Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 17 - 3 Ways To Sell More Without Selling
Synopsis:
In this insightful episode of Peaceful Profits, Mike Shreeve unpacks three transformative strategies to revolutionize your sales environment: mastering deep industry knowledge, leveraging the power of frequency bias, and creating evergreen demand. He explains how these methods can turn defensive sales calls into genuine strategy sessions, enhance trust with potential clients, and make every sales conversation smoother and more impactful. Discover how understanding these principles can boost conversions and shift your mindset from scarcity to abundance in business.
Transcript:
3 Ways To Sell More Without Selling
[00:00:00] Hello, my dear friends. Hope you're doing well. Thank you so very much for taking a listen to today's episode. At the core of this philosophy is the idea that the sales tactics that you are required to use in order to create a transaction are dependent entirely on the sales environment that you create.
In other words, if you change the sales environment, right, if you change the. Say the, the, the circumstances surrounding the sales conversation itself, you can change the tactics that are required to make that sale happen. I'll give you an example. If I am reaching out, I. Using cold outreach methods, that is an environment that I have created.
The environment is I'm approaching a stranger who didn't ask for me to approach them, and I'm asking them to give me money. So of course, I am [00:01:00] constrained in what sales tactics I can use to turn that circumstance into an actual conversion into a sale. So the first thing to understand about selling without selling is that it is about changing the environment.
It's not necessarily another series of sales tactics for you to memorize. It's not really a script for you to learn. It's not, you don't need to read a big book. It's more about changing the nature of the conversations you are having. Okay, so it's very, very important to to understand before we dive into the specifics.
Okay. So there are three ways of many, but these are three strong starter points for you to get started working on in changing some of the environment in which you are currently selling in. So the first way that I like to advise [00:02:00] clients is to know more. Okay, so step one is to know more. Now, what do we mean by know more?
I have found that a lot of clients who are struggling with sales tactics. Are spending more time and energy learning sales systems than they are, than they are spending time learning about their prospect. I mean that individually and collectively. So for example, if you don't do any pre-research on your prospect, then of course the sales environment that you have set up for yourself.
Is going to be terribly awkward. It'll be very rigid. It will be, both parties will have some kind of defense mechanism at [00:03:00] play. I. Does that make sense? And so your starting point in that conversation is much different. Remember the environment is much different than if at least one of you has done some pretty good research on that individual, right?
Hey, I saw that you are into this, or Hey, I, that kind of familiarity with the prospect before the sales call happens will translate into you being more comfortable having the conversation. Now that's at the individual level, and that may improve your performance by five or 10%, right? It's not a big, you know, door swinging on tiny hinges.
It's not really an 80 20. If you have a sales team, encourage them to do some pre-research and you'll see an increase. But it's not really the core of this idea of knowing more on a collective level, learning to know more about your prospect. Is an 80 20 [00:04:00] activity. What we mean by that is sitting down and understanding the pains, the struggles, the answers that your prospects are looking for, and actually getting intimately familiar.
It is why some of the best salespeople in the help industry are people who are selling solutions to themselves of five years ago. So for example, I am very, very good at helping people make a million dollars. In their business coming from six figures or so, because that was me a decade ago. I remember what that was like.
I remember the struggles. I remember the fear. I remember the anxiety. I remember those problems. And so it's very easy for me [00:05:00] to change the environment of the sales call from. I'm here to give you a presentation. Two, I'm here to help you along the path. I have traveled. Do you see how it changes the environment?
You can still use the same sales script. You can even reduce your sales script a little bit if you think it's overly aggressive. You don't even need a sales script if you show up to a call and in your mind the call is, I'm having a conversation with somebody because I want to give them what I have found for myself, and I want to show them the exact path that I have been through.
Right. That's an, that's an example of how learning who your prospects are and having that intimate knowledge can benefit. Well, let's say you're hiring a sales team and these are not your, you know, it is, it's you're, they're no longer the expert who's leading people through, say, a coaching program or a done for you service or something like that.
They can still benefit from those same, uh, [00:06:00] research opportunities. By understanding and learning who these people are, and there's a couple ways they can do it. One, they can learn who your best customers and clients are, hear their success stories, learn about who these people were, where they came from, what they're doing, and et cetera, so that they can understand who to look for and what to offer as advice, insight, et cetera.
