I have a huge problem with the premise of a lot of “guru” sales trainings: that your prospect is going to try to “stay in their comfort zone” or their “false story of why things aren’t that bad” and that it’s your job, as a seller of professional services, to “call them out” and “help them see how bad things are” and “the cost of not taking action.”
How insulting to prospects!
And what an overstepping of boundaries by you as the seller, too. It’s not your job to argue with the worldview of someone who isn’t even your client yet. If they don’t think their problem is that bad, who are you to question that?
The real question is, if they really didn’t think their problem was that bad, why would they be on a call with you about fixing it? People generally don’t get on calls to talk about paying to fix things that aren’t that bad.
Here’s the reality that I see:
Most prospects DO know how bad their problem is and/or how great their desired outcome would be. When they start saying things like “this isn’t that bad” or “maybe now’s not the right time” – those are often polite excuses.
In other words, they’re substitutions for saying, “I don’t like how you’re speaking to me on this call, and I’m not sure that you have a real method for helping me either.”
(One of my past clients who said on the sales call that “now is not the right time; maybe I don’t want to work on this right now” actually admitted to me later that he just wasn’t sure what my method was or if I could really help him. He said that it sounded like stuff he had done before. He came back to me when I improved my explanations in my content and said that it made sense to him now and he could see how different it was – and he enrolled!)
I will often peek at the marketing of folks who say (in FB groups and such) that they’re getting prospects who say now’s not the right time or things aren’t that bad.
I usually find that they’re using some kind of vague content to pre-sell people to get on a call with them. This can come in the form of a vague webinar or vague posts/emails that aren’t supposed to “give away the ‘how.'”
Like the so often used “6 steps webinar” that only gives the high-level points of “raise your prices,” “use webinar marketing,” and “embody a high-ticket mindset.”
Isn’t it obvious why people would give all manner of objections on the sales call if they don’t get more information on what the heck all that means?
Like, how exactly are you going to help them raise prices? What precisely is included in your webinar structure that’s going to make their webinar perform better than all the times they’ve tried one in the past? What is a “high-ticket mindset” and how precisely can someone just “embody” it?
Humans are fantastic at NOT saying exactly what they mean, so most people will not tell you why they’re REALLY objecting. They’re not going to say, “Whoa! You’re coming on really strong here when I was just hoping to get more information about what you talked about in the webinar. I’m nowhere near ready to buy today – and that doesn’t mean I’m not committed to my goals. It just means that I want to make sure you really know what you’re talking about and that this is really the right thing for me to do to help solve my problem.”
When your mental stance for the call is that you’re going to interpret any hesitation as proof that they’re not committed to their goals, and that you’re going to expect a decision by the end of the call even if they don’t feel they have enough information, the prospect can sense that. And they’ll start looking for ways to politely exit the conversation, because even though you made them uncomfortable, they don’t want to make you uncomfortable in return. (See, that’s the GREAT thing about most people.)
This can be a tough thing to swallow. I’m sure many will not agree with what I’m saying here, and will maintain that their prospects really aren’t committed and they really do have to challenge them.
That’s fine. I used to think the same way.
But one day I decided to question my assumptions, and I discovered that people actually signed up with me in droves (like to the tune of 1-3 signups per week for high-ticket programs) if I did absolutely zero coaching on “getting them out of their comfort zone to take action and drop their bullshit stories.”
Instead, what I focused on was producing content that described my methods in detail, so that people would know exactly what they’d be getting if they hired me, and could assess whether it was right for them or not – before even getting in touch with me.
This included things like:
–a detailed video describing exactly how to come up with the sellable outcome that’ll make people want to buy your services – including my best thinking on what the main categories are that outcomes fall into, and what questions to ask yourself to figure out what yours is – plus many examples and live case studies for different businesses
–a post describing the exact framework of how I write posts and emails to get pre-sold leads messaging me
–a post listing the exact 6 steps to take to ensure booking 1-2 clients every week – including specific details like how many posts to make, what kinds of posts to write, and how many friend requests to make
–and many more.
When I started producing detailed content like this, I found that nearly all objections fell away and I just didn’t get them anymore. In fact, I even had people DMing me saying they would love to sign up with me and wondered if I required a sales call or if they could just pay now without getting on a call. (And that was how I stopped doing sales calls… 😉 )
After finding success with this way of doing things and earning over half a million dollars (and approaching a million this year), I can easily compare my content with the content of those who say they get these kinds of doubtful prospects – and the difference is like night and day.
It may somehow serve them to believe that their prospects’ attitude is the problem, but I have to wonder what would change in their sales conversations if they would shift their content to be the kind that I described above.
Also, here’s one more piece of food for thought: Coaching by definition is for people who are empowered and generally functioning pretty well in their lives. Therefore, good candidates for coaching generally do not have to be convinced to be committed and take action. If someone really, truly doesn’t have the personal agency to be able to decide that they want help fixing a problem and that they will pay for that help without anyone convincing them, it is not coaching that they need, but a much deeper solution from a credentialed professional.
If you’d like help to shift your content so that it does almost all of the work of selling for you and you no longer have to worry about coaching prospects to say “yes,” DM me on Facebook about my 30-day 1-on-1 intensive. This is the main thing we work on in that program.