Sales has been a human skill since the first mammoth skin changed hands. People were bartering and making deals long before the evolution of invoices and payment gateways. So, why are so many small business owners still terrified of selling?
Digital marketing expert, mentor, small business owner and author Kate Toon argues the problem is not a lack of ability among leaders; rather, it’s a misplaced focus and a misconception about what a good sale actually looks like.
“There are ways of selling that don’t require you to be over the top,” she insists. “It can be genuine and come from the heart if you have a product or service that you love.”
In the latest book in her Six Figures series, Six Figures in Sales, Toon dismantles the myths that keep founders stuck in what she calls “Marketing Land” and offers a practical framework for understanding and connecting with buyers to grow a small business. “This is not a superpower,” she promises. “Anybody can learn to be a very good salesperson.”
Sales Needs A Reputation Makeover
Toon blames 1950s vacuum cleaner merchants for creating a stereotype that persists today. “I think sales has a terrible reputation,” she says. “If you’ve ever bought a car, if you’ve ever worked with a real estate agent, we get this vibe that selling is kind of manipulative and full on, and we don’t want to be any of those things.”
Part of the problem, she believes, is that most SME owners launch a business based on their craft but are thrust into other roles, like sales, without training. “If you’re a small business owner, you’re likely to spend less than 50 per cent of your time doing your skill,” she estimates. “The other 50 per cent will be marketing, sales, accounting, bookkeeping, new client onboarding – all that admin-y stuff you never really signed up for.”
She has seen many founders try to avoid sales entirely and retreat to what feels productive but does not generate revenue. In many cases, it’s basic social media promotion. “People spend a lot of time in Marketing Land, in top-of-funnel land, sharing quotes on Instagram and making reels and dancing around,” she explains. This busywork can create a false sense of achievement. “I think people faff in marketing, and they feel like they’re doing stuff, but it’s not actually generating any revenue for the business.”
They often lean into social media advertising, not just owned channels, but Toon bluntly insists this is generally unnecessary. “It requires you to have a decent amount of money to get started, and most small businesses don’t have money,” she points out. “You don’t really understand what you’re doing, you’re just pouring money into it and hoping you’re going to get that return. I just think a sale that comes through building a relationship is a more genuine sale and more likely to build loyalty and repeat sales.”
It can also lead to advocacy. “If you build a relationship with someone and they like what they buy, they are so much more likely to tell other people that they liked it. It’s very hard to build a relationship with an ad.”
Business Relationships Are Built On Understanding
Toon’s immediate advice for reluctant salespeople is to recognise that buyers are not hostile. “When someone’s at the point of even considering buying, they pretty much already want to buy. People do like buying things, right? We get that little dopamine hit. They just don’t want to feel they’re making a bad decision.”
She offers a framework she calls the BDF rule: beliefs, desires and fears. “Take a carpenter as an example. [The buyer] has a preconceived belief that you’re going to charge them a fortune,” she explains. “They have a desire that you don’t make too much mess in their home and that you turn up when you say you’re going to turn up, and their fear is you’re going to be some kind of dodgy tradie who they never see again. If you can understand that BDF and overcome it in the conversation, you will win that client.”
Understanding a buyer’s fears is only the starting point. Toon argues that sustainable revenue comes from treating every sale as the beginning of a relationship, not the end of a transaction.
“What we really want is repeat customers. Not because it’s any more affordable to get a repeat customer – that’s been disproven now, it’s a similar cost – but because those customers already know, like and trust us. It should be easier to sell to them,” she says. “We really just need to build a relationship with our customers, rather than having a series of one-night sales stands.”
Toon has had a live testing ground for these principles since she stepped in to save her local bookshop from closure, adding bricks-and-mortar experience to her background in online marketing, copywriting and SEO enterprises. She says she has learned more about sales in two years behind the counter than in two decades running digital businesses, because “you see the impact of what you say immediately on someone’s face.” Whether B2C or B2B, the key is building connection, she says.
Sales Requires An Investment Of Time
Toon urges business owners to embrace customer complaints as free intelligence. “A 10-minute conversation with a customer, even an angry one, will be so illuminating and help you solve so many problems with your onboarding and your sales process, you wouldn’t believe it,” she says. “You’ve just got to be brave enough to do it.”
Authenticity, she adds, means resisting the urge to appear flawless. “Too many business people are always, ‘Everything’s amazing! Everything’s positive! Our brand’s amazing!’ And it’s like, actually, I know that’s not true, so therefore I trust you less,” she explains. “Whereas, if once in a while you say, ‘Oh God, we’ve messed up this delivery,’ I trust you more when you say the other delivery went well.”
The obvious objection Toon hears from time-poor founders is that relationship-building sounds great in theory but is impossible in practice, when the demands of SME ownership mean they’re already at capacity. Her response is that most leaders are already doing it; they just need to do it deliberately and diarise opportunities. She advocates using AI and automation to brainstorm, draft copy and prepare customer questions to free up time but warns against outsourcing certain client interactions.
“In this world of AI and technology, it can be very tempting to leave it to the bots, to automate everything, to chatbot every interaction and every email,” she says. “But instead, I think we’re all craving a return to old-fashioned values of just calling a customer and asking how it’s going.”
“AI cannot build relationships. That is still a human quality,” she argues.
Play The Long Game To Build The Strongest Connections
Toon says small business owners can take practical steps to shift their sales mindset and ‘build a tribe of raving, credit card waving fans’ without high-pressure tactics.
Focus on written conversations
Most sales interactions start in writing long before speaking to a customer. Toon recommends taking a systematic, step-by-step approach to copywriting across all channels. “Everything from SEO, social media, video sales, email, sales, sales, page, sales, product descriptions.” She offers templates for AI prompts to help with this content.
Develop genuine interpersonal techniques
Toon reiterates that leaders do not need to be pushy to close a deal. Instead, they should focus on learning effective, authentic communication skills, such as rapport building, mirroring and confidence building.
Keep communication casual
Better connections can be built by adjusting tone and being more accessible to your buyers. Toon advocates having a chat or face-to-face meeting and answering emails in an informal manner. “I think that’s the answer: treat your customers like real people and you’ll reap the rewards,” she says.
Stop looking for a quick fix
Ultimately, sustainable sales growth comes from consistent, human effort rather than a secret formula. “Stop thinking there is some magic powder that you can sprinkle over your business to make it sell more and really go back to basics,” she says.
