Ethical Sales

I thought I took a sales job to learn how to eat what I kill. Instead, I discovered I’d been carrying one of the market’s rarest assets my entire life: the ability to earn trust quickly and pair it with good judgment. This is the story of how six unexpected months changed the way I think about work, value, and integrity.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

I'm Ashley and this is Dear Sovereign Self, my audio journal on the way I walk through life, practicing sovereignty, living from truth not wound, and choosing alignment over self-abandonment. Here's today's entry.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

A year ago, if you had asked me what job I never wanted, I would have answered without hesitation, uh, sales. Definitely sales. Because I thought that I'd have to become some other version of myself that I didn't want to ever become. I've always had this almost moral suspicion of sales. It felt corrosive. Like if you stayed in sales long enough, you'd slowly trade little pieces of your integrity for bigger and bigger commission sales or something. Like maybe not all at once, but just one compromise at a time. You know what I mean? So when my life took a pretty dramatic detour earlier this year, and I found myself accepting the first job that I could get, a job at an ATT call center, nonetheless, selling internet and wireless plans and phones. It honestly felt like survival, and it it was. This wasn't the career plan, it wasn't the dream. This was the job that I could get while I was rebuilding my life. Well, then something happened that I still can't quite believe. A few months later, so a few months into the sales role, I walked away with an award. Now, to be clear, that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is that I still don't think I learned how to sell, though I made daily sales. I think I learned that I'd been wrong about what sales actually is, or rather what it entails. Because somewhere between helping strangers troubleshoot Wi-Fi, de-escalating angry phone calls, and trying to remember which internet plan went with which household, I discovered that the thing I hated wasn't actually sales or selling. It was manipulating. And those are not the same thing. In fact, I had spent years avoiding sales because I had confused selling yourself with selling your soul. So yeah, if you had asked me a year ago what kind of job I never wanted to have, I would have said sales without hesitation. Not because I thought I couldn't do it, but because I thought I shouldn't do it. Like I said, it felt corrosive. I imagined. Scripts, pressure tactics, artificial urgency, people buying things they didn't actually need because someone had figured out how to push the right psychological buttons. And that isn't far-fetched at a call center. Actually, that's that's it. That's really it in a nut gel, but it's not the complete picture. And so I had no idea that this little call center was about to fix something in me that had been broken for decades. So, first off, almost immediately, at least twice a day, and I am not really exaggerating here, someone would stop me before hanging up and say, You're really good at your job. Like you're really good at your job every day, sometimes multiple times a day, from the first day, which is incredible encouragement for someone who has like mere hours of sales experience at best. But the irony of the constant compliments was that the caller was absolutely grading a different assignment than my employer. They were evaluating whether I listened, whether I understood what they were actually calling about, whether I solved the problem they had before I ever tried to solve the problem the business had, whether I was patient, whether I could explain something complicated without making them feel stupid, whether I could de-escalate frustration, whether I can make them feel like there was another human being on the other end of the line. Those were the moments they were thanking me for, complimenting me on. AT ⁇ T, however, had a different scoreboard, right? Sales, conversions, revenue, transfer percentages, call time. And if I'm being honest, those customer compliments almost made me nervous because I knew what came next. After solving the issue they actually cared about, I was expected to transition into selling. So what was human bonding to them was supposed to be discovery for me. Learn about their household, learn about their internet usage, learn about their family, learn about their devices, and if I found an opportunity, recommend another product. That transition terrified me at first because it felt like I was about to violate something. There's almost something sacred about the space that we had built and the rapport that we had built over these past 10 or 15 minutes. Someone had trusted me. They'd let me into a frustrating moment in their day. If they started the call frustrated and I softened them, they'd start telling me stories about their families, their business, their kids, their finances, their home. And then I was supposed to sell them something. It felt like I was being asked to immediately monetize trust to leverage the relationship I just built, to take something that felt genuinely human and turn it into a transaction. And I remember thinking, I don't want to desecrate this. And that was the word that came to mind like desecrate, because that's what it felt like. Like I had built something honest, and now I was being asked on behalf of AT ⁇ T to trade it in for something almost immediately and on every call. So naturally I pushed back on the system and the scripts and became insistent on my own style. And even though my style was getting me daily compliments, it wasn't yet earning me daily sales. So I was earning trust in the first 30 seconds of calls, but there was a deer in the headlights vibe about spending that earned trust