Episode 4
When sales stopped being scary and became just research
Are you an impact-driven founder struggling to improve your sales? Join Julie on this insightful episode of the Rebels and Geeks Podcast as she unveils transformative sales strategies that blend your research skills with an effective sales process. Dive deep into the journey of shifting from fear of selling to reframing sales as research.
Subscribe to my newsletter here
In this engaging episode, Julie shares her personal transformation, recounting how she went from fearing sales to loving it. She highlights the crucial realization that "sales in B2B is just research you get paid for." This revelation not only reframed her approach to selling but also empowered her to leverage her strengths as a professional researcher, ultimately leading to clarity and control in her business.
Key topics covered in this episode include:
- The common misconceptions about sales and 'being commercial'
- How the fear of selling can be transformed into an opportunity for growth
- Identifying core questions that every founder must answer: What are you selling? Who are you selling it to? What value does it bring? And will customers pay for it?
- The importance of sales fundamentals and clarity in product positioning
- The role of self-accountability and resilience in the entrepreneurial journey
- The mindset shift from perfectionism to using sales as an extension of your service
Learn about crucial strategies such as funnel management and the significance of the discovery call in shaping your value proposition. Julie emphasizes that effective sales practices are vital for sustainable growth, revealing that clarity in communication makes it easier for customers to engage with and purchase your offerings.
Moving through the process, Julie encourages listeners to reflect on the state of their own sales funnels.
- ATTRACT: Are you attracting the right clients?
- CONVERT: Are you struggling to convert leads?
- CLOSE: Or do you need to make a lot of offers before you close a single deal?
- (DELIGHT: Usually, the problem is not in delight - recurring customers should be a default)
She invites you to take actionable steps towards refining your sales strategy by treating it as a learning opportunity rather than a daunting task.
Don’t miss this chance to turn the perceived chaos of sales into a structured research process that not only aligns with your natural strengths but also leads you to profitable outcomes.
Hit 'Follow' on the podcast page for more episodes packed with wisdom on building impactful sales systems designed for sustainable success!
🎧 Listen now and revolutionize your sales approach!
For more tips and resources, subscribe and get actionable tips on how to effectively leverage research as a powerful sales tool.
Transcript
Sales in B2B is just research you get paid for.
Speaker:That one line transformed and completely flipped how I looked at selling.
Speaker:For the longest time, I believed I wasn't good at sales.
Speaker:I believed that I just had to push myself more and be more commercial and maybe
Speaker:consider wearing a power suit or something.
Speaker:I thought it was about projecting confidence
Speaker:and having answers and things like that but
Speaker:I was really still in the phase of like okay so what am I selling and to whom
Speaker:I'm curious to discover it but I am also kind of selling a Swiss knife at this
Speaker:point I was selling I can do anything for everyone in innovation.
Speaker:Turns out that did not convert.
Speaker:In this episode, I want to tell you about what did work for me.
Speaker:And the clue is in that sentence.
Speaker:Sales in B2B is just research you get paid for.
Speaker:I thought I knew the answers until I worked with a sales coach.
Speaker:Shout out to Colonel Veronica.
Speaker:Amazing coach who helped me to face four
Speaker:very simple questions so simple I
Speaker:would dare to call them basic and the
Speaker:intellectualization that was happening at the time was so eloquent that I thought
Speaker:right that I kind of scoffed when I heard the simple questions what are you
Speaker:selling to whom are you selling it what value does it bring what problem does
Speaker:it solve and will they pay,
Speaker:and I thought I knew the answers. I'm like, yeah, we'll get to that.
Speaker:But when I was pushed to answer them, turns out I didn't.
Speaker:And what was more interesting was why I didn't know these answers.
Speaker:And that's where everything changed for me. So in today's episode,
Speaker:I'll share how I went from being paralyzed by fear of selling to realizing that
Speaker:I actually already have all the skills to make sales work,
Speaker:but without turning into someone I'm not.
Speaker:Let's get into it.
Speaker:So before I worked with a sales coach, this was basically my belief.
Speaker:I have to try to be commercial and I can no longer procrastinate sales because
Speaker:I am dodging my responsibility as a business owner.
