Make Sales – Help

Q&A Call Recording

Help Topics

This section will grow so please make sure to check back if you have a question and haven’t been back in a while.

I am terrified of being ‘salesy’ or selling in general

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Think of something you love owning or something that has significantly helped you move forward in your life. Are you angry that that person/marketing team ‘sold’ it to you?
2. How would you feel if one of your favourite places to purchase closed down?
3. Are you genuinely trying to help people? Is it wrong that you be fairly compensated?
4. Do you believe in balance? If value flows from one person to you shouldn’t value also flow back to you?

Honestly, if you are providing valuable services, which you are, there would be an imbalance for you not to be compensated. And given that you are providing valuable services you are actually doing people a DISSERVICE by not letting them know how you can help them.

The ‘sales people’ we dislike are the pushy ones. Read through your sales conversation outline. What is happening there? What is happening is you are having a genuine caring conversation with someone who may need your help. You are taking the time to discover if you can help them and if they want your help. If it’s not a good fit that’s fine – you help them by directing them to someone who is hopefully a better fit, if it is a good fit you are discussing how you can both help each other.

I have had several private clients tell me they are afraid of selling. Then I ask them to think back to our Strategy Session and they always say – oh but we just had a nice chat. EXACTLY! Sometimes I would call them on their insecurities or worries but that was it and I only did that when I had more experience.

Once you have done a few you’ll see that actually sales conversations are interesting conversations with interesting people from all over the world. Sometimes you part ways just happy to have had a real and helpful conversation (you always learn too) and sometimes you do business together.

The only way to reach this place is to actually do them!

Do I need to do have a sales conversation for test clients?

No, not unless you are charging people and they want to have a conversation with you to decide whether it’s a good fit. In the process of 1) test (free) clients, 2) killer intro offer and then 3) sales conversations leading to your offer at full price I would only expect you to need sales conversations when you hit stage 3.

Do I need to do sales conversations at all?

If 99% of cases – yes, if you want to make sales. A sales page along will only do it in certain circumstances. Those circumstances are:

• Your offer is cheap enough so that people don’t need to talk to you to buy. You will need to have another mechanism for people to find the offer to buy it though. Later on when your Starter Offer is on your website people most likely won’t need to speak with you to buy it.
• You have a big enough following and enough social proof so that people are already convinced they want to buy from you, they don’t need to speak to you first. Even if you have this if you are coaching with someone you will still want to check they are a suitable client.
• It would be unusual to speak to you before working together. As an example if you are selling card readings or something that is typically 1-3 sessions it wouldn’t necessarily be normal to expect or want to speak to the person providing the service beforehand. This is where it is your call.

As a general rule you need to be speaking with people if you want to make sales above a certain price point. There are, however, exceptions to every rule.

What is the difference between the test clients and the sales conversation – I am confused as they both seem to be a free session.

The test client is a trial run of your Starter Offer being run as though it was being paid, but no money is being exchanged because it’s a trial run. You are asking for a testimonial instead of being paid and are also running it to see if you want to make any changes before going live with paid clients.

The sales conversation is an enticingly named free session designed to showcase your expertise, help the potential client, offer value and if relevant, discuss working together. It’s a proven method of getting clients that works very well.

While you may discuss working together with your test clients once the Starter Offer is complete, you would not do this until the work of the Starter Offer is complete.

With the service I sell I can’t coach or offer strategy in the sales conversation so what should I do?

Say for example you do readings or you build websites, obviously then you can’t provide people with value that comes under coaching or strategy in the sales conversation that actually moves people forward so they feel like they get a results – you can’t do a reading for them then and there and in the case of the website you can’t build anything for them then and there. There are a few options here:

1. You can give examples of what you’ve done with other clients so they can see what the path forward would be.
2. You can give advice around how to move forward even though they may not be able to actually do the work themselves e.g  You are going to need a website with x,y,z functionality because of a,b,c…
3. You can explain what their issue is and how it can be solved using your process e.g. The reason you are experiencing such frustration with weight loss is you are missing the mindset piece. Once you start digging deeper on WHY you are x,y,z then you’ll start to make progress.

