My first sales job nearly convinced me I couldn't sell.
I was at a corporate hospitality company, selling days designed to get sales teams together and boost their culture. A perfectly good product. I was terrible at selling it.
It took me years to understand why. I had never run a sales team. I had never really been in one. When a buyer asked me why one of these days would change anything, I was reciting someone else's answer. And buyers can hear the difference between a person who is reciting and a person who believes what they are saying. They hear it in the small moments: how you handle the question you didn't prepare for, whether you will name the thing your product is bad at, whether the person on the phone sounds like they would buy this themselves.
I didn't have a technique problem. I had a belief problem. And I have never seen technique fix a belief problem in anyone, including me.
where belief actually comes from
There is research on this, which surprised me, because conviction sounds like the fluffy end of sales. A study published through Baylor University's Keller Center measured knowledge, skills and conviction separately across 62 salespeople at the same firm. The performance gap associated with conviction was as large as the gap associated with skill, and sometimes larger. The highest-conviction sellers outperformed regardless of tenure or experience. Their definition of conviction has stayed with me: belief, rooted in personal experience.
Rooted in personal experience. Not in a product deck. Not in an onboarding week. In my career, belief has arrived from exactly three sources, and every company I ever sold well for provided at least one of them.
the first source: people who can explain the why
The first proposition I genuinely believed in was NCC Group's risk management and governance services. Not because anyone told me to believe in it, but because the consultants in that division could clearly explain what they provided, why it was valuable, and why it was needed. They handed me a chain of logic I could walk in my sleep.
Companies get bigger and want to win bigger contracts. To win them, they need to show their prospects a level of security maturity. The easiest way to show it is an accreditation like ISO 27001. And the first step towards ISO 27001 is understanding where you are today and what the gap is, then working through the list.
Once that chain made sense to me, something strange happened to my cold calls. They stopped being pitches and became questions. Are you looking at ISO 27001? How did you work out what you would need to do to get there? We have done this with a lot of companies in your industry. I wasn't performing. I was asking about a problem I understood, and offering a path I believed worked.
That is the thing nobody tells you about conviction. It doesn't make you louder. It makes you curious.
the second source: proof you didn't write yourself
At Secureworks, the thing that convinced me was external. We were one of a small number of companies approved by the NCSC for cyber incident response in the UK. I found that genuinely impressive, so I built my pitching around it.
Notice what is happening there. My conviction was borrowed from a source the buyer already trusted. I didn't have to sell my own opinion of the company. I could point at the assessment of the UK's national technical authority and let it do the heavy lifting. If your product has independent proof like that and your sellers are not leading with it, it is usually because nobody ever sat them down and explained why it matters.
the third source: the room
Later in my career I sold penetration testing as a subscription, at a time when almost everyone bought it by the day. I could pitch that model well for one reason: I had personally watched the day-rate model frustrate the people who lived with it.
This is the source I would fight for hardest, because it is the one most sales teams never get. You have to feel the pain your solution solves, and the fastest way is to be in the room, face to face, where the pain is etched across the buyer's face. I have watched buyers bang a fist on the table with frustration at how things currently work. One question opens that door more reliably than any other I know: what is your view on your employees' attitude towards information security?
Ask it, and then watch the face, not the answer.
A seller who has sat through three meetings like that does not need a motivational talk about believing in the product. The belief walks in with them on the next call. Which leads to the practical point for founders and sales leaders: if someone on your team has never once seen a buyer visibly angry about the problem you solve, no deck and no training day will fix their pitch. Put them in the room.
the test, and the three honest options
There is a psychologist at the University of Queensland, William von Hippel, whose research found that people become measurably more persuasive once they have first convinced themselves. His line: if we can get ourselves to believe something first, we will be more effective at getting others to believe it.
So the first sale is always to yourself. Here is the test I use: would you sell this to your own mother?
If the answer is no, you have three honest options.
First, get closer. Sit with the consultants until the logic chain makes sense. Find the independent proof. Get in the room and watch a customer live with the problem. Most sellers who don't believe have simply never been given the chance to.
Second, narrow. Sometimes the product is believable, just not for everyone it is being pushed at. Conviction often returns the moment you only sell it where it genuinely fits.
Third, if you have done both and the belief still is not there, be honest about what that means. The problem is not your pitch, and no amount of sales training will fix it. Fix the product, or leave.
That last one sounds brutal. It is also the kindest thing I can say to anyone grinding out calls for something they don't believe in. Buyers don't buy what you say. They buy what you believe while you are saying it.
Conviction is something you can build in a team, not just hire for, and it is central to our cybersecurity sales training built for technical founders.
James Irving is the founder of Emotive JLI, a sales consultancy for technical founders. He learnt to sell the old school way: 50 cold calls per day in a Manchester boiler room, then enterprise cybersecurity, then ThreatSpike, where he joined as the first commercial person and left with a £10M sales engine. Tell him what you've built or watch the stories.