Do you wake up in the middle of the night worried about how you are going to pay your bills? Maybe you can’t even fall asleep because you are thinking that you might have to go get a job again. Then the thoughts of failure and lack start to roll around in your mind. Then the dreaded “I am such a fraud” conversation takes over. Any of this sounding familiar?
Boy that’s a downer for the beginning of a blog post, right? Well I have been spending a lot of time over the last couple of months focused on these conversations.
I have had them with clients, I have had them with my coaches, I have had them with my mastermind partners (I’ve even had them with my parents) and I have to tell you that it doesn’t matter what level your business is there is some form of this conversation happening. You might be bringing in a whole bunch of money and you can still be having the failure, lack or fraud conversations with yourself.
So I want to ask you 3 questions:
1. What are you offering? What is the service or product you deliver? What is the change you want to make in the world? (And yes that counts as one question). Can you tell me what is the emotional trigger that it has for your clients? There are certain things people love to spend money on – making more money, saving time, getting healthy, their kids and their pets. People feel emotion around these areas. So you aren’t selling virtual assistant services, you are selling saving time which in turn gives them more time to make more money. When you are clear about this you will be able to close more sales.
2. Does your calendar look like someone spilled a bottle of Whiteout on it? When I was a Mary Kay Sales Director we would say we had “snow blindness”. If you don’t have appointments on your calendar you are kidding yourself.
- You have to be networking! This should be a combination of “in-person” and “on-line”.
- You have to schedule appointments to follow-up with those you meet networking!
- You have to have appointments to offer your products and services to potential new clients! This could be both one-on-one conversations and one-to-many conversations (meaning speaking).
For all my shy friends out there – you have to have actual conversations with people to sell them your products and services. There is no easy way to get around that.
3. Are you battling the “fraud factor”? About a year ago I was sitting in a hotel conference room with about 30 entrepreneurs and we were having a discussion about how we all felt like we were frauds. It was the “What gives us the right to say we can make these changes in the world” type of conversation. The most interesting thing to me was that there were people in that room that were running upper 6 figure and 7 figure businesses and they were having the same conversation. There was a best selling author, a world renowned musician and many other successful people.
Are you a fraud? I think this thought hits us hardest in the early stages of our business. When I started Decisive Minds and I started telling entrepreneurs that I could show them how to build a 6 figure business there was definitely a fraud conversation happening, because at that point Decisive Minds was not a 6 figure company, until one day my coach said “Michele, what were the annual sales for your trucking company?” Knowing the answer was $15 Million annually he went on to say “So don’t you think running a multi-million dollar trucking company for 20+ years gives you the right to say you can show people how to do that?” Just another reason to have a business coach.
So maybe you haven’t run a 6 figure business, but have you had a certain education that makes you more knowledgeable than the average person on your subject? Have you been in a certain industry for a long time? Do you have skills that transfer from other things in your life that make you knowledgeable – dare I say, an expert?
What is your next step? Where is that next appointment coming from? When are you talking to your next potential new client? Leave me a message below to let me know what you are committing to do to make this business work!
Great post, Michele! #1 and #3 are so important and they relate to one another quite well. As business owners, sometimes we are afraid to glorify our value for fear that customers may not receive the desired emotional outcome. I challenge all biz owners to step out on a limb and speak highly of their services and products. Sell the dream, and do it with overwhelming confidence. Not only will it make the sell smoother, it will also put the purchaser in a positive mindset when buying. After all, if you don’t toot your own horn, who will? The next step for anyone reading this would be to get out a sheet of paper and literally draw 2 columns. Column 1 should be “What benefits does my company offer to customers?” Reference Michele’s points of saving time, saving money, etc. Column 2 should be, what makes me an expert at what I do. Don’t hold back on either of these!
I have 3 websites. Not because I wanted 3 websites originally but I needed to learn the process and was taken for a ride because of my naivety in what I was wanting to accomplish. Now I am st the stage where I have to make this work to pay back all the credit card debt I have incurred just getting it all started. I am not the best salesperson in the world so I am really having to work at getting that down. I am probably going to be one of those people that has to go back to work at 65 just to pay those bills. Any ideas?