Hearing "no" in business

Foreign. Hello, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. Welcome to my live. I am talking this evening about hearing. No, sorry, my brain just went to a different place. Anyway, so I'm going live to The Facebooks, to LinkedIn, to YouTube and to Twitter, which I may drop because, you know, who cares about Twitter anymore? But anyway, whenever, whenever I have this conversation with my clients, with anyone I'm training on sales, it feels like the consent conversation. Okay. And there are two things that happen, right? Is that we want to be good people, right? And we've been told all this time as we've been building our businesses that we have to sell, we have to sell, we have to sell. And then we look out into the world and we look to examples of people selling shit and we see how they've done it and we see how not consent based selling really is. I come from sales, I worked in sales. God, I think I worked for, in sales for about 10 years before I became a coach in various aspects. So I worked in the wine industry, I worked in the fitness industry, I worked in the video production industry, I worked in Internet security, I worked in solar, I even sold yarn at one point. And let me tell you, there is an ethical way to sell and then there's a consultative relationship building way to sell. Now let's acknowledge that the typical way to sell blows past no's. It just blows past them. It is just not interested in you saying no. It's completely interested in me shoving my product or my service down your throat. Now, I know the humans who, who are drawn to work with me and I know myself. This is not something that feels good. Manipulating and pushing people into buying something that they're not completely aligned to in that moment never works out well. Never works out well. And here's the thing. If you're selling a service, if you are selling this relationship, you can't pressure people into working with you because you're going to be working with them for an extended period of time. You're going to be, you're going to be like front and center with them. It's not like selling a car or once someone drives off the lot, you really never see them again. Right. Unless they come in for their, like, you know, checkup at a certain hour, whatever they call it. I obviously don't get my car serviced service. That was the term. Yeah. To come in to get their car serviced along with their warranty or whatever. So let's talk about no in a consent safe relationship building Business. Now this may shock you, but hearing no is actually a good thing in your business. So whenever I talk to my, my new clients or someone who's considering working with me and I ask them, you know, how many clients do you have? How's your business going? How much are you charging? What percentage of the people that you talk, talk to and try to sell your service to say yes to working with you? And it's always so funny. My, my people who get 100 yeses are very close to it. They're so proud of getting a hundred percent of everyone that they talk to saying yes that they'll work with them. They're always surprised that I'm not that impressed by it. And not to say like, I'm not proud of you for putting yourself out there and getting on sales calls and enrolling people. I am so freaking proud of you. Good job. You've done amazing. But getting a 100% yes rate in your sales calls means a very ugly thing, is that your pricing is too low. That's it. Your pricing is too low. You need to raise your rates so that only between 50 and 25% of this, of the people that you speak to actually say yes. Okay? That is the sweet spot where you will know that your pricing is appropriate for the market. You do want to scare some people away. And for those of you who are like, oh, but I want to help everyone, there's absolutely ways to help people who can't afford to work with you one on one. That's why they created group programs. That's why there are digital courses, that's why there are PDF guides. There are a gazillion ways to help people who can't afford your services. But I want to remind you that whatever service you're providing, whoever it is that you are here to help, you cannot consistently help them if you cannot consistently pay your bills. Okay? You have to consistently pay your bills. And then we can talk about creating some more affordable options. Now say you're a coach, women's empowerment coach, and you really want to work with high powered executives, but you also want to work with women who are like struggling. Maybe they're getting out of an abusive relationship and they have to like re revamp their career. Now sure, you could give away all your time and not make any money helping people who desperately need it, but then you're going to be desperate and in need, right? You're going to need some help. So my advice to you is build up a business where you're working with like 8 to 12 clients who are paying your full price and then have some, some scholarship positions available in your practice, that is absolutely okay. But I just want to head that off. If you're worried about raising your rates because you're worried that you're. You're not going to be able to help everyone and you want everyone to be able to say heck yes, because you're so passionate about helping them, there are so many ways to continue to support them. All right? Now, the other thing about hearing no when you're selling your service is that it feels like the biggest fucking rejection. It just does. Even my clients who come to me from a sales background, like they worked in a career in sales, selling software or cars or houses, whatever, I have to retrain them on how to run the sales call. Because selling your own service, selling your time is a far more vulnerable experience. And hearing no to your service, to your time, to your expertise, hits a hell of a lot harder than it does when they're saying no to the car or to the. The software as a service program that you're selling or the house that you showed them, okay, those can be frustrating because usually if you're working in a job and you're doing sales, you have a quota to meet and you just wasted all your time on someone who didn't end up buying. But here is the thing to remember when you hear no from