Episode 5: The 4-Step Sales System

Hello. Hello, everyone. So today we are going to be talking all about my four-step sales system. How you go from doing the amazing marketing, managing your leads all the way to actually selling someone to sign up to work with you. And, this is something that I was really intimidated by when I first started my business, and I know that's where you guys might be, too.

So within this episode, I'm going to cover all of the things that I would love for you to do before you actually get on a consult or a sales call, how to outline and timeout your consultant sales call. And third, the third step is why you should have three templated responses prepared for after the consult and what you should do after a consult or a sales call.

So, within sales, I think that a lot of the rhetoric around sales is not at all the way I feel about sales now. At this stage of my business, I realize that I want you to reframe the way that you think about sales. And I want you to think about it as you serving people. I want you to think about being on a sales call is just getting to show up for someone committed to, serve them and help them in any, every possible way you can, but not necessarily attached to them being your next client.

It can feel really scary at the beginning of your business because essentially a lot of your income and a lot, of times our brains make it mean that the, a lot is riding on you closing a sales call. And again, the rhetoric around sales a lot of times can be somewhat negative. And I want you to know that being in a sales conversation is one of the most beautiful things that you can do, where you can hold space for this person and let them dream about what the future of their life could be. An alternative they probably never even realized would be possible if not were, because if they didn't work with you, they wouldn't know what it would be like.

So, within the four-step sales system, I want to make sure that you feel so in service, feeling like you really are showing up and are able to care for these amazing people that you're about to help. And in order to do that, your brain is going to have a lot of mental chatter before a sales call.

So one of the things that we want to do is we want to clean it up before you get on a sales call. And it was like the thumbs up just came up on. But when you were thinking about going onto a sales call, especially if you are at your first six figures, what happens is your brain makes the sales call mean a lot of things. It makes it mean if they ghost you or if they don't want to work with you, then it means something really negative.

And our brains are designed to be like that, because if you think about where human beings have evolved from, we used to be in, like, communities and in tribes. And if somebody, somebody didn't have, if someone didn't like you, if someone rejected you, if you failed, or if you were abandoned in any way, it literally felt life-threatening.

And there's good news and bad news. The good news is, someone rejecting you isn't going to actually kill you. It does feel like it in the moment. But I promise you, you will live to tell the tale. And what happens is within your business. That's why it's so, so, so, so important for you to remind yourself, hey, worst case scenario, this person doesn't sign, and there are so many more humans on the planet that I could totally help, and we're going to be okay.

So the bad news is your brain is going to default to that fear factor, like, 80% of the time. It's called, it's your subconscious, your nervous system. I am jumbled, bundling those terms together. I'm sure there are people who are very into science and know far more than I do, but when you're thinking about that part of your brain, that's the part of the brain that's the oldest, and I've heard it nicknamed the primitive brain, lizard brain, but that piece of you is still really awesome and really important, and it served you really well. But we cannot use that part of your brain to make decisions on sales calls.

And if you are feeling nervous before a sales call, that already means that your emotions are high. So when your emotions are high, what's physically happening? If you think about a group, I'm going to give you a very vague, general, non-professional, overview of something called the polyvagal theory. Feel free to look it up. It is something that has been very interesting as I've grown my business.

And what happens is, as your emotions rise, what's happening is you. Your brain literally cuts off blood through blood flow through your, to your prefrontal cortex. That's the newest part of your brain. It's developed right behind your forehead, and it's a logical part of your brain that can actually make decisions and think rationally. So that's the part of your brain that's functioning 20% of the time.

So your number one job on the consult is to get into a place where you are regulated and, like, really in a state of not being activated or triggered. No matter the outcome, I promise you're going to be okay from it. And what I want you to do is before you get on a sales call, I want you to really get any negative thoughts out about the consult call out about anything, and I want you to work on your thoughts about your sales call.

I teach my clients I have, like, a very long, little pre-consult worksheet that I give them. However, for you, one of the things that you just need to know if you are not a life coach, one of the things that I learned about coaching is that your thoughts create your results. I'll tell you all about the way that I was trained in a later episode, but all you really need to know is that your thoughts create your result.

And what really is happening is there is a neurological impulse where that happens in your brain. A hormone will be secreted because of the pulse. And then you are going to do things that are going to create the results in your life. So you want to be intentional about doing things and creating a response that is going to serve the other person.

And that does not mean you're always going for a yes. Your goal should never be 100% conversion because there are always going to be people that might not be a good fit for you. It is my personal opinion. So within your sales call, when you're going to do a sales call, before the sales call even happens, until you get into a place where you're doing enough sales calls, that it's almost like exposure therapy, where you're, like, not feeling as nervous anymore beforehand.

