Episode 26 Why Selling Feels So Hard (And What to Do About It)

If talking about your work, following up on enquiries, or asking for the sale makes you want to quietly look the other way, this episode is for you.

This week I'm getting into something that doesn't get talked about enough in the home baking world: the discomfort around selling. Not pricing, not finding customers… the actual act of putting yourself and your work forward with confidence.

I talk about the three beliefs that keep brilliant bakers stuck, why the version of selling most of us are afraid of isn't the version we actually need to do, and what the reframe is that changes everything.

There's also one practical task, something you can do today, in about ten minutes, that will start to shift how you talk about your business.

And at the end, I share details of the Sales Confidence Challenge, a free five-day challenge I'm running from Monday 1st June. One email a day, one short video from me, one task. Link below if you'd like to join.

Sign up for the Sales Confidence Challenge: https://anniebennett.co.uk/the-hbba-sales-challenge-2026/

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For her website with all this and more:

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello and welcome to the Profitable Baker Podcast, the show for bakers who mean business. I'm Annie Bennett, founder of the Home Baking Business Academy, and every week I'll be sharing practical lessons, mindset shifts, and inspiring stories from bakers who are building businesses they love. Because success in this industry isn't about who bakes the fanciest cakes, it's about who builds the strongest business foundations. Let's get started. Welcome back to the Profitable Baker Podcast with me, Annie Bennett. Now, today I want to talk about selling, a subject I'll be talking about throughout June. I'm talking about the actual act of selling, talking about your work, following up, asking for the sale. The part that makes most homebakers want to quietly look the other way and hope the right people just somehow find them. I'm going to talk about why it feels so hard, specifically why it feels hard for people like us who came to this through love of baking rather than love of business. And I want to name what's actually going on underneath that discomfort. Because I think once you can see it clearly, it starts to lose some of its power. And then I'm going to give you one thing, just the one, that you can do today that will start to shift how you think about this. Not a 10-step system, just the one thing. Okay, let's get into it. I want to start by making something very clear, and I want you to hear this properly. If selling feels uncomfortable for you, that is not a personality flaw. It is not evidence that you're bad at business, or that you're not cut out for this, or that you're somehow missing a gene that other people have. It's a completely logical response to a set of beliefs you've absorbed probably over many years, probably without even noticing, about what selling is, what it looks like, and what kind of a person does it. And I want to go through three of those beliefs specifically, because I've heard versions of all three from Bakers at every stage of running their business, including, if I'm honest, from myself in the earlier days of my own business. I'm going to name each one, and I want you to notice if any of them sound like something you've actually thought. Not something you'd say out loud necessarily, but something that lives a bit further back. So, belief one, selling feels pushy. Most of us have been on the receiving end of selling that felt uncomfortable, a pushy salesperson, a hard sell, a tactic that felt manipulative or pressuring. And somewhere along the way, we absorbed the idea that selling is just that. That if you're selling, you're doing something to someone, imposing yourself, making them feel obligated, creating pressure they didn't ask for. So when it comes to talking about our own work, we hold back, we understate, we add a sorry before the price. We don't follow up on inquiries because we don't want to be one of those people. I understand that completely, but I want you to hold that thought because we're going to come back to it. Belief two, my work should speak for itself. This one is incredibly common in creative businesses, and I think it comes from a genuinely good place. If what I make is beautiful and the quality is there, people will find me. Word of mouth will do the work. I shouldn't need to shout about it. The implicit belief underneath is that actively promoting your work is somehow a bit desperate. That if you have to talk about it, maybe it's because it's not good enough to be talked about by others. And I want to say something gently but directly about this. Even the most extraordinary cakes don't sell themselves. People need to know you exist, they need to understand what you offer, they need to feel confident enough to reach out. And all of that requires you to do something consistently to be visible and clear about what you do and what it costs to work with you. The quality of your work is essential, but it's just not sufficient on its own. So on to belief three. Most home bakers, and I'll happily include myself in this, came to their business through passion, through the love of baking, through the satisfaction of making something beautiful and seeing someone's face when they receive it. The identity of salesperson feels completely foreign to that, maybe a bit uncomfortable, maybe a bit at odds with the warm, caring, customer-first way you approach your work. And so anything that starts to feel too salesy triggers a kind of internal alarm. I don't want to be that person, I don't do it that way, I just bake. And I get that, I really do. But here's the thing I want you to notice. All three of those beliefs: the pushy sell, the work speaking for itself, the not being a salesperson, they all have something in common. They're all based on a version of selling that isn't the version you actually need to be doing. So let's talk about what selling actually is for you in a home baking business in the real world. Here's the reframe. And I want you to really think about it because if it makes sense to you, it changes quite a lot. Selling is not pushy. Selling is being clear, being helpful, and making it easy for someone who already wants what you make to actually get it. And the key phrase in there is someone who already wants what you make. You are not trying to convince someone to buy a cake they don't want. You are not trying to manufacture desire that wasn't there. You're not manipulating anyone or creating artificial pressure. You're running a business that makes beautiful things that people genuinely want to buy. Your job, the selling part, is simply to make it possible for those people to find you, understand what you offer, and actually place an order. That's it. That's the whole thing. So let me break that down into three parts because I think each one is worth its own section. So being clear. How easy is it right now for someone who discovers your business, finds your Instagram, gets your name from a friend, stumbles across your page, how easy is it for them to understand what you offer, what it costs, and what they need to do to order? Now that might sound a straightforward question, but for a lot of home bakers, the honest answer is not that easy. Information is vague or hard to find, or it requires the customer to send a message before they can even understand whether you're in the right price range for them. And here's the thing about that: a customer who can't find the information they