Selling is a tough reality for many small business owners. Naturally, you would like to focus primarily on working on your projects, doing the work you love but unless you keep on selling, there might be nothing to work on.

You need to keep on finding new customers, deliver presentations to get the work in and manage those projects throughout to ensure a repeat order. And that’s all on top of your usual day to day activities in the office.

It doesn’t come as a surprise then that many small business owners loathe sales and avoid doing so with all their might.

Part of the problem also are certain myths that delude the understanding of sales in a small business operation. I decided to tackle this problem with this article.

Myth 1: Great services or products sell themselves.

Unfortunately, this is as far from the truth as it can be. Regardless of how great what you offer is and what results you get, you still need to find people who want or need it.

Every market place is filled with people selling similar solutions and regardless of how great yours are, you need to work really hard to get noticed among the others.

Myth 2: You need to be born with a gift to sell

This is by far the most damaging myth that alone causes small businesses to lose thousands of dollars every year.

No one is born with a gift to sell. Some people might be better at communicating with the others, or be more natural when meeting someone for the first time but that’s just about it. Selling is a skill you can learn and master, there is nothing that you need to be born with to be able to do it.

Myth 3: Selling is a numbers game

Actually, this one is true. However, how it is interpret isn’t. Selling isn’t about how many cold calls you make per day, how many leads you generate in a given time period etc. These can be your achievements but they have nothing to do with selling.

The only numbers in sales that count are: the total value of your sales, how much of this money you have already received and what is coming in the pipeline.

Myth 4: Internet helps to speed the sales process

Unfortunately that’s not true either. Internet helps you to speed up finding prospects and building your personal brand online but that’s about it. You still have to spend the same amount of time talking to prospects, meeting them and presenting what you offer to them. Internet will not speed this process up.

Myth 5: As a sales person all you do is bothering the others

This is true if you are trying to sell to people who don’t need your product or service. In such case you are not only bothering them but also pestering. But if you approach the very people who need what you sell and offer them solutions to their problems, then you are not bothering, you are in fact helping them. And, that’s the essence of selling.

Thomas is a sales writer and marketer working for the online sales training company. He provides sales advice to small business owners and freelancers.