It changes the environment of the sales conversation, but there's something else beyond just understanding your prospect and it's you, yourself knowing more, becoming more of an expert. And here's why. If you are finding that you are getting on a lot of phone calls and people are getting off of the phone calls, sales conversations, whether you're doing a chat, phone, whatever, and you are finding that a lot of those calls.
End up with the other person ghosting you or just getting off the call and [00:07:00] deciding not to, et cetera, et cetera. There's a high likelihood that what happened is they got on the call hoping that you sounded like the expert, or hoping that by you talking to them, it would calm their fears and they would make a sale, right?
But instead what happened is they got on the phone call. And they listened to you talk and they got off the phone call and they said, this person doesn't know enough to help me. This is a common problem when you're newer in your business, when you haven't taken hundreds and thousands of sales calls and et cetera, and the antidote is not a script change.
The antidote is to just get. Better to know more. And what will end up happening is that you will have more answers for bigger and bigger problems that people have. So when you have these sales [00:08:00] calls, they become almost like counseling and true strategy sessions. Right? How many times do people say book a call for a strategy session?
It's not really a strategy session, it's just them. I'm trying to walk you into a sale, a true strategy session where somebody can ask all these types of questions and you're giving them incredible answers. They always convert better, and it's always a much different environment. That's why it converts better.
Jadedness and defenses go down. Openness and willingness to accept advice and suggestion goes up. You can then suggest your offer. It's received in a much better way, and you have a higher likelihood of actually closing deals and closing sales, but it requires you to know the answer to the problems. So again, whether it's for yourself or for your sales team, constantly learning more about what you do is always going to [00:09:00] translate into a shift in the environment.
That that sales call is being held in. And the last element of knowing more has to do with the pre-selling that occurs before you ever have a sales call. And it goes like this. The more you know, the more content you can produce and or the smarter that content can sound and or the better that content can sound and you end up with more hooks in the water.
So, for example, you don't have to post to social media every day. Content doesn't mean post videos, podcasts, et cetera. Content means ideas that you have. Maybe you want to bundle those ideas into a book, and so the more you know what. The more books you have, how many books does Tony Robbins have? How many books does Jim Rowan have?
How many books does Zig Ziglar have? How many books does Mike Mcal have? How [00:10:00] many books does Russell Brunson have? How many books does Dan Kennedy have? It's not one. It's multiple. So the more you know, the more you are able to change, adjust, and shift. The environment in which a sale takes place. If somebody goes through and reads multiple books, if somebody goes through and watches multiple YouTube videos, watches multiple podcasts, if they're on your email list and you're emailing them, good stuff often and frequently, the act of improving your knowledge so that it can translate into content equals.
The action that you can take to improve the environment of the sales conversations that you have. Because think about it, if somebody has spent 20 hours watching YouTube videos, six hours listening to podcasts, they got two of your audio books for a total of [00:11:00] 14 hours consuming your audio books and they've been on your list for a month and a half consuming your emails, what do you think the environment is going to be?
Who are you talking to at that point? You're talking to a fan and a conversation with a fan is a completely different environment to have a conversation than having a conversation with a stranger who is defensive to your suggestion. So one of the best things you can do for your sales team beyond training them is just to make content so that they're having conversations.
With fans rather than conversations with strangers who are defensive, et cetera. It's why I don't like VSLs and things like that where the call happens after they've only watched a, you know, maybe partially a 30 minute portion of a very short video. I. Okay, [00:12:00] so that's number one. The first thing you can do to change the environment is to know more and the, and we just discussed a couple of different ways in which you can know more.
The second thing you can do is to exploit the frequency bias. Exploit the frequency bias. There is an obsession in the online marketing world. Where, uh, you are taught that it is one call close or die, that if they get on the call and you are unable to close it, you're never going to close that person ever again.
That is not only, uh, a very horrible selling environment. It's also scientifically inaccurate, untrue, and kind of a terrible idea. There have been more studies than. Then, then I know for a fact I've not seen all of the studies and I've studied this quite extensively, that continuously show that the money's in the follow up.
That the longer [00:13:00] somebody gets to know you, the more they trust you over time. Uh, that, uh, you know, the 1585 rule, which I've said many times on this podcast. That 85% of people are gonna buy from you after 90 days. Only 15% will buy within, uh, within 90 days of first knowing you, et cetera, and et cetera, and et cetera, exploiting the frequency bias.
