The Honest Truth About Sales That Nobody in My Industry Wants to Say

By Michelle Carlberg

Why the Close Was Never the Point

I want to tell you something about the way I sell.

Actually, I do not want to call it selling at all. Because the word itself misses what I am actually trying to do.

Let me start over.

I want to tell you something about the way I show up.

Because there is a version of what I do that looks like sales from the outside. I reach out, share content, have conversations, and ask for meetings. On the surface it checks all the boxes of a traditional business development playbook.

But here is what is actually happening underneath all of it.

I am trying to find the people I can genuinely help.

Not the people who will give me a transaction
Not the names on a list that need to be converted
Not the metrics that need to be hit by the end of the quarter

The people, the actual human beings leading organizations, navigating growth, carrying the weight of workforce decisions that affect hundreds of other human beings, who are stuck. Who are frustrated. Who have been trying the same approach and getting the same results and quietly wondering if there is something they are missing.

Those are the people I want to talk to.

And I want to be honest about why.

What Sales Actually Looks Like When You Do It Right

I have been in some version of sales and business development for almost my entire career.

And the thing nobody tells you early on, the thing you have to learn the hard way, usually by doing it wrong first, is that the close is never the point.

The relationship is the point.

The close is just what happens when the relationship is real enough, and the trust is deep enough, and the timing finally lines up.

I have seen the other version. The recruiter who gets the placement and disappears. The vendor who wins the contract and checks out. The salesperson who hits their number and moves on to the next name on the list.

I understand the pressure that produces that behavior.

I have never been able to make peace with it.

Because here is what I know from years of doing this work: the relationship that was built carefully, honestly, and without an agenda the other person could feel?

That is the one that calls you back six months later with the opportunity that actually matters
That is the one that refers you to three other people without being asked
That is the one that tells you the truth about what they need instead of just telling you what they think you want to hear

The transactional close has a one-time value.

The genuine relationship compounds forever.

That’s the real difference between a vendor relationship and a hiring partnership that doesn’t feel transactional.

The Disconnect I Cannot Stop Thinking About

There are 7.3 million open jobs in the United States right now.

Hires are running at 5.3 million.

That gap — 2 million positions sitting open despite record application volume… is not a math problem.

It is a trust problem. A process problem. A strategy problem.

And it is happening inside organizations that are working hard, trying to do right by their teams, and genuinely cannot figure out why hiring keeps feeling this hard.

The candidates are there.

Not in the job posting
Not in the ATS
Not in the pile of applications that an algorithm screened before a human ever saw a name

They are employed somewhere else right now. Performing well. Not looking. Not applying.

But open — quietly, carefully… to the right conversation from the right person at the right moment.

And the organizations that cannot reach them are not failing because they lack resources or budget or intent.

They are failing because the approach they are using was never designed to find the people they actually need.

More postings, applications, and volume.

None of it closes the gap between available talent and hireable talent
None of it reaches the experienced superintendent who has worked on three hyperscale data center builds and is not on Indeed
None of it surfaces the operations director who would move for the right opportunity but will never see your job posting because she stopped looking six months ago

That gap is not going to close itself.

And the organizations carrying it are paying for it every single day, in vacancy costs, in delayed projects, in burned-out teams absorbing responsibilities they were never hired to carry.

This is the exact paradox behind why so many open jobs sit next to so many available workers.

If We Are Connected — Why Are We Not Talking?

Here is the part I want to say most directly.

If you are in my network, if you have been reading what I write, engaging with the content, nodding along to the data, and you are also sitting with an open role that will not close, a hiring process that is not working, or a workforce strategy that was built for a market that no longer exists —

Why are we not talking?

Not because I want to close you… Because I genuinely believe one conversation can change the way you are approaching this.

Not a sales call
Not a pitch
Not a scripted walkthrough of our service offerings

A real conversation, where I listen to what you are actually navigating, share what I am seeing in the market, and tell you honestly whether what I do is even the right fit for your situation.

Sometimes it is not. And I will tell you that too.

Because the relationship, the real one, the one built on honesty and genuine care for your outcome, is worth more to me than any placement fee.

That is not a line I say to close the gap.

It is the thing that has been true about the way I work since the beginning.

If you knew me…really knew me, you would know that I will never be the person who just takes the sale.

I want to earn the partnership.

And the partnership, in the end, is worth so much more than the close.

That same honesty, including telling a prospective client when something isn’t the right fit, is at the center of why so many hiring leaders are skeptical of agencies in the first place.

What One Conversation Can Actually Do

I have sat across from, or on calls with, leaders who came in skeptical.

Who had been burned by transactional recruiters
Who had tried three agencies and gotten three versions of the same disappointing result
Who had decided, somewhere along the way, that working with a recruiting partner was just another cost center with another invoice at the end

And I watched something shift when we stopped talking about services and started talking about their actual situation.

The role that had been open for four months. The internal team that was stretched beyond capacity. The candidate who made it to round three and then went cold. The compensation offer that kept losing finalists to a competitor they could not see clearly.

One conversation that was actually honest, about the market, about the process, about what was really creating the gap, changed the trajectory of the search.

Not because I had a magic solution.

Because I had been in enough of these conversations to know where the real problem lived. And because I was willing to say it out loud even when it was not what they expected to hear.

Brutal transparency. Real accountability. Zero drama.

That is what a genuine partnership looks like.