Episode #19 - How to Sell to Customers Without Being Pushy

Episode #19 - How to Sell To Customers Without Being Pushy

In this episode of the Joy-Led Business podcast, host Tina Joy Cochran explores how to reach customers and grow your business without resorting to pushy sales tactics. Discover the difference between marketing and sales, and learn how to create a genuine connection with your audience that aligns with your faith and values. Tina shares practical strategies for making your message heard while staying true to who you are, helping you to serve your customers with grace and authenticity. Tune in to find out how you can let your business be guided by joy, not pressure, and build lasting relationships that honor your creative, rural lifestyle.

Show Notes:

• Welcome and Introduction
  • Tina Joy Cochran introduces the episode's focus on selling without being pushy.
  • Overview of the importance of balancing marketing and sales with integrity.
• Understanding the Difference Between Marketing and Sales
  • Definition of marketing: The process of making people aware of what you have to offer.
  • Definition of sales: The action of exchanging value between two people.
  • Why many of us are already good at sales without realizing it.
• The Fear of Being 'Salesy'
  • Common concerns about coming off as pushy or manipulative.
  • Why it's hard to be pushy if you're genuinely focused on serving your customers.
  • How to shift your mindset from selling to serving.
• Four Key Questions to Guide Your Sales and Marketing Strategy
  • What are you trying to sell?
  • Who is your ideal customer?
  • Why are you in business?
  • How big do you want to be?
• Practical Strategies for Reaching Customers
  • The importance of clarity in your message.
  • How to craft a message that resonates with your audience without pressure.
  • Examples of how to use marketing as a tool to guide customers in their decision-making process.
• The Role of Faith in Business
  • Incorporating faith into your sales approach.
  • Trusting that the right customers will come when you serve with integrity.
• Conclusion and Call to Action
  • Summary of key takeaways: Focus on serving, not selling.
  • Invitation to explore more resources and community support at GoldenHeartland.com.
  • Encouragement to subscribe and share the podcast with others who might benefit.
• Closing Remarks
  • Tina reminds listeners that their business success matters to her and to God.
  • A final note on the importance of being joy-led in all aspects of your business.

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Transcript

Tina Joy 0:01

Hey there, welcome to the Joy Ladd business podcast. I'm your host, Tina Joy Cochran. I am thrilled that you're here. Sometimes growing a business can ruin your work life balance and make you feel like you have to be someone you're not, but it doesn't have to be that way. Business should incorporate your faith and honor the creative rural lifestyle you cherish. That's why I created this podcast to be your personal business coach in your pocket. Here you'll find Practical tips, insightful interviews, and easy to follow training all crafted to fit seamlessly into your busy life. Whether you're driving, creating, or taking a walk, I'll be right there with you. Now let's dive into this episode and start turning your dreams into reality. I can't wait to share this journey with you. Today's topic is how to sell without being salesy. Let's review first, what is marketing? Marketing is the process of getting the word out there and helping people make a decision. Bottom line. Today we're going to cover what is sales, how is it different than marketing, and then four big questions. What is sales? Sales is the action of exchanging value in the marketplace between two people. Notice there's nothing in there about twist the arm, convince people to buy things they don't want to buy. Sales is basically, here's the money. Give me my stuff. It's an action between two people. Many of us are already great at sales. We say I'm not a sales person, but if you think about it in these terms, you are absolutely great at sales. If you have ever popped up a vendor booth, if you have ever had a garage sale and have ever had someone give you money and you gave them something, you have done sales. And you know how to do that. Make sense. A lot of people in my space have been doing vendor booths for years and years and years. That's sales. If someone comes up to your booth and you can take the money and you can give them their product and move on, then you know how to do sales. So for those of you that are like, I don't know how to do sales. Yeah, you're probably already doing it, but we don't want to be salesy. What does that mean? When you say we don't want to be salesy, what are you actually saying? What I've heard is pushy. I don't want to be pushy. I don't want to be that used car salesman, right? I don't want to Manipulate right. I heard someone once say I don't want to be the the one who doesn't take no for an answer, right? Trying to convince the person to like and buy. So let's look at that for a minute. Can you really convince somebody to do something they don't want to do? I would submit that you can't. That people do what they want to do, no matter what you do. I don't want to be rejected by people because I'm too pushy. So let me ask you this question. Could you be salesy for very long if you really tried? If I were to say to you right now, unfortunately, I know you don't want to be salesy, but unfortunately in order to be successful in sales and be successful in business, you have to be. Could you do it for very long if you tried? I would bet most of you would say no. I cannot do it even if I tried. So what if, think about this if you can't do it anyway, why are we worried that I'm gonna do that? There's the disconnect here. What if we just stopped focusing on what we don't want to be? What if we just, Stopped focusing on who we don't want to be and started being completely who we are and we focused on marketing instead because the difference between marketing and sales is marketing is the process, right? Marketing is a process that helps people understand what we have to offer and helps them make a decision. Sales is the action, it is the transaction of exchanging the money. Do you hear anything in there, that is pushy, that is convincing people to do something they don't want to do. No, there's nothing in there that forces people to do anything. If you think about it, If you go to a restaurant and the owner of the restaurant is walking around with a coffee pot, is he doing sales? Well, I would submit in a way he's absolutely doing marketing and sales because he's going to be saying, I have coffee, would you like coffee? The difference is, he's not committed to whether you say yes or no. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether people say yes or no. It matters that you ask the question. Make sense? So if a waitress is just going, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, they're not going to crumple up and cry and melt away if someone says no thank you. If someone says yes, they're going to complete the transaction and give them the coffee and the cashier is going to take the money and we're all set. Make sense? What we do is we get ourselves all tangled in whether or not people say yes or no. You can't control whether they say yes or no anyway. So that would be like the waitress who says, we have coffee, it's over there. If you want it, go get it. And then goes back to their phone they're not helping you make a decision about the coffee. They're not helping you get there. So remember when we're talking about marketing, we're talking about a message plus a strategy, plus a call to action. Basically, what is the message? I have coffee. What is the strategy? I'm going to walk up to the table and I'm going to show you the coffee what is the call to action? Do you want it? That's it. You need both sales and marketing. We can't just pop up at a vendor booth and sit, not looking at anybody hiding behind our booth and hope That people will buy from us enough to make a living at it. You could do that and you might get some sales and you might have some transactions, but if you really want to make this a business, then you need to lean into the marketing? Because the marketing is the engine that grows the business. So in order to do sales without being salesy, which is what we all want, right? And we just said we can't do it. We can't really be salesy anyway. Then what we need to do is get really good at marketing. And we got to get really good at that message and the call to action. So how do we get really good at the message? This is where the four big questions come in. In the Academy, we call this the sandbox. So a sandbox, why sandbox? Because you need to sift through all the junk. all the junk of who I am, what I think about marketing, what I think about me, what I think about my stuff in order to get clarity and focus. And when you get clarity and focus around these questions, now you're protected from Getting stuck because you've already done the work in order to establish. This is the business that I'm growing. So what are these four questions? These four questions are number one, what are you trying to sell? Number two, who is your ideal customer? Number three. Why are you in business at all? And number four, how big do you want to be as you start to build this business? These are four key questions that we need to ask before you start investing in any kind of technology or marketing or even business cards, because knowing these things protect you from the overwhelm of all of that, because if you know what you're building, And then you take tools that fit and get rid of tools that don't fit. In our academy, we have an entire course that gives you structure and allows you to dig in. For today, we're going to dig into each one of these a little bit deeper in the time that we have. So first and foremost, what are you trying to sell? Someone said I don't really have anything to sell. It's really hard to do marketing if you don't have anything to sell. If marketing is the process of making people aware of what you have and you don't have anything, you kind of have a little bit of a problem there. You'll hear me say this over and over it doesn't matter