Selling Anxiety

Sam. Hello and good evening, everyone. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist, Money mindset coach, and your practical business coach tonight. Welcome. There's someone asking me if I'm religious over in Tick Tock. That's weird. I'm not. So, you know, peace be with you, my man. Have a great night. Anyway, tonight. Oh, a couple of housekeeping things. So I'm over here on my phone on the Tick Tock. I am over on Facebook, LinkedIn, and on YouTube. I love this to be interactive. So if you have any questions about the topic tonight, then please do pop them into the comments if for whatever reason. I do not. I do not. Oh, no. I'm going live in the wrong place. That's why. Oh, my gosh. Hi, Nick. Okay, I. Hold on. I've got a. I'm having a moment. Okay, I'm going to end this live here. Sorry, guys. I meant to go live on my business account. Oh, my gosh. That's the confusion. Okay, well, bye, everyone. Thank you. I'm having. I'm playing, apparently Tick Tock roulette with all of my Tick Tock accounts. I thought it was weird because they wanted me to verify my age, and I've never had to do that before. Okay, now we're gonna start going live on Tick Tock. I knew I was screwing something up. Okay, but tonight, while I do this, we're gonna talk about what it's like to hate doing sales and start a business. Because the bad news about starting a business, especially if you're doing it on your own and you're selling your own service, is you are the only person who can run this business. You have to sell. There's not a salesperson who can actually do it for you. Let me just. I can do the two things at one at the same time. I swear to God. Okay, hold on. Okay. I thought it was funny that someone was asking me if I was religious. That doesn't usually go in my. In my normal thing. Hello, everyone. Okay, so let's talk about sales. Because if you're running a business, you're a new business owner. I'm sorry to break it to you, but your job is now sales and marketing and product development and customer care and customer success and janitorial. And you're the CEO and you're also the bookkeeper and all the things. It's a lot of hats to wear. But one of the most important parts is you have to do sales, right? Because you cannot have a business if you do not have clients. A business does not exist as a business if it doesn't have money coming in. And the only way to get money coming in is to have people out there in the world. You say, hey, you. You do something that I need help with and I would like to hand you money so that you can provide me this service or give me these goods. Okay? Sales is an inherent part of the job when you are running a business. And I know it feels so gross. It can give you all kinds of anxiety and it's in, like, insanely stressful. I worked in sales for, oh God, like, over five years longer. Don't want to do all the math of, like, all the different jobs that I've had. But my first foray into sales, I found it so incredibly stressful. A we had quotas every single month. And this is one of the things that you have control over when you're running your own business. You don't have to set a quota for yourself. It helps, but you don't have to. But beyond that, like, you have to constantly go out there and ask people to buy your thing and people say no, and it feels like they're rejecting you. It feels like you've done something wrong and people hate you. Like, why would someone say no to you? Right? Because generally, as human beings, like, we don't go around asking people for things. If we think that we're going to hear no. It's. It's just, it. It seems like it's going to endanger us. I thought that was a spider. It's just a fly flying around. We feel like it's going to endanger us. Okay? It's just this natural tendency that we have to want to protect ourselves and to not be rejected. Right? So I remember when I first started in sales and I heard no. Like, I would cry every single time until one of my co workers was like, hey, it's not that big of a deal. They're not rejecting you. They're rejecting the thing that we're selling. Okay? You have nothing to do with this. Like, I was listening to you and you did great, right? So learning how to do sales, like, even if you learn how to do and you do it and you are the best salesperson in the world, you are still going to hear no. That still will happen, guaranteed. And actually, no is actually a really helpful thing to hear, actually. If you're getting 100% of your people saying yes to working with you, you know what that actually means? It means you're not charging enough. Hi, Terry, Welcome. Hi, Krish. Mirage. I don't know which part of that was the first name, last name, but welcome. Hello. Hi. So. So it's healthy if you're running a business, you're selling your services. It's healthy for your business to have people saying no. In fact, 50 to 75% of the people you. You speak to should say no to working with you, okay? That is a sign that you have a really solid offer, that you're attracting your ideal clients, and you are charging enough for the work that you provide. All right? So hearing no is not the worst thing in the world. Okay? But let's talk about the sales call. When you. When you're not sure what you're doing and you don't have a system and you're just so, so desperate to get clients, here's what goes through your head, okay? And I know this because I've been there, all right? And I have clients who talk to me about this all the time, okay? So you have someone who's shown interest in working with you, and you get on the phone with them. Hi. Hi, Preston. Welcome. Good to have you. So you get someone on the phone, and