need doesn't always chase it. Often they just move on. Not because they didn't want a cake, not because you weren't right for them, simply because the friction of finding out was too high. Clarity is not aggressive, clarity is not pushy. Clarity is a form of customer care. When your prices are clear, your process is clear, and your next step is clear, you're doing your customer a favor. You're taking something off their to-do list. So let's talk about being helpful. And a useful reframe I often use is you are not selling, you are helping the customer to buy. Think about what your customer is actually experiencing when they reach out to you. If someone's inquiring about a wedding cake, they're probably at some point in the middle of planning one of the most logistically complex events of their life. They are making hundreds of decisions, many of them for the first time. They are trying to feel like things are under control, like the important things are in safe hands. And when they inquire, they're not just looking for a price. They want to feel like this particular thing, the cake, is sorted, like they can stop worrying about it, like it's with someone who actually knows what they're doing and cares about getting it right. Being helpful means meeting them where they actually are. It means answering the question behind the question. It means being the person who makes them feel I've got this. Your cake is going to be beautiful, and here's how we make that happen. And that's not selling, that's care. Except it's also selling because it's the thing that makes someone feel safe enough to say yes to you. So let's talk about making it easy. Now, frictionless is kind. Every extra step in your order process, every time a customer has to wait or chase or figure out the next step themselves, is a place where you can potentially lose them. Not because they've changed their mind, but simply because life got in the way and they never quite got back to it. So a clear follow-up message, a payment link rather than a bank transfer, a confirmation that tells them everything they need to know so they don't have to chase you, a gentle nudge if you haven't heard back. None of that is pushy. All of it is professional, and all of it is selling because it's what moves someone from I'd like a cake to I've ordered, paid a deposit, and it's in the diary, and I can stop thinking about this now. So the version of selling that feels uncomfortable, the version that lives in the beliefs we talked about earlier, is a version where you're trying to get someone to do something they don't want to do. And that's not what you're doing. What you're doing is making it possible for someone who already wants what you make to actually get it from you. And those are genuinely different things. And once you start to feel that difference, really feel it, the whole thing gets a lot easier. So I want to give you one practical thing to do today. I want you to write three sentences that answer this question. What does it mean to the person who orders from you? Not what you make, not your flavours, not the fact that everything's baked from scratch, or that you use real butter, or that or that your finishes are beautiful, though all of that does matter. What does it actually mean? To the mum planning her daughter's 16th birthday who wants the cake to be the moment her daughter remembers? To the person who wants to say thank you in a way that feels genuinely personal rather than just another gift voucher. To the couple who want everything at their wedding to feel like them and who have decided the cake is the one thing they're not compromising on. What does it mean to that person that you exist? Most home bakers describe their business in terms of what they make. I make custom celebration cakes, I do wedding cakes, I do birthday cakes, I specialise in sugar flowers. All of that is accurate, but none of it is why someone cries when they see the cake at their mum's 70th. Shifting your language even slightly from what you make to what you provide changes everything. It changes how you write your captions, it changes how you answer the question, what do you do at the school gate? It changes how you feel about selling because you stop thinking about yourself as asking someone to hand over money for a cake, and you start understanding that you're offering something that genuinely matters to them. So, three sentences. What does it mean to the person who orders from you? And I genuinely encourage you to think about this. Pause right now before you finish the episode. Get a piece of paper or do it digitally and write it down. Don't think about it, don't make a note to do it later. Do it now while the question is live and fresh in your head, because that's where the change actually happens. Not in thinking about doing the thing, in actually doing the thing. Now, before I tell you about something I'm running in June, I want to say something brief about why I wanted to make this episode. Selling is a topic that home bakers are least likely to voluntarily seek out. Finance, pricing, record keeping, all of those feel like things you should know about, things you can learn. Selling feels more personal, more exposing. Like it says something about you if you're not good at it. And what I know from working with home bakers across all stages and all sizes of business is that the people who are quietly struggling most are not the ones who can't bake. They're the ones who bake brilliantly but cannot bring themselves to say so with confidence. And I don't think that's a character flaw. I think it's the result of never having been told clearly that what they're offering is valuable, that it's okay to ask for the sale. And that version of selling they've been afraid of isn't the version they need to be doing. So that's why I made this episode. And if it's been useful to you, I want to tell you about what's next. In June, in fact, it's starting next week, I'm running something called the Sales Confidence Challenge. And I want to tell you about it, not as a pitch, just as something I think you might genuinely want because I am very excited about it. It's five days, one email a day, and in that email is a short video from me. And in that short video, I give you a task that takes perhaps 15-20 minutes, something like that. And it starts on Monday, the 1st of June. We'll be working on small tasks that will shift your thinking about sales and make you realise that it's something you can learn to do. And it's completely free. It's five days, first email Monday, fifth email on the Friday. It's designed to prove something to yourself, not to perform for anyone else, not to hit a revenue target, not to transform your business overnight, but just to give you the experience of talking about your work with a bit more ease, of following up with a customer without the dread, of asking for the sale and discovering that the world doesn't end. The link to sign up to the challenge is in the show notes, and I would love to see you there. So that's it for today. Thank you so much for being here. Whether you've been listening since episode one or this is your first time, I'm really glad you found this one. And if it's resonated, if you recognized yourself anywhere in what we talked about today, please do share with another baker who you think might need to hear it. The bakers who need this episode most are often the ones least likely to go looking for it. So if you know someone who's brilliant at baking and finds the business side of things quite exhausting, send it to them. I'll be back next time. Until then, take care of yourselves and take care of your businesses. Until next time.