A short interview between Sachin Patel and a guest exploring whether sales skill is innate or learned. The guest argues that children demonstrate natural persuasive behaviors but social fears in adults inhibit sales; sales can be reframed as "the art of helping people make the right decision." Key practical points: the first sale is selling yourself (belief/confidence), then selling a vision of a better future to clients, and using low-priced or free initial offers to build experience and testimonials before raising prices.
Chapters
What would you say is the. It's, it's. What I find is really interesting is that there is. Do you believe that salespeople are born, are like natural, are people naturally good at selling? Or is it a skill? Or maybe a little bit of both, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Well, the best salespeople in the world, I believe, are children. You know, Charlie, Charlie, my boy, seven year old boy, man, he's been working on me, on why I should let him stay up later, why I should let him have a sleepover, why I should let him go buy this thing from the grocery store. And he'll use every tactic. He'll use anger, he'll use sadness, he'll use please, please, please, he'll tell me how great I am and then he'll make the sale. Only in adulthood do we start to develop these fears of, oh, I don't want to be pushy, I don't want to bother people, I don't want to make people uncomfortable, oh, I'm not good enough at this price. And you know, I don't want to pressure anybody. It's only because we've started to develop social fears, right? So for anybody who's listening, who feels like sales is not my thing, I'm not a salesperson. I'm really excited for you to change your relationship to sales to one where you love sales and you love being a salesperson because there's so much freedom and power in that. So I will provide you with a definition of sales that you might feel more comfortable adopting to associate to yourself. And sales is simply the art of helping people make the right decision. Not necessarily to pressure them to buy the thing that you're selling, but to help them decide what they want to do about the problem that they have. They might decide they want to do nothing. They might decide they want to figure it out, how to solve it themselves, watching YouTube videos and figuring it out. Or they might want to spend money on some other solution other than yours. Or they might want to buy your solution. Your job is to help them make the right decision for them. So if you feel like you're good at helping people make decisions, or you like helping people make decisions, poof, you're in sales.
Where do you feel like the. You know, there's internal objections, right? Then there's external objections that come up for us. Like the first sale I believe we have to make is of our. On ourselves, right? We've got to be sold on ourselves. And then of course, you know, the program or whatever offer we're putting together. What other, what other? What's that next sale that needs to take place? Maybe we can talk about that. That first sale is obviously us, but then the next. What's that next sale that needs to take place?
So you're right about the first sale is you very hard to sell something you don't believe in. And when we're selling our services, we're often confused and associating that I'm selling me. And you even hear this confusion in people saying like, I charge what I'm worth. It's not you they're buying, it's not you you're selling. What you're selling is a vision of a better future that you're co creating through a conversation, asking them questions, where do they want to be six months from now? And they're buying that vision of a better future that they believe they can get to with you. So that's one thing that you're selling is you're selling this vision of a better future, which is different for every patient, it's different for every client. You're asking them questions like, let's say you and I work together and everything works out really well and you get the results that you want from hiring me. What does your life look like in three months? Their answer to that question is what they are buying now. It's easier to sell when you've had a hundred clients and you've got a wall full of testimonials and really believe in your service and your ability to get results. That's called confidence. It comes from experience, it comes from results. But what if you don't have the confidence yet? How do you get those first couple of sales? Well, we think about how we buy stuff as consumers and we think about ideas like, well, I'll offer it at a discount or I'll make it free because we like free stuff and we like discounted stuff and that's how we buy. We tend to sell the way that we buy. Right? So I actually think that's not a bad idea to start off is to have prices so low that you're thinking to yourself, you're going to be silly to not say yes because that you're really sold in that. Right. And even to the extent of doing work for free. Although the downside to free work is that they're the hardest clients because they're the least committed. But we're working on building your confidence here. So give yourself your first few clients. They got to be committed if it's free, it's harder and start to build the results. And as you build results, so you're sold yourself. You're helping them see a clear vision of a future that they're buying into and they're committing to financially, you're getting results. Then you start to raise your prices to competitive prices. Then ultimately you get yourself to a level of confidence where you're at premium prices where you believe either because you're very unique in your focus of who you serve, or you really are confident that you do a great world class job. Then you're charging perhaps multiples of what the competition might be charging because you're so good at it. So that's kind of the phases I think you get into.
Really good. I think people have really struggle with what to charge. Right the especially in the beginning. And I like how you gave this example of charge something that feels like it's a real bargain for them. Right. So you're really able to offer that service to them, build up your repertoire, build up your confidence and then obviously that leads to then changing and adjusting and modulating the price accordingly as your experience grows.
I think that's sound advice, but only for your first five clients in your first three months. Don't make low price your perceived competitive advantage as your primary business strategy because that really only works well for super high volume, super efficient, super low cost operations, which is usually not the people that are listening to this podcast. Right. So it's okay to discount at the beginning to build some confidence, build some testimonials. I call these case study clients. And here's the script. I recommend you say listen, normally this would be a $3,000 investment, but I'm going to give you a special opportunity to be a case study. And a case study means we're going to show your before and after picture. We're going to tell the story of how you came into the program and how you left the program doing really much, significantly better. And because you're going to be a case study, it's going to help me grow my business because I'm going to use you as an example to inspire other people to go through the same process and they're going to see that it works for people like them because you're going to be similar to them. All that I ask is that you're 100% committed because I want to have a 100% success rate. That means you're going to show up, you're going to do the work and I'm going to be bragging about your results by the end of the program, can you commit 100 to showing up fully the whole way? They say yes. You say, great. Okay, normally the price is $3000. The case study price is a bargain. It's 50% off. It's only 1500 dollars. Then deliver them a $3000 program, but charge them 1500 bucks and you're going to feel like they got a great deal. In fact, deliver them a program that they would be happy to pay $30,000 by the end of the results, and they only paid fifteen hundred dollars.