Speaker:Up until then, for the first two, three years of my business,
Speaker:gigs just came rolling into my network. And how great was that, right?
Speaker:Especially since I started in the first month of COVID.
Speaker:But I wasn't really getting the type of work I
Speaker:wasn't getting the type of work at all that I wanted
Speaker:to do because I discovered along
Speaker:the way what my values were what type of business I actually wanted to build
Speaker:instead of just continuing to do what I was doing but on a freelance basis right
Speaker:I was doing corporate consulting and innovation strategy and I wanted to work
Speaker:with The smallest companies that are making a profit by doing good impact startups, right?
Speaker:So I wanted to build a business based on that, but I wasn't really doing anything
Speaker:to build that business in terms of sales.
Speaker:I was just thinking about it a lot.
Speaker:I mean I just fell into this like I can do anything for anyone trap because,
Speaker:I felt like if I chose for
Speaker:impact startups that means I have to abandon the
Speaker:corporate consulting gig and that is
Speaker:a golden cage you just don't leave it's not like I was rolling
Speaker:on money or anything like that but it did give me a sense of
Speaker:control and stability doing something I have been
Speaker:doing for I had been doing for like eight years and yeah
Speaker:knowing that there is a willingness to pay and there
Speaker:is of course um yeah a
Speaker:validated business model there that I'm familiar with so it
Speaker:was really hard for me to get over the
Speaker:choosing feels like losing and not
Speaker:pinning down my basic like sales
Speaker:fundamentals of what do
Speaker:I sell to whom etc meant that
Speaker:I had to that I could extend that choosing is losing paradigm right I basically
Speaker:just wanted to have my cake and eat it too I wanted to cash in on corporate
Speaker:consulting while doing impact startup coaching and in the end,
Speaker:I ended up losing so much more in not converting,
Speaker:by not converting the people that I did attract.
Speaker:I just got a lot of technical conversations about the methods I use.
Speaker:I got a lot of polite nodding, a lot of great, a lot of yes,
Speaker:yes, I'm very interested.
Speaker:And then no actual conversions up to a point that I got into financial trouble
Speaker:because of a lack of sales. Not that fun.
Speaker:But now I can feel in control
Speaker:as I follow and tweak my sales process instead of just hoping
Speaker:for these magical deals but these magical deals the deals that every so often
Speaker:came in I felt like these were just purely based on on luck I I didn't really
Speaker:have a way to replicate them.
Speaker:I believe that if I did enough thinking and researching, that eventually I would
Speaker:get to clarity, that I would just need to strategize more or something,
Speaker:or that I needed to market myself.
Speaker:But to market yourself, you also need to have your sales fundamentals in place, right?
Speaker:You need to know what service you're positioning, what product you're actually
Speaker:offering, what your value position is and to whom.
Speaker:So being a Swiss knife actually was way more scary than having a sharp offer
Speaker:like I have today, funnily enough.
Speaker:And having this I can do anything for anyone was really a golden cage that made it super scary.
Speaker:Like when you set a new goal, right? when you set out, like,
Speaker:I have to write content or I have to start working out.
Speaker:These are like super big goals or they seem like that when you start at first.
Speaker:While, yeah, getting better at sales was exactly the same. It was too big of a goal.
Speaker:So enter my coach. At a certain point, I attended a workshop to really understand
Speaker:like, okay, what are these five steps that she proclaims are the steps to get to a clear positioning?
Speaker:Because I was really feeling the problem of having a lack of clarity for my
Speaker:clients, but also for myself.
Speaker:So I went to this workshop, I saw her process, I felt like I could trust this
Speaker:person, which turned out to be true, and I decided on the spot, this is what I need to do.
Speaker:I'm going to lose so much more if I don't do this just in the time that I'm
Speaker:sitting, spinning around in my head in circles.
Speaker:Just in the deals I'm losing, the deals I'm not chasing and making.
Speaker:I'm gonna lose so much more so I felt the pain at its hardest when I was at my brokest let's say,
Speaker:and funny thing about being broke is that there's always a next level of being
Speaker:broke right and I didn't even achieve the ultimate levels of being broke lucky
Speaker:lucky me I have a I have a But for me,
Speaker:I, at that time, I consider myself broke and I spent 5k of which that I was lent money, basically.
