I remember how much I used to analyze all of the sales calls where somebody DIDN’T sign up.
Ya feel me? 😉
I’d go over and over each call in my head, even re-listen to the recordings, and try to figure out where it went wrong – or why the prospect did/said the things they did/said.
ESPECIALLY the ones where everything seemed to go well – they checked all the boxes for my ideal client, they said they had no objections or questions and even that the price sounded good and doable…
…and then they shocked me at the end by saying they weren’t going to join right now or needed to get funds lined up first. (and then never came back)
I’d analyze these people and situations to death – why would they say it sounded good and then ghost?
Were they lying?
Did they change their mind?
Did I say something wrong?
Was there one little detail about the sales call structure that I forgot or did wrong somehow?
Etc.
Lots of sales experts will happily analyze your conversations for you and tell you all the little details that might be causing your prospects to slip away.
And I’m not here to say that they’re wrong.
But I WILL offer you an different kind of diagnosis for all of the “unsolved mysteries” of your sales calls – and it just might put your mind right at ease.
I’m going to quote Matthew Hussey (dating/love/personal development coach) for this one.
I used to watch his videos all the time, then he fell off my radar for a while, and then for some reason last night YouTube served me up his latest video where he offered this gem:
“The right relationship is not brittle.”
He was talking about when a relationship ends and you torture yourself thinking “maybe if I had done/said this ONE thing differently, they wouldn’t have broken up with me.”
And I think his point was that if you and somebody are really meant to be together, whatever ONE thing you’re torturing yourself about wouldn’t make or break things.
And it struck me that this insight applies to the potential relationship between you and a client, too.
If you’re really meant to work together – if your gifts are a perfect or near-perfect match for the person who’s considering working with you – then one little “mistake” on a sales call won’t stop that relationship from happening.
What I’m sharing here won’t make sense to some people because they don’t believe in this idea of a relationship (professional or personal) having this “meant-to-be” quality about it.
But I believe that there is a divine plan at work in the world, even in the tiniest nooks and crannies of our lives, and that God doesn’t give gifts to a person without there being a perfect match out there who needs them.
(And vice versa too – I don’t believe there’s a need out there that doesn’t have the capability of being fulfilled by someone.)
If you believe these things too, then you’ll know just what I mean here.
To say it another way:
When a relationship doesn’t move forward, or ends, it’s not for some tiny little reason – it’s for a BIG reason, or many reasons.
There is some fundamental incompatibility or problem that would still remain even if you fixed that one little thing, or several little things.
There’s one major caveat to all of this, though.
In order for your ideal client to be able to REALIZE that you and they are meant to work together, they have to be able to fully see you.
They have to fully understand what you and your work are all about.
Only then can they develop that deep-down gut feeling that says, “Yes – this person is for me.”
On its face, this idea seems fairly obvious, doesn’t it?
I mean, let’s say that you had a prospect on a sales call who you knew for a fact didn’t know anything about you or your work.
Let’s say all they knew was that you claim to help people lose weight or grow their business or something else general like that.
You wouldn’t buy this “meant to be” idea, would you? The idea that little things about the sales call don’t make a difference?
Of course not.
Because they don’t know anything about you, or about your philosophies, how you solve the problem, whether your philosophies apply to their particular flavor of the problem… etc.
So how could they know that the two of you are “meant to be”?
To develop this idea further:
If people come to your calls unclear about what you actually do and how you do it, then YES little tactical things about the call might make a difference to whether or not they sign up.
(I’m sure many of us have had the experience of signing up for something because of how smoothly the sales call was run, only to later go, “OMG – this program isn’t at all what I thought it would be.”)
But if people come to you with a rock-solid understanding of what you’re all about and believing that it’s a fit for them, that’s when you can relax a lot more about the details of the sales process.
In fact, what happened for me was that I started to get more and more enrollments from people where we barely had any sales conversation at all – usually just a few text messages back and forth over Messenger.
(I’ve now sold over $800K worth of my packages – and counting – that way)
And I started to get way fewer conversations where people ghosted – or did anything except say yes and pay.
I used to get something like 30 inquiries per month about working with me and 4-5 would say yes and pay.
Now it’s more like 4-5 inquiries and they all say yes and pay.
(after I qualify them to make sure they fit the ideal client for my offer, which they almost always do)
It’s almost as if getting clearer on your front-end messaging renders the entire sales process almost (not totally, but almost) unnecessary because people are able to self-select in or out before they even talk to you.
And it also saves you from all the time-wasting analysis of the ones who don’t say yes, because those people mostly don’t even contact you in the first place.
I recently saw somebody freaking out in a FB group about how they had a prospect say “sounds great but I’m not going to sign up today” and they just didn’t know how that could have happened because they “followed the syntax they were taught.”
They even clarified: “I especially made sure not to give away what method I’m going to use in the program.”
I couldn’t help but think, “That bit about ‘making sure not to give away the method’ might have been exactly why the prospect didn’t sign up.”
If they don’t even know what your method is, how are they going to recognize you as the right person for them?
To hammer this home yet another way:
If you want to stop having confusing interactions with prospects where lots of them seem wishy-washy about you, you have to show up more fully so that everybody you encounter can be a clear YES or a clear NO to what you’re putting out there.
Either that, or you have to get really good at sales tactics and memorizing scripts. 😉 That’s the other option I see.
Now, for those who’ve followed my work for more than 5 seconds, you’ll know that I have a real method for helping people to be super-clear in their marketing (before they ever have sales conversations) about what their offer is, what it’s about, what methods it uses, what EXACT problem it solves, who exactly it works well for and who it works less well for, etc.
It’s been tested and proven in every niche imaginable for several years now – with people reporting that they no longer have to do sales calls or if they do, the calls are quite short and the vast majority of prospects are a “yes” for their $5k-$30k+ offer without their needing to use any particular sales tactics.
I use this communication method in almost every post that I write here on this website, on my Facebook profile, as well as in my FB group.
And I also teach it… for free.
If you’re spending a ton of time on sales and on analyzing wishy-washy prospects, you may just want to learn my method.
It involves two main types of posts:
1) A post where you directly pitch your offer
2) A post where you unpack a small micro-piece of your method and talk about how it can solve a micro-problem that your ideal client is experiencing (and that is solved by your offer)
I have detailed trainings for how to write each of the two types of posts.
You can find the trainings here and here.
I also have MANY public case studies where I critique posts that people have written and point out details about what they can change to better conform to my method, so that prospects will come to them more pre-sold and less wishy-washy.
(And so they can easily get 4 or more sales per month for their high-ticket offer while spending almost no time on sales 😉 )
You can read some of the case studies here.
And – of course – you can hire me if you want my help to think through how you are articulating your method, outcomes, and ideal client – and critique your writing in detail.
I do this work in a 30-day private intensive, the details of which can be found here.
You can simply DM me on Facebook if you’re interested in the program and we’ll have a brief chat to make sure it’s the right fit for both of us – though, if you make it that far into my sales process, it probably is 😉
Have you ever overanalyzed why some prospects didn’t say yes and enroll?
Did this post give you any “ahas” about that?
.