Dearest Reader,

When I first heard of intuitive eating I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my own brainstem. It sounded like this mythical nirvana…just eat whatever you want and somehow achieve whatever health-related goal you have? Pyramid scheme! Right up there with your friend who is still selling essential oils.

But as someone who is allergic to prescriptive advice, it held an appeal. I fucking loathe the forensic-analysis approach some people bring to honestly everything. When we were sleep training my kid, I read: let them cry for one minute, go in, pat them exactly three times, leave. Then let them cry for two minutes. Blah blah blah. Like, wtf. Just let me use my judgment.

Anyway, in order for me to eventually eat intuitively, I had to learn to recognize my own judgement and signals. Which meant I had to learn the fundamentals - macros, maintenance calories, avoiding naked carbs, and how many calories are in things. That mattered because I couldn't trust my gut on something I didn't understand.

Founders operate in the reverse order, and it trips them up every time.

You sold intuitively first. Read the room, knew which lever to pull, closed deals nobody taught you how to close. Then the business grows, you hire someone, or you just get tired of being the only one who can move a deal forward and suddenly "trust your gut" isn't an instruction you can necessarily hand anyone else.

That's when you need to learn the macros of sales so to speak: the shared language for the problem, the solution, and the deal. The judgment calls you make without thinking, written down plainly enough that someone else could make them too. The tools, proposals, discovery, follow-up...built once so you're not starting from scratch every time, and consistent enough that you can actually tell what's working.

A client of mine ran into this exact wall: a creative, high-touch agency owner. She could sell intuitively all day. That was never the issue. The issue was her team couldn't. Every deal defaulted back to her because the process only existed in her head, and you can't hand someone your gut. So before anything else, we mapped the foundation: the actual sequence, the actual judgment calls, written down plainly enough that someone else could run them. Not instead of her instinct...from it.

Anyway, if you want to grow sales, whether that looks like being more referable or buyable or hiring sales support, it doesn’t actually happen without mastering the fundamentals, which for many of us involves mapping out what you've historically done, very naturally.

Until next week, happy selling!

Talica

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