Get over awkwardness of selling

Do you feel awkward every time you have to promote your offer?
Do you worry about sounding “too salesy” on social media?
Do you know your product or service is good… but still hesitate to actually ask for the sale?

If that’s you, this episode is for you.

Today I’m helping you get over your fear of selling so you can stop hiding, start confidently talking about your offer, and finally make sales without feeling pushy or cringe. 

We’ll unpack the mindset blocks around money, why knowing your ideal client changes everything, and how to create content that sells without sounding salesy.

Go deeper on this subject with my eBook "Get Sales Confident" here

Need help getting clear on your ideal client? This episode is for you

Get daily support with all of the above in GSGS, our incredible Social Media Mentorship for Small Business Owners here

• Social Media Strategy and Support: Join Get Seen Get Sales and get the tools, support, strategies & accountability you need to grow your small business (product or service) on social media with confidence Learn more
• Connect with Amanda on Instagram: @amandahughes.uk
• Growth Addicts Show Notes: Read the blog + grab freebies + guest links
• Free Small Business Downloads: Access all of Amanda’s freebies in one place → Get them here
• Exclusive Discounts: Exclusive discounts on Amanda’s favourite small business tools & services → See discounts

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of Small Business Global Fatics. I'm Amanda Kewes. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking today about a super important subject amongst small business owners. I'm going to be talking about it in the context of using social media for your business, but this applies to all lines of business and it's about getting sales confident. How often have you heard or said yourself, I don't want to sound too salesy? Does that sound too salesy? That feels too salesy. I hear it all the time. Recently I put a post on Instagram asking my Instagram audience to challenge me and ask me what they were struggling with right now to see if I had a freebies horse, like in terms of maybe a blog post or a podcast episode. I'm not in the habit of making 20-page PDFs as freebies. It's more likely to be something like this. So I asked them to challenge me about something they were struggling with and see if I had a freebie source that could help them. And Keely from Moon and Dusk. Hi Kaylee asked about mindset around getting comfortable selling to people who are there, you know, as in on social media, getting comfortable selling to people who are here to buy. She was saying that she feels awkward, but you know, sometimes your audience is waiting for you to start a selling, but she feels awkward about that. And Keylee, you're not alone. You are not alone. I guarantee that every business owner listening to this episode has felt like that at some point. So we're gonna crack that nut right today. And this is a problem that I really enjoy helping small business owners overcome, getting over that fear of being too sales-y, like we need to knock that on the head. And in fact, a while ago, I think it was like maybe two years ago now, it certainly was 2024, actually wrote an e-book called Get Sales Confident, which is all about this exact subject. And it was on the back of a poll that I had run on Instagram at the time asking how people felt about the actual selling element of their business. And it's clearly one of the many hats that we wear in small business ownership that a lot are very uncomfortable wearing because 65% of my Instagram audience at that time voted on that poll to say that they felt out of their depth and lacking the skills to actually sell their offering. And 19% had said that they do it, but they don't really know what they're doing. So, yeah, lots of conversations came after that, which led to me about in the e-book. So if you would like to get into this subject deeper, I will link to the ebook. So you have an incredible offer. I have absolutely no doubt about that, but your mindset is holding you back from selling it, from getting it out there. You're trapping it behind this barrier. That is that barrier that we need to knock down today. And first off, I'd like to talk about what qualified me to help you with your approach to sales. And if you're asking yourself that, then that's a very good question. Because my corporate background was in retail banking. So I worked in high street banking from like age 17 in a bit, just after you know, I left school and went to college and then just went straight into banking to get a quote proper job unquote. A retail bank is a very salesy place. If you've ever been into a bank to pay in cash or take out cash or, you know, open an account or whatever, you will probably have had a product promoted to you at that point. So yes, that was me once upon a time. I worked for over my career two major high street banks, first as a cashier and then a bank advisor, a service manager, and then right up to being the branch manager. And every one of those roles that I had included sales or management of salespeople, every single one of them. So I have picked up certainly a few transferable skills along the way that now help me in running my own business. And it's skills and knowledge that I want to pass on to you guys because it will help. It will help you knock down this barrier of feeling to sales that we're gonna just kick that to the curb. But what I know for sure doesn't work and we'll keep that barrier up and continue to keep it up, is if your mindset is holding you back, do you believe in your offer? I mean, I've been self-employed now for I think about 12 years, maybe 12 years this year. I've had two businesses. My very first business was a wedding and event floristry business. So now I worked in the bank and then I took a floristry course and then set up my own business on the backhoe, but doing wedding and event floristry, and that was in an award-winning wedding and event floristry business. My summer months were regularly booked years in advance with weddings and events. I held Christmas workshops that were sold out within 24 hours every single year. Fast forward now to my current business, where I now mentor small business owners to grow on social media. I host this podcast. I have an Amazon number one best seller, and the podcast is an Apple Top 30 podcast. Then there's no way I would have been able to achieve these things, is the point I'm getting at here. There's no way I could possibly have got these results by shying away from promoting and actively selling my product. And that product essentially now is my own service, my own skills and knowledge. And I just really want you to get the same results as well. So if we're starting first off with mindset, like I say, I can sit here and say you have got an incredible offering, it's a service, a product, whatever it might be, I'm sure