All the popular motivational books say something like ‘Do something you love, and you will never work a day in your life’.

I am lucky enough to do work that I absolutely love, and work on a project that is entirely of my own creation. Every day, I can’t wait to get up and work on my startup HR Partner.

However, there are aspects of building a business that I don’t enjoy. I could sit and write code for hours straight, but picking up the phone to talk to a new potential customer ties my stomach up in knots.

I am skewed towards being introverted, and I have never considered myself a sales or marketing type of person. But a big part of growing a business is getting customers to pay money for what you have built. It’s not that I dislike talking to people - on the corollary, I actually love talking to customers. It is the ‘salesy’ part that I don’t like. Some deep part of my psyche must believe that ‘selling’ somehow equates to ‘making people buy things they don’t want’.

Now, I am currently lucky enough to have a co-founder and an outgoing team that is great at marketing and sales, but as in most small companies, we tend to share tasks around. Added to that the fact that most customers like talking to company founders, I find myself doing sales and marketing quite frequently.

If I know I have to wake up in the morning and code up a new feature, I spring out of bed with a bounce in my step. But if I know I have to wake up and do an online demo of my product to a customer on the other side of the world, then wild horses have to drag me out of bed!

But here is the rub… If I focus on just having a conversation with the customer during the demo, and letting my genuine love and passion for my software product come through on those calls… it works! Customers respond positively. They buy subscriptions to my SaaS. They actually give me money for all this ethereal code that was spun out of my crazy imagination.

In talking to colleagues and vendors, they all seem to say the same thing. “Gee Devan, you are good at marketing and selling”. I always do my incredulous face when I hear this. If I had to rate myself, I would give myself a solid ‘4’ out of ‘10’ for it.

But it is obvious that there is a lot more depth and subtlety to this art of selling. And I don’t understand it. But it works for me, even though I don’t love it - and that is what is important. You don’t have to love something to actually be good at it.