someone who has gotten on the phone with you and, you know, inquired about your work, is that they're actually not saying no to you. They're not. I know they are, but they're also not. You actually play into this very little. What they're saying no to you. What they're saying no to said that weird is the idea of who they are going to be on the other side of working with you. They, in that call, they have played out this vision in their head of who am I going to become if I end up working with this person? Like, what does the future hold for me? What work am I going to have to do to get there? What transformation am I going to have to go through? Am I willing to put myself through this? And also that, that promised or that suggested outcome, do I actually want it? Am I willing to put some money down right now, get some skin in the game to make that reality true? And some people just aren't. Some people aren't ready to actually take that transformation and make it real. Some people will actually spend money and not do any action. It's incredible how much money people will spend and not work not do the work to get there. It happens. You want those clients who aren't ready to commit fully to whatever it is that you're offering. You want them to say no? Because here's the thing. They're not going to get the results. They're just not. If you're a copywriter and you're sending clients and they're. They're not really committed or whatever, you don't want to discount your work. You don't want to. You don't want to do anything to bend over backwards to get them to say yes, to save the sale. Because if they're not really committed to you at your value, at your rate, they may not even use the copywriting that you write for them. You know, they may edit it so it's completely useless. They may, like, go through if they hired you to do some SEO work and. And completely with it. Okay? If you're a coach and say you're helping people find the loves of their lives or change careers, you know, anything that's like, big and juicy and, like, going to completely alter the path of their life. Anyone who isn't willing to invest in that dream, you want them to say no. Because you want good testimonials. You want people that at the end of working with you are going to turn around and be like, holy shit, this changed my life. I was so committed to this. This is exactly what I needed. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. This is what I got out of it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When you pressure people into saying yes when they're a no, the yee don't always end there. You don't always end there. Hearing nose in your business is a great barometer. Or barometer. How do you pronounce that word? Barometer. Think so for how you're doing. So if you're hearing no too often, here are some things that might be happening. First and foremost, I'd want to look at your sales call. I'd want to look and see how are you structuring that enrollment conversation. Because I will bet you good money that you're probably not doing it right. You're not doing it in a way that's empowering to this person to make the decision to invest in you. The other thing we do want to look at is your pricing. Sometimes people set their prices too high, and that's not a big problem. You know, that's very, very easy to fix. And sometimes maybe your program needs tweaking. And that's something that some market research can absolutely help. But anyway, just wanted to reassure you that if you're hearing no in your business, you're not fucking it up. You're not doing it wrong. This is what starting a business is about. It's trial and error. Okay? If. If there was a tried and true, like, plan that everyone got to use that worked perfectly for everyone, then starting a business like everyone would have one. Okay? You're doing something that's exceptionally hard. And, you know, it's just, it's not going to work the same for you that it does for someone else because you're a different person. You're unique and you have a special personality and you have a way that you like to work and your service is unique. What you have to offer the world, your gifts are unique. How you convert that into paying clients is going to be a little different. And as always, if you need help, if you need help with getting paying clients, with attracting high paying clients, it's one of the things that I am brilliant at, if I do say so myself. My sweet spot is honestly helping people make more money in less time with fewer distractions. Which is why I specialize so much with ADHDpreneurs. Because there are a lot of distractions when you have adhd. Anyway, that's all I wanted to say for this evening. If you're hearing no's in your business, take a deep breath. You're doing fine. You're doing great. Okay? Keep at it. This is hard. This is one of the hardest things you're ever going to do in your life. Okay? Stick with it. And if you need to make any changes. Hi, I'm Katie McManus. I'm a business strategist and money mindset coach. And I'd be more than happy to help you with that. Shoot me a DM if you want any more information about, you know, how I can support you. If you've heard no recently from someone and it really kicked you in the gut, then please share your story with me. I'd love to hear it. And I look forward to going live with you all tomorrow. I'm not sure what I'm talking. Oh, wait, wait. I do know what I'm talking about. I'm doing Biz Lab live with Tyler and. And David. Tyler Cook and David Fryman. It's so exciting. If you haven't seen my post yet on LinkedIn. Hi, Chastity. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so happy. If you haven't seen my post on LinkedIn yet, go and vote, because you have three options for the kinds of businesses that we are going to build. You can build a nutrition business or we're going to build it, but you can vote for a nutrition business for a dog watching business. I think I wrote dog sitting in the quiz, but oh well, it's the same thing. Or travel tour business. I know, it's so exciting. Go and vote for that and tune in to see us tomorrow at 6:45pm Eastern Time. And as always, stop being a weenie and get into your business. Okay. I love you all so much. Thanks for joining. Chastity and I will see you tomorrow.