Hey,
I want to tell you about something I've been doing for the past few months that has terrified me in a way I didn't expect. And I'm telling you because I think you might be avoiding the same thing.
I've been DMing people. Cold. Warm-ish. People I met once at an event. People who are two degrees away from the person I actually want to reach. I've been sending emails to strangers explaining what I do, getting on calls where the entire purpose is to say: here's what I see in your marketing, here's what's missing, here's how I can help.
This probably sounds normal to you. Maybe even basic. But for me, it's been like learning to use a muscle I didn't know had atrophied.
I've spent my career on the other side of this. Building content systems, writing strategies, constructing the architecture behind brands. I loved that work. I was good at it. And somewhere along the way I built an identity around it that had a very clear wall: I am the strategist. I am not the salesperson.
You know where that wall came from? Cuba, probably. Growing up surrounded by propaganda gives you a very specific allergy to anything that sounds like you're trying to convince someone of something. Sales, in my head, lived in the same neighborhood as manipulation. Somebody smiling too hard while they slide something across the table at you.
So I avoided it. I told myself that good work would speak for itself. That the right clients would find me. That selling was someone else's department — literally, a different team, a different skill set, a different personality type.
And I was partially right about that last part. Marketing and sales are different skills. Any real salesperson will tell you that. There's a creative, analytical engine in marketing that needs to be protected, and there's something in sales that requires... I don't know how else to say it... a kind of fearless honesty. A willingness to say "I see something you don't, and I think you should pay attention to it." Those are different muscles.
But here's what I got wrong: I thought staying on the marketing side meant I didn't need the sales muscle at all. And that cost me. Not dramatically — I wasn't in crisis. But slowly, in the way that things cost you when you don't notice them for years. Opportunities I didn't pursue. Conversations I didn't start. People who could have used exactly what I offer... who never heard from me because I was waiting for them to come to me.
The shift happened when I started actually doing the outreach. Not theorizing about it. Doing it.
I DM'd someone I'd met once and told her what I noticed in her content strategy. She wrote back the same day. I got on a call with a founder who'd been referred to me by someone who'd been referred to me by someone else — three degrees out — and within twenty minutes we were deep in the gaps in his marketing operation, and he was asking how fast we could start.
The conversations surprised me. They were honest and useful in a way that posting content into the void never is. They felt like actual service.
That's the part I want you to hear, because I think this might be where you are too.
If you're in marketing, in social media, in content — you probably have a version of this wall. The one that says: I build. I create. I strategize. I don't sell. And you might be calling that professionalism or humility or just "how I'm wired." But if you can look at someone's brand presence and see the voids — the misaligned messaging, the content that's going nowhere, the systems that aren't connected — and you're not saying anything? That silence has a cost. And the person paying it is the one who could've used what you see.
That reframe changed everything for me. The DM stopped feeling like an intrusion and started feeling like follow-through.
I'm still building this muscle. I still hesitate before hitting send. I still hear the voice that says they didn't ask for this, you're being too much. But now I also hear another voice — the one that says: you can see something they can't. Say it.
There's a bigger question I'm sitting with underneath all of this. In a world where anyone can ask an AI to spit out a content strategy in ten minutes, where does our actual value live? I don't have the full answer yet. But I think it lives in the thing that happens when you look at a brand and know — before you can even articulate why — what's off. That instinct. The pattern recognition that no prompt can replicate. The read that comes from years of being in the room, doing the work, watching what happens when the strategy meets real people.
That's worth something. It might be worth a lot.
The question is whether you're going to keep giving it away for free... or start a conversation about it.
I'd love to hear from you on this. Hit reply and tell me: what's the skill you know you have that you haven't figured out how to sell yet?
Diana