Is about changing the nature of the environment of your sales conversation by relying on frequent touchpoint and the frequency of those touchpoints. So for example, a lot of people are obsessed with what's the perfect autoresponder sequence and what's the perfect webinar and what's the perfect, perfect, perfect.
And they put all this energy into perfecting one touch. And then they launch their funnel or they launch their business, and what happens? Well, it might be the best one [00:14:00] touch in the world. It may be the best welcome email, may be the best webinar that's ever existed, but that person who watched your webinar, who saw your social media post, who listened to that one podcast, et cetera, they're also listening to a bunch of other podcasts.
They're on a bunch of other email lists. They're watching a bunch of other webinars. They're doing all these things. And your one touch is standing all alone in a sea of hundreds, if not thousands of other touches from competitors and touches from things that aren't even a direct competitor. So just a human being going through life and things coming at them at a high frequency, uh, and, uh, you know, constant distraction.
And there's Netflix and there's all these sorts of things. So explaining the frequency bias is about understanding that human beings are drawn, emotionally [00:15:00] drawn to the things that are convenient, frequent, and obvious. I'm gonna say two names. Gary Vaynerchuk, grant Cardone. Now let's put our, our biases aside for a second.
I have my own opinions on them as people, but Gary Vaynerchuk and Grant Cardone, you probably recognize their name, but why? Why do you recognize their name? Is it because you love all of their content, or is it because they are all over the place all the time? The fact that your brain has stored their name.
For easy recall is a perfect example of the frequency bias. Your brain is reacting to the fact that they're all over the place, so the brain's [00:16:00] ability to recall based off of quality only is not nearly as strong as the brain's ability to recall the things that are frequent. Obvious and convenient, and the way that this affects the environment of your selling conversation is multifold.
So the first thing that happens is we tend to connect emotionally to the things which are easily recalled. Okay? So, uh, memories are. The events that occurred, which are of all the events in our life the most easily recalled, which is why we can remember them, we attach significant emotional meaning to those memories.
It's how we are able to navigate the world and remember things. So if you are [00:17:00] remembered by people in your audience. Or at least easily recallable because you are everywhere. Remember, you don't necessarily remember Grant Cardone or Gary Vaynerchuk because they're good or because you like their content.
You remember them 'cause they're everywhere. So it's a default recollection just by being present. It doesn't even matter if you're good, you're just there. And so when your prospects have you. Easily, uh, uh, you can, you, you know, they come to your mind. It's called front of mind marketing because you are constantly present and there.
Then when it's time for them to come to a decision, what do you think happens? You are the first in the line of consideration, so that is happening. But the other thing that's happening is that we tend to grow emotionally [00:18:00] connected to those who show up frequently. So if you think of some of your strongest relationships that you have right now, many of them, not all of them.
There's always exceptions to this kind of stuff. That's the thing about psychology. There's always exceptions, but as a general rule, the majority of the relationships that you have are a relationship in which frequency does play a part in the development of that relationship. So you are connected to the people that you're connected to in part.
Because you connect with them often, and if you are trying to change the nature of the environment of your sales conversation. One of the best things you can do is have people trust you before they get on the call. Well, one of the easiest ways to get people to trust you is to just show up often. Now, what does this all look like?
Tactically, tactically speaking, it's as simple as [00:19:00] something called nurture content. Okay? Now, if you follow what we teach. You write a book, you create a low ticket offer, you run it out to some paid traffic, you build a big old list of customers, okay? So you build a big old list of customers. And by the way, when you have advertising that pays for itself, like we recommend with books and low ticket offers, being able to perpetually run that advertisement is what?
It's a frequency play. You are listening to this podcast very likely because you've seen at least some of our ads. And you've seen them a lot, and there's a reason that we don't care what our frequency is. When we look at our Facebook ads metrics, we want frequency because we know that there's power in the frequency bias, that if we just keep showing up over and over and over and over and over again, eventually you'll say, this must be something for me to do.
Because in your brain is a pathway that is built to prefer to, it's a bias. So it's a preference towards the [00:20:00] thing that is. Uh, convenient and obvious and, uh, front of mind essentially. Okay. So anyway, so if you're listening to this podcast, it's because you've seen one of those ads, this podcast, this episode.
