How to Sell Without Feeling Yucky w/ Lauren Najar

If selling feels forced, uncomfortable, or just plain yucky, the problem probably is not your pitch.

In this episode, Lauren breaks down why so many entrepreneurs feel gross when they try to sell and what to do instead. She shares why the pressure to convert every conversation into a sale is not only unrealistic but actually working against you, and how shifting your focus to genuine relationship building changes everything about how sales happen.

Lauren also walks through how she reads cues and clues to know when someone is actually ready for a sales conversation, why releasing the outcome leads to more closed deals, and how her background in banking, retail, and service industry sales shaped the way she approaches business today.

When you stop trying to close and start genuinely connecting, the sale becomes the natural next step.

Chapters:

00:40 Why selling feels yucky in the first place

02:05 The pressure to convert every conversation

03:25 How Lauren builds relationships that lead to sales

05:25 Reading cues and clues from your leads

07:25 Why sales calls are not the only way

08:25 Building confidence in your sales approach

10:05 Releasing the outcome and staying open

11:40 Why one relationship can lead to many sales

This podcast is brought to you in partnership with Liz Chapman & CO

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Business Chaser, your quick pour of strategy, clarity, and momentum. We skip the small talk and get straight to the strategy here in these bite-sized episodes. We're here to help you grow smarter, market better, and chase what matters all in 15 minutes or less. I'm your host, Lauren Najar. Tune in and let's chat. Hello, hello. Welcome back to Business Over Cocktails. I'm Lauren Najar. And if this is the first time that we are getting to know each other, hello, hello. I'm a business coach. And this particular episode is a short and sweet episode that is released on Fridays, where we have quick little tidbits, education, little trainings from our guest experts or then myself. Mondays are our full length episodes, about 40 to 45 minutes at the most. And where I'm either interviewing a guest or I am talking about a topic. So welcome, welcome, welcome. So glad that you're here. Thank you for listening. Thank you to my listeners who have been listening all of the way. I appreciate you. And so today I'm going to talk about a hot topic of how to sell without feeling yucky. Again, this goes with Monday's episode. This is strictly going to touch on building relationships, but I think the a little bit deeper part of like, okay, well, then how does selling actually come into the picture? And so I really want to get really specific with that piece of it. And the first thing I'll really kick off with, right, immediately is I believe that people, especially in the online space or when we're attending networking events, we immediately think we need to convert somebody. Immediately, right? It would be, yes, we want to convert people. However, we set our sights on the one person we're talking to and we need to convert them without actually listening to them and seeing if they're even a fit for us or seeing if they even have a problem. And I think that's where I want to begin. We put this imaginary pressure on ourselves that we think that every message that we have on social media, every email that we send, every person we interact with in person or online, it needs to convert into a sale for us. And that is just simply not the case. That's not how you do sales, that's not how sales happen. It's just not something that is realistic at this point. There are a lot of things that go into making sales easier for yourself. That is a whole different episode and podcast. But the whole idea around building relationships is truly about how you can get to know the person and a couple of different things in the sales aspect is finding the need, how you are going to help them. So if they have a need for what you are solving, right? If they have the problem and you have the solution, that is a great person to keep building a relationship with. For instance, having small talk, this is truly from real life experience. This is truly what happens literally every single day for me, is I will message somebody and over time we get to know each other simultaneously and on my content. I'm constantly teaching on my content, whether that's lead generation, content marketing, content that converts, selling, building relationships, running events. I am providing education on my platforms. When somebody then comes and signs up for my email list, when someone signs up for my masterclass, that is something that people are finding valuable. And not only that, but they also know me now. And now I know they have a need, right? If they signed up for my workshop a few months ago, that's content that converts, guess what? Reason why they're here, it's not a networking event, it's here to learn because they need help with content that converts. So guess what? Those become leads of mine. And I'm going to continue to pursue those people and talk to them. Now, there is never a pivot in a conversation, especially if someone hasn't like given you like any sign that they are interested in working with you. What are the signs that someone needs to give you, right? They sign up for your freebie, they attend a live training, they attend an in-person workshop, they ask you about your services, they are opening emails and clicking on your sales page links. These are leads. Every single thing is a lead. Now, mind you, did I say at any point, did I ever have a conversation with these people? Not yet. I wait. I'm having a conversation, yes, but I have not pivoted the sales conversation yet. Because again, I am looking for signs and tells. And in my sales background, we called those cues and clues. So cues and clues, whether or not they are ideal for me. So I've been doing this now for about eight years, and I can typically tell when somebody is struggling, either with their messaging, their business, even just from conversation. And so that has taken practice for me to get confident in knowing those cues and clues. So me right now, I'm a lot better at telling that than I was even four or five years ago. So if you're in your business right now and you're like, well, you do it so much better, it's like because I've been in this game for a while. And even then, I was in banking for 10 years. I've been in the service industry my whole entire working career. Like I started in McDonald's, where then we would have to upsell people to the large value meal. You know, we would have to like when we like again, like people would shop us, right? Give us reviews, and we would have these like mystery shoppers. We would have to always offer like Apple Pie or a Sunday or something along those lines. Same thing. My next job was at Office Depot. And if you're not familiar with Office Depot, Office Depot is an office supply store with printers and computers and laptops and chairs and desks, and we would have to sell protection plans. Those were really annoying to sell. But again, if you do it long enough, you kind of know then from evidence of how to get someone to buy one of those, right? If you have real good success with them. The next job I had was banking. As a teller, uh bank teller who is just responsible for running transactions, I would have to sell people other products that they don't have if they didn't have a savings account with us or a credit card or a car loan. And then I moved myself all the way up to assistant manager and we or and then I was responsible for training my staff into having sales conversations. When you have sales conversations with people, so this comes from my corporate world, is you start with small talk. That's how it happens. And if someone's in front of you, that conversation happens very quickly. If you don't have the luxury of being in person all the time and you are building an online business too, you can have these conversations over a time period while it's still making it interesting over a time period in the DMs on any given platform. This is how I've built my business. Truly. I have not been in person for more than half of my business. I have been online for all of my business. I have built relationships online. And I don't resort to sales calls. I don't force people to get on sales calls with me. I don't use that as a KPI. I have never tried to get people on sales calls to use a script to sell them. It is a conversation that happens over time. And that is how I've gotten around to not feeling yucky, right? Because here's why you feel yucky. You feel yucky because you are selling to someone that you have no idea if they even want to work with you. And that is why you feel yucky. You feel yucky because you're forcing it, you're forcing the issue, you don't feel good about it, you feel unsure, you don't feel confident. It could be any or all of those things. And the reason why you feel yucky is because you're not doing a good enough job of building the relationship. If you are actually building the relationship with someone and you are actually vetting them to be a good lead and you are actually finding the need, this sales pivot of the conversation is a natural next step. It is an organic next step. If you get to the point where you've talked to someone enough to be like, oh yeah, like tell me about your business and whatever small talk you want to talk about, they maybe get to a point where they're talking about what's next for their business or their health or their life or whatever it is. And you, as the expert, know what questions to ask to vet, right? Or you should. And if you don't know, you need to study that because it's like, okay, cool. Well, what questions should I ask? Well, you know, you should know that. That is an ideal client avatar issue. That is a clarity issue. If you don't know the problem that you solve, then you have a problem here if you don't know what questions to ask. For me, I usually ask, you know, very straightforward, what are your marketing tactics currently? What's your marketing strategy? Well, I don't have one. Okay, well, I have my hands full now. Or even more specifically, because I love lead generation and I love sales, I will ask, how does your lead tracker look right now? And nine times out of ten, maybe close to 10 out of 10, it's I don't have a tracker. I am not tracking my leads. And there's your problem. If you are doing all of the work, you're making this very hard on yourself if you're not tracking leads. So, side note to that, you need to have a tracker with all these conversations that you are having and all of these leads that you have. It makes your life a lot easier. So the last few things I'm going to say is why you feel yucky is because you are not confident in your ability to sell, and you're not confident in your ability to ask the right questions. Therefore, you feel like you're just forcing, like, oh my gosh, I have to pivot the conversation. Oh my gosh, I have to use this script. And it doesn't sound like me, it doesn't feel like me, I don't feel aligned, whatever it is. That's why, that's why the yuckiness is coming. And there's such a better way. You have to release the outcome. Just forget about the outcome. You don't have to convert them at any given lightning speed. Talk to everyone because eventually they're all going to start closing. Some people build relationships faster than others. And there are so many different caveats, right? There, I know that there are so many different industries versus mine who are listening to this podcast. But the principle of this, of building a relationship and getting to know somebody, genuinely caring about whatever they're going through, progress, whatever it is, being invested into every relationship and being grateful for every single person that even remotely engages with you, that's where it can begin. And being thankful, being grateful, being appreciative, being open, being transparent, truly rooting for people in general and giving them a good experience before they even inquire with you, before they even book a call with you. So that's where it truly, truly begins. And then after that, having the conversation, talking with them, all of these different things, it's going to be a lot easier for you. And sales is going to become more natural, more organic, and all of the things. So I hope this was helpful for you. If you have any questions whatsoever, please let me know. But please take this with you that every conversation you have, be open to the possibilities. Because even if you are open to the possibilities, you're not single-handed focus on the sale closing, it could lead to five sales. It could lead to 10 sales because that person had such a good experience with you. They're going to refer you and refer you and refer you. So remember that you might be pigeonholing yourself too, and you're not open to the opportunities or possibilities. There's so many different outcomes if you just release the actual outcome that you want and let the experience with you be more powerful than oh my gosh, I need to close this sale right now. Release the outcome. I'll see you back here next Monday. We'll probably have a good guest and we'll talk soon. That's your quick hit of clarity and momentum for the week. If it sparks something, share it with a friend or tag us in your stories at Business Over Cocktails and or at Lauren Major. We love seeing what resonates. Don't forget, Mondays are for full-length episodes with rich conversations, and Fridays are the Business Chaser episodes. These are bite sized insights pulled from our guests to keep you inspired and aligned throughout the week. Do you have a question or takeaway? DM us at Business Over Cocktails. We just might feature it in a feature episode. Cheers!