Speaker:So 5k that I could barely afford banking on future income to pay for the part
Speaker:of the payment that had to come, that would come later.
Speaker:And of course, it's needless to say that this is not financial advice.
Speaker:But this really forced me to
Speaker:take my business seriously in a way that I hadn't done in the three years before
Speaker:that it forced me to want to earn that back tenfold it forced me to look at
Speaker:the sunk cost of not making choices of not taking these sales actions that I
Speaker:so desperately needed to take.
Speaker:And this coaching process started triggering, right?
Speaker:The basic but cutting questions of what am I selling to whom?
Speaker:What value does it bring? Will they pay?
Speaker:All of these questions were very relevant, yet basic, right?
Speaker:But what was interesting is while working through that, while having a sounding
Speaker:board, a sparring partner that is way more experienced than I am,
Speaker:we started to uncover and peel away at the levels underneath that,
Speaker:at the layer of mirroring my behavior,
Speaker:which was really starting to expose a lack of self-accountability.
Speaker:As an entrepreneur, this is one of the biggest skills that I had to learn,
Speaker:together with resilience and grit, but keeping myself,
Speaker:holding myself accountable to a goal that I set is still a daily battle with
Speaker:the fun perks of having ADD and other neurodivergences, but keeping myself accountable
Speaker:is definitely the biggest power I have now.
Speaker:And that says a lot about how big of a lack I had of that self-accountability, if that's a sentence.
Speaker:So the questions that she asked underneath were questions like,
Speaker:what makes you hesitant to focus on building one product or one service for one audience at a time?
Speaker:How do you feel about the time, like investing three months of time,
Speaker:for example, in a focused effort,
Speaker:and having payoff or no payoff versus not choosing to focus on anything and doing a bunch of things?
Speaker:Like what does that give you why do
Speaker:you consider choosing losing what does that give
Speaker:you and for me i realized
Speaker:like i was wasting time in very expensive thinking
Speaker:i was basically hoping
Speaker:to find the right
Speaker:answer i was
Speaker:trying to find the right answer i
Speaker:was i had a held the secret belief
Speaker:a bias an assumption that a
Speaker:right answer existed somewhere somehow
Speaker:maybe my coach had the answer maybe the market had it I don't know how many
Speaker:calls I did with colleagues to see like where do you get your clients to try
Speaker:to understand like what is that one place where the pot of gold lies,
Speaker:or how do you actually package your services?
Speaker:And practicing answering these questions with my coach showed me much faster
Speaker:than I did on my own in the two years that I was kind of struggling with this.
Speaker:It showed me that I didn't have any clear answer.
Speaker:That even if I had the right answer, I wouldn't even have known because it wasn't
Speaker:clear, so I couldn't challenge it.
Speaker:It's like when you try to test a hypothesis in the lab. if your hypothesis is
Speaker:unclear, it's impossible to say whether it's validated or invalidated.
Speaker:For the people who don't work in labs or in the lean startup world,
Speaker:that was Chinese, so I apologize.
Speaker:But basically, the clarity of the answers was the real problem instead of having the right answers.
Speaker:Because the right answer just didn't exist. So how did people then,
Speaker:people who were successful how did they come up
Speaker:with their answer then was the next question right
Speaker:I could start to ask myself better questions and that
Speaker:was for me the thing that that stood out when I like
Speaker:I inevitably started comparing myself to
Speaker:others was like well they all
Speaker:seem to have one thing in common that they kind
Speaker:of know or they are clear about what they do and how they do it and what service
Speaker:they provide and I found it sometimes very confusing and scary because I'm like
Speaker:yeah but if you if I would determine that that feels very permanent and none of those.
Speaker:Services feel perfect in fact every time someone told me what they did I was
Speaker:like yeah I would do it differently.
Speaker:But the thing they had in common was that at least they were clear about it. They had clarity.
Speaker:And that was really what my coach triggered me and pushed me to find,
Speaker:was to have a clear answer.
Speaker:Not the right answer, but an answer. A clear answer.
Speaker:The...
Speaker:And so I started really diving into sales, right?
Speaker:I started to devour sales books and I started to look at, okay,
Speaker:how should I actually do sales?