What I want you to do is I want you to do an exercise I call limiting to empowering beliefs. It is literally where you are going to write down all of the negative thoughts in your brain before a consult, and you're going to give it a more empowering belief in a solution around it.

For instance, if you're thinking, they don't like me before, when you're in a consult, we want to use your, your primitive brain, the fear

part of the, part of your brain that's really going to be quite fearful. Technically, it's going to be like your amygdala. And what's going to happen is you want to get out all the fears. You want to be like, all right, tell me, what are all the things that you're scared of?

Primitive part of my brain, and I want you to list them out, and then I want you to negate those negative thoughts. So it's like what if they don't like me? What if they think I'm a loser? What if they hate this offer? All the thoughts that might be going on in your brain, which are totally normal, I want you to know it's not a problem that if you have those thoughts, that nothing has gone wrong.

And what I would love for you to do is think of a way, a, more empowering reframe for each of the thoughts. Okay, so you might have this thought like, I, they might not like me on the call. And it's like that, we know, could be a thought that would be a limiting thought.

I want you to draw a little arrow and I want you to be like, okay, what's a more empowering thought I could have instead? What is something that I could think? What is something that I could think that would make me feel better than thinking they might not like me? When you are able to manage your mind, you are able to show up truly in service.

You're going to be able to be detached from this person and you're going to be committed to serve them to the best of your ability. So it's the first thing that you want to do.

The second thing that you want to do is you want to have an outline for your sales call. Now, the majority of sales calls that, first off, I've seen a lot of sales scripts. I've actually heard one recently, and it was like just really interesting because they weren't really listening to the person.

So again, if you're nervous, you're going to talk more. You want to be talking 20% of the time. That means that you are asking a lot of questions for 80% of the consult within this, what you want to do is you want, the basic overview of having questions asked during a consult is where are you now? Where do you want to be after x amount of time of us working together?

And then you fill in the gaps for your plan within that overview, what I like to do is I like to make it really specific for your offer. So if you are helping somebody coming back to your pillars, I like to ask them, where are they at now and where do they want to go with the pillars?

And I'll link the first episode or the second episode about making your six-figure offer in here. But for instance, if one of the pillars of your offer is a program or is confidence, what you want to do is instead of just asking them in general, where are they at now? Where do they want to go? And it's like, well, I'm in Raleigh I want to go maybe live in Germany.

You know what I mean? It's like, that's so vague. And it's helpful at the beginning, but you're not going to know where to guide them because every single consult is going to be so drastically different. You're going to be like, where do you, where are you now? Where do you want to go? It's like, well, are we talking about my car? Are we talking about my personal life? Especially if you're a generalist, it can get really in the weeds and you can really help people.

So that is a huge issue when you are going on your consults. What you want to do is you want to make it specific about your offer. So when your brain is, like, lighting up and panicking and having all the thoughts, you can really know that you can help this person with specific things. So, for instance, if you're like, okay, I want help with, if, one of your pillars is stress, you can say, okay, where are you at with your stress? On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst, ten being the best, and then they'll say they're number, and then you'll ask them, why are you that number?

Then what you're going to do is you're going to go and you're going to say, okay, where do you want to be six months from now with stress? If your program is six months long, and a lot of times they're not going to be able to articulate what stress like, what that would actually be.

A lot of times, people have a really hard time. So those be, like, less stressed. Good. But you can help them make it even better. And so what you'll say is you'll be like, oh, thank you for sharing that with me. Within my six-month program, I have this, protocol that I teach my clients called the stress reset, and it helps them to, whenever they're feeling stressed throughout the day.

It sounds like your boss is someone that's causing you a lot of stress. It helps them to have an intentional way to deal with it so that their boss doesn't trigger them anymore. That's like something that would be useful for you. They'll be like, oh, yeah. And then you go on to the next step and you're like, okay, tell me about where you are now with confident or with time management, let's say.

And they're like, oh, wait, I'm. They'll rank the number, why, where they want to go, and then you'll be like, here is my specific process for this when you have that level of an outline, it makes things so much easier. So when you are outlining and when you're thinking about your sales call, you want to start off by just saying hello.

Then you want to get into, when you're thinking about that, that sales call, you want to identify their basic needs, and then you want to build out a blueprint for where they are now and where they want to go. And then you want to do a q and a and be like, okay, here's the way I would help you. I would help you with this, this and this. We would work together one on one. Do you have any questions about what that would look like? Maybe might ask like, okay, do I get support from you outside of the calls?

And it's like, yeah, you can message me anytime, virtually, things like that. And then you have, them do a q and a. Be like, that's like the next little piece of it. You're going to get additional information, and then you're going to get into pricing and decision making.

So what will happen then is if they have no other questions, they might ask you the price as a question, or you can be like, here's a price. What questions do you, how would you want to move forward with that? That's the way I like to, ask them. They'll usually give you a response, and then you like to make a decision on the call.

