Scared of Being Salesy?
Scared of sounding salesly? Me too.
I’ve never considered myself “good” at sales. In fact, I hated sales so much that I decided to build my entire business model around never having to “sell” again.
And oddly enough, this model has earned me more sales than I ever got when I was trying hard to sell.
Overcoming the Fear of Selling
To be clear, no agency is going to thrive without sales. You need opportunities to speak with prospective clients, tell them what you can do for them, and then finally ask for their business. Once you make the sale, you have a client and can keep your doors open a little longer.
I actually never minded talking to prospects about their project. Everything would go so well, until… they’d ask for the price.
Then I would get all uncomfortable.
I was so scared that whatever number I’d tell them would be too high.
I was scared that they were expecting lower.
I was scared they wouldn’t relate that price to all of the value I had just built for them in our conversation.
Too high of a price could lose the entire sale.
If the client sounded the least bit put off, I felt I had to start selling them on the idea of hiring me. It felt icky. It felt like I was trying to convince someone to do something they didn’t want to do.
And I didn’t like it. So I stopped putting myself and my clients through it.
That’s when I built my whole model the way I did:
Clear offers.
Clear prices.
No icky price convo.
No convincing. Take it or leave it.
I never wanted to have that nerve-wracking price conversation ever again! And you know what? I haven’t had to since then. Not even once.
Can You Sell Without Selling?
My No-BS Agency Model came from my own discomfort with sales. Yes, I still had conversations with clients. And yes, I still sold my services. More of them, actually.
How?
It all came down to the Non-Sales Sales Convo.
Besides not liking how I felt when I was selling, I realized I was doing it all wrong. I was pitching. Explaining. Justifying. But I should have been asking. Listening. Making connections.
To make it come more naturally, I developed a script for the Non-Sales Sales Convo so that I would never have to feel awkward again.
The script is based on the idea that we should NEVER pitch people. We should only try to understand someone’s problem and let them know if we can help them.
When you come at it from this perspective, everyone (you AND the prospect) gets to relax.
Pressure = GONE!
The conversation instantly becomes valuable because both sides stand to gain optimal outcomes.
There’s no hard sell involved. There’s no pitching. There’s no sweating a pricing conversation and then trying to justify your rates based on what your client will receive. All of that happens within the context of the conversation.
And it’s not just about going through the motions, either. It’s not about asking questions for the sake of sounding authoritative. It’s about asking the right questions to look at a project through a customer’s eyes. It’s not about looking like you’re listening but rather giving your full attention to a client so you can remember key details later—details that will help the project reach its full potential. You can give these conversations your undivided attention when you’re not forced to sell and pitch lots of clients at once because you know that some of them won’t close.
When it’s a valuable conversation, it either naturally becomes clear that they should hire you, or it becomes clear that they shouldn’t. That’s the way it should be.
Because who wants to convince someone who isn’t a good fit to hire them? If you’re not a good fit for them, they’re also not a good fit for you. And vice versa. Neither will ever achieve the value that you expect going into the project.
Let’s face it: selling someone on something they don’t want to do is hard. It’s also one of the reasons why real salespeople (i.e., not me) like sales in the first place. It makes them feel powerful.
But the rest of us—those who aren’t just after a sale but rather a good fit project—don’t have to sell.
When you stop selling and start coming from a place of curiosity, you’ll actually end up selling way more in the process.
Now I’m curious—are you scared of being salesy?