Transcription

00:00:00
In this episode, we're going to be diving into how you can keep your mouth shut and actually get a client. Some of the most common questions I get from new business owners is how do I do a proposal?

00:00:21
How do I do a whole presentation? How do convince people to buy from me? What should my slide deck look like? And I don't answer those things because it really doesn't matter. In your very first sales call with someone, we can call it a sales call, we can call an enrolment call, you can call a discovery call.

00:00:39
You can call it anything, honestly. But in that first call, you should only be talking 20% of the time. Now, this is really hard for business owners with ADHD because three things get activated in us when we're talking to someone who's expressed interest in what we do now, number one is our hyper fixation gets activated. So you know when you have an interest in something, when you're really passionate about something and someone asks you about it? You can talk for hours on end about that thing, and you're so excited for it, and you just assume they're just as excited when they really just asked you, what are you up to in regards to this thing for your business?

00:01:24
This can happen also. I see this happen so often, especially with new coaches who have just learned how to coach. They've maybe gone through their certification process and someone asks them, oh, tell me about your coaching business. And they go on this journey about how they do the coaching and about powerful questions and about how you let people feel their feelings and all this stuff. And they use really, really coachy language.

00:01:48
And if you look over at the other person, they've checked out, their eyes have glossed over, they're thinking, oh, my God, how do I escape this conversation? I didn't mean for this to happen. This happened with my dad once, actually, when I was like six years old. I was sitting in the kitchen with him and the news was playing, and there was something about Afghanistan on. And I asked my dad, where is Afghanistan?

00:02:11
And my dad, who is a geography major and really loves talking about geopolitical situations around the world, pulls out an atlas, and instead of just pointing to this country on a map, he goes into a half hour long spiel about everything that was happening in Afghanistan at the time. Now, this is the mid 90s, just mind you. So there was a lot happening then, talking about the history, talking about the Taliban and Russia and all this stuff. And I remember seeing my mom sneaking in from the backyard and sneaking up the back stairs. She looked over at me like, "Poor thing".

00:02:49
And I looked at her with eyes that just screamed, Rescue me. And she just smiled and kind of silently laughed and shook her head and just disappeared upstairs. Now, I want you to imagine when you're on your sales call with a client and you're talking too much, your client is that six year old, and that's not the experience a potential client should be having with you on that sales call.

00:03:13
So you want to notice that this is your hyper fixation and remember that this is about them. This is not about you and not about what you do. Your potential clients actually do not care about what you do. It doesn't matter to them if you could solve their problems by belly dancing for them. Believe you me, they would be there just saying, Dance, bitch, dance.

00:03:39
They would not care if you could magically belly dance and solve their problems. They would just want you to dance for them. That's it. So this is about them. It's not about you, and it's not about what you do.

00:03:49
So no one cares about what you do. Stop talking about it. The second thing that happens for the ADHD entrepreneur is we tend to mirror energy, okay? So if this person is really excited to talk to us and they're animated and they're sharing stories and they're going on and on about their problems and what they really, really want, and if it's at all similar to our troubles and our desires, we can get activated and start going into story sharing mode. And you know what that mode is?

00:04:17
It's like someone tells you about a vacation that they were on, and it reminds you of a vacation you went on once, and you start sharing that story back, okay? That does not help them make a decision if they want to hire you or not. That's something you do with friends. They may decide at the end of this conversation, wow, I really want to be friends with this person, but they're not going to buy from you. And by the way, that's a really awkward way to start a friendship.

00:04:42
It's like, no, I don't want to give you my money for the thing, but do you want to hang out sometime? Probably not going to end up in friendship. Let's be real. It's going to end up in a lot of regrets for friendship. Now, the other thing that happens for the ADHD entrepreneur is we have a lack of emotional impulse control.

00:04:58
So when we feel excitement for everything that they're telling us, we sometimes just start talking out of excitement. We start talking about all the things that we could do. We start wanting to convince them that we can help them. This is something that we just all have to be aware of. If you know that when you get excited about something or inspired by something that you tend to get really excited.

00:05:22
You want to literally just hold your lips shut. This is one of the reasons that. When I'm training sales to my clients, I tell them, do not do sales on Zoom. One of the reasons there are a bunch of other benefits of doing all your sales calls on the actual phone. But on Zoom, people are going to see you hold your lip shut, literally, like pinching the top lip and the bottom lip together with your fingers.