Ultimately your aim with this section of the sales conversation is to help them. That may be with coaching if appropriate, advice, insight, examples, the key is they get value from it.

I am worried about inviting people to a “strategy” session when really it’s a sales conversation. I am worried about lying or being inauthentic. What do I do?

I named the conversation you are having with people a sales conversation so that you are clear that it is about helping people AND about making sales. It is NOT JUST a free call. That said 75% or more of the conversation is about helping the person in their individual situation, which is why it is accurate and honest to call it a strategy session or whatever you have named your session when putting it out there to people. Your prospects will get massive clarity and value out of the conversation. They will likely be very thankful they signed up.

There is NO hard selling at all involved ever. You are only talking about your offer if they are a genuinely good fit for the offer and if they either a) ask how they can work with you further or b) you have asked if they would like to hear about how you could work together and they say yes. So you aren’t forcing anything on anyone. If it’s not a good fit you refer them to someone else.

The conversation is all about HELPING the other person with strategy, or whatever else they signed up for as well as finding out if they would like to take things further.

The sales conversation outline is all about helping your prospect and if they want more help letting them know how that can look and guiding them to make the best decision for them.

I am concerned about doing sales conversations now. Won’t it be easier if I wait until I have a website?

Technically speaking, yes it will be a bit easier to get people into a call if you have a website and they can check you out. But why wait? The best way to handle this, is to answer the no website objection in your post to get people into the call. Remember, the call you are offering is not called a sales call and it offers the person who takes it up free value. You can write in the post something like “While I am setting up my website I am offer X number of free <name of session>…” or “in order to celebrate the birth of my new business while my website is in development I am offering…” Then no one will question why you don’t have a website, you already explained.

Whether or not someone wants to work with you is decided on the call, once that personal connection is made and if you genuinely help them everything else becomes irrelevant. Have you checked the website of everyone you’ve ever given money to? Most likely not. Ultimately you care more about if the person can help you.

You will be doing sales calls so honestly, it is better to bite the bullet now rather than putting it off and putting more pressure on yourself later. Plus earning money is great! Let’s get you earning now. It will also of course mean when you do your website it will be even better because of the feedback and understanding you got from your paying clients.

What should I offer people in my sales conversations – the Starter Offer or the Upsell/Larger Package?

Ultimately you should offer them what is most appropriate for the outcome they are looking for. Once you have a website you will not generally be doing sales conversations for your Starter Offer. This offer is designed to give people an opportunity to jump in and work with you easily without a price point that means they need to speak with you or think about it too hard.

I would lean towards offering them your larger package as a larger package means bigger results for the package but ultimately your job in the sales conversation is to listen to their needs and advise which package will help them best depending on those needs.

Do I have to use the method of posting on Facebook?

No, use whatever you feel is best for your situation and what you have available to you. I absolutely encourage you to use your imagination and experiment. If you prefer another option absolutely go with it. The Facebook post is a suggestion as it is open to everyone and it works really well in a number of markets.

I have managed to book some sales conversations but I am getting  a high number of no shows. What do I do?

If you are finding people no show for your sales calls as they book in send them an email with the subject line “Your <name of session> on <day> at <time in their time zone>”

Why are we not now creating landing pages and getting people on to our email lists? I want to do that!

Even though for some people this is not complicated to do I want to concentrate on making sales. Getting people on your email list is not as direct as having sales conversations. Generally getting people on your email list, leads to sales conversations with a good autoresponder sequence. Instead of setting up an email list, landing pages, creating an optin, all of which takes time, my approach is get straight to what is going to get results. Which is why I recommend going straight for the sales conversation instead of taking more time and taking the more complicated, long term route. By all means let’s add this stuff in later, and we will, but first let’s take the easiest route to getting clients 🙂

What’s a typical conversion rate on a sales call?

This completely depends on how warm the people in the calls  are but taking all factors aside just to give a number a good rate would be 1 in 3. Here are a few examples to show how the conversion rate can vary: