Taking the pressure off selling: a reframe

Service and sales go together hand in glove, but we tend to forget this when we’re launching a programme or writing a sales page.

People have all kinds of issues around selling - around talking about money, around how to price what they do, around monetizing something they feel passionately about and around deep discomfort with the political system of capitalism. 

But the one I'd like to talk about here is self doubt, because I think it's the one I see most often in my own clients.

I think a reframe is helpful. Self doubt is so often related to impostor complex, comparisonitis and perfectionism. I love this quote from Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander (which I came across via Sarah Avenir's book Gather The People): ⠀⠀

“Unlike success and failure, contribution has no other side. It is not arrived at by comparison. All at once I found that the fearful question, ‘Is it enough?’ and the even more fearful question, ‘Am I loved for who I am, or for what I have accomplished?’ could both be replaced by the joyful question, ‘How will I be a contribution today?’"

As Sarah Avenir goes on to say, "At the point our work becomes about making an earnest contribution to another person’s life, we will be amazed by the strength and energy we will always find in ourselves to complete it."⠀⠀

Tara Mohr makes a similar point, saying, "We are each a cell in the larger body of human community. We are meant to live and work in circles, to make our contribution to the whole."⠀⠀

If you're struggling with feeling like your work isn't good enough or transformational enough, this is such a good reframe, just to think in terms of how you can make the best contribution.

If you think about your work in terms of how you can make the best contribution towards the people in your audience, you can take a huge amount of the stress and guesswork out of your sales.

Customer research can be more than just a final touch to your sales page in order to tweak your language. If you build it in from the ground up, so that whatever you're making is completely rooted in your understanding of what people really need - that's not just in alignment with the reframe of making a contribution, it also means that your work isn't about YOU, it's about the people you're making it for.

Which takes some of the pressure off, don't you think?

If you combine with reframing your sales process as part of how you’re in service to your clients, with thinking about buying psychology instead of sales psychology, you may find that sales ends up being your favourite part of your business.

If you’re currently struggling with writing a sales page - here’s an introduction to sales page basics to bear in mind. And here’s an introduction to ethical, non-manipulative sales page writing.