Sell Like This and Ruin Your Business (and Reputation)

Transcription

You want to know the fastest way to destroy your business and your reputation? That’s what I’m going to share with you in today’s episode of the Healthpreneur Podcast.

I hope you’ve been well. I have a little anecdotal story to share with you.

 

Example of an outdated, high-pressure sales tactic

I was out for dinner with some friends a couple weeks ago and one of them told me that he went to good old Grant Cardone’s three-day sales bootcamp.

I’m not going to mention my friend’s name. I love him dearly, and the way he does things is up to him. I do things differently and I don’t resonate with Grant Cardone. If you don’t know, he’s all about closing the sale at whatever cost, achieving at the expense of relationships and moral ethics, and all that stuff.

Anyway, so that’s him. My buddy was at his event and told me about it. He told me that, on the first day of the event after the first session, he went to the bathroom. One of Grant Cardone’s clones, one of his sales guys, came up to him and said, “So, we going to get started? What are we going to do today?”

My buddy said, “I’m good, thanks.” The closer replied, “Are you good or do you want to be great?” You can see where this is going, right? He said, “Well, I’m good. I’ve got a coach.” The guy said, “Well, if you got a coach why are you here?”

It just kept going down.

There’s a lot to appreciate from the directness of those types of questions, but in that boiler room-type closed environment, I don’t know if there’s anything that makes us feel more uncomfortable. Even if you love selling, nobody likes being sold to like that.

At least not in my experience. You see, from a selling perspective, we must learn how to sell in a way where buyers want to buy. There’s a huge discrepancy in the way that a lot of people sell things nowadays, whether selling through video sales letters, products with sales copy, or enrollment calls with people.

 

The old way of selling: The good, bad, and ugly

A lot of sales training and methodologies used are outdated.

I’ll speak specifically to the way people render calls because that’s what we do every single day. The way we approach things is very different from a lot of the approaches you’ll find out there. To be very honest, it’s the opposite of Grant Cardone’s high pressure experience.

If you like Grant Cardone’s style, you can do that. That’s totally cool. It’s just not the way I want to be perceived in this world, so we don’t do anything like that.

The old way of selling was the typical image of a used car salesman or the cold-calling stock broker on Wall Street who’s makes cold calls all day long. The Wolf of Wall Street type stuff. Those are the images that come to our mind when we think of selling; the guy who’s coming to our door to sell us some widget, cold calls from whoever about whatever they’re selling.

We all love the telemarketers who call us directly at 6:30 at night while we’re having dinner, right? If none of us liked that experience, why would we emulate it and try to sell to our clients using an outdated model?

Sure, they work. They’re tried and true principles, and there’s ways to use that to your advantage to learn from some of their elements.

Putting people in a situation where they feel extremely uncomfortable and do business with you out of fear, remorse, guilt, or to just stop the pressure is why most companies who are selling like that see high refunds to the tune of 20 or 30%.

Remember the episode where I was talking with you about my buying experience in Morocco? It was horrific in terms of how we felt on the receiving end of that. I would never want to subject our prospective clients to that.

If you want to tarnish your reputation, brand, and business, please go out and sell like that. I promise you, as a health coach and health expert, if you try to do that, it’s probably not going to fly.

 

A better way to sell: Serve

In this market of helping people with their health it’s a very different prospect. It’s one thing if you are a stockbroker selling options, futures, and stuff like that. It’s a different culture. But if someone’s coming to you because they have a health issue that you can solve and you’re bullying and high pressuring them to buy or do business with you, that’s a sketchy way of enrolling clients. That’s the way I see it.

I believe that that methodology is not only ineffective, it’s disrespectful. It’s disrespectful to the people you’re serving and it’s not the best way to start a good relationship with people you’ll work with closely. You don’t want people enrolling with you if they’re going to leave the phone conversation or feel worse than when they started.

Instead, come from a place of service instead of selling.

When you focus on serving, you don’t need to sell. When you focus on building the relationship and getting to know what the person’s fears, frustrations, and desires are, you make the “selling process” all about them and not your stuff. It becomes a whole lot easier to figure out if you can help them, if you want to help them, and if they’re a good fit for you, too.

They’ll see the benefit and value in what you’re providing and it’ll be a whole lot easier for them to say yes during the process.

 

How the internet has changed the way we sell

When we talk about selling in 2018 and beyond, we must consider that, back in the day when a lot of these high-pressure tactics were developed, the internet wasn’t around. If we’re talking about the 1980s – with the big shoulder pads, funky hairdos, and all that stuff – no one had the internet.

Nowadays, if you are engaged in a conversation, a discovery call, an enrollment call, a strategy call, whatever you want to call it, and you subject someone to that kind of beating, guess what might happen? They might go onto Facebook or other social media outlets and start spewing bad stuff about you. That is the last thing you want to have happen.

One of the things I’m most proud of in our business is the fact that we run Facebook ads every single day. Here’s something interesting: To my knowledge, as of this recording, none of our ads have thumbs down, negative reviews, or spam complaints.

That is a very big deal because it reflects the way we go out and attract clients in the first place; the messaging we use, the images we use, and the promises we make.

If we went out and started creating stuff that was over-hyped and hardcore, it would piss people off. People don’t like seeing that stuff. Like Dan Kennedy famously said, “You want to be a welcome guest not an annoying pest.” Think about that.

 

Preserving your reputation by selling with integrity and service

When you’re appearing in somebody’s news feed through a Facebook ad, you’re about to call someone, or you’re sending your audience an email, you want them to think, “Yes, thank God I’m getting an email from this amazing coach,” not, “Oh man, what’s he going to sell me now? What’s the latest thing?”

You have a lot of assets; your website, your client base, your assets, your income, you have all of that. When that’s all stripped away all you have left is your reputation. Do not compromise that because it’s your name, your brand. It’s you.

If that reputation becomes tainted, if it becomes ruined, everyone will know. People will search for you online and see some bad stuff. When that stuff creeps up it’s never a good thing.

That’s a quick lesson I want to share with you today. The old way of selling – with high-pressure and hard closing – is done. It’s done.

Please don’t start doing calls to enroll people with those types of scripts. It’s not about the script. You don’t need a script to follow, you need a framework. You need to understand the logic, the flow, to lead somebody through a call or discovery process.

You don’t need a word-for-word script to follow. We give our enrollment coaches a script but we ask them not to follow it. We ask them to get comfortable with it but follow the structure. We have an 11-part structure to our calls, and the most important part is the step-by-step. The flow is important but if they’re reading from a script it sounds so canned and phony.

It’s not about that. It’s about speaking less and allowing the client to speak more, which goes back to what we talked about in our previous episode about how to be a better coach.

 

An open invitation

That’s the message for today. If you enjoy this type of stuff and want to go deeper to figure out a game plan that takes your business to the next level, then I invite you to attend our Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint.

It’s a free online training. I’ll walk you through a new way to quickly build a high six or seven figure coaching business without one-on-one coaching or high pressure nonsense. If you want to attend, you can go to Healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Grab a spot that works best for you in the next two days and we’ll see you there.

In the meantime, I want to thank you for joining me again today. If you haven’t done so, please subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast.

I do this to share what I know and help you move things forward with your business, live the life of your dreams, impact more people, and feel great about what you’re doing on this planet in a way that make sense to you. I want you to have the income and the freedom to live life on your terms.

Thank you once again for taking the time to join me. Continue to go out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you on Wednesday.