to close a sale. I needed to close the gap because one thing sales does not care about is bleeding hearts. Right. And then one day it clicked. And I realized I wasn't actually learning how to sell. So AT ⁇ T had a word for it, discovery. Discovery was everything. You don't just answer the questions that they asked. You get curious, who are they? How many people live in the home? Do they work remotely? Do they stream? Do they game? How many devices are connected? Who's on their wireless plan? What frustrations keep coming up? Right? So at first, discovery felt like a means to an end. It felt like gathering ammunition. Like if I ask enough questions, eventually I'll find something I can sell. But after a few weeks, my brain started organizing it differently. I stopped thinking like a salesperson, partially because I couldn't, and I didn't even know what that meant. And instead I just started thinking like a physician, which again, not qualified to do. But somebody walks into an emergency room, they don't all need the same treatment. Some people need stitches, some people need surgery. The diagnosis determines the medicine. That's all. That's what I mean by thinking like a physician. And then suddenly the products, like broadband, cell phones, cell phone lines, stopped feeling like inventory that I was pushing and they became treatments. So if someone was constantly buffering while working from home, fiber wasn't an upsell, it was medicine. If someone's family had outgrown their wireless plan, a different plan wasn't manipulation, it was medicine. If they genuinely didn't need anything, the right prescription was nothing. And oddly enough, those became some of my favorite calls. Because I realized that while my job was largely, though unofficially, to manufacture a need for a new product, the goal was to recognize a genuine one. And once I understood that, I started selling. And one of my favorite compliments people would give me wasn't thanks for fixing my account. It wasn't even that you're really good at your job that I was getting every day. It was, if you were the person I could call every time, I'd stay with ATT. And I thought about that sentence for a long time because it started to highlight the real value I was awakening to in myself because they weren't complimenting the company. Actually, more often than not, they were saying that to me as they were leaving the company. They were calling in to cancel their services, right? They weren't even complimenting the product again, because most of the time these people were disgruntled with all aspects of their ATT experience except talking to me. So they were telling me something much bigger. They were saying, I trust you. And that's when everything I'd ever done professionally suddenly snapped into focus. Because as an executive assistant, people trusted me with information. More than just information, information flow, the rhythm of their day, the rhythm of their life. As an operator, you're entrusted with systems. As a strategist, you're entrusted with decisions. Now, as a podcaster, people entrust me with disseminating information. Entertaining them. Ideas. We'll just say people trust me with ideas. The product keeps changing. The gift doesn't. The gift is trust. That's what I've actually been building my entire career. I just didn't have the language for it yet. And that's why this little professional detour ended up changing so much more than my opinion of sales. It changed my opinion of myself, which then set me on the course of my ultra light beam shout-out to the last entry. Because somewhere in the middle of all of those calls for the first time, I understood what people were actually buying from me. They weren't buying my resume. They weren't buying my job title. They weren't buying proximity to powerful executives. They weren't even buying ATT. They were buying my judgment. Or maybe more accurately, they were borrowing it. For 20 minutes, while they sorted through a problem they didn't know how to solve, they trusted me to see clearly on their behalf. And if I recommended something, they believed it was because it was true, not because I had something to gain. That sort of trust is portable. You can take it into a call center, you can take it into an executive office, you can take it into entrepreneurship, you can take it into a relationship. Because trust compounds. And looking back, that's what this whole season was really about. I think the biggest thing I got wrong coming into sales was what I thought I was there to learn. I thought I was there to learn to eat what I kill, how to hunt, how to close, how to survive by producing my own opportunities, which I actually knew, right? Like I am very good at creating opportunities out of thin air, but I meant in a different way, right? And I did learn that, but that's not the biggest thing I walked away with. What I walked away with was the realization that I'd been carrying a hunting knife my entire life, as it turns out. I just didn't know what it was. And the knife, so to speak, isn't persuasion, it isn't charisma, it isn't objection handling, right? My ability to take no. It is my ability to build trust quickly, pair that with good judgment, and then make recommendations people genuinely believed were in their best interest. That's a weapon and a rare one. So what did sales actually teach me? The mechanics. How to track the animal, how to dress it, how to preserve it, how to actually eat what I kill. The knife I already had. So I thought I was rebuilding my finances, and I was. I thought I was rebuilding my career, and I was. I thought I was just surviving until the next opportunity came along. What I was actually rebuilding, though, was my confidence that my greatest professional asset had never been the title next to my name. It was the ability to earn trust quickly, tell the truth consistently, and help people