00:05:42
If you want to do the duck bill platypus, you could also do that. I got that from Runaway Bride, by the way. Thank you. Julia Roberts so it's just something to be aware of. If you have a lack of emotional impulse control, then knowing that and kind of checking in with yourself before you get on the sales call is going to be really powerful because you're about to get on the phone.

00:06:02
With someone who you know you're going to get excited for, and you just kind of have to take a deep breath and just go with it. So there are a couple of things that you can do that will make you better on a sales call that will help you keep your mouth shut. And we're going to go into those right now. So the number one thing is listening better. Now, we all think that we're great listeners, right?

00:06:23
But how most people listen is a very surface level style of listening, okay? So most of the time people listen. And while they're listening to someone else, yes, they're hearing the words, but what they're really doing is in their own head, they're coming up with what they're going to say next.

00:06:43
So if someone's sharing a story, then you're in your head thinking of a story, you can share back. If someone's sharing a problem, you're in your head thinking about another problem or a solution that you can share back. Now, that is not listening. That is being in conversation, but it's not listening. To listen better, you want to listen, yes, to the words that they're saying, but you also want to tune into what's the emotion that's being communicated under the surface.

00:07:11
In coaching, we call this level two listening. So the key to listening is honestly silence. Now, what you don't want to do is just get on the phone with them and say, hi, I'm so and so. Is this so and so? Oh, great.

00:07:26
And then just stay silent and listen. For them, breathing, that doesn't help. Okay, so for you to be a good listener, you also have to be a good question asker. Let me tell you what this doesn't look like. Being a good question asker doesn't mean asking smart questions.

00:07:43
The smarter your question, the harder it's going to be to answer. So, for instance, say you are a relationship coach and you're trying to get to the bottom of if this person is a good fit for you. You want to get them talking about what they're struggling with in their marriage and what they want in the future. You may think this is a really great question, asking them, so tell me, what are the three things that you struggle with with your husband and how do you want me to help you? Now, you might get some answers about what they're struggling with with their husband, but they don't know how they want you to help them.

00:08:18
They're not an expert in what you do. They have no idea what you do. For all they know, you could be a magic belly dancer. So you're asking a question that's hard for them to answer. You're not going to get a long answer.

00:08:28
A better question to ask is what do you want from your relationship? And the key here is silence. You want to ask the question and stay silent, something that people automatically do when they ask a question. There's not an immediate answer is, we follow up with another question. I want you to imagine you're in school and the teacher knows that no one has done the homework.

00:08:49
They can do a quiz and they could ask everyone an essay question, right? Which is that first short question, what do you want from your relationship? So when the person doesn't answer the question the way you want, or they're taking some time to think about it, what does the teacher do in that situation? They go to multiple choice, oh, well, do you want more romance? Do you want more sex?

00:09:08
Do you want them to be more supportive of your career? I mean, yes, you could potentially get an answer, but the person you're on a sales call with was just thinking about the first question. You've now interrupted them with a second question. And none of those options might be relevant to what they want, but they're going to think about those three options because there are the options you gave and they're going to think, well, which one is the least miserable for me? And then they're going to be thinking about, well, which one is true or which one do I want?

00:09:35
And then in the school scenario, what does the teacher do when no one knows multiple choice questions? They go to true and false. So do you want a good relationship or not? Which, as I bet you can imagine, creates a very argumentative and accusatory sales call, and we don't want that. So when you do get on a sales call with someone, there are a few things that you want to ask.

00:09:57
You want to ask them what they want, what's getting in the way of them doing it, and really, what are they afraid of or frustrated with in trying to get to where they want to go. And so you want to ask the question, what is it that you want? And you want to stay silent. And oftentimes people will answer with, Well, I don't know.

00:10:20
I want you to think about when you turn on the shower in the morning, right? And the water is not going to immediately be hot, okay. So the pipes have to flush out all the cold water before the hot water can get to the shower spout. Okay? When someone says I don't know to a big question like that, I want you to imagine that's just the cold water coming through.

00:10:40
They have to get it out of their system before the real answer can come through. So when they say, I don't know, you just stay silent. You just wait for them to know. Okay? People tend to use I don't know or "oooh, that's a good question."

00:10:54
Or "ooh, I'm not sure" as a way to buy time as they're thinking about things. So give them the time to think through it and don't panic. They're not not going to answer it. If they genuinely do not know, they will reiterate that and then you at that point are allowed to ask a question a different way. Sometimes people will give you a very short answer like, oh, well, I would like more intimacy in my relationship.

