Sales Is Education: Say these words & people buy.

Sales is education. So what that means is no one is gonna buy the thing that you are trying to sell them if they do not understand the problem that it solves. And I think this is such a simple idea that a lot of people misunderstand. For example, a lot of times when I'm coaching writers, you know, I run a variety of different writing programs like our premium GoTraining Academy, um, our AI writing school. I've written 10 books, I've generated over a billion views, I've trained 10,000+ writers. Over and over and over again. Whenever I'm mentoring writers, one of the first things that they say to me when I tell them, hey, if you want to make money, you should go do these things, is they say, okay, yeah, but Cole, I don't want to be salesy. And this applies to, like, in our Ghostwriting Academy, for example, I say you need to go do cold outreach, and they say, I don't want to do cold outreach because I don't want to be salesy. Or in our AI Writing School, when I'm talking about how to build digital products and I say, hey, you should get comfortable sending 10 or 20 emails about your upcoming product or product launch or cohort or coaching program, whatever. You gotta get comfortable sending a bunch of emails to your email list. People say, I hear you, but I don't wanna do that 'cause I don't wanna be salesy. And I think what that implies, and this is the topic I wanna talk about today, what that implies is that the way to sell is by selling. And if I've learned anything, you know, I've generated tens of millions of dollars at this point through a variety of different writing businesses. I've done it, in all sorts of different business models. I've, I've done it with low-ticket digital products. I've done it with high-ticket group coaching. Uh, I built the first ghostwriting agency for founders and executives to millions of dollars in revenue. Um, I've done over a million dollars in, uh, book sales, self-publishing books. I've done millions of dollars in consulting. I've, I've generated, uh, a meaningful outcome across a lot of different business models, but all of them having to do with the same fundamental skill, which is writing. And when I think about the, the activities that led to those outcomes, many of them are anchored in understanding how to sell. And oftentimes when I hear other people talking about sales, they frame it through this lens of thinking that sales is about persuasion. It's about convincing other people to do something. And if I've learned anything, it's that The best way to sell is to not sell at all. And instead, I really like thinking about sales as education. Okay? When someone has an objection to something, objections are not facts. Okay? Ob— just because someone has an objection doesn't mean that it's true. Just because someone is wealthy or successful or powerful, just because they have an objection and they say it with conviction does not mean that it is true. And I'll walk you through an example of this. When you hear an objection from someone, you have to remind yourself that that objection is actually signaling a lack of education. The person would not have that objection if they were educated. And I'll give you a prime example, okay? Um, I am very educated about how organic content and organic traffic works within a business. I understand that organic content is not the same thing as running ads on Facebook. And so when I think about allocating resources in our company, and you know, inside our company we spend upwards of $50,000 a month on internal team members helping create content and scale me online, right? I understand how this game works. I am educated about it. So I do not have the same objections to whether or not I should invest money in this thing, which is very different than— and I remember this even in my days as a ghostwriter— when I would go approach other business owners and I would say, "Hey, it's in your best interest to create organic content online," I would often get met with lots of objections. But it's not that those objections are facts. I think this is a really important idea to understand. Just because someone has an objection does not mean that it is true. And what I started to realize over time is that the people who had objections over hiring a social ghostwriter, for example, like, "I will help you author articles on your social accounts to build an audience and build authority and drive organic traffic for your businesses," right? The people who had objections to that, their objections were rooted in a lack of education. They didn't actually understand how the organic game worked. And one of the ways that I knew that, and I could pick up on that signal, was they would say to me, "Okay, so how do I measure the ROI like a Facebook ad?" So maybe they understood, you know, performance marketing. Running direct ads, but they didn't understand organic. And so their objection was rooted in that lack of understanding. And the way that I would, quote unquote, sell them on why they should hire me and why and how I was ultimately able to overcome that objection, not in one person, not in two people, like hundreds of clients, is I had to spend a lot of time educating them on how to think about this thing differently. Because when someone is sufficiently educated, they will naturally come to a different conclusion, right? And so your job, whether, whether we're talking about selling services or selling products, whether we're talking about sales over the phone or writing and sending emails, your job is to educate the person to the point where they can make an informed decision. Now, to take this a step further, What I think is so interesting about this is if someone is uneducated about something, they are always going to default to no. So we'll use a silly example. Let's say that your friend— you've never played pickleball before ever. And let's say that your friend goes, "You should play pickleball." You've never played it. You don't know anything about it. You're not gonna default to yes, right? You are going to default to no. And the only way that you are going to move from no to yes