Ant Hodges 0:00
Selling makes a lot of people feel really uneasy. And I get it. There's so many things that can get in our own mind, around rejection, around feeling too salesy, feeling like I don't want to put pressure on people, I just want to serve people. I get all of those. That's all because of the way in which mentors, trainers, other people who are selling right now are doing their sales, and it's making you feel the ick. So I really want to unpack for you how we can start selling without feeling that ick, and how we can do it with the highest levels of integrity. We see it all the time. We see people selling with very scripted pitches, urgency, with countdowns and all the kind of objection handling that they build into their sales process, even from a perspective of maybe putting applications in place, and then when the sales calls happens, there's strategies around actually getting somebody over the line, depending on what they said, and it all leads to a place of really people following process rather than actually having good conversations with people. Selling for me has become one of the most favorite things that I do in my business, not just because it brings money in and it's a good thing to see money hit in the bank account, but doing it well is actually about serving people. Selling for me has become a thing that I love to do because as well as being able to produce content like this and serve you in a public way with content that's going to be of value, that you could take some kind of action on, and position myself as an expert. The reality is, when I sell a product or a service, I can go so much deeper with someone. They can get so much more value out of the paid for products and services that I have and so selling for me is not an ick thing anymore. I've developed a conversational framework that I kind of stick to, that focuses on serving them in the best possible way and helps me to serve at the highest level of integrity that I can results is really all that matters to me. I'm not selling to make money. I'm selling because I want somebody to get results, whether they're working with me directly as their fractional CMO or a coach, or they've joined my coaching community where they've got access to lots of my training, or they turn up at one of my live events, whether that's online or in person. They've bought from me because they're looking to get a result, and that's all I care about. I've got somebody in front of me who's paid to get a result. I haven't just got somebody who's paid me money, and it sat in my bank account, and now I'm just going to let the training and the service deliver what they've bought, because it's not what they've bought that they're looking for. They're looking for a result. So in the rest of this episode, I want to unpack for you kind of a bit of a high level view of my selling without selling framework. It's something I talk about inside of my book, and you can get your copy of my book simplify the funnel by heading over to simplify the funnel.com and grab your copy. It's also available in all kinds of bookstores and Amazon as well. But if you head over to simplify the funnel.com you can actually purchase a signed hardback copy, as well as some other resources and stuff that you will get and some video training off the back of it that you will also get if you purchase directly. Now, for years, sales was really a technique that I had in my business that was really learned from all of the learning that I'd done from those in the internet marketing world, from being involved in the property world, where I was a negotiator and I was I felt like I was trying to shoehorn people into properties. People would walk through the door or make inquiries, and the sole focus was trying to get them into a property. And also, I was a tele sales person for a company called Book Club associates back in the day, where you used to be able to pick up the phone and sell books to people as well. I learned sales in so many different ways, but the thing that for me, that changed the whole process where selling without selling was really born, was actually when I trained as a coach in 2015 2016
Ant Hodges 4:51
I certified at master coach level, and I learned the art of coaching, the coaching. That I learned, and this is something, again, it's a little golden nugget that will help you massively to understand what coaching is really all about. Coaching is the art of helping somebody get to their point of realization that change needs to happen. Coaching is about questions. It's about understanding the person, and it's about helping the person intrinsically get to that point that they know things need to change. That's really all coaching is when somebody then needs the skills to make that happen. You could step into the role of a trainer, and you could train somebody to have the skills to be able to make that possible, or you could maybe step into the role of a mentor. Not only have you then got the tools and the experience that you can lend to that person, but you've also got the time and the ability to walk with them through it and mentor them through it. So coaching, training and mentoring are often muddied, and they're often sort of put into one kind of category, but coaching, let me say this again. Coaching is the art of helping somebody get to a point of realization that change needs to happen. And during my coaching accreditation, my final coaching accreditation, before I was awarded the master coach level, I was actually having a coffee with somebody else who was on that coaching accreditation with me, and inadvertently, I kind of turned that into a coaching conversation. I used what we'd learned around coaching in previous in those sessions, and I was literally just coaching this person around marketing and around their business, because the accreditation process didn't tell us anything about marketing. How do we generate leads? How do we actually sell as a coach, the whole coaching accreditation program, and it was said from the front by the trainers, was to really help you master the coaching skills. People ask questions around business development and marketing, and the trainer at the front said that's not what we cover in this week. So it wasn't like I was doing something untoward or sneaky here. But we were