you're so desperate for this client, and you start talking to them, and in your mind, you're thinking, okay, well, I have to impress them. I have to show them that I know my stuff, that I am qualified, and that I can do this and that, like, they want to hire me. And you get really, really in your head about this. And so, like, you end up, like, they're speaking, but you're not actually listening, right? You're in your head, and, like, you're like, oh, God, they probably think I'm an idiot. Oh, did I say the wrong thing then? Oh, no. Like, and you start kind of catastrophizing and spinning out, and in the back of your mind, you're already kind of like. Like being the fortune teller of how this is going to go badly at the end, right? And so. Oh, thank you for the hat and mustache. Great. Thank you. And so you start coming up with all the reasons why they're going to say no to you at the end of this call. And so you start, like, kind of putting on the brakes, and you're like, oh, God. Well, you know, let's. Let's try to convince you, but also, like, let's find a way to convince you that this is going to be worth the amount of money that I'm going to ask you for. And then you get to the end of the call, and you start getting weird, right? Because you don't want to, like, ask them to pay what you actually charge for your work because you've started making this whole story in your head, they can't afford it or that they're not going to be willing to pay. And what ultimately happens is you either chicken out of asking them to become your client, you discount your work, and you don't, you don't ask them to pay your full pricing because, you know, you're afraid they're going to say no or laugh at you or, or you kind of throw it out there and then you make it weird for some reason and you don't give them enough time to think about it. And ultimately what happens is you don't get the client and you're not really sure why you didn't get the client. Right. People subconsciously interpret quality for competence by price. 100%, Preston. I say this all the time. 100%. Yes. Yeah. So you chickening out on your pricing, actually, and, and, and discounting your work actually tells them that your work's not actually that good. Right. There have been so many instances where I've talked to someone and they wanted to work with me as a one on one client, and I told them my pricing and they're like, oh my God, that's so expensive. And I was like, yeah, it is. It's expensive to work with me one on one. And, you know, here's what you get, though. And I thought about it and they're like, okay, well, I'm interviewing other people because I want to find the right business coach. Can I come back to you and say, yeah, absolutely. It's really important that you find the right business coach for the business you're building and for your personality and the people that you like, feel like you can trust the most. I can't tell you how many times I've had people come back and say, hey, I'm choosing to work with you because you're the most expensive and I want to be able to be the most expensive. Right. People associate cost with quality. Quality. Of course, it helps if you are also offering a quality service. But of course you are. You are smart and you are capable and you have experience, and it is worth every penny for your clients to pay big money to work with you. All right, thank you, Preston, for that. I needed to go on that little tangent there. Anyway, so you have all this anxiety about selling. And let me just tell you right off the bat, like, I work with people who come from sales all the time, even people who work in Sales or had like a long ass career working in sales, have to be retrained on how to sell their services when they're selling for their own business. Okay. It is a completely different animal when you're selling houses or luxury handbags or cars or cybersecurity as like software, as a service. You're not selling yourself, you're selling this thing. Okay? The rejection still sucks. Like having things not work out, especially when you've been working on a really big deal and having them say no for whatever reason, that blows. Absolutely. But it's not a rejection of you. But when you go out and you say, okay, well, I have consulting services or I'm a coach or I'm a copywriter and really like, what you're selling is like the intellect, the experience that you have in your little brain hole here. And people say no to working with that. They say that they don't want to work with you. That feels so much worse. It feels like you had a crush on someone you want to ask. You went and asked them out and they were like, nah, nah. And then they laugh at you and then they make fun of you and then you have to go home crying. It's really sad. Okay? That's. That's what your brain is going to make this out to be. It's not that the reframe I want to offer you that I find really helpful and my clients tell me this helps them and is that when someone's thinking about working with you, especially if you offer a service and it's an intellectual service and there's some kind of transformation that you offer them is they're not actually thinking about hiring you, okay. You actually don't really factor into this all that much. Like, they might like you, they might trust you, they might think that you have a lot of expertise that they want, but what they're actually buying is the future version of themselves that has the result that working with you would provide. That's what they're buying. They're buying the future version of themselves that doesn't have the problem that they're struggling with right now. They're buying the future version of