All the content, the emails that we send, it's more important to me to be frequent than it is necessarily to sit and worry about is this the best podcast that's ever been created? I mean, let's be honest, it's not right. I mean, a lot of this is a bullet point list of things to talk about. I kind of go off the cuff.
You know, podcast experts will say, you need to keep your podcast under 15 minutes and you need to do this, and you need to do that. You need to have all this. I don't worry about that stuff because the 80 20 in improving the sales environment for my sales team and myself. Is to show up more frequently.
And when you look at everyone who has a very successful business, you [00:21:00] will find frequency. You'll find frequency. So it's, it's important to, to keep that in mind, to bear that in mind. Now there's lots of ways to automate frequency. There's lots of ways to take frequency and turn it into retargeting campaigns and all sorts of stuff.
So those are some other solutions to. Just understanding that frequency bias exists and that if you exploit it, what will happen is a stronger pre relationship and front of mind marketing when people have, uh, you know, when, when they're ready to, to buy. I'll give you an example. In our own team, we are, uh, about to make a fairly large purchase for our company.
And we were thinking about who could help to provide it. And my operations manager, who's very soon gonna be stepping up into becoming the CEO, she mentioned to me, you know, these one people have been following up with me for the past six months. I think about them every single time they check in. Maybe let's [00:22:00] take a look at them.
And where do you think on our list of people to talk to, they went on our list pretty high. Right, because even though it was follow ups and it was nice follow up, it wasn't the kind of cheesy 19-year-old internet marketing boy who sends the follow up and says, Hey, you're a piece of crap. 'cause you didn't, you know, they try to do that fake kind of, um, I dunno what that's called.
Passive aggressive gas lighting style follow up, which never works on real people. Uh, but uh, it makes for interesting. Uh, marketing videos, I guess real decent follow up is, Hey, I was thinking about you this month. Are you guys still interested? Or, you know, what's up? How are you? Where are you? Is there anything we can do to help?
That kind of follow up will work like a charm. It's based off frequency, it's based off relationships. It's an understanding of why you follow up and et cetera. Okay? So remember that people are drawn to what's frequent and obvious and look at [00:23:00] ways in your business to increase the touch points. If all you did was just increased, how often you are communicating and trying to help people with content, with emails, with whatever, podcasting.
If you do that, whatever it is, you don't have to necessarily turn it into podcasts and videos. Maybe you just write more books. Again, this goes back to our first point. Content doesn't have to be delivered in a specific way. You're just looking for. Like we do at the end of every quarter, how many touches did we give to our audience?
And then we look at how much money we made and we say, can we increase the touches? If the answer is yes, then we can expect the following quarter our revenue to increase, even if we don't have more leads or more front end offer Sales. So really, really powerful to take a look at in your business. Just how can you more [00:24:00] frequently, uh, touch base with people.
The other thing, uh, that's important to understand is that obscurity is just horrible. It's, I know that many people listening to this will say, well, I don't want to create content. I, I'm not smart enough to create content. Nobody wants to hear what I have to hear. I would refer you back to point number one, that knowing more so spend time consuming learning, getting better so that you can create content for others.
But the alternative, which is obscurity, is willfully. Because it, it's, it's an act of will to sit down and create an audio like this. I'm just using my cell phone. I don't even know what the app is. It's the free app that comes on your cell phone. I just make some notes, click play, record, and then we upload it.
So it's a willful act to not add points into your business, and the result is obscurity. And what will happen is you may have. [00:25:00] Really smart marketing campaigns where you're bringing in all sorts of leads and all sorts of customers, but because you're not, uh, frequently touching base with them when you go to do some kind of promotion or get people to book a call, you're booking a call with gosh darn, nearly strangers.
And that's not the environment we want to create. Is it? We want to create the environment where our sales team or ourself, if we're taking the sales, are talking to friends, fans, consumers, people who already love us, right? And that's one of the ways you can do that. Okay. Point number three is to create evergreen demand.
If you want to cha radically change the environment in which you or your sales team has to sell, create evergreen demand. Now, specifically calling it evergreen because there are ways to artificially create momentary static demand. And that would be, [00:26:00] say for example, to run a launch to your email list with a deadline, right?