just having a coffee, and I was just asking him, because my experience of being a marketer, just things were obvious in my mind about what he needed to do, and that's how the conversation went. And we were talking about what he was, you know, the challenges he had, and so on and so forth. And like I said, I turned it inadvertently into a coaching conversation. But by the end of the coffee break, he was a new client of mine. I hadn't pitched I hadn't closed him in any way, shape or form. I just helped him realize that he wanted to work with me, and he was the one that actually asked me, ant, could we work together over the next three months? Could you help me with this? And then we shaped what that looked like, and he became a client. That was the day that selling, without selling as a framework for me, was born. But it really wasn't until a few years later that I actually realized that I was following a pattern, and I was following a framework, because I had a new team member come on board in my organization, and one of the things I wanted them to do was to think about selling and being, you know, a sales person within the team. So I kind of did a post mortem, and I looked back on sales conversations, and this was like before the dawn of AI. And for me, what I would have loved to have done right now, and this is the kind of how I use AI today, I would have taken transcripts from all of my calls. I would have thrown them into an AI. Would have said, what patterns do I follow? All of this kind of stuff. Show me a structure on sales calls that converted and sales calls that didn't convert. Show me the patterns that worked. AI could do something like that, and take all of those if you have sales calls right now on something like zoom, and you get them transcribed, or you do coaching calls, putting transcripts. And I'm not talking like one or two, I'm talking like 20, 3050, 100 calls, putting those transcripts into an AI and asking for patterns of what worked and what didn't work will help you to discern what you did right and what you could work on, you know, within your sales process. But let me get back to this story about when I had my team member come on board. So I went through everything manually myself, and I looked for this kind of pattern and this kind of framework, and things just started to pop out for me about the framework that I was following, and about how I was just having
Ant Hodges 9:53
conversations with people. And from that, I pulled that framework together, and that's when. I trained my team, my new team member on it, and that's what I've then put together and put into my book as selling without selling. And put my training together there's there's a training that you can get over at selling without selling.com. On this entire process. You can get access to that video training. That training is also available inside of my community. My community membership is a membership where people get access to all of my training as part of their membership. They also get access to live Q and A calls with me once a week. We also have office hours calls every week as well. And there's a whole bunch of other training if you want to discover more about my community and my other training, then please just head over to Hodges net.com that's Hodges net.com and that's where all of my training and my community stuff fits. So head over there if you want to find out more about that and even get access to the selling without selling training as well. The thing that's really important for me and why selling without selling has really become something that I have weaved into every kind of aspect of my business, on how it appears on sales pages, how it appears in webinars, and how I do it physically from stage. Selling without selling, no matter what kind of medium follows the same pattern, because it's fully aligned with my faith as a Christian, and what I read from the Bible and how Jesus, he never really manipulated anyone into anything. He never really forced anyone to follow him. He asked questions, he listened to people, and he met people, really where they were at. And I think the biggest thing was he invited and he literally stood there to serve. The aim of Christians today is to model Christ in our own lives, model the behaviors of Jesus, and that includes marketing and sales in our business. I think back to the there's so many stories that I could pull out of the of the Bible, but there's a story in the Gospel of Mark. It's Mark, chapter 10, verse 51 where he's actually talking to a blind man called Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus is sat there side of the road. He hears the commotion and hears that Jesus is just walking past him, and Jesus basically looks at him after Bartimaeus calls out and Jesus says, What do you want me to do now, just if we think about that for one moment, Jesus had all the power of Heaven. He was healing people at that time, he was, there were many miracles recorded in the Bible that he did. But he could have just seen Bartimaeus, and he could have it was, would have been really obvious that Bartimaeus was a blind man, and literally, he could have healed Bartimaeus without Bartimaeus even actually saying anything. But he didn't assume. He didn't kind of pitch and go, Well, I can do this, this and this and this. He just asked. And Bartimaeus replied with, Rabbi, I want to see. So that's what Jesus did at the heart of sales. If we sell in the right way, and if we build our sales process in the right way, it's ultimately the way that God designed them to be, a conversation, a diagnosis, and invitation, not any kind of manipulation, no pressure, no fear based closing, just a conversation. And if you build your sales process in this way, something happens. You actually stop dreading sales conversations. You actually will be able to start looking forward to them, because every one of them becomes a chance for you to be able to serve somebody Well, rather than actually force them to buy from you. And the seven step selling without selling framework is the complete framework that I've built over years, and I'm going to walk you through the first kind of three steps to understand this framework, because these are the most important things. It's how you start the conversation. I will often start a sales conversation with the phrase, what's bugging you right now, or what's going on right now,
