Raise your hand if you LOVE sales!!!
Anybody?
Anyone?
I know there are a few of you out there — but if you didn’t immediately put up your imaginary hand, you’re not alone. I love sales now — but I didn’t always.
When I started my coaching business, I was focused entirely on working with retreat leaders. It was the perfect way to use both my mastery as a math educator and my passion for spiritual transformation.
I worked with brilliant healers, coaches, and spiritual teachers helping them plan and execute transformational retreats that had a huge impact on their participants.
What I discovered through the process was a startling trend in my clients: they lacked experience, resilience, and mastery around sales. My clients wanted the people to just show up — as if by magic. They also had major blocks around doing the math and charging what they were worth — and the combo of these blind spots with their resistance to sales meant that they consistently struggled to fill their programs and retreats or make enough money to sustain their businesses.
Not having full programs led to them doubting their purpose and themselves. It ate away at their confidence and self-esteem and intensified their feelings of imposter syndrome.
And it honestly didn’t matter how good their curriculum was, or how beautiful the retreat center if they didn’t fill the room.
So, I started teaching sales in a way that truly resonated for my clients. And demanding that my clients master sales. Which meant a daily routine.
I taught my clients how to approach sales as a spiritual practice — a service to others, an expression of their spiritual leadership, and a self-development tool.
Here are the three main pillars of this teaching:
1. Sales is a Service
Sales are about helping another person make a clear decision about what they want to experience in their lives. This is radical and powerful because most people are used to tolerating a lack of clarity and messy decision making (or total indecision) in most areas of their lives.
Your job as a salesperson is not to get someone to buy what you’re selling: it’s to help them make a clear decision about what’s next for them. If part of what’s next for them aligns to your product or service, great! Then it’s your job to sell that to them.
That’s service.
Let me say it again: your job is to help people find clarity — not buy your product.
When you change your mindset to approach a sale as service, you automatically make the sale about what will serve the other person. You also understand that if hiring you or buying your product does not directly serve the other person’s vision then there’s no need for a sale. It’s your job to celebrate their clarity and release them with love.
The next time you’re entering into a sales conversation, ask yourself, “What would need to happen to allow this sales conversation to deeply serve the other person?”
Then do it that way.
2. Sales is Saying “Yes” to Change
Anytime you make a clear decision to purchase any product or service, you are doing so because you want something to change.
Let’s look at some examples:
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When you buy dinner, you want to feel nourished.
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When you buy a TV, you want to be entertained.
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When you buy a session with a spiritual teacher, you want to go deeper, experience less suffering, claim more freedom, know the truth, etc.
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When you buy a book on marketing, you want to learn something new that you can apply to your life and business.
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When you buy a six-figure coaching program, you want to completely transform your relationship with your partner, business, money, self, etc.
These examples have a range of intensity and scale, but the heart of each purchase is about saying “yes” to some type of change in your life. Whether big or small, internal or external, short term or long term, spiritual or material — sales is about change.
When you have that clarity in mind, you can easily see who truly wants change and who doesn’t.
If your potential client or customer wants the change your product or service makes possible, it is your job to help them create that change by buying what you’re selling.
3. Sales is a Spiritual Practice
As we’ve discussed, the sale is an offering to a potential client or customer. The sale is also the practice for you to become a more powerful leader, teacher, healer, guide or coach. Why? Because each moment of a sales conversation demands that you stay in service — and all the moments you’re distracted, resistant, judgmental, codependent, or emotional show you the next place you have to grow and give you the opportunity to release it.
In my experience working with spiritual entrepreneurs, sales isn’t the best spiritual practice — but it’s the “next” one, the next meditation, the next growth opportunity. Sales takes us deeper by holding up a mirror to our egos, our co-dependencies, and our emotional dysfunction. Sounds fun, right? LOL. It is truly uncomfortable to look at this stuff — AND it’s one of the fastest and most effective tools for getting free.
When I first started sales, I was constantly thinking about myself. I thought, “Will the person say ‘yes’ or ‘no’? Am I doing this right? Am I going to get a ‘yes’?” I was constantly spinning out and believing that the content of my thoughts needed my attention. It did not.
The only thing that truly needed my attention was the person in front of me. And what I learned to do — and do well — was wake up when I was not being attentive to the person in front of me, and pivot my attention back to them instantaneously.
Hence, spiritual practice.
Doing sales requires stepping into your most generous, unapologetic, conscious, and mindful self — the perfect spiritual practice.
If you’re ready to start your own business, but don’t know where to begin, check out Jesse Johnson’s free online course, “The Energetics of Sales”.