Someone once told me, “You are not a good salesman. You are like the tuna fish salesman,” and then shared a story that went something like this: A tuna fish salesman was extremely successful, with sales skyrocketing. One day, he decided to taste the fish he was selling and discovered it was terrible. From then on, his sales declined.
The underlying message was that knowing a product too well can be a disadvantage, because once you truly understand its limitations, intellectual honesty makes it difficult to simply overlook them in a sales conversation.

I did not begin my career in sales. I became a nuclear engineer because I was passionate about technology and wanted to challenge technical misinformation, whether it supported or opposed a given technology, starting from nuclear energy. Even so, sales—direct or indirect—has often been part of my work. My priority has always been to build trust with potential customers, whether I was offering a product, a solution, or my expertise.

Only once in my career did I have a difficult discussion with a customer who suggested that I had misled him about the performance of a monitoring system. It was hard because my intellectual honesty, the foundation of both my personal and professional life, was being questioned.

So, to make it short, I’ll always taste my tuna first and if I can’t feel the smell is because I have a cold, not because I closed my nose.

What does your sales approach look like?