So that involves, like, if they have any objections, if they have any questions about that, we'll do a whole probably episode just around

objections and actually, like, helping people make a decision on the call. But that is a critical piece of things.

And then you want to give them a recap and say, hey, thanks. There are going to be three responses from that consult, and what you're going to do is you are going to give that outline to them. You're going to do the actual consult. And then, and I'll give you guys, I actually wrote, a breakdown, so I'm going to give you that today.

Six phases of a consult call, I call it. And for that first step, the agenda here. Hi. Nice to see you. Where are we going? About five minutes. Identify big needs. That's about five to ten minutes. Have a blueprint built out. That's about ten to 20 minutes. So notice that by 30 minutes in, you should be getting to questions.

And I would recommend that you make your consults a full hour because you really want to get into knowing what they're all about, telling them all these different things, and then you want to get into the pricing, take about five minutes to ten minutes for that and then recap. And thank you.

The biggest mistake I see people do is they, don't get, they don't get an answer on the sales call. And that's a really important thing because in order for you to move forward and for them to actually have a decision, they need to actually know what it's like to work with you. So what you want to do is you want to actually have them make a decision. And if they need a follow-up call, make that decision on the call.

And then if they want to actually work with you, decide a time within the next seven days if possible, that they are actually going to start working with you. So that is the general overview of a sales call. And when we're thinking about that, what you want to do is afterwards your brain is going to be shot.

If you do the limiting to empowering beliefs beforehand, which I would highly, highly recommend until you feel like totally like cool on a sales call. What I would do is I would recommend doing like an hour of that. At first, just the pre-consult work, really thinking about your thoughts.

Then I would say that the second step in the system would be to outline and actually do the sales call for 60 minutes. And then afterwards, what's going to happen is your brain is going to be freaking out and you're going to have lots of thoughts. But you want to be a professional and you want to follow up very quickly.

You want to give a quick response. So I would recommend writing three responses for you just in a separate document. And I would have them ready and queued up to go. So I would have a response for not now and being like, hey, thanks for meeting for this consult.

I really appreciate you meeting with me. No big deal. Still going to keep in touch. Thank you again. And if you ever need, anything, please let me know. You're going to have another response for follow-ups. It's like, hey, thank you again for meeting with me.

I can't wait for you to follow. I can't wait to see if this is a good fit for you. Let's, here's the link for our follow up. Usually I recommend doing a follow up in 48 hours after the initial sales call. Feel free to like, send any questions that you or any other critical decision makers have and send it my way.

And that would be like the second thing I would have queued up and then the third one would be like, hey, thank you so much for today. Here is the payment link. And send them the payment link. Don't get them all onboarded. If you have like a lengthy onboarding process.

I do, like for instance, I actually make people's, I make a folder with all this, all these templates for them. I have to add them to my portal so they can get all the modules and they can access to pretty much everything they need. It's a lengthy process and I also send them like links for their calls and stuff like that. So I actually don't do that right after the call.

They aren't going to. Most humans will pay a little bit later. They might pay right before the call actually starts. So I wait until they actually have, ah, paid in order to onboard them. I would recommend you do the same. And so I want you to send out whatever response you need and then I want you to evaluate the consult.

There are. Again, I teach my clients like a very in-depth evaluation process, but just a super simple one that you can get from this consult or from this podcast would be what worked. Because I'm sure there are amazing things that worked on it. And your brain, it takes five positive thoughts to replace every negative thought.

So I want you to write down five positive, like what worked and try and come up with five because your brain is going to fixate on the negative. And then I want you to list like what would you love to improve next time? What would be great to make even better for the next sales call.

I've heard this state before where it was like what didn't work? And if you tell your brain to look for what didn't work, it's going to freak out and it's not going to serve you. So you want to think about instead what could of use improvement, what could be even better.

And then that makes your brain like a little like, oh yeah, like that would be nice. I would love to improve that. But I'm really proud of what I did and how I showed up on the sales call. I, because I know I showed up to the best of my ability, even if it wasn't made my best work I possibly could have done.

And then last but not least, you want to evaluate what you want to do differently and make intentional plans for that next time. So the next time you're doing your pre-consult work, you can definitely take a look at the notes that you said and get it ready to roll.

So my friends, in essence, when we're thinking about just four steps to having a sales system, I would recommend doing pre-consult work. I'd recommend having an outline and clear agenda for your call. I would also make sure that you have those templated responses ready to go so that you don't have to worry if your brain is freaking out after a call.

And then I would intentionally evaluate your consult and see how you could make it even better for the future. I hope this was very helpful for you. I'm including the timing for the consult call in this bottom area, and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.