I’ve heard it said that if prospects object to your offer – saying they don’t have the time, money, etc. – it’s a sign of their fears and limiting beliefs, and you need to help them overcome those.
I’d like to respectfully disagree and propose an alternative: Your offer (or the way you’re describing it) might not be very good. 😉
Look, I don’t know everything. In theory it’s possible that the “limiting belief” thing could be true some of the time. My own experience just doesn’t support it.
When I used to get all the doubts from prospects, I now see that I had a vague offer and would very quickly mush over the explanation of it (because my sales coaches said not to give TOO many details or else prospects might think they had enough information go do it on their own).
When I actually started spelling out my methods more (and moving those explanations over to my content/marketing, not waiting until the sales conversation to reveal them), all the doubts from prospects vanished. Funny, that. 😉
In fact, prospects started messaging me saying that they knew they wanted to work with me and were wondering if I required them to get on a sales call to qualify them or if they could just sign up over Messenger after a quick chat to make sure it was a fit.
(In case you’re wondering, when a prospect offers you the opportunity to save 60-90 minutes of your time and still make thousands of dollars anyway, the correct answer is “yes.” 😂 Which was how I ended up completely eliminating sales calls from my business after previously being totally unaware that it was even possible to sign prospects up without them.)
I’ll give you an example of the marketing I was doing back then.
I had one of those webinars that gave the 6 basic points of my “method” for helping to solve a problem (which I named as “get amazing high-paying clients” per the advice of a coach).
First off, “get amazing high-paying clients” actually isn’t a very clear outcome. What does “high-paying” mean? I now know that means different things to different people.
For that matter, what does “amazing” mean? That, too, means different things to different people.
Also, it’s not really clear what problem this would be solving. Is the problem that the person has never gotten a high-paying client (whatever that means) in their life? And I would be helping them to get their first ones?
Or have they gotten some but would like it to be more consistent, say, getting at least 2 per month?
There are even more options for what it could mean, based on my experience of having various business and marketing coaches as my own clients. Everybody solves a slightly different version of this client-getting problem.
Now for the 6 things I was teaching in my webinar that would solve this vaguely-defined problem.
One was “claim your personal power.” I put that in because my coaches said that I should have at least one mindset-related thing in there. I didn’t really know what the hell I even meant by that, though. I’m not a mindset coach. Turns out it’s best to stay in your lane and not try to offer things you’re not an expert in. 😉
Another was “use the problem-first approach.” Here I talked about the need to frame your offer in terms of solving a problem. This was actually a good point, and to this day I haven’t changed my mind about that being one of the main reasons why people struggle to sell high-ticket.
But there were only a couple of slides in the webinar about this point, and they didn’t sound much different from what tons of others teach about framing your offer in terms of a problem.
I now see that very few people actually understand this “problem-first” idea or can truly apply it successfully to lots of different niches to fix folks’ offers. What I’ve done since that time is to write lots of different posts giving concrete EXAMPLES of where people are failing to frame their offer in terms of a problem and how they can fix it.
I’ve even done free coaching calls for my Facebook group helping many different people to apply the idea to their businesses. In this way, people start to understand the idea (and see how deeply I, their potential coach, understand it) in a way that they never could from seeing a two-slide summary in a webinar.
Another of my 6 webinar points was to “simplify your marketing and sales process.”
I took a long time to make my point in that section – there were a ton of slides and I’m not even sure where I was going with it. I think I was mainly talking about what folks DIDN’T need in order to get high-paying clients: stuff like a long funnel, lots of low-ticket/free things, etc.
But I now see that I never really said what I DID recommend people do. I never presented a clear method or step-by-step way of attracting and enrolling clients.
In particular, I never said what my recommended lead generation method was. I kinda just glossed over that point.
Now, I think that was because I didn’t really HAVE a clear lead generation method at that point in my business. That wasn’t my expertise or strength – messaging was.
But I should have then been clear that this webinar was for people who only needed messaging support – who had an audience or leads, but weren’t communicating well to them.
(Say, now that I think of it, a version of that sentence above probably should have been the title of my webinar. Having an audience but not being able to sell them on your offer is a fairly specific problem. It’s different from not having ANYTHING in place to attract clients – no audience, no offer, no plan.)
I could go on with the webinar points, but you probably get the idea. They weren’t clear. They didn’t inspire confidence that I could get folks an outcome. The outcome itself wasn’t even clear.
I still got some sales calls from folks who viewed the webinar, though. And those calls mostly consisted of prodding folks’ pain points (the whole “tell me how bad your life/business is so that I can then later get you to admit that you need me” strategy – you probably know it well).
With then a short section at the end where I would pitch the program – using the exact same 6 points from the webinar.
And, a spoiler alert: if the points aren’t clear in the webinar, just repeating them out loud to a prospect on a call doesn’t make them any clearer. 😆 Especially if you don’t provide any additional details behind the points.
Which, I’m seeing, is probably the reason why a few people did sign up for those calls. They were hoping I’d provide the details that my webinar didn’t provide, and that then they’d feel more confident I could help them.
And, of course, most of my prospects didn’t sound confident by the end of the call. They gave very predictable objections/doubts:
“Can you share more about your method?”
“I’m not sure I have time for this right now.”
“How soon do you think I can generate some leads? I don’t have any right now.”
“Wow, that’s a lot of money and I’m not even sure this is what I need.”
Can you see the problem here?
They were doubtful, not because they had fears or limiting beliefs, but because my offer wasn’t good. More specifically, it wasn’t positioned well.
A lot of those folks weren’t even a good fit for it because I wasn’t really teaching a particular lead generation method and a lot of them needed that.
When an offer is positioned well and presented well, and the right person is reading/hearing it, those fears and limiting beliefs will tend to clear right up.
They certainly have for my prospects!
If you’d like help to clear up your offer and pitch it using my proven framework for a 500-word social media post, that’s one of the main things I work on with folks in my 30-day private intensive.
I actually DO teach a specific lead generation method now too 😉 and in the intensive I’ll help you to customize it to your own business.
You’ll also get my help to write posts that fully educate people about your methods and processes so you don’t get the doubts in sales conversations (AND so you get people reaching out to you with interest in your offer every time you make a post).
I’ll also review your sales process, help you simplify it (which you can do easily when prospects are better educated), and show you how you can enroll clients over Messenger if you’d like to do that.
Just DM me on FB if you’re interested in the program and we’ll have a quick chat over Messenger to see if it’s a fit for you and your business.
If you’re not ready for help yet and would like to learn more about my methods first, I recommend bingeing on some of the videos in my free FB group.
I did a free Q & A call on Zoom earlier this week where I helped a lot of different people to position their offers as solving a big problem. You can get a really good sense of my thought processes from the examples in there.
Other than that, comment here if you have any questions or thoughts about what I shared above. I’d love to hear if you relate to any part of my story. Have a great weekend! 🙂