Ant Hodges 14:45
what's the biggest challenge right now? However you kind of want to phrase that, that's going to help me understand the pain that they have right now, the challenge that they have right now, that enables me to just identify the key frustration that needs to be addressed. In some way, shape or form, I might unpack that. I might ask more clarification questions, depending on how long you've got in terms of a conversation piece. And then I'm going to ask the question, well, what's going to happen if we don't get that sorted? That's going to help me to understand the consequences of not solving that frustration and being able to understand that means that I understand their fears, their future pain. It's not something that's real right now, but it's something they want to avoid in the future, and if I can understand what their challenge is right now and what they want to avoid from happening. It gives me a really good sense of how I might be able to start helping them. But step three is where the gold comes in. I will ask a question that enables them to be able to tell me what a future result might look like. So typically for me, this might be something like, Well, where do you want to be in 90 days? And if I can understand their future pleasure, then it's really important for me to be able to see that, to feel it, to hear it, to dig in to get some clarification, maybe get some reasoning behind it, only for then for me to be able to follow the rest of the selling without selling framework. And the rest of the framework is really, then just about me positioning the right thing for them in the right way. The rest of the framework is all detailed in my book, simplify the funnel. Head over to simplify the funnel.com where you can grab your copy of my book and understand the full selling without selling process. If you can understand this framework, it's not a script, it's not a prescribed process, you will be able to put your spin on it, you'll be able to change some of the language so that it fits you. If you don't, if you wouldn't, naturally, just say the words what's bugging you right now, because that's how I talk. Then you just change it from a from use your language. But the but the key thing is, what you're wanting to do is to understand what the challenge is in that person's life or business right now, once you understand that you can move through the rest of the process, and this is fundamentally all about building relationship, and it's what all our relationship building values should be built on as human beings, including sales. It listens before it speaks. It serves before it asks. It honors the person and their free will at every step, because it never manipulates and it's never pushing them into something that they might not want. It tells the truth, including telling someone when your solution isn't right for them, because once I understand their frustrations, their fears, their aspirations, the next stage is for me to be able to present an offer that would be right for them, but by doing that, I'm choosing in my mind, to not present other offers that I might have, because at that point they might not be right. So as an example, if I'm talking to someone and they're telling me what stage their business is at, and so on and so forth, I'm not going to try and just shoehorn them into my most expensive, fractional cmo retainer over the course of a year, which starts with a $15,000 consultancy package, which I typically cover in a whole day. It's called simplified day. And then there's a retainer that goes on over 8k per month as a fractional CMO, if they're just starting out their business, I'm not going to try and pitch that and sell it, because I know that it's not right for them. If they're just starting out in their business, then I may introduce the community that I run 197 a month gets you access to my community, and all of my training gets you access to a couple of live calls every week with me, and I can help you to work through this, because that's going to be the logical next step for them. I'm not trying to sell them anything that wouldn't be right for them in any way, shape or form, and when we can
Ant Hodges 19:28
start to have conversations where we're not manipulating people, and even to the degree that if I've got a high ticket product or program, and even if I found out that they're not quite right, because they might not have the money. I'm not even manipulating them in a way to train them how to go and get a credit card and, you know, manipulate the process to get higher credit card application processes to get higher credit card rates so they could get lines. Credit to buy from me, which I know trainers who sell like that. They have a high ticket product or a program, and they literally manipulate people to a degree of training them how to go and get credit cards, multiple credit cards of in the same day, and how to negotiate higher rates of credit so that they could literally buy the training program that, for me, is not operating from the highest level of integrity, and it's not something that I'll ever do. You know, I haven't stacked my offers in any of my sales pitches with multiple things and then put some kind of fake, fictitious multiple 10,000 figure on the bottom, and then slashed it to just put a much lower amount on screen. And I certainly haven't lied about fake scarcity or fake deadlines or limited availability, because we know that scarcity sells, so I've got to build that in, but if I don't have it, then I can manufacture it, even things like webinars. When you run maybe an evergreen webinar, and the emails that go out of follow up, emails afterwards say, Oh, we had so many people buy in. We've only got limited spaces left. That's all kind of pre written before the webinars. So if the webinar bombs and the offer doesn't even make sense, those emails are still going to go out, and they're blatant lies. I honestly feel like we need to operate from a highest level of integrity in all things, and that's what I stand for, personally. And for me, what I read in the Bible, this is how Jesus went through the world. It's how we're, I believe, called to do business today. I'm sure you've seen every sales tactic on