themselves who has achieved this goal they've always dreamed of. That's what they're buying. And sometimes in talking to you and figuring out like what it is that you do and how you can help them and how much work it's actually going to take them to do that they realize, actually, this isn't what I want, this is too much work. Maybe this isn't the path I want to take. And they're making that decision based on who they want to be on the other side. Right. And sometimes it's just not the right fit. Maybe sometimes when they, they think about working with you, like, your methods don't feel like the right thing for them to get to where they want to go. They're not willing to put themselves through that struggle in that way to get where they want to go. It has absolutely nothing to do with you. I tell my clients who have coaching businesses all the time that people don't buy coaching. No one goes around thinking, I really want to spend thousands of dollars on coaching right now. Like, that would be the best thing in the world. No, they go around saying, I have this problem in my life and I'm over it. I'm so done with this, I want to fix this. Or they go around saying, oh, my God, I've always dreamed of doing this thing, and I just can't figure out how to do it or to make myself, like, get off my ass and go and take action. So, like, the method to do that is hire a coach, but hiring the coach is not the thing that they were setting out to do. The thing that they were setting out to do is either solve the problem or reach the goal. Hi, Chris. Hi, Jacob. Hi, Karina. Hello. Rejection hurts more if you own your business. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Especially, you know, and here's the thing, like, it is so stressful when you're doing all the sales for your own business because, like, you're watching your bottom line. You're watch how much money is coming in the door. And, like, you are responsible for keeping this business afloat. And when you hear no, like, your mind will immediately go to, oh, my God, I might have to shut down. Oh, my God. Like, this is the beginning of the end. Okay? Our brains are so good at taking one little piece of evidence that we have some little piece of data that this one person didn't want to work with us and turning it into my whole life is going to end. Like, I'm never going to be able to be successful and, like, all these awful things are going to happen to me. Okay? Just because your brain is good at coming up with, like, shitty futures for you does not mean that your brain is accurate. Right. Our brains are. Have not evolved very much since, you know, we were hunter gatherers and they were required to constantly identify dangers out there in the world. Okay? Right now we're so lucky that there aren't lions and tigers and bears waiting around every single corner, we know which, which foods are poisonous and which ones are edible. Okay. We don't have to have that fear with everything. And yet our brains are like, no, no, no. We have to have fear. We have to find the dangers. And so it comes up with danger in the things that we do every single day. So learning how to do sales for your business is one of the most important things that you can do in your journey as an entrepreneur. Okay. It's important to find a style of sales that works for you. There are sales styles that are very presentation driven and, and that works for a lot of people who are selling some kind of like, product. Like, I know, I know. Like, like there are a lot of window and door salespeople that have presentations. When I worked in the solar industry, we had a whole presentation that we took people through. I didn't love it. You know, there's also like the try it on kind of method. You know, like this works a lot in retail. If you're working, if you're selling like, you know, high, high end clothes or bags or whatever, like you give people the experience. Experience, like holding it, touching it, being with it. That is also a way, a lot of my clients are selling services, right? They're selling some kind of like intellectual service or some kind of transformation that they offer their client. Right. And so those don't really work. So what I tend to train on is what I call holistic selling. And it's this method where it's very consultative and it's a two way interview. You're not trying to get the client at any, at any like, measure. You are genuinely there saying, are you the right fit for me? Because I only work with people that I like and I only work with people who I genuinely think that I can add value to. Right. And it's also a way for you to like really hear from this person what they want to achieve so that you can really honestly and with integrity say, yes, I'm totally on board with helping you. Getting there. Okay. And here's what that looks like. You know, I always go into each and every sales call with this mindset that my job is to help this potential client make a powerful decision either way. Okay. Sometimes that put that powerful decision is to work with me and to spend money with me, either in my group program or working with me one on one. And sometimes the powerful decision is, oh my God, I didn't want to start a business. I thought I wanted to start a business, and I don't want to start A business or, you know, I thought Katie might be the right coach for me. And actually, after talking to her, like, you know, she's fine, she's great for whatever reason, but like, the way she does things, not going to be a fit for me. I need something else. Right. Both of those decisions are incredibly powerful. So when you walk into a sales call, that is the energy I offer you. That's