Hi, George here from Bigger Brighter Bolder. Today is a message about sales and the importance of, instead of ignoring sales, avoiding sales, and trying to hide from sales, actually taking sales and bringing it to the forefront of your business.
It can be an uncomfortable concept for many business owners, because when you set up your business, you didn't set it up so you could be a ‘sleazy’ salesperson. You set up your business so you could do what you do best and bring it to market - bring it to customers, bring it to fellow human beings, and make the world a little bit better - whilst maybe giving yourself a certain lifestyle and a certain freedom while you were doing it.
You didn't, however, set up your business so you could bash away at sales all day long, getting rejected, maybe feeling like you're pushy. The chances are, like many small business owners, you might be avoiding sales opportunities because of the discomfort. When someone lands you a lead on your lap and says, "Here you are, look, George, I've been speaking to this person. They love what you're doing, they'd like to talk to you about how you can help them." We love that sales opportunity all day long. I know you do too, you love that conversation.
When I'm talking about sales, I'm not talking about the ones that land on our plate in front of us. What I'm talking about are the ones we have to go out and work for, the ones we have to go out and do some cold connecting for, maybe even some cold telephone sales, or we reach out through LinkedIn, maybe through networking. That can be really uncomfortable for many business owners.
However, the longer that you put off embracing sales in your business, the longer your business is going to struggle to achieve what it otherwise could do. Conversely, the quicker you accept sales as part of your daily life, the quicker you accept that sales is a fundamental part of your business and you bring it to your daily activity, the quicker that both you and your business will achieve the next level.
So, my mission with all my entrepreneurs and business owners and Success Groups isn't to beat them with a stick, to make them do sales - I do a little bit of that sometimes - but actually it's to get business owners to fall in love with sales.
Every year, at least two times a year - this year I think we've done three - we do something called the 28-Day I Love Sales Challenge. All our members, from start-up, all the way through to our multi-million-pound businesses, come together and for 28 days straight focus on sales.
The reason we do that is to break any of those bad habits, to blow off all those cobwebs we might have around sales, to get over ourselves, to kind of gamify the process. So, it's less about every individual conversation and more about being part of a team that's out there challenging themselves. And they’re sharing their successes, and then licking their wounds together as well.
Over 28 days, we literally can transform people's mindset. And it's called the I Love Sales Challenge, not the Sales Challenge, because it's not just about doing the sales for 28 days, I want people to fall in love with sales, because when you fall in love with sales, you will look for opportunity to do sales. Not just the easy sales that fall in your lap, but also to go out there and to prospect and to cold call or to cold connect and to meet people and to have conversations and pull them in and start talking about how you can serve them, how you can help them.
When you start to realize that sales is the very thing that's going to enable you to do why you set up your business, and the quicker you realize that every hour you spend doing sales is worth a small fortune to your business, you start to get over yourself a little bit, and you start to embrace sales, and you want to bring sales right to the centre of your business, the heart of your business.
And, you want to be a sales person that you can go to sleep with at night, and feel comfortable with. This is not about putting your foot in the door and being a sleazy used car salesman. You know, we've moved on a long, long way from that. And, there are many ways of selling to prospects without having to be that sales person that maybe you think you need to be.
So what we do is we help people in order to overcome their inner challenges, and their inner blocks to sales, whilst also helping them with their sales tactics and their skillsets, and we create this incredible team environment to make the whole thing fun, pleasurable, so that people fall in love with sales.
Sales, of course, is not just for the 28-day challenge. Sales is something that they take on and build those habits on and they do every single day, every single week of their business.
So, if you're a business owner and you find yourself hiding from sales a little bit, you need to understand that when you're hiding from sales, you're actually hiding from your own success.
And, if you want to be successful in business - whatever that means to you by the way, I'm not going to put a label on what that looks like - but if you want to be successful in business, you're going to have to also be successful at sales.