that's incredible. But I want to ask you: do you truly believe in what you're offering? Do you really believe in yourself and your product, your service, your business? If you have taken what you know or what you've made, or what you're making, you know, when you've made it into a business, I want to presume that you're promoting a product or service that you truly wholeheartedly believe in. And if that is the case, then you're halfway there already to making the sales process a lot easier. But if not, then that might be the first thing to address. Are you not feeling confident in what it is you're offering, you know, and and really dive into that. Why are you not feeling confident? Does it not feel aligned with you? Is it someone else's words, you know? Is does it just not feel good? Have you grown out of it? You know, were you selling a certain product that you're now not completely in love with anymore? And have you moved on? Has it evolved? I would sit with that first and think about how you actually feel about what it is that your business is, what it offers, and make sure that your mindset's in the right place. Do you wholeheartedly believe in it? Are you completely invested in it? Or are you having doubts? Have you moved on to something else? Are you a bit of an in-between stage that you're transitioning from one thing to another? But a drive might be really sit with that and have a good think about that because really this mindset around being able to confidently sell your offering comes from you wholeheartedly believing that you are capable of what it is that you're offering and the product or service that you're offering is absolutely 100% fit for purpose for the person that it's intended for. And I think in line with that, another big mindset block that we have is around the M-word. What was it? Was it the movie Death Becomes Her, where they talked about the sordid topic of coin? I always remember that phrase. I think it was from that movie. I'll have to find out. The money word, the sordid topic of coin. I mean, we love to have money roll put into our bank accounts, but as small business owners, we seem to have a lot of issues around getting it there. A lot of conversations I've had with small business owners, particularly in my Instagram community, if you're not already following me there, please come and say hello at amandahughes.uk. There's definitely a common sales block that comes up around asking for money in exchange for the product or service that you're offering. And even though, you know, if we've both done the mindset work and we know that we are completely and utterly confident in our ability here and in the offering that we are offering, but once it comes to the matter of exchanging cash for your offering, these sort of feelings of embarrassment and discomfort can come in. They can actually lead to you often like discounting your product or even giving it away just for no other reason other than how uncomfortable you're feeling about actually the selling of it, actually exchange of money for your offering. But I really want this to sink in like it's you're a business and it's okay and it's expected to ask for money in exchange for your product or service. What you're offering is valid and it is worth the price that you're asking. Now jot that down if you need to stick it in a post-it note, pop it on your screen, your computer monitor. You're running a business. We go into the supermarket and we expect to pay for the shopping that we're going to leave with. It's completely normal and completely expected, and we just have hyped it up to be this really uncomfortable thing. And I mean, you don't see like your neighbour leaving for work in the morning and think how embarrassing that he's off to work for money. Like we don't. We say morning and we get on with our day. People who are employed go to work, do their job, receive their salary at the end of the week or the month, whenever it might be. And that's the end of it. They they've exchanged their time and their skills, their knowledge, or expertise, whatever it might be, their labour for money. And all your customers focused on is that they've got good value for money. And I bet that they just can't wait to use or experience what they've just bought. They are expecting to pay for it. So, next up, I'm going to talk about a subject that if you've been here for a while in my world for a while, whether it's been on social media or in the podcast, you will have absolutely well have heard me talk about ideal client because I talk about it all the time and I'm not going to stop because it's so important. You are not for everyone, and that's fine, neither am I. And if you're trying to market to everyone, it won't work. And then what happens is that silence that you're hearing in return when you're really trying to promote and sell and actively get your product, your offering out there, and you're hearing crickets in return, it really knocks your confidence. That will just further hinder your ability to promote and sell what it is that you offer. It's known as spray and pre-marketing, you know, market, it's like marketing with no solid strategy behind it. And a lot of that is down to not knowing who exactly your offering is for. But when you do and you get to know your ideal client inside out, it's so much easier to market to them. Like you can then avoid freebie hunters and discount shoppers and whatnot, unless, of course, that is who your ideal client is. But the more that you know them, the more that you can tune in your marketing to speak directly to them and no one but them. So the more you know them, the easier it gets to do, the easier marketing your business gets to do. And if it is something you're struggling with, I will link in the show notes today to an ideal client podcast episode that I did that will help you really get to know them inside out. And once you've done that, you just you're your top then, your plan and your marketing for your ideal client as if you're speaking directly to them. Like it won't even feel like sales or promotion, it'll just get to be so easy when you know exactly who you're talking to. So far, we've covered mindset around selling and whether you believe in your offer or if there'd be any work you have to do there, mindsets around money, the fact that it's okay and it's expected for you to receive money in exchange for what it is you offer. Ideal client, you know, if you don't know them already, get to know them, check out my episode. And really do that work because doing that work opens the gateways for marketing your business to become so easy. The next thing I want to talk about, then the last thing I want to touch on is then creating content to sell that doesn't feel salesy, it doesn't feel awkward, it feels nice. Because by this point, when you get to the point of actually creating and putting content out there, you're totally confident in what you're offering. You know that you're