what I want you to go in. Because when you go in with that energy, you're actually there to serve. You're not there to give your service away for free, but you're there to serve this person in front of you. So there are a few things that I know you do when you're selling, because we've all been there. Every single one of my clients, before they start working with me, they do this. And sometimes after they start working with me, they'll do it still. Because bad habits, you know, take a while to die. But you know this, these are things that I want you to keep an eye out for. And if you start doing them, know that it's okay. Know that this is the natural tendency when you're having to sell your service. But really, you have to get over these because what did we say? You can't have a business if you don't have clients. Businesses that don't make money are not businesses, they are hobbies. Okay? So if you want this to be successful, you're going to have to. What is it? Sell. You're gonna have to sell. Okay? So first and foremost, you have to stop chickening out. And I know, like, you get to the end of the call and it's so awkward because it's like, oh, God, do I have to ask them for their money now? And yeah, you do. When I worked in like this high, high end fitness club in San Francisco, anytime we didn't get the sale, our regional sales manager would be like, well, did you ask for the sale? And he was kind of joking, but he was kind of serious. Because sometimes it's so easy to just forget people to like, ask people to buy. Right? And it's the way that you do it. Like, you just have to give them the information about how they can become your client. Right. And I want to tell you so, like, if you get to end of a call and you chicken out of asking them to become your client, what this can look like is, oh, great, so this sounds good. Awesome. So I'll send you a proposal. I'll send you an email with more information and then you can just let Me know or you know, you think about it, you go in, think about it and then just come back and then like we can talk about next steps, right? That that is how you chicken out on asking for the sale. And what this actually communicates to the other person is that you actually don't want to work with them. You know, as humans, we're really self conscious, okay? You have to have a lot of confidence to go and ask someone for help and to admit that you might need to hire them to help you with something. And imagine like you use up all your confidence on that and you get on the phone call with them and you're vibing and you're like, you really like them and all this stuff and all of a sudden like they're not telling you about how you can buy for them. Like you're going to start making up all the stories that they don't want to work with you, that they're not interested in the problem that you have or in what you're doing and they don't want to help you. And guess what, you're never going to hear from them again. They are going to just get in their head and think that they have been pre rejected by you. Now if you actually don't want the client and you feel weird about saying this isn't a fit, like cool, great. That's a method. That's a way you can do it. Hi Jonathan, welcome. But if you actually want the client, you, my friend, you're gonna have to say, hey, I would love to work with you and then tell them how they can work with you. We have this belief that like we have to play it cool. Like we can't come on too strong. You know, like, like when you're in middle school or high school and you have a crush on someone and you don't want to like, like be known as having this massive crush. So like you're trying to like pretend like it's not that big of a deal. You're like aloof and cool. Stop that, stop that. Like fangirl over your or fanboy over your ideal client. I do this like when I really want to work with someone, I'm like, oh my God, I really, really want to work with you. Like from everyone here, everything you're telling me, I would absolutely love to work with you. What are you feeling in this moment? Right in that moment? Like I can read from their tone if they are genuinely also excited about working with me or if you're like, oh God, she's crazy. You Know, like, yeah, like, I'd be interested in learning more, right? But, like, you have to bring that energy or else they can't bring that energy back. Okay? No one is going to be that vulnerable about wanting to work with you. You have to bring that energy first, okay? And then you have to, on that call, tell people how you can work with them. Now, in my sales portion of all my programs, I do teach about exactly how you present your offer. So you don't have to go into, like, this long presentation and, like, do all the thing. Like, you don't have to pitch is what I'm saying. There is a way to sell that you're not pitching because pitching is gross, in my opinion. I don't like being pitched too, and I don't like pitching. I think it's. It's out of touch. It doesn't feel like I'm building a relationship. Okay? So that is, number one, the way that you are getting in the way of your own sales happening. Okay? You're chickening out. Okay? Number two is you are trying too hard to impress them. Right? And every time I. I start a sales training with my clients. I had one today. We have a sales lab once a month. I go into. We don't want to try to impress them because if you're talking more than about 20% of the call, you're talking too much. Right? For a sales call to go well, for the person to really feel like you understand them and see them and like, like, see their problem and see their goal and, like, can sort for, yes, I can