If anyone had ever asked me whether I thought I'd end up in sales, I'd have said "Never!"  Not only didn't it interest me, I couldn't imagine making a living at it: I'd be horrible at sales.  I just knew it.   And like so many things I knew, I was wrong.

I still don't like the idea of being in sales.  I don't like to think of myself as good at it.  And I still don't think I could make a living at it.  But then I realize, I probably do make a living at it, and a reasonably good one at that.

I don't sell brushes.  (I'm not the only one who equates "sales" with those Fuller brush men who showed up at the door periodically!)  And I don't sell things at all.  I sell skills.  Mostly, I sell my own skills.  Or at least I used to, until recently.  Now I sometimes sell my own skills, and sometimes I sell the skills of others.  The others are graphic artists, HTML coders, programmers, other consultants and non-government organizations.  And sometimes, when I'm really lucky, I get to sell ideas.  Or causes.

All of this has occurred to me today because today I switched into high gear selling a "cause".  In this case, it was homelessness prevention, focussing on how people do their jobs, and whether they might do them a little differently so that  people wouldn't end up without homes.   Lawyers.  Teachers. Bankers. Social workers.  Police.  It doesn't take much thinking to realize that these folks have not thought of themselves as being in a position to prevent homelessness.  And most of them don't find this new way of thinking to offer much more than guilt and another reason to feel they've failed at the end of the day.

But, it's my job to convince them they can make a difference, and that they want to make a difference.  I get to be the one to convince them that the changes they'd have to make aren't onerous, that they can do it with support from other sectors, and that at the end of the day, they and their organizations can be heroes.  So now I'm selling heroism -- their own heroism.  The list of items for sale expands as I even thinking about it.

Is it different selling ideas, concepts, causes, heroism, than it is selling brushes?  I'm not sure.  The Fuller brush sales team got money in return for goods.  I get some progress toward social health and wellness for some group or another, in return for the time I get others to give.  What they get in return for giving me their time may be expertise, or satisfaction, or brownie points with their bosses, or good play in the press.  But it's not all that tangible.   They don't have a brush they can use in return for their contribution.

The truth is, with the kind of work I do, there is almost no direct gratification.  And there certainly isn't any instant gratification.   This homelessness project, at its best, will save one or two people from homelessness in every major city in Canada on a weekly basis or thereabouts.  But we'll never be able to prove even that.  We can never prove what would have happened in the absence of what I'm selling.  There is, as the academics would have it, no "counterfactual" on which to base such an analysis.

So I sell intangibles to those who pay with their time and sometimes their passion and their hope. And in return, if we're really lucky, those who buy my product and I who sell it get some satisfaction that we're at least trying to make things better, and somewhere, sometimes, there are people whose lives are less horrible because we did.  Quite the sales job, no?

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