I am an software engineer and an introvert. Have been sitting at my desk coding all my career. Once I got a job at a technology company, but the office I was sitting in had very few engineers and most of it was filled with sales and marketing personnel. I was surrounded by all sales and marketing people. The sales and marketing department at that company ran a one month programme open for everyone at the company to sell company products on weekends at multiple brick and mortar retail stores prior to Christmas season. I thought, hell why not I should participate and give it a go; what could go wrong? So I enlisted in the programme. On the first day I was sent back home from the entrance of one of the retail stores because I was wearing jeans pant which was against the retail store's policy. So I went back home and dressed accordingly and returned back. For the next 4 weekends over the month I spent selling company products at 4 different retail stores directly to consumers. What I experienced was that people started coming to me with their requirements and asking what product they should buy! I am not even a native english speaker and I was selling in an english speaking country. I went on to win an award for selling most products in that programme in that year.

So what did an introvert, non-english speaker with no experience of selling do to sell successfully and what did I learn? Here is what I learned, and it is really very simple:

The first rule of selling is don't sell; rather learn, inform and help i.e. genuinely learn about the customer's requirements/problems, genuinely inform the customers about the solution you have or anyone else who could provide the solution and genuinely help the customer with the decision making process. That's it. And your customers then become your recommender and help you "sell" more!