It's understandable that there are loads of people who come across material like this and say, "what does all this talk of selling have to do with me?"



People in the civil service and not for profit sectors understandably think this has nothing to do with them.



In fact the average public servant doesn't worry about selling skills until they are past retirement age at 65 and they retire home to start up a fishery or poultry farm.



So sales skills! Customer service! What does this have to do with the rest of us who aren't self employed, entrepreneurial, or business owners?



Let's start with the "not for profit" sector.



This the typical line of thought I get when talking to guys and girls in the NGO space.



But to see the truth of how relevant sales skills are to the objects of a charity, we have to look at a few real life examples.



A charitable organization I did some work with in the past has aims to...



“Provide vocational skills, access to market and financial inclusion opportunities for women...”



The phrase “access to market” in this case shows that the finished goods made by the charity and it's wards have to reach the market a la “end consumers” somehow.



If your charity is built around teaching indigent women crafts and trades, then you're not going to be of much use to them if none of these wonderful things don't "gain access to the market".



If there's no access to the market, there's no financial empowerment for the women, and we cannot even begin to start the conversation around financial inclusion.



Financial inclusion assumes that we're talking of people being bankable, no matter how paltry their income is.



Doesn’t all this involve selling? What else does gaining "access to the market" mean? How will the goods produced get to the market if they are not "sold" to directly to the end user, or through middlemen?



This NGOs mission statement shows that they work with stakeholders that involve not just the market and women, but also government regulatory agencies concerned with issues around financial inclusion.



So obviously stakeholder management is a key concern of theirs.



Stakeholder management involves a number of skills around presentations, persuasion, and effective communications. These are necessary to move the agenda froward with these partner institutions.



These are skills that are not only involved in selling, but these same skills can also be greatly enhanced by the very art of taking sales training seriously.



Sales and selling is obviously something that people in the NGO space do.



Even if they didn't (because they don't want to be considered as sales professionals), they would all greatly benefit from sales training when it comes to stakeholder management, fund raising, and "access to market" for those institutions that have market facing goals and effects.



We can spin this conversation anyway we want, but at the end of the day it’s obvious that both “big business” or "not for profit" businesses could be better off with more training in sales related matters.



If “sales” sounds tacky for your NGO, then start calling it the fancy new term everyone uses this days.



It’s called “fund development”.