absolutely help. Help you. You have to listen. You have to hear it out of their mouth what is going on for them, right? You're not. You're not psychic, okay? I mean, maybe you are psychic, but, like, if you are, like, I hope you're really good at sales, but most of us aren't psychic, you have to hear it out of their own mouth what problems they have. Why is it a problem? What do they want? Why do they want it? You have to stop trying to impress them, because here's the thing. They booked a call with you. They are already impressed. They reached out. They found your calendar link. They came out of the woodwork and said, you, I really want to book a call. Call with you because I think I can give you money and you can solve my problem. They're already impressed. They already assume you know your shit, okay? If you just sit over there yapping at them for 30 minutes, they're gonna be looking at the watch. They're Gonna be playing a game on their phone, they're gonna be like checking their email. They're gonna be like glazed over. You're not gonna get the sale. Stop trying to impress people. All right? If people need like to see testimonials to understand what you've done with other people, like, they'll ask for it. You do not have to trot that stuff out, especially if you're offering some kind of service. Okay? Lastly, lastly, you have to change your energy around this. Okay? If you go into each and every sales call, assuming this person's going to say no, you're right, they will. Okay? It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If you go into every single sales call being like, I'm so desperate for clients, I need the client, give me the client. Like, then they're gonna get this energy of like, wow, they're really needy and like desperate and all this stuff because that energy gets communicated so easily. So we need to reset our energy that of course this person's going to sign up. Why? Why would some rando stranger on the interwebs take 30 fucking minutes out of their busy life to get on a call with you if they didn't intend to sign up with you? Why would someone drive across town to go to a gym to check it out if they weren't intending to buy a membership at that gym? Why? Like, like play it out in your head? Like, how often do you just book random sales calls where you have absolutely no interest in buying the thing that they're selling? You don't. You 100% don't, okay? Because you're not a psycho. And neither are the people who are coming to you. They are coming to you because they have a problem. They have a goal and they believe that you can help them either solve that or reach it or both. Okay? They have already decided to hire you. Okay. They might need a little breathing room to think about it and understand the pricing and figure out how they're going to pay for it. And like, is this right moment in my life to do this one thing? But they already want to work with you. Okay? You going in with that energy and just assuming, of course it's going to be yes, of course they want to work with me. This is honestly just me deciding if I want to accept them into my business. That is so much more powerful. And that's when everything changes in your whole sales structure. You know, sales is a full time thing. I know, I know. We, and we knock it and we think it's not like a real job it's not a real career, but guys like sales is a real thing. Like, it's a real career. It exists out there. Then the fact that you've never done this before, stop expecting yourself to be perfect at it. You've never done it before, okay? It's not something that's innate. There are no people in the world who are just natural born sales people. There are people who are naturally likable. There are people who are natural, naturally good listeners, right? And so they adapt and are able to like, listen to people and, and bring them in and explain their service, right? There aren't people who are innate salespeople, okay? That's a myth, okay? It's taught, it's learned. And you know what? People learn it every single day. You can learn it too. And if you're going to be in business, you're going to have to learn it because you will not have a business if you do not have clients. All right? So stop chickening out of telling people about your services. What you're actually communicating to them is that you do not want to work with them. Stop trying to impress them with how cool, smart, you know, successful you are. Start listening and change your energy. Okay? Go into this assuming this is going to be a yes. Go into this assuming they've already decided in their heads that they want to hire you, okay? And you're just going in this to suss out if they're the right client for you to accept into your business. All right? To everyone over on TikTok, Jacob, Daniel, Meg, Jonathan, Antone, Preston. Thank you guys so much. I hope this is super useful to anyone who is watching over on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. I didn't see any comments come through. I hope this is useful if you're struggling with this part of your business, if you're not sure how to get clients, if sales just seems completely out there for you, I want you to reach out. Doors for my build your own business group program are currently closed. They will be opening in a few weeks, however. So if you're curious about that, we can get you on the list. We can get you a way to reserve your spot when doors open, or at least we can talk through it and see if it would be the right fit for you. Anyway, I'm Katie McManus, your practical business coach. Thank you so much for being here and I look forward to being live with you tomorrow. Okay, bye, everyone. Bye.