what you pick, just that you pick. So if you don't know. what you're trying to sell. What would you pick if you did try one thing, if you want to sell all the things, then my suggestion would be to start with a signature product. Start with one thing and try it out. The next question is who is your ideal customer in business schools? And other marketing training and you listen close, there's an assumption, you know, this answer, they'll tell you to identify your niche, identify your avatar, pick an edge. And the thing is we have to do the work around this to know who is our ideal customer. What's beautiful. As believers, we have an advantage because the question can be, who has God called you to serve? I believe that if he's giving you something to bring to the market, then it's because he's prepared people to receive it. So leaning into that and going, Lord, who have you called me to serve? And knowing who those people are allows you to then be in the right place and talk to the right people. Next question. Why are you in business? This is a huge, huge, huge question. I cannot. I can't stress this enough, particularly in the handmade space or the writer space or any of those spaces where you create the product why are you in business at all? Is it a business or is it a hobby? Because if you really, truly do not care and do not need to ever, ever sell anything that you make, why not give it away? Why not be the one that creates, I don't know, chemo beanie hats for people who are going through chemo, right? If it's does not matter about the money, if you're not looking to make any money with it, then it's a hobby. On the other hand, if you are looking to make money with it, then it's a business and we need to commit to the fact that we're in business. And that means we have to learn the things that we need to learn in order to market the business, in order to grow the business. When you first got into whatever the product or services that you sell, when you first got into it, did you know everything about it? Absolutely not. I'm still learning about coaching. I'm still learning about business and I've been studying this for decades. You will never know everything that you need to know. But you've got to make a decision and it doesn't matter what you pick about whether you're in business or not. If you make the decision that you are in business, then this is just what it takes to do business. Okay. If you have a job and you make a decision to accept that job, are you going to not show up because you don't feel like it? Are you going to go, you know what, I'm afraid that people won't accept me at my job, so I'm not going to show up. No, you're going to show up and you're going to figure out how to get over the stuff that you need to get over in order to get there because you made a commitment to the job. So why not make a commitment to your business as well? And if you're not at a place that that makes sense for you, then that's okay. Just own it. But that's what's going on. Alright, last question. How big do you want to be? When I first started this work, I was completely amazed by the number of people that when I asked that question did not have an answer. One of the reasons you want to answer this question is so you know how big is the business that you're building. If you want to be a multinational multimillion dollar business with hundreds of employees, then that is a completely different business than what most of the people that I work with. And most of our people in my space in the academy are building what they call a lifestyle business. And yes, your economic development people and your business schools will tell you that's not a real business. If if you don't know, small business administration defines a small business as 250 million or under. And for most of us, if I can make an extra 25, 000 a year, that would be great. I don't can't even think about 250 million. Makes sense. So let's get clarity on how big do you want to be? And if what you're trying to do is support your lifestyle, then build a business that supports your lifestyle. If what you're trying to do is build a business that allows for time freedom, then build a business that does not have a brick and mortar store making sense. So ask yourself the question, how big do you want to be? Most of us, We'll never want to be on shark tank because we're not doing, I made the next great widget and I want to sell 12 million of them. See the bottom line is that our job is to do the sifting to get to a clear message. And then we add a strong call to action so that the people God has prepared for us can make a decision to take action easily. Our job is to be that waitress going. I have coffee. Would you like coffee? and offering it in a way that people can say yes or no. Doesn't matter whether they say yes or no, it's that they make a decision. Ephesians 2. 10 says, For we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do the good works which God prepared in advance for us to do. Therefore, if it's already prepared, our job is to sort not sell. Let's sort not sell get clear in our message so that people can decide if it's for them. See, notice we're not trying to convince people to buy. Please don't try to convince anybody to buy. You don't want to do that. Don't do it. Right. And stop telling yourself that that's the only way that you can do it. No, it's not. Because if it was, 95 percent of us wouldn't be in business at all because we can't do it anyway. Okay. So your job is to sift through these questions so that you have clarity so you can deliver a message that gives people a chance to answer the question. Is this for me? It's not for everybody. So your job is to sort through the people that it's not for and let them move on with their lives so that You can serve and you can deliver products to the people that it is for. Make sense? If you have one takeaway from this, I really hope that you can hear loud and clear that if the thought of being salesy makes you crazy and upsets you and you get stressed out and you don't think you can, can do it, you won't do it because by the time you feel like you're being salesy, you're only going to be at about half done. Yeah. What a pushy sales salesperson would do. Pushy salespeople don't realize they're being pushy and they don't care. So if you care about that, you won't do it. So you can't do it. So let it go. Makes sense. So what is your assignment I bet some of you have already guessed. Answer these questions. What are you trying to sell? Who is your ideal customer? And if you don't know, who do you think it could be? Why are you in business? Get clarity on why are you in business? What is the whole purpose of you trying to do this? And then how big do you want to be? And the clearer you can get about that, how much money do you need to make, right? That's going to give you a whole lot of clarity about how much you need to do. For those of you that are like, I don't have the time to do this. Well, how, how big do you want to be? Let's look at that and then go, okay, do I have time to do this? If I don't, maybe I need to take a step back and think about, maybe I don't want to be this big. Okay, You've been listening to the joy led business podcast. I'm your host, Tina Joy Cochran. Thanks for sharing part of your day with me. You don't have to walk this business journey alone. Discover others just like you at goldenheartland. com. Business coaching community for creative rural women. Faith. Go there to learn more and get free gifts I designed just for you. Be sure to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode and share this episode with someone who could use a bit more joy today. Remember, your business success matters to me and to God. Being joy led will get you there. Can't wait to meet you at Golden Heartland.