00:11:19
And after they answer in that way, I want you to stay silent for another 10 seconds. And I know this seems uncomfortable, and it is. It's basically a game of chicken that you're going to have with this person on a sales call because people inherently want to fill silence. And so this person who has just given you a kind of short answer that really you don't know what that means for them because intimacy can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people in that silence. They're going to be like, oh shit, they're waiting for more, okay?

00:11:51
And then they'll start explaining what they mean by intimacy and you just let them talk. Now, if that doesn't happen, you can ask a follow up question like, well, what does intimacy mean to you? What would an intimate relationship look like for you? And again, you want to stay silent until they give you a really juicy answer. But I want to remind you, the more simple the question, the easier it is for them to answer your questions.

00:12:16
Also, don't have to be specific to what you do with them. Actually, they shouldn't be because if you're a career coach and you're asking a whole bunch of questions about what this person wants for their job, guess what? You're not getting information on. You're not getting information on their family, on their personal life, on their love life, on their health goals, all things that are going to be contributing factors to whether or not they sign up with you. Someone can come in and say, yeah, I want a promotion.

00:12:44
Great, let's get you that promotion. Oh, well, I'm not sure if this is the right choice for me because you haven't tied into well, why do you want the promotion? Oh, you want your daughters to be able to see that women can climb the ladder. Oh, wow. So it sounds like you really want to be a strong role model for them.

00:13:00
You also want to have more time off. Okay, great. So what job would that be? That we can get you more time off? Because maybe it's not going up the ladder.

00:13:09
Maybe it's a lateral move to a different company that has better time off policies and and pays more. Maybe being a role model to your daughters means being comfortable negotiating for more money in the position that you're in that you already love. You get to the root of the problem as to how you can help. But if you're only asking about the promotion that they say that they want, you're not getting any of that. So make it not specific to what you do.

00:13:33
So listening is super important. You need to be comfortable with the silence. And let me tell you, you can practice this with anyone in your life, okay? So your significant other, your family members, I want you to ask them broad, open ended questions like, what do you want? What would make you happiest in life and stay silent?

00:13:56
I did this with my cousin's son when he was nine years old. He was switching schools. He's going from a public school to a private school. And we were driving to pick up his sister from like, little League or something. And I remember asking him about how he was feeling about this big transition coming up.

00:14:12
And he's a nine year old boy. He wasn't really going to want to talk to me. And so he's like, yeah, I'm fine. And I stayed silent, and I stayed silent, and I stayed silent. He's like, well, actually, I'm a little nervous.

00:14:25
I only have a few friends at my public school and I am worried that it's going to be really hard to make friends at this new school. And then I stayed silent. And then I stayed silent. And then I stayed silent. And then he kept sharing with me.

00:14:40
And he could tell I was listening because I was looking over at him. I was driving, so I wasn't like, looking at him full time, but I nod and go. And he kept just sharing because he had the space to share. And I'm so glad that I learned this skill. I literally learned this skill, like three weeks before this conversation.

00:14:58
And let me tell you, I was so excited to be able to give him the space to talk about what he was concerned about because as he shared, we were able to talk through it. And after that conversation, he told me he felt a lot more confident about being able to make friends. That's what's possible when you become a better listener. So I urge you, practice this with everyone. When you listen at this level, you're really getting in tune with who this person is on a deeper level and how magical is it to be able to understand your potential client at that level and know that you can help on their side.

00:15:34
It also feels magical because they feel like you get them. It feels like you've listened and you understand them on that level because you do. That's one of the most impactful things that you can do in a sales call. If you take nothing else away from this episode, I want you to remember that this is also something that I train in all of my programs, how to do this in a sales call. So it's not just an amorphous question asking game.

00:15:57
And if you're curious about that, then you can go to Winniecast.com Holisticselling. Now, the next thing that can happen in the sales call is, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

00:16:17
Now, the next thing that can happen in the sales call is you are experiencing all this excitement, right, because your hyper fixation has been activated and you're mirroring their energy and you have this lack of emotional impulse control, right? So here is this person who you're so excited could be your client. You could help them. They could also pay you money. And you're just bubbling up and you're bubbling over.

00:16:40
Now, you being excited for yourself is nice, but you being excited for them is way better. Now, when you're excited for you, you tend to want to just share all the details about your program. You want to show them a slide deck. You want to tell them all the things that are special about you and what you do and EW, gross. No one cares.