And, when you embrace those two things, synonymous with one another, and you truly start to not only acknowledge sales as a fundamental part of your success and of your growth and also, of being able to give what it is you want to give to the world around you, then you start to embrace sales.
The more you embrace sales, the more you connect with sales and the results - all results, not just your financial ones, but the results of growing your business, the pride of growing your business, but also being able to help more and more people - the more you want to do, the more motivated you're going to be.
The more you do that, the more you're going to fall in love with it.
When you love something, you'll always find an opportunity to do it. So don't hide from sales, don't hide behind other activity. Many small business owners get busy with clients, and they stop doing sales because they don't really want to do sales, they don't really enjoy sales, they don't love sales. So they stop doing sales, but they're making money because they're delivering. And then what happens is, as that delivery starts to fall off, as they finish those projects, for example, the money starts to go down.
As pain starts to kick in, small business owners then tend to reluctantly go out there and start doing some sales again in order to bring in some more leads and more business. And as soon as they've got some clients on the go, they stop doing sales activity.
So what happens is, they go from making money through delivery, to not making money while they're doing sales, to making money through delivery, to not making money through sales.
And the sales activity is converse. It's the opposite of that, which is, when they're making money, they're not doing sales, and then when they're not making the money - they haven't got the clients - they are doing sales. So what happens is you've got these curves like this.
What we want to do is we want to make sure that we have a consistent amount of sales activity happening. So we're consistently bringing in new business, so we have consistent revenue streams, and we're consistently winning new business and delivering new business, and we take those lumps out of our journey.
Also, of course, even if you are being consistent in sales, if you bring more activity to your sales, then of course you're going to get a better result. And, when you realize that actually every hour that you do in sales is worth a small fortune to your business, and you realize you only have to do a relatively small amount of sales in order to generate enough business for a lot of delivery, it's a very small sacrifice to make so that you can do fundamentally what it is that you want to do in business - have the success you want, the financial success you want, the freedom you want, the entrepreneurial freedom - and get to give your gift to the world out there. It's a very small price to pay.
The more we embrace sales, the more we bring it to the forefront of our thinking, the more our business will thrive, the more our business will be successful, the more successful we will be, the quicker we'll get wherever it is that we are heading - whatever success is, defined by your terms.
So bring sales to the absolute forefront of your thinking, your mindset, bring it to the forefront of your business - not to the exclusion of everything else, just bring it to the forefront of your thinking - and I promise you, you will thank me for it in the future.
We'd love to learn more about you and the business that YOU are building, and we offer a free initial consultation to help you scope out whether BBB is right for you.
We will be completely honest about whether we can help you.
Join us for a 90-minute masterclass to maximise the speed and efficiency of growing your service business to £100k and beyond.
READ MOREWe run regular discovery days where you’ll experience a taste of the magic our Scale groups have to offer. We think seeing really is believing, so we invite you to join us and try us out before you commit. We’re confident that when you see what you get out of a day, you’ll be itching to see what the year ahead can bring.
READ MOREWe cut through the nonsense advice to give you what you need for the stage you’re at in your business, reducing the risk of wasting time, money and energy in the process.
We’ll help you determine how to become a £100k business owner.Â
We’ll show you how to stress test and evolve your business model so it’s £100k ready.Â
We’ll share the straightforward methodology you need to apply to get there.
CLICK HERESuccess and happiness start with self-esteem
The Self-Esteem Reboot is a complete programme with daily lessons and exercises, a 72-page workbook and online access to support videos and bonus content. It is proven to boost self-esteem and confidence levels with just a small investment of your time each day.
CLICK HEREGive your new service-based business the nurturing and firm foundations it needs to grow and flourish from your first year.
Get in touch..
Give your new service-based business the nurturing and firm foundations it needs to grow and flourish from your first year.
Get in touch..
Be the first to receive our proven, practical business-building know-how and fresh business insights delivered straight to your inbox.
Everything we share is designed to help you grow your service-based business.