It's like, Hey, we only have two spots today. And it's, it's going, going, gone, right? And that's. Totally fine. It's, it's, you know, a lot of people use it. I prefer not to do launches myself. It's just not worth, the juice is hardly worth the squeeze compared to spending that same time, effort, money, et cetera, on more evergreen efforts where you can build it once, set it up, and it will go for a very long time.
But the key to evergreen demand. Is to understand the supply and demand curve and to constantly realize that you as a business owner, it's up to you to change the supply and demand curve. It's not the market who is in control of your supply and demand curve. Okay, now, what's the supply and demand curve?
Very, very simple. Econ 1 0 1, don't worry. I didn't go to college, so if I can understand it, you can understand it. [00:27:00] It's this simple. As there are fewer supplies, the cost of those supplies go up as there is less toilet paper. In the beginning of the thing that happened this year or last year or however many years it's been going, as there becomes less toilet paper on the shelves, the price of that toilet paper goes up.
We're now in the middle of some pretty intense inflation and the that occurred because the supply of money went up. We injected a bunch of money into the world, just printed it like it was going outta style, and now the demand for that money goes down because there's so much of it. Therefore, the value of that money is less.
So what we need to do. In our business is create very little supply [00:28:00] and a lot of demand, and it changes the environment of our sales conversations. Let me just give you this. It's a very simple thought experiment. If you knew that saying no to the prospect you're talking to right now, that your next call, you would be guaranteed.
To connect with a dream client, how would that change your psychology? So, lemme see if I can explain that a little bit better. Just, just a thought experiment. Most people are selling out of desperation or lack or scarcity. They get a sales lead and they're like, oh, I need to sell this. I need to sell this person.
And so what happens? It's a very different environment. The prospect has the power. And you are essentially trying to perform for them, convince them that they need to buy from you. Well, what if you [00:29:00] knew that after this call you had another call and that person was probably going to buy? Okay, you had two sales calls.
Just, just let's keep it simple. Two sales calls booked for the day. So the conversation you're having right now with this person. Almost doesn't matter. In other words, you can be outcome independent. It doesn't matter what the outcome of this call is because the next call is probably going to be sold.
Right? And now what if that was your reality every day for months and years on end and your normal was that? It didn't matter in any single phone call whether somebody was going to buy or not. How would that change you psychologically? Well, I imagine your shoulders just slumped a little bit in the sense that you finally relaxed your shoulders, [00:30:00] right?
You're not so tense. You probably are a little bit more interested in the prospect on a personal level. Because you're now changing the requirements for people to buy from you. So I think, uh, recently we just did an episode on avoiding certain people and, and be careful of certain clients. You can now start to change your sales conversation, not into you begging someone for sales, but into you using the conversation as a way to filter their.
Uh, essentially their worthiness to becoming a client of yours. So again, we've changed the nature of the conversation. It doesn't matter what the script is. If you can't create that sincere confidence in yourself to know that you have more calls and tomorrow's call is really good and all of that sort of thing.
If you don't have that sincere confidence, then it doesn't matter what the script is. [00:31:00] Okay? So what we're talking about here is creating that sincere confidence. So how do we do that? How do we actually make that happen? Well, you can't fake it. Right. You can't lie to yourself if you only have one call this week and you need that call to close.
Otherwise, you can't pay rent. There's no real mental trickery. You can play on yourself to truly believe. That you don't actually need that sales call. So the first thing is we have to actually create the results. So we need to be able to deploy a system in our business, which does give us that confidence.
And the first step to that confidence, and this is something I want you to. Always come back to whenever you're struggling with sales, whenever you're struggling with sales, just come back to this tattoo, this on the back of your mind. New leads every day, new leads every day, new leads every day. If you do not have in your in your [00:32:00] business right now, some kind of process that guarantees new leads every day.
I know it sounds so simple, but actually ask yourself, do you have a process that guarantees new leads every day? That would be step one and then step two, does that process work in your absence? If you do not have a process for bringing in leads every day? That's where I would start in your business. I wouldn't worry about sales scripts and all that kind of stuff.
Let's just get new leads coming in every single day. Because when you have that happening, your psychology will change, your actual situation will change, and then you can start working on all this stuff. As new leads come in, you can nurture them, you can know more, you can, um, exploit the frequency bias, you can create demand, et cetera.
