LIINA LAAS: The Barbecue Theory of Sales

In the high-stakes world of the "new economy," where startup founders often mistake "hustle" for a personality trait, a fundamental truth remains: sales is not a talent show; it is a math problem.

When I was twenty and selling telecom door-to-door in the north-west of England, I assumed sales were about confidence. Or maybe about being slightly shameless. You knock on enough doors, and at some point, you either develop a thick skin or decide university suddenly sounds very appealing.

At that age, I genuinely believed the people who succeeded in sales simply possessed something the rest of us did not. They were more persuasive, more charismatic, more naturally convincing.

The compensation plan corrected that illusion fairly quickly. Speak to one hundred people. Close four deals. If you did not close four, the explanation was not that your personality lacked sparkle. It was that you probably had not spoken to one hundred people. Alright, I thought, it’s a process, and it must be doable in this case.

There was something brutally honest about that framework. It stripped away any romance about talent and replaced it with arithmetic. If you did the work, the numbers worked back.

The work itself was not romantic. It rained a lot. In the mornings, hardly anyone was home. In the evenings, everyone was home but exhausted. Some people were polite. Some people were not. A few seemed personally offended by the concept of broadband being discussed at their doorstep.

What I realised over time was how rarely any of it was actually about me. When someone snapped or swore or shut the door mid-sentence, it felt deeply personal in the moment. But it was almost always about timing. A bad day. A tight budget. A child crying in the background. I had simply arrived at the wrong minute.

That realisation changed something fundamental for me. Sales felt emotional, but most outcomes were situational.

There were variables I could not control. Whether they were home. Whether they had money. Whether they had already signed a contract with someone else. There were variables I could control. My tone. My clarity. Whether I spoke to the right person. Whether I kept going after a rough hour.

And there was something else I learned, which took longer to internalise. If I executed my pitch properly, with real confidence and calm rather than forced enthusiasm, I did not always need one hundred conversations to get my four deals. Sometimes I could do it in seventy. Sometimes, much fewer. What matters is the delivery, listening, and qualifying properly.

But even excellent execution does not remove the need for volume. You can be articulate, funny, and persuasive, but if you only knock on ten doors because you are discouraged or because you convince yourself that you are focusing on “quality over quantity,” the maths does not bend to your narrative. If no one opens the door, there is nothing for your charm to attach itself to.

There were also days when the universe felt almost suspiciously generous. I once knocked on a door and discovered a barbecue in full swing. They invited me in, I signed up the homeowner. Then one of the guests asked about the offer. Then a neighbour joined the conversation. Within a couple of hours I had hit my weekly target whilst eating grilled food with people who, earlier that afternoon, had never heard of me.

Those days are intoxicating. They make you believe you have cracked some secret code. But they are luck. You cannot plan for a barbecue party at every house. You cannot build a pipeline strategy around sausages and good timing.

Luck exists in sales. It is real and occasionally spectacular. But it is not dependable. The only dependable variable is consistency. The willingness to keep knocking, especially on the days when nothing seems to move.

Years later, building Knowzilla and doing B2B founder led sales, the environment looks very different. I am not standing in the rain anymore. No one shouts abuse into my face. No one slams a literal door. Emotionally, that part is easier.

Strategically, it is more complex.

In door to door sales, the compelling event was often obvious. Someone had just moved in and needed internet. The need was clear and immediate. In early stages of testing your idea, especially when you are selling something that affects how a company operates, the urgency is rarely that visible.

With Knowzilla, we speak to founders and sales leaders about how they onboard and enable their sales teams. Many companies rely on informal systems. Shadow someone. Read a few documents. Ask questions as you go. It works when the team is small, and everyone sits in the same room. It starts to break when the company scales, hiring accelerates, and new reps are expected to ramp quickly and consistently.

That moment, when growth exposes the cracks in the process, is the compelling event. That is when the question shifts from “nice to have” to “we actually need to fix this.”

If there is no such moment, no real friction, you can deliver the most polished pitch imaginable and still hear “let’s revisit this next quarter.” You can build rapport. You can present it beautifully. But if there is no urgency, you are essentially speaking into empty space.

This is where the process mindset matters even more than personality. In B2B, there are more nuances. You need to build trust. You need to understand the client’s real pain, not just the one they casually mention. You need to uncover why now matters. And if it does not matter now, you need to accept that without taking it personally.

The resilience I built from knocking on doors has been unexpectedly useful here. When someone swore at me at their doorstep, it felt dramatic but rarely personal. When a prospect ghosts you or says no in a polite corporate way, it is easy to internalise it because the stakes feel higher. You are not just selling broadband. You are selling something you built.

But the underlying principle is the same. Most NOs are about context and timing, not about you.

Sales is hard work, whether it is door-to-door, over the phone, via LinkedIn, through email, or at industry events. The channel changes. The psychology does not. It remains a game of numbers guided by process.

If you consistently speak to the right audience, listen carefully to what actually hurts, refine your pitch based on real feedback, and follow up with discipline, your odds improve. If nothing is improving, that is data. Perhaps the audience is wrong. Perhaps the problem is not painful enough. Perhaps the product needs refinement. Those are solvable strategic questions. They are not character judgments.

I no longer believe sales is a personality trait. I believe it is a structured effort applied consistently to a real need. Confidence and clarity can reduce the number of conversations required. They cannot eliminate the requirement to have them.

And sometimes, if you are consistent long enough, you will stumble into a barbecue day. You will enjoy it. You will appreciate the luck. And then you will go back to the process.

Because over time, it is not the spectacular days that define your trajectory. It is the steady, sometimes boring, often uncomfortable commitment to keep knocking on the next door.