the planet, including those at play, at live events run to the back of the room, limited seats, limited availability in webinars and on adverts, including statements and stories that just don't ring true when you know the truth. Let me just unpack something I saw today before recording this. I knew I wanted to talk about sales in this episode, and the selling without selling framework, but I saw an advert, a video advert on Facebook that popped up from someone who's promoting a fairly sort of big event here in the UK that happens every year. He's got a fairly big following, fairly successful in his business, from a financial perspective, and growing his business. Last year they ran the same event, and they actually struggled to sell all of the tickets for their event. They actually promised some of their speakers that they'd have an audience of around 1000 people. They booked the room for that they spent a lot of money on the show and the hype of it all, and all the marketing and all the advertising, and they didn't manage to get those 1000 tickets for that event. And when I saw the advert today for this year's event, it was the same person who's running the event, and the same person who, you know, I had a little bit of respect for, but actually he lost all respect for me in this one advert. He lost all respect from me in this one advert, because I don't feel like he was truly operating from a position of integrity. I know that they struggled to sell those tickets for last year's event, but he told some kind of fictitious story about how they went to their audience, and they were told that by their audience that they preferred smaller audiences, so they capped tickets for this year's event at 500 but why not actually be truthful and say last year we didn't manage to sell all 1000 tickets, so to steward the resources well, to make sure that we serve you in the best possible way, and so that we don't have a big empty room and all this kind of stuff, we've capped tickets at 500 for this year, and it is strictly limited to those 500
Ant Hodges 24:03
that would be operating, in my opinion, from the highest level of integrity. Sometimes those kind of messages, they're not sexy, but it's the truth. Selling without selling is about understanding the person and offering the right thing to the right person. It's not about tactics. It's not about strategies to manipulate somebody into the sale. With my triage system that I use in my business, where I triage leads, it allows me to filter people through inquiries and actually have human conversations with the right kind of people that potentially might be able to buy my books and my training and my products and my fractional cmo services and my coaching and my membership. I don't allow bots and automations and AI or even team members to do the selling for me. I am literally doing all the selling in those conversations, and I've been closing around 90% Of those sales calls, I've even been trying some group sales processes where I deliver a paid for workshop and I'm delivering a group level, and that's working when it's me delivering as a human but more importantly, I'm able to sleep well at night. I've been able to look every client in the eye knowing I served them, that I didn't pressure them, that they made the choice to buy. I didn't sell to them, and I've built a business with what I believe is something that God's pleased with, because that's the person I'm answering to. And I want you to build something the same the framework is in one chapter of simplify the funnel. The rest of the book covers how you can build the minimum viable funnel to create content that attracts and helps people to convert in the best possible way. And everything is about not being able to operate your business to a point where it is disjointed from the values you hold as a person, whatever your belief system, I don't want you to lose your soul in the process of selling or marketing. If you want the full framework, including the language patterns and the way that I handle some objections with integrity and the follow up strategy and how to weave this whole process into sales pages, emails and webinars, then get your copy of the book at simplify the funnel.com it will be a signed hardback copy that will be winging its way to you if you're an entrepreneur who really wants To build your business with the highest levels of integrity, no matter what your kind of religious beliefs or values may be. If you want to build it at that level, then I urge you to just do as Jesus did. He came to serve. Serve first, be truthful and honor the person enough to allow them to tell you what they want, rather than try and shoehorn them into a product or service they might actually not want, not need, or not be able to afford in some way, selling isn't something that you should have to apologize for, and the ache of precious selling shouldn't be Something that you should ever have to feel ever again done right. Selling is one of the most serving things that you can do in your business. So I want you to go and have a good conversation today with someone. Serve them in the best possible way. Invite them on the next logical step of the journey with you, rather than you trying to shoehorn in your big ticket product or program. I've been ant Hodges, and it's been an honor to serve you on this episode. If you want to know any more about the things that I do, you can always head over to ant hodges.com if this episode has resonated with you in any way, then please share it. Please send it to somebody. Share it on your social media. Give them a way in which they can start to look at and see a different way of selling, because selling is one of the biggest challenges that people have right now. You could serve the people you're following just by sharing this podcast episode. So please consider giving it a five star rating and leave a review on whatever platform you're listening to it on and join me on the next episode of less. Is the strategy the podcast that is going to help you to simplify everything in your business, from a marketing a sales and a business process position, so that you can operate from the highest levels of integrity and build a simplified business. I've been ant Hodges, I look forward to catching up with you again real soon. Take care. Bye.