conversation towards what I want to sell, and the other person perceives the manoeuvre even if they cannot explain why.
The questions I learned to ask are not about the product but the context: what happens today, what they want to happen, what they have already tried, who else is involved and what happens if nothing changes. They are simple questions, but asking them requires accepting that the answer may be “we do not actually need what you sell”. If you cannot accept that answer, you are not listening; you are waiting for your turn.
Consistency is where trust is tested
Sales is often assumed to end at the signature. In my experience, the opposite is true: that is when the relationship begins to be tested. Having worked in project management before sales, I know what follows — delivery, problems and expectations that turn out to differ from how they were understood. A salesperson who disappears after signing leaves the customer alone at precisely the moment the customer is deciding whether to trust them again.
Consistency means remaining present when there is nothing to sell: calling to ask how things are going rather than to propose an extension, and being the person a customer writes to with a problem even when it is not your responsibility, because they know you will take it to the right colleague. It is work that does not appear in quarterly figures but determines the figures in later years.
This consistency also has a practical sales effect. A customer who feels supported after signing is less likely to look elsewhere when a new need appears — not because they are locked in, but because rebuilding trust from zero costs more than it seems. Relationship-led selling is not slower than aggressive selling: it is slower the first time and faster every time thereafter.
Selling without losing yourself
One final lesson surprised me. I feared sales would require becoming someone else: more insistent, more extroverted and less attentive to nuance. The opposite happened. The kind of relationship-led selling that works in my environment rewards precisely what I had developed earlier: observation, translation between different languages and an understanding of what genuine delivery requires. I did not have to change; I had to recognise that what I already had was useful.
"The moment I stop listening is the moment I stop selling. I simply notice it later."
Selling without ceasing to listen is not a slogan. It is a daily discipline that is easy to lose because pressure for results pushes in the opposite direction: talk more, close sooner, move on. Resisting that pressure is now the most difficult and interesting part of my work — and, looking back, the part everything else in my path had prepared me to do.
Continue with the power of genuine connections and what customers think they are buying.
