I often get asked this by CEO's ...Another angle is to not sell, but have conversations with potential customers - ask questions, qualify who has the problems that you can solve, be enthusiastic, and create conditions where a prospect wants to buy rather than selling to them. As the other responses above indicate, over time, one will acquire selling techniques, but they are not critical to close business. I wrote a brief post on this a while back:
http://www.peaksalesrecruiting.com/sell-more-by-selling-less/
Cheers,
Eliot