Speaker:I got some sales scripts, I got some sales methods,
Speaker:and I started to see like
Speaker:tons and tons of approaches passing along and as soon as I started to apply
Speaker:them a quote came my way the quote that I mentioned in the beginning sales in
Speaker:b2b is just research you get paid for,
Speaker:it it found me just like a good book finds you on a specific time,
Speaker:and and and that defines what you think of the book often more often than not,
Speaker:And this quote just really, really stuck with me.
Speaker:The shift that happened, the reason this really resonated with me,
Speaker:was that I always held to believe I was bad at sales.
Speaker:But if sales in B2B is just research you get paid for, then that's really good
Speaker:news because, guess what?
Speaker:I'm already a professional researcher.
Speaker:I do user market research
Speaker:for a living i if
Speaker:i would just be a loose
Speaker:cannon i would be down every single rabbit
Speaker:hole of new technologies and of of methods
Speaker:and whatever i would just be geeking out all day i mean
Speaker:been there done that you know like when when web3
Speaker:came along i was the one who spent 30 days working
Speaker:in daos you know like when blockchain came
Speaker:out in 2016 it was
Speaker:the same so in over the span of of seven
Speaker:eight years that has been like nothing
Speaker:much has changed because it has been a constant in my life i'm always curious
Speaker:to discover things right now i'm less curious about technology i'm more curious
Speaker:about people and about other things but for me it's um It's always been like
Speaker:about really understanding something,
Speaker:really grasping something and articulate it in a way that makes sense to me, you know?
Speaker:So I figured if I'm good at researching, then I'm sure I can find my answer.
Speaker:Because then sales just becomes, how can I structure learning instead of how
Speaker:can I get good at persuasion?
Speaker:And that was for me a very big mindset shift because I felt I needed to put
Speaker:my stake in the ground and to some degree I have to, but then persuade people of it.
Speaker:While what I wanted to do was to just hear what do people need and then adapt to that.
Speaker:But the truth is somewhere in the middle. the truth
Speaker:is learning about what the market needs just enough until
Speaker:you feel confident to put a stake in the ground to then see if
Speaker:the market actually responds to that and you
Speaker:feel that as i described that you feel
Speaker:that that's a sort of interplay right with my
Speaker:hands i'm gesturing this sort of like engine that that
Speaker:kind of reacts to it itself because
Speaker:sales and research are kind of this little tandem
Speaker:or that's at least how I look at
Speaker:it now it's not like okay I finished the product
Speaker:now I'm ready to sell it no it doesn't work that way in a
Speaker:startup when you're doing something innovative when you're not doing a traditional
Speaker:business you need to first figure out what you're actually selling but that
Speaker:word I just got myself using first figure out no no You need to figure out what
Speaker:you're selling while you're selling it.
Speaker:And this is the hard part, right? This is the constant balance to find is how
Speaker:much do I have to, how deep do I have to put my stake in the ground?
Speaker:How hard do I have to develop my solution, claim what I do, have answers versus
Speaker:how much am I actually...
Speaker:Learning from the market and selling in that market.
Speaker:So for me, the big reframing was looking at sales as a research process,
Speaker:because that meant I was good at it on one hand,
Speaker:but it also meant that I didn't need to give in to my perfectionist tendencies.
Speaker:I was really, before I started doing this, I was really obsessed with my technical expertise.
Speaker:I admit, I was kicking out like crazy. I was like, yeah, but this business design
Speaker:method, it's like step one, step two, step three.
Speaker:And I could write for days. I mean, I wrote an 80-page book that I never published
Speaker:about the method because, I mean,
Speaker:you need to find the people who would actually read that book, right?
Speaker:Would actually get value from that. So I was too much into my product,
Speaker:into my solution. I was too much into developing mode.
Speaker:And the real reason that drove that for me was that that was a shield.
Speaker:It was just comfortable.
Speaker:It was comfortable for me to geek out because it shielded me from actually selling.
Speaker:So it protected me from my own perfectionism and from my fear of failure,
Speaker:which I realized was way bigger than what I anticipated. Fear of success was
Speaker:also a part of that, by the way, which is funny.
Speaker:Anyway, so I think that was the biggest shift for me.
