One of my clients is a network marketer. Her challenge was that she really didn’t want to be sale-sy. She really didn’t want to alienate her friends and family and always be all about her new products and opportunity. She has a great mentor in her business, but she found his style (while very successful for him) very difficult for her embrace, mostly because it seemed very pushy and always about a sale.
- Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself. Robert Collier
We started our sessions working on the basics. I assigned her homework and she had to read “Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin and “Purple Cow” by Seth Godin. (because in talking to her and hearing what she was saying about her personality, I believe that Seth Godin’s approach to marketing in general is more to her liking… then perhaps the door to door salesman approach of Zig Ziglar)
Does that make sense?
While I’m a big believer in following your intuition and trusting your heart, I also know that fear will convince us of many things. (That’s where I come in) Simple steps to big success is all about taking small actionable steps towards a goal. We may all have common goals, like; wanting to have a job we love, spending more time with friends and family, living a stress free life, or even retiring and living financial free in the future… While we may strive for similar things, we are all unique.
We all talk to ourselves differently AND we allow other peoples opinions (spoken or inferred) to affect us differently.
Back to my network marketing client… Her personality is one of a helper. She is constantly thinking about how she can help other people. She volunteers at her son’s special needs school, she is a member of several community organizations and has dinner on the table when her hubby comes home from work. She loves that. She joined the network marketing company because she uses and loves the products and believes that they can help people.
Our first step for her success was to work out the question, “Who is your ideal customer”. You see, she was spending a lot of energy talking to EVERYONE about her opportunity that she was running out of people in her community quick. She also felt like people were starting to “shun” her when she arrived thinking that she would start talking about her opportunity.
We laugh about it now, because she had turned into … human SPAM. (ha ha ha ha) She was the human version of that email message that goes directly to your junk folder, and she started to feel like junk too.
Our first simple step was borrowed from Michael Port’s book, “Book Yourself Solid” and appears in the companion workbook under the heading 1.1.4 Written Exercise: Define your Ideal Client. List the qualities, values, or personality characteristics you’d like your idea clients to possess. She needed to narrow down her customers.
She needed to be picky and choose more carefully who she would WANT in with her for this opportunity, rather than just telling everyone she met and hoping for the best.
Here are the questions that she answered, why don’t you give them a try.
1. What type of people do you love being around?
2. What do they like to do?
3. What do they talk about?
4. With whom do they associate?
5. What ethical standards do they follow?
6. How do they learn?
7. How do they contribute to society?
8. Are they smiling, outgoing, creative?
9. What kind of environment do you want to create in your life?
This simple step, helped my client crystallize her idea of the type of person she would most enjoy working along side. She has a clear picture of the type of person that will energize and encourage her… the type of person that she can energize and encourage.
Now, she is able to figure out where that will mostly likely be found and she can reach out and speak directly to that type of person.
Does that make sense?
It turns out that her ideal client, the person she most wanted to reach are also helpers and more specifically:Nurses…and Nurse Practitioners. She has slowly gained the support of several nurses she has met through the medical offices she visits with her son, and has been able to work with them in communicating the opportunity to other nursing professionals. She has learned the “language” they speak and together she and her business partners are helping their customers as well as each other.
Sales is a conversation, you need to know what language to speak in order to have the conversation.
Sales is a relationship based on trust and a strange kind of social media friendship.
Success can be measured in so many ways… but truly measured in how you feel every morning when you wake up…
Find your ideal client, than you can find a way to speak to them.
Well, that’s my bit of success talk… Have an amazing day!
