My business has made millions over recent years and yet for most of my career I avoided selling like it was a root canal performed by a badger.

Let me explain. I’ve spent nearly two decades as a copywriter, SEO consultant, author and mentor. I’ve built courses, memberships and masterminds. I’ve made a couple of hundred thousand dollars in a few hours, have tens of thousands of humans on my email list, and books on actual shelves in actual shops. But for years – and I mean years –  my “sales strategy” was to quietly publish something, hope someone would notice, and then feel a bit queasy if they asked how much it cost.

I undercharged. I over-delivered. I dreaded discovery calls because, if I’m honest, I’d usually spend the whole conversation talking the client out of the sale. “You might not actually need this.” “It’s a lot of money, are you sure?” “Tell you what, let me throw in another six weeks for free.”

I was a reluctant seller. And if you’re running a service business, I reckon you probably are too.

Why so many founders resist selling

Here’s what I’ve noticed after years of working with thousands of small business owners in my Digital Marketing Collective: it’s almost never laziness that stops us selling. It’s something stickier.

We’ve all been on the receiving end of the greasy business coach, the cringey webinar, the LIMITED TIME ONLY (for the next six weeks) email. We don’t want to be that person. So we swing wildly the other way and we don’t sell at all.

Then there’s the fear pig, snorting in the back of your mind: Who are you to charge for this? What if they say no? What if they say yes and then ask for a refund? What if someone calls you a fraud on LinkedIn?

And underneath all of it is a deep, irrational wobble: the belief that wanting to be paid for your work is somehow grubby. That if your thing were really good, people would just find it. Say yes. Hand over the credit card without being asked.

Spoiler: they won’t. Not because your thing isn’t good, but because humans are busy, distracted, and need to be invited.

The reframe that changed everything

The mindset shift that finally got me off the fence wasn’t a script or a funnel or a fancy closing technique. It was this:

Selling isn’t self-promotion. Selling is service.

If I genuinely believe my SEO course will stop a small business owner haemorrhaging money on bad Google Ads, then not telling them about it is the problem. My silence isn’t humility – it’s leaving them worse off. It’s leaving them in the hands of unscrupulous SEO folk.
In fact every time I hide my offer, I’m prioritising my own discomfort over their outcome. That’s not noble. That’s just a little lame.

Once that clicked, sales stopped feeling like asking for something and started feeling like offering something. It’s the difference between tugging on a stranger’s sleeve and holding a door open. One is pushy. The other is just good manners.

I still don’t do cold DMs. I still don’t run fake-urgency launches with countdown timers that reset every Tuesday. But I will now cheerfully look a potential customer in the eye and say, “I think this is for you. Here’s what it costs. Here’s how it works. Let me know.” That’s not salesy. That’s respectful.

How outdated ideas hold people back

Most of the “salesy” stereotypes rattling around in our heads are about forty years out of date. Nobody needs to wear a prospect down with seven follow-up calls. Nobody needs to manufacture scarcity that doesn’t exist. The old-school, high-pressure, always-be-closing playbook isn’t just icky –  it actually works worse than the alternative.

What works is clarity. Put your prices on your website so nobody has to book a call and feel ambushed. Productise your services into clean, easy lumps of work that a client can actually understand, instead of offering a bespoke wrestling match every time. Write the sales page. Describe the outcome. Answer the objections up front. And then –  this is the bit reluctant sellers skip –  actually ask for the sale.

That last step is the whole game. You can have the best offer in your industry, but if you never say “here’s how to buy it”, you’re just running an expensive hobby.

The quiet truth

I still feel a tiny wiffle of discomfort every time I launch something new. I don’t think it ever fully leaves. But I’ve stopped reading that feeling as a signal to stay small, shrink my prices, or hope the clients magically find me. These days, I treat it as the emotional cost of doing business.

Because here’s the quiet truth nobody tells you about running a million-dollar business: it isn’t built by the loudest sellers. It’s built by the ones who finally stopped apologising for having something worth buying.

Kate Toon is the author of Six Figures in Sales, out now. www.katetoon.com

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