Step one leads every day. Step two, you need those leads to come in every day independent of your input, [00:33:00] because I know you, you're a human being just like I am. And if it's dependent upon you, you have a rough patch. Those leads go up and down. It's not as secure a feeling as when you have leads coming in every day.
Step number three is to stop working with leads and start working with customers. Now, this is my personal bias, but there is a difference between having leads coming in every day. And customers coming in every day. This is why I like book funnels or low ticket funnels, although book, if I have my choice, I prefer to do a book.
Uh, why, because of some of the other stuff that we've talked about, being able to express knowledge that makes people trust you more and et cetera. But having a book funnel out there, selling books every single day. Add another book, add another book. The book funnel works without me, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay? Now I have a personal bias towards that. My company helps people do that. Uh, it is my preferred way of doing business, and it is [00:34:00] the process that I recommend to everyone. However, however, whether you have customers coming in every day, or you have leads coming in every day. It, it at the end just gets something to where you have new people coming into your world every single day, and not two or three a day, but 50, a hundred, 150, 200 people a day.
Again, whether you're using somebody else's method where they teach you to bring in freebie seekers every day, or whether you are using what we do, which is you have 50 to a hundred book sales a day, whatever it is, it doesn't matter to me. Get that started now, and what you'll have is the foundation of a, a transition into a new kind of selling environment.
Because what you will have is the ability to make tons of mistakes. You don't have to be good at sales [00:35:00] anymore if you have more people coming into your business looking for help. Than you could ever possibly serve in your current iteration of your business right now, when the demand is so great that it makes sense to start hiring.
What are you doing? You're increasing your ability to supply the growing demand, and so what are you doing? You are essentially manipulating your own supply and demand curve. You don't oversupply. You keep that supply. So when you're hiring people to help you fulfill, make sure you're not overcorrecting and now you have.
Tons of people who can fulfill on tons of orders, but not enough people coming in, and so now you have supply demand issues and et cetera, et cetera. This is a little bit more advanced than what we're talking about here, but the idea is to always come back and say, am I bringing into my world more people than I could possibly serve?
If you [00:36:00] are, you've changed your selling environment. Now people are no longer there to be sold by you. They are there to make their case as to why you should work with them or they should work with you. Now, don't abuse this. This isn't about power. This isn't about ego. This is about changing the nature of the conversation.
It's no longer I need to convince you that you should buy this. It's much more, let's see if we can do good work together. And again, uh, check out the other episode of the show where we talk about that a little bit more in depth and how to go about that process. But artificially, right, because, and when I say artificial, I mean it's something you can create.
You're not waiting for some natural pH phenomenon to occur. You can entirely control the supply and demand curve for your offers. You can, you are in charge of that. No one's gonna swoop down and do it for you. So [00:37:00] that's the bad news. The good news is you don't have to wait for anyone. You could do that today.
Now, 2022. The time of this recording could be the year that you have more people coming into your store as customers or leads, doesn't matter to me. I prefer customers, customers, or leads. You have more people coming into your store every single day than you could possibly sell to. That is when you can sell without selling.
So those are our three points. No more. So you can do all the things that people who no more can do. Number two is exploit the frequency bias, and number three is create evergreen demand. If you would like help, especially in the area of creating evergreen demand, go to peaceful profits.com/call. Have a chat with our team.
We have a lot of different ways we can help you to do that. I can promise you that our sales calls are not high pressure. Because we [00:38:00] do everything I just told you about. We have way more demand than we have supply because of things like this podcast, which we're gonna send to our email list. It's open and available in the public.
We have more than one front end offer, bringing us multiple hundreds of. Customers every single day. We then nurture those customers with content like this, with emails, et cetera. And this all has created for our sales team, which currently we have three full-time salespeople taking calls all day long, and our sales team knows that the calls can be outcome independent.
We don't have to. Try and, uh, convince anyone. We don't have to use high ticket sales tactics. We don't have to do any of that because we have these three mechanisms, plus a couple others all at play. If you would like my help, if you'd like my team's help to implement any part of this, we have all sorts of different [00:39:00] options and different ways that we can do that.
Again, peaceful privates.com/call. Otherwise, my dear friends, I hope that you have a wonderful day and I'll see you in the next episode.
