Sell Without Making People Feel Sold

This is Tony...

He's creative, has faced difficult struggles, and decided almost two years ago to leave a secure high-paying job as a lawyer to start carving his own path. I'm introducing you to him today not just because he's rad (he is). But to help me teach you about selling without making people feel like they're being sold to. When you get this right, you'll build genuine relationships with people, the enrollment phase will be easy, and your clients will sing your praises publicly.

Unfortunately, many don't get this right here because they're in a hurry to "get the sale".

They...

Make the folks they interact with feel like a number in a funnel 🤮

Don't provide any tangible value to those in the "thinking about it" stage

And try to push people to take action when they're not ready.

Shortly after Tony and I began working together, he made a public post, completely unprompted, that brought tears to my eyes. I'm going to share his post in sections to help drive the points home. Here's how it started:

And here's how you can enroll people without them feeling like they're being sold to.

Treat Folks Like Individual Humans

One of the awesome things about the internet is you can be connected with a near limitless number of people. 5.18 billion humans are online. You can easily interact with hundreds of folks a day with nothing more than your phone.

The downside?

It's easy to forget that behind every picture + every name you see on a screen is an individual person. A person with dreams, hopes, and aspirations. A person with fears. A person whose experienced disappointment, shame, joy, and excitement. A person whose had their heart broken, whose trying to be a good parent, or is wanting to build a business so they can provide for the people they love.

If you forget this, it doesn't matter how awesome you are at what you do.

"People won't care about how much you know until they know how much you care." - Theodore Roosevelt

Make It Valuable to Be in Your Orbit

Now that they know how much you care they're way more receptive to what you have to share. So give them value. Loads of it.

What's valuable?

Providing questions, insights, and tools that gives people clarity. Sharing stories that inspire. Showing what's possible for them if they make the leap. And giving tangible things your Dream Clients can apply to make their life, business, relationship, career, or health better right now.

The second time Tony and I met up, I gave him actionable advice that he could apply to his business. Specific things he could do differently with his virtual assistant to increase the impact of her work. I also provided him guidance for his messaging to avoid creating confusion given that he has two businesses.

Let Them Go at Their Own Pace

My favourite comparison for the enollment process is dating.

Imagine you meet someone you're into. You dig their vibe and see there's potential. But they want to move faster than you're comfortable with and put pressure on you to take the next step.

Maybe they even try to make you feel guilty about not wanting to move faster.

Yikes. How would that make you feel? And how likely is this to blossom into a long term relationship?

Exactly.

Different people are ready at different times. That's OK. Give them the space they need.

Now go treat people like individual humans, make it valuable to be in your orbit. and let folks go at their own pace so you can enroll more folks and get to help more people.

-R

P.S. Next week I'm going to break down exactly how I helped Tony and his co-founders Evan and Josh get their first paid clients, sell out their second mastermind, and have Tony say "it's been so powerful and so nourishing to be working on something where we don't even feel like we need to sell it. That all we have to do is make the thing and put it out there".