is is you needing to be educated on all of the things that you have objections around. Now, what's interesting about objections is objections are really just questions. So when someone has a question, that is really an objection in disguise. And when someone has an objection, that really is just a signal that they have an unanswered question. They are defaulting to no. Right. And so using the pickleball example, it's like your friend says you should play pickleball. You go, no. They're like, no, you should absolutely play pickleball. You'll love it. You go, no. I default to no. Right. And then eventually you start to relent and you don't jump to yes instantly. What you do is you start asking questions. You're like, all right, well, look, I'm not saying I'm going to play pickleball with you this weekend, but like, hypothetically, how does the game work? Do you have to wear anything specific? Is there a certain racket that you play with? Do I need to buy my own racket? Where are there courts around here? Is there a court near my house? If I don't own my own racket, are there rackets there that I can use or rent? All of these questions are actually signals of the different objections that you had. You just had them unconsciously. And those objections are why you defaulted to no. And as you get answers to each of these questions, one of two things happens. Either you are going to come to the conclusion that you were wrong and this actually does sound like a lot of fun. Now you're educated and now you want to do the thing, right? Or you are going to sufficiently educate yourself and then be able to make an informed decision and say, not from a place of ignorance, but from a place of education, No, you know what? I decided this isn't for me. I don't want to do it. But, but now you're conscious of why you don't want to do it. You're not just defaulting to no. And I think this is a really important concept to understand when you are selling things to other people, because the most helpful thing that you can do for any person is to help them become more informed. It's to help them be able to make a decision on their own, right? And the path to doing that is to educate them. It's not to sell them on anything, because if you sufficiently educate them, they either sell themselves and agree with you, or they become educated about the thing, and now when they say no, they at least know why they're saying no. And a lot of times, I think when I explain this, people think that's a net negative, but it's not, because that person might not buy from you today, but because you were the one to educate them and you were the one to help them make an informed decision, that's not a no forever. That's a no for now. And there's still an opportunity for them to come back 30 days later, 60 days later, 90 days later, a year later, 2 years later, 3 years later, and go, "You know what? I thought about it," or "I've changed my mind," or "This is now a priority for me." And who do you think they think of first? They go, well, you were the one who educated me, so I think you're probably the most equipped person to help me. And this is such an underrated idea in business, which is oftentimes people look at sales through such a short-sighted lens. They think of it like, I do this one thing and I instantly have to have the other person say yes, or I instantly have to collect all the cash today, or I have to make the sale today. Or none of it matters. And that's such a binary way of looking at it. And that's not the most helpful way of looking at it. The reality is whether you're selling products or services, the longer you're in business, the more that you benefit from compounding. And one of the compounding things that you benefit from is all the people that you educate along the way who maybe didn't buy from you day one, but 30 days later changed their mind. Or 30 days later decided this was now a priority, or 30 days later, now that they are informed and they understand and they've sort of sat with, "Oh, there actually is more reward than risk here. Now I want to prioritize this." And because you are the one to educate them, they are most likely to go back to you. And that's the part that everyone misses is it's not always about how do I persuade them and how do I get the sale today. It's The most helpful thing I can do to get the sale today is to sufficiently educate them. But even if they don't buy, it is still a net positive because now they are informed and now I've increased the likelihood that they will come back later and potentially buy at some point in the future. Okay? And so this is, this is very, very important to understand. And I just want to hammer home on this idea of like, if they were educated, they wouldn't have the objections that they have. So all roads, no matter what, lead back to, "I have to make sure that this person is informed," which sort of raises an interesting question on the behalf of, you know, if you're a writer and you're selling services or you're a writer/entrepreneur and you're selling digital products, if you're working within a company, it doesn't really matter what your role is. It's interesting to think about how if the goal is to inform people, and the goal is to sufficiently educate people, then your job is to make sure that no matter what you do, the person ends up more informed than they were before the conversation, right? Which means— this is such an important nuance— which means that you have to be more informed than them about whatever thing you're talking about. And I wanna, I'll go back and tell you a quick little story. When I first started ghostwriting, I was 26 years old. I did not have very much money. I maybe had a couple thousand dollars saved up. I quit my full-time job. I was like, I'm gonna be a freelance writer. I'm just gonna work for myself. And I sort of fell into the world of ghostwriting. And very quickly, I started ghostwriting for high-powered executives. And these were people, like my first client sold his company for $2 billion. And he just randomly found me on Quora and we connected and I was just like a hungry 26-year-old and overdelivered for him and he was my first client. And at that age and at that time, I had a really— I had a difficult time understanding how someone so rich and powerful and successful would want to listen to me or trust me on anything. I just felt like, "You know all the answers and I'm just here to work hard." And it took me a couple years to realize that yes, all these people I was ghostwriting for were very smart and very accomplished and very powerful and very wealthy and very successful. But about this one thing, like writing on the internet, writing articles on the internet, this one teeny tiny thing, it took me a long time to realize that I knew more than they did. That when I say that, I do not mean like, oh, I was sitting there and I thought I'm actually smarter than you in every sense. No, it's not what I'm saying. I didn't think I'm better than you in every sense. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying generally they were smarter and more successful than I was. But specifically about this one individual teeny tiny thing, I knew a lot more than they did. And it took me a long time to realize that, first of all, and then second, to realize that when one of these, you know, very smart, very successful clients had an objection or something, it— that just because they said it didn't make it true. It wasn't a fact. And I knew, because I was writing on the internet so much, and I was always practicing on my own, and I was always testing things on my own, and I was always developing frameworks on my own, right? I knew what the correct answer was. So when a client would tell me like, oh, I don't think that posting articles on LinkedIn works, for example, like, you might be a very smart, very successful person, but about this one thing, you are wrong. And I know you're wrong, not because I like puff out my chest and think that I'm this super smart person. I know you're wrong because you have spent all of 15 minutes on LinkedIn and I have written 3,000 articles on LinkedIn. Right? So it's not about general knowledge, it's about specific knowledge. And once I started to understand, "Wait a second, about this teeny tiny thing, I actually know more," I was able to land so many more clients because I was able to overcome their objections so easily. And the way that I would overcome their objections is I would simply educate them on something that I realized they didn't actually understand. So a client might say, "Oh, I don't think posting articles on LinkedIn," for example, "works." And I would say, "Okay, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I've done this a lot. And so I just want to educate you on how this works." And I would share my screen and I would pull up LinkedIn and I would walk them through it. I would educate them. And when I was done educating them, the vast majority of the time, the person would go, Oh, okay. You're right. I agree with you. So it had nothing to do with sales. It had to do with the fact that they had an objection to something that they didn't understand. And the average person, or in this case, the average writer, when you hear an objection, you take that as a fact. You think that you cannot change that. And worse, what a lot of people do is they get confronted with an objection and they think the way to overcome that objection is to convince the client of something. It's to persuade them. It is to sell them. And that is not the most productive path forward. The way that you sell them is by not selling them and educating them, because once they are sufficiently educated, they will sell themselves. Now, if you're asking, okay, so how do you actually do this? I have another great YouTube video on this, breaking down this, this script that I've sort of memorized in my head, but I'll walk you through high level. Whenever I'm having an education conversation, and I wanna frame it though, it's education but with a goal, right? I'm educating you because I want you to understand why this is so helpful to you or why this would solve your problem because I want you to hire me, I want you to buy my service, I want you to buy my product, et cetera. So it's education but education with a goal, right? And if you think about like what you need to accomplish in that conversation as an arc, It's really going through the same 8 steps. So first, I need to educate the person on a problem that they have in their business. Now, this takes on potentially 2 different forms. This could be a problem that they know they have, they just haven't gotten around to solving. They are constrained in some way, constrained by time, constrained by not having the right team member, constrained by resource, constrained by priority, whatever it is. Or it's a problem they don't even know they have. They're running their business, business as usual, and they have no idea that this problem exists. Well, I can't sell them a solution to a problem that they're unaware of. So first, I need to point out and educate them about a problem in their business. Second is, in order to educate them, I have to tell them, here are the reasons why you have this problem. So whether they're aware of the problem or not is step one. But then whether they're aware of it or not, I need them to understand why, right? Why this problem is a problem, why this problem exists. Then third, okay, whether they're aware of the problem or not, whether they understand the reasons why this problem is such a problem or not, the third is I need them to understand the consequences of this problem. And what this means is I either need them to understand how much money this is currently costing them. Loss, or I need them to understand how much money they are missing out on— opportunity cost, right? They need to understand the consequence of this problem because otherwise they will be unmotivated to solve it. And then finally, on the problem side, I need to connect them emotionally to the ultimate negative outcome. So it's not just you're losing money, or it's not just You're leaving money on the table. You could be making more money. There's almost always some other second-order emotional impact that this problem is having. This