Wouldn’t sales be SO much more fun if it didn’t involve pitching, chasing and convincing? Good news…it doesn’t have to! Today I’ll share a new, authentic approach to sales. One where YOU choose who you want to work with, instead of convincing potential clients to choose you. I’ll give you my simple 3 step formula for inviting wow clients into your workflow and building genuine, long lasting relationships with your leads. 

Read transcript below:

Steve Napolitan: Wouldn’t sales be SO much more fun if it didn’t involve pitching, chasing and convincing? Good news…it doesn’t have to! Today I’ll share a new, authentic approach to sales. One where YOU choose who you want to work with, instead of convincing potential clients to choose you. I’ll give you my simple 3 step formula for inviting wow clients into your workflow and building genuine, long lasting relationships with your leads. 

So how can we sell without chasing or convincing? See, a lot of the old techniques of sales was to having a fantastic pitch, to get really good at the pitch, and then follow up. And, “Fortune’s in the follow up,” and all these sayings that I was taught, as well as so many other people, and the reality is that those techniques are … I would say that they probably never really fully served us. Do they work? They can, because if you pitch enough people, the likelihood of someone saying yes is probable.

So a lot of people did this because if you just had a huge amount of numbers and it became this numbers game, then you could acquire sales and you could do business. And then there was a lot of pressure too, and you’re chasing with the follow up and you’re trying to convince people to buy your product or service. When I think if we flip all that, first thing we have to flip is for us to choose who to work with instead of them choosing us, and the way to do that, to know if we’re making an authentic offer, is to ask questions.

So I want to say that we have to stop pitching and start asking questions. Often, people think that they have to present how good they are and all their accolades and what they can do and how they do it. And we get caught up in all of these things that actually just give more for the person you’re talking to to think about, to decide upon, and what happens is they end up not making a decision. And so then that leaves us, again, in this pressure, and especially if you’re building a business and you need to make revenue so you can keep things going, then it just adds to the pressure, it just continues to compound.

So the way that we flip this, so let’s talk about asking questions. To ask questions, we have to find who we’re meant to work with and ask them the right questions. So often I say in business, “We need to find our wow client,” which I’ve talked about in other episodes prior to now, we need to ask them what they want, and then we need to give them what they want. Now you might be an expert and say, “Well Steve, a lot of the people that I work with, they don’t know what they need. They might want something, but they don’t really know what they need.” And that’s fair enough, but we still have to meet them where they are.

So I say, give them what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt them. If it’s going to hurt them, then we want to not give that. But you find your wow client, you ask them what they want, then you give them what they want, then you teach them what they need. So you find your wow client, ask them what they want, give them what they want, and then teach them what they need. And this changes everything, because for a lot of us that are speakers, teachers, consultants, all those things, we want to start teaching right away and we do it too soon. We teach too much and we’re trying to change people too much.

So we need to focus on this journey that we take with them, and if we can give them what they want first and start engaging that relationship, then start to teach them what they need, then they’re likely to do it. So if someone comes to me and they say, “Steve, I want blue,” and then I’m able to give them blue, and it doesn’t hurt them, blue is good, but it’s not as good as red. And so over time they’ll say, “Steve, this is amazing,” and you can do this in shorter periods of time or longer periods of time. “Oh my gosh, this is amazing Steve, what else can we do?” And then you start to teach them about red, and red and blue makes purple, and purple’s awesome. And so then this way they start to come on this journey with you.

And there’s many examples of this. I was working with a chiropractor and it came back that their clients wanted on-time appointments. Now they still needed pain relief from that chiropractic appointment, so just in a case, they wanted on-time appointments, but they also wanted the pain relief. If you had an on-time appointment with no pain relief, then it doesn’t work. A background check company I worked with, what they needed was a quality report and great customer service, but what they wanted was quick turnaround time. Now if you have quick turnaround time and you have a failed background check, then it’s not going to give you what you want.

One time I worked with a financial advisor, now what do you need? You need good financial advice that’s going to help you grow your money, not reduce it. But in the city of San Francisco, what they were able to give and what people wanted was free parking because parking can be quite expensive and they had a parking lot, so that did attract people, but then they still had to have good financial services. Now you think that might be all crazy, like, “Oh my gosh, parking to financial services?” But it made a difference in attracting new clients because it was convenient, but then once they got in and they saw that they could help them.

So you never know what it is that they want unless you ask. So the big thing is to ask the clients what they want in an open-ended scenario, not how good do they want their financial services? How much pain relief do they want from a chiropractic? What is the quality level that’s necessary for a background check? You have to ask them what they want and be open to what they say, even if it’s outside of what you do, because if you tie that in, you may do it.

Many years ago, I heard about a movie theater that brought childcare in so people could go on a date, have their children right on-premise. Now, a movie theater doesn’t necessarily want to be in the childcare business, but they could partner with a childcare company and then make something like that happen. So just start asking yourself, “Am I giving my clients what they want and then leading them to what they need?” And if you do this and you ask the right questions, you can stop pitching and you can just start having more clients.

So I hope this was helpful. Let me know what the best part was. What was the biggest takeaway? If you have further questions, let me know. It helps for future episodes. If you really like this, subscribe and hit the bell so you get notified when we do these. And until then, we’ll see you on the next episode.