more than capable of it, you know, that you are the person to be offering this, you know exactly who you're offering it for, you know that it's totally acceptable and expected to be having money in exchange for this offering. So then when it comes to creating content for social media, there's three different sort of pillars for creating content that I like to stick to and I like to teach inside my mentorship. So I have an online small business social media mentorship community. It's called Get Seen Get Sales because that's exactly what we do in there, which is what every small business owner using social media for their business wants. They want to get seen and get sales. So in there, you would find my get seen, get sales method, which is now a registered trademark because we're very fancy. And this method goes through a lot of what we spoke to about today, ideal client, but also optimising your social media profiles to make sure you can be seen and that people know they're in the right place. Planning content, creating content, and then community, just having the people around you that help make it all stick. If you're looking for support with your social media, if you just want more community around your business, or you want a place to ask questions, then do check out Get Seen Get Sales. It's an incredible small business community at its core. Yes, we are all about learning how to grow on social media, but it's so much more than that. It's a whole community of small business owners just cheering each other on, holding each other up, and just generally making small business life, self-employed life, so much nicer, so much easier. So do check that out. But yes, the last thing I wanted to touch on was creating content. And we want to create content that does three things attract new ideal client followers into your world, and nurture relationships with existing followers and convert followers to paying customers, clients, students, whatever your terminology is. And what I really want to talk about today is the nurturing content because what I see is a lot of small business owners really comfortable with the attraction content, right? So we know that mostly that's sort of short-form video on reels and what, and we can put, you know, really jazzy wheels out there, catchy wheels, catchy hooks to attract people in, get the views up, you know, and that feels good and get them to follow along. And then we're quite clear on what conversion content is. That's the, you know, if you'd like this product, then DM me, comment, head to the link and bio, etc. etc. That's the sort of buy now, ask now. But I just want to tell you that the sales are generally not made in either of those camps. Your sales decisions from your ideal clients are generally made in the nurture content. And it's the bit that so many people miss, that so many people skim over or they think like, who cares about this sort of content? Everybody, your ideal client cares about this sort of content, trust me. So the nurture content is where we get to know you and your business and your why and your product or your service and client reviews. We just get to peek behind the scenes. That's what nurturing content is, it's peeking behind the scenes. So attraction content, we're drawing people in, say hi, you've landed in the right place, follow along. This is what I share, this is what I do. Conversion content, we're directly asking for the sale, but nurture content is where people get to know you. And the age-old scene and marketing is still very, very true in 2026 that people buy from people, especially now in the online world where a lot of people have been stung in the past, they bought courses, they bought products, they bought you name it, that did not live up to what they thought it was going to be. And so now they're more cautious than ever about buying from businesses online. So this nurture content is more important than ever. We want to peek behind a curtain. You know, if you think if you had a brick and mortar, you've got your tills set out on the desk. We want to go behind a till, we want to go behind a curtain, we want into the staff room, we want to see what's going on. And it's in that nurturing content where people think, oh, because she's really down to earth, you know, or God, that service is really professional. Like I like the way they come across, or she's a mum as well, so I can really relate to her so she'll understand me, which therefore means her service might be more tailored to my life, but it piques the interest. And the more nurturing content there is out there, the more get to know you, get to know your business, get to know behind-the-scenes content there is. When it does come the time for your ideal client to make the buy-in choice, they've already made that decision. They're just waiting for you to ask. And that brings me back full 360 back to the start of what Keely mentioned where she was saying she feels awkward about selling and feeling salesy, but sometimes your audience is just waiting for you to start selling. Yes, they are. We can't have too much of any of this type of content. Too much attraction content is going to bring followers in. But then, you know, if you're not nurturing a relationship with those followers, where are they going next? They're going to drop off. There's nothing else for them. And if you're just doing conversion all the time and your social media profile just looks like one big advertising billboard of buy now, book now, sign up, etc. etc., that's not going to do it either. The nurture content is where it's at. It really, really is. And I'm going to put in a lot of resource for you today all around different types of content and what they do. So you can click on that in today's description and grab that and get more information around Attract Nutture Convert. But like I say, if you really want the nitty-gritty of creating content, then you want to get into the Get Seen Get Sales method. And that can only be found in the GetSeen Get Sales community. So as always, the link for more information about that is in today's description and show notes. We would love to see you there. Come and join us. They're such a friendly bunch. We wouldn't have it any other way. Everyone is on your side. Everyone is cheering you on. So I hope that's been really helpful in helping you get over some of these sales barriers, help you get sales confident, let's get away from this awkward feeling sales there. Let's just take that term, that phrase out of our vocabulary. Easy for me to say all together and let's get sales confident. Let's get confident about ourselves, about our product, and get it out there to the people who need it. Any questions, any feedback, anything you want to share with me, as always, the best place to find me is on Instagram, amandafuse.uk. I would love it if more podcast listeners and said hi there. It's such a pleasure to hear from you. So I'll speak to you too. Take care.