make good decisions. That is what followed me into that call center, and it's what followed me out of that call center. Not a sales technique per se, but a deeper understanding of what I actually bring into every room I walk into. And as it turns out, that's worth a lot more than I ever gave it credit for. So, yes, for most of my life I thought selling yourself and selling your soul were basically the same thing. And I didn't have language for the difference. I just knew I never wanted to become the person who exaggerated or performed or pretended or manipulated people into seeing something that wasn't there. And I thought that if I ever got really good at sales, it would mean that I had already become someone I didn't want to be. What I discovered was almost the opposite. The sale isn't really the point. The point is trust. That is what people are buying. Not broadband, not wireless. They were borrowing my judgment. I had become more valuable than the product I represented. And I don't say that as a grandiose statement, but as a matter of fact, I know I can build trust quickly. I know I can listen well enough to find the problem underneath the problem. I know I can make people feel heard. I know I can explain complicated things simply. I know I can de-escalate tension. I know I can diagnose before I prescribe. And I know that when I recommend something, people generally and genuinely believe I'm doing it because it's in their best interests. I didn't develop those abilities in a call center, but I did prove that I had them and I was awarded for them. That's different. So, no, this wasn't the six months of development I thought it was going to be. It was actually six months of discovery. There's that word again. Because those same abilities showed up in other areas of my professional life. Again, the product can change, the asset underneath doesn't. And that's why I wanted to record this entry before this season became just another line item on my resume. If it ever even makes it to my resume, which I highly doubt. But I want to record this before it becomes a blip in my professional memory at best, because then I want to remember it as the six months where I had to sell phones, right? I want to remember it as the sixth months that I finally discovered one of my most valuable assets, my ability to quickly earn trust. So I don't just leave this season with more confidence, I leave it with more evidence. Evidence that one of the most valuable things I bring into any room has been there all along. I just finally have the language for it. And let me say, rewinding to the point about me previously drawing a parallel between selling your products and selling your soul, I realized that I had been extending products a generosity I had never extended to myself. Because the entire job of selling depended on accurate representation, the right medicine for the right patient at the right time. No embellishment, no omission, just the truths. That became my personal code. Right? And then I realized that I had been holding myself to a completely different standard. I undersold myself all the time. And I convinced myself that making me smaller, putting myself on sale was more virtuous, while in other areas being convinced that overvaluing myself was also a virtue. And to me, ethical sales is representing reality accurately. So maybe that's the lesson that will stay with me long after I've forgotten the sales metrics, the products, or even the headset. Because every single one of us is selling something. We sell ourselves in interviews and negotiations in every room we walk into. The question isn't whether you do sales, the question is whether you're representing yourself, honestly, proper calibration. And to that point, the proper calibration point, I mentioned earlier getting an award in my short six, five, six month stint. And I should probably clarify something. When I say I won a sales award, I don't mean I sold the most. That wasn't the award. The award wasn't for top seller of that month. It was actually for overall performance. So AT ⁇ T didn't just measure whether you could sell. They measured whether you solved the customer's original problem, whether your customer satisfaction scores stayed high, whether your calls were efficient. So that is to say your call time, your average call time, whether people had to call back because you hadn't actually fixed the issue. So it's like your seven-day resolve, whether you were giving away unnecessary credits, and yes, whether you sold. In other words, they weren't trying to create the most aggressive salespeople. They were trying to create the most calibrated ones, someone who could balance all of those things at the same time while selling. And somehow I finished in the top five of those calibrated salespeople, not pure salespeople. And I don't think that that was an accident. Um that the framed award that the universe wants me carrying on my desk still years from now. Uh, because looking back, I don't think that I was being rewarded for selling. I think I was being rewarded for judgment, right? From both the customers and the institution itself for knowing when to recommend something, when not to, how to build trust, how to solve the actual problem, and how to leave the customer better than I found them. That's a much more interesting and rewarding award because it's not just about sales, it's about discernment. And only I could walk out of a call center with a discernment award. So I'll leave you with this. I walked into this season of sales believing that to be successful, I'd probably have to compromise my ethics. I walked out knowing that my ethics were, are my competitive advantage. So my question to you is this where have you assumed success requires compromising your values when your values might actually be the strategy? Let me know. We'll close the page here for now. Until next time.