Do you ever find yourself struggling to sell stuff to people who don’t want it? I spent years doing this! Of course I didn’t sell much, hated what I was doing – and so I concluded I was bad at sales.

Embarrassingly recently, I’ve come to understand some of the key mistakes I was making.

And yesterday, at a lunchtime talk at the RSA in London, I discovered an additional piece of the jigsaw.

Prof Paul Bloom, speaking to promote his book How Pleasure Works, was explaining how people value things more highly if they appreciate the story behind them. A genuine Vermeer painting is worth more than a fake Vermeer, even when they are apparently identical.

Both real-world and laboratory brain-imaging experiments have demonstrated that people value things more highly when they understand and appreciate the story behind them – for example, the artistic endeavour involved.

Someone who knows nothing about art, however, would not value the genuine Vermeer to anything like the same extent.

There’s an “entry fee” to the world of art appreciation: people need to spend time learning about it before they can fully enjoy the pleasures it brings.

So how does that relate to sales? My husband Steve McCann spotted the connection as I told him about the talk.

Who’s going to value your work more highly – the person who has some knowledge of your field and the subtleties of the work you do, or the man on the Clapham Omnibus?