problem is causing you a lot of stress. This problem is requiring you to work an extra 2 or 3 hours a day, which means you don't get to spend as much time with your family. This problem might be the reason why you're unable to raise your next round of funding. There's almost always some second-order larger, more emotional negative outcome. And so I not only need the person to be educated about the problem, but I also need to connect them emotionally to what this problem is really doing to their life and to their business. And then I present the solution, and the solution, of course, is my service or my product or whatever. The nuance— and this is an advanced thing— but the nuance is I am not saying the solution is me. The way that you educate someone is by educating them on the category of solution. So in this case, let's, let's say I'm educating the person on how by having no presence on LinkedIn or X or any social platform, the ultimate negative outcome is it's actually going to be really hard for you to raise your next round of funding because nobody even knows that, knows who you are. No one knows what you're doing. You have no mission. On the internet, right? I don't say my solution is, oh, and I, Nicolas Cole, am the solution. No, I say the category of solution is, you know what founders are doing now? A lot of founders are investing in building their personal brand on LinkedIn. That is the category of solution. I am merely the person who would execute on that category of solution. So you're not selling you. You're not selling, "This is my service," or, "This is my product," or, "This is my package." You are educating them that once you're aware of this problem, just so you know how people are solving it, they are solving it with this category of solution. That's a very important point. Then we need to help them understand the power of this category of solution. Then I have to explain, "And here's what makes this solution so effective." Right? Here's why when you have this problem, this is actually the thing that you should do to solve it. Here are the reasons why this solution is so effective. And when you implement this solution, here are the benefits of it. Here are lots of good things that happen. Right? So in this case, when you start writing on LinkedIn, you're not having to repeat yourself over and over and over again. I'm sure every time you go raise money for your company, you're sitting down, you're having coffee or lunch or dinner, and you're repeating the same things about your mission over and over and over again. Well, one of the benefits of building your personal brand on LinkedIn is that you don't have to repeat yourself as much. Instead, you can write out the core problems that your startup is solving and you can build these pillar pieces on your LinkedIn that can actually scale you. So then when you meet someone new, you don't have to repeat it over and over and over again manually. You could send them one of these pillar pieces and they can read it themselves. Think about the leverage you get with that. That is a benefit. Of the category of thing that I am proposing, right? And then ultimately I want to connect them to same way I did on the problem side. On the solution side, I want to connect them to the ultimate positive outcome. So when you do all of these things, what is that end state that you're like, oh my gosh, light at the end of the tunnel, I am so excited about getting there. So sticking with our example, and I know this example well because this was one of the core examples of that I ran into when I would sell startup founders on ghostwriting services. You say the ultimate positive outcome is, wouldn't it be great if instead of you chasing down potential investors, investors came to you? I don't think there's a startup founder on planet Earth who doesn't want that ultimate positive outcome, right? And so notice in this entire logic line, not once am I talking about my company, my package, my offer stack, my— it has nothing to do with me. It has to do with the fact that no matter what, whether this person buys from me or not, I want them to walk away from this call more educated, more informed than at the beginning of the call. And that means I have to educate them on two things. I have to educate them on the problem in their business and the levels to that, and I have to educate them on the category of solution and the levels to that, which ultimately leads to, if you do this successfully, It creates the single greatest moment that you will ever experience on a sales call ever. And I promise when you experience it, it is, it is like witnessing magic. You haven't talked about yourself at all. You are purely educating the person on the problem and the category of solution. And by the way, if you're not doing this on a sales call, this is also what you do in emails when you're selling digital products. It's the same thing. It's just talking on Zoom or written in emails. The natural next step on a live sales call is once the person is sufficiently educated, they sit there, they go, oh wow, now I'm aware of the problem and now I know what to do to fix it. And they look at you and they say, do you know anyone who can help me with this? And all you have to do is say, yes, I do. This is what I specialize in. And now they are selling you on why you should work with them. And it is the single greatest situation that you can create for yourself on a sales call. And the way that you create it is very simple. You are not getting on a sales call trying to convince someone of something. You are not trying to persuade them to take an action that they don't understand. What you're doing is you are educating them on a problem. And educating them on a category of solution, and you spend the entire time educating them to the point where the only question left is, "Wow, I really need to solve this. Do you know anyone who can help?" And then all you have to do is say, "That's actually what I do. This is what I specialize in. That's why I'm so knowledgeable about it." And then the entire power dynamic has flipped, and they are the ones selling you on why you should help them.