00:17:02
When you're excited for the other person, what you're actually doing is painting a picture of what their future could look like if they choose to work with you and if they do the work. And when done well, you're also giving this person permission to dream bigger than they've ever dreamed before. And when you do this, you can feel like you're being kind of a fortune teller and honestly just go with it because I want you to trust your intuition here that you understand on a deeper level what this person might want in their future. And even if you get it wrong, they're going to bounce back with what they actually want. So what this looks like is say you have someone who wants to start a business and they really care about empowering underrepresented people to run for office.

00:17:46
Like they want to coach anyone who wants to run for office and start representing in their local government and you can name for them, wow, it sounds like you really want to change the world. And what I actually see for you is not only running a coaching business where you're helping local soon to be politicians with their speaking abilities, how to get in touch with voters, and to build up their confidence so they can actually get on stage. I actually see you on stage. I see you at the Democratic National Convention being a prespeaker to whoever's keynoting that at that time, but inspiring all the delegates in that conference center to throw their name in the hat for the next election. I see you inspiring them to boost up other underrepresented people so that they can run for office.

00:18:41
And think of the impact you could have if you were standing on stage in front of, what, 8000 people. That would be incredible. That person might not have thought that big before, and they may not even want to be on stage, and they may come back with, oh, well, that sounds terrifying. I do not want to do that. But you know what I would love to do is I would love to write a book, and I would love to have a table at the Democratic Convention.

00:19:06
I would love to give this book away to anyone who wants it. And it's the one, two, three s of getting elected, and I'd want to put that book in anyone's hands who's ready to run for office. You've just given them permission to think bigger than they were thinking already. And in the sales call, you don't have to explain about what you do, but you can say that that's what I want to help you with at that point. Them signing up with you is not about how much your time is worth.

00:19:33
It's not about the things that they're going to do with you. It's about them getting to their big goal. So you're listening better. You are transferring your excitement from you to them because it's all about them. It has nothing to do with you.

00:19:46
And finally, there's just some self management.

00:19:52
We all know when we are in communicating mode and we're excited with this person and we want to share stories, it's really hard to self manage, and this does take practice. I'm going to say it like it's easy, but it's not easy. It's going to take practice. You need to just shut up. You have to just tell yourself.

00:20:11
Your stories do not matter here. You sharing back about your feelings does not matter here. This call is for them. It's not for you. So some things that can help you manage yourself better is honestly writing on a piece of paper right in front of you.

00:20:27
Shut up. Don't tell stories. Don't try to share back. Listen to them. Seriously, listen to them.

00:20:35
Ask follow up questions if it helps you also to take notes while you're hearing what they're saying, sometimes that makes a difference to really tap you into that level two listening. And as you're taking notes, you might come up with more inspired follow up questions for them. It's also great for you if you have any follow ups with them, you can refer back to those notes. Also, another benefit of taking notes is that you're going to be occupied. So you literally cannot mirror their energy.

00:21:04
You're listening and you're taking it in and you're just writing it down. While you're trying to self manage and hold yourself back from sharing all these stories, it's helpful to remind yourself that you are also interviewing them. If you're going to take this client on, you may work with them for a month to three years, depending on what you do, right? That's a lot of time. Do you want to work with them?

00:21:27
Are they funny? Do you get good vibes? Do they annoy the crap out of you? Pay attention to that. Help yourself out in the long run by assessing if this is the right client for you.

00:21:39
If you tend to over talk, you're never going to figure that out. And guess what happens if they do sign up, which is unlikely, but if they do sign up, you're going to be miserable working with them. And as with anything, getting good at sales takes practice. I hear from so many new business owners who come to me and they're just like, I suck at sales. I'm the worst.

00:21:59
Can't do it. I'll never be able to do it. And they're always surprised when I ask them if they were trained on it, because they assume that people who do sales just are naturally good at it. No, that's not how it's done. People can be naturally personable, they can be naturally talkative, they can be natural networkers.

00:22:17
But no one's good at sales right off the bat. Everyone who is in sales has been trained at it. And by the way, even my clients who come from a sales background, when they work with me, they have to be retrained on sales because selling your service and your time is way different from selling cars or houses or anything that is separate from yourself. It's way more emotional. So be gentle with yourself and forgiving you can get good at this, it's just going to take some know how and some practice and you shutting up.