Speaker:Sales in B2B is just research you get paid for. Yes, I will repeat this until no end.
Speaker:Okay, so what does a consultant do, recovering consultant, guilty as charged,
Speaker:what does a consultant do when you discover a new paradigm, a new mental model?
Speaker:Sales is just research you get paid for.
Speaker:Then I start to see, okay, so how do I implement that? What are the tools?
Speaker:What are the tools? What are the things that I can use to actually execute this?
Speaker:And I had two tools to my disposition already through my coaching and my sales focus.
Speaker:The first one was funnel management.
Speaker:I never actually really managed my sales funnel.
Speaker:So what's a sales funnel, first of all, since I also had to learn the basics of that?
Speaker:Sure I used sales in I mean
Speaker:I was a sales queen at my previous employer but I never
Speaker:had set up my own sales funnel that worked for me and the basic tenets of a
Speaker:sales funnel are four steps first you attract clients then you attract potential
Speaker:clients right so leads then you convert them.
Speaker:You try to go from, hey, I exist to, hey, let's talk.
Speaker:And then you close them. You send them an offer or you make them an offer.
Speaker:Never send an offer without presenting it. But you make an offer and you hope
Speaker:that they close the deal. So attract, convert, close.
Speaker:And then you delight them, right? You make sure that they're so,
Speaker:so, so, so happy that you have delighted customers.
Speaker:Those are the four basic steps of a sales funnel. Attract, convert, close, delight.
Speaker:So I had that tool to my disposition. And the way I used that was to troubleshoot
Speaker:where the leaks were in my pipelines.
Speaker:In my funnel. Because sales is a huge problem, right?
Speaker:And saying my goal is to sell 60k in two months, that's just not realistic, nor is it in my control.
Speaker:So that actually offered me a way to break up the problem and to reframe the
Speaker:problem in a way that I could actually do something about it.
Speaker:So for me, the way my pipeline was leaky, where I was losing sales opportunities,
Speaker:was definitely not in the light.
Speaker:Like, the only reason my business was still alive was because I had customers
Speaker:that were happy for years, you know, and they just came coming back.
Speaker:But it did feel like magic or luck whenever I found a new client or when a client
Speaker:came back, it was like, oh, lucky me, then got their back.
Speaker:And the place where my funnel was leaky was actually also not attracting,
Speaker:because I have quite a good network.
Speaker:I was meeting people, I was getting out there, going to events and things like that.
Speaker:I know quite a lot of people around the globe and locally, so it was totally fine on that sense.
Speaker:The spot where it leaked was in convert and in close.
Speaker:Like actually in
Speaker:close really i think it was but convert was
Speaker:like okay what do i want like
Speaker:who do i want to talk to was mostly the problem like corporate or founders and
Speaker:um what how do i handle that first conversion conversation to then leading into
Speaker:the offer like what do i even offer them you I was doing custom service work,
Speaker:so that was no longer sustainable.
Speaker:So I saw, okay, the convert and the close phase are the two parts that need the most work.
Speaker:And the tool that I used to make that part work was...
Speaker:The tool that I'm actually using still to this day as well. Just as my funnel,
Speaker:I use this tool to this day.
Speaker:And those are my discovery scripts.
Speaker:My discovery scripts I composed based on many different sources, right?
Speaker:I went through different sales methodologies. Obviously, I got a head start
Speaker:through my coach who gave me a very simple methodology that I still use today
Speaker:that is completely aligned also with the research methodology as it happens.
Speaker:And this is basically the typical discovery
Speaker:method of let's discover whether we're
Speaker:a fit and then let's discover how we can work together and so we broke it up
Speaker:into two steps the first step is if we should work together and those are different
Speaker:criteria of like okay do you have a problem that I actually can solve?
Speaker:Are you a client that aligns with, yeah, my values, honestly?
Speaker:And are you looking for someone to solve that problem, right?
Speaker:So basic qualification, let's say.
Speaker:The second part is in how. So discovery if we're a match and discovery how we can match.
Speaker:Second part is how, and that, yeah, took a lot of shaping of my value proposition
Speaker:before we actually got there.
Speaker:So again, it's an interplay between research and shaping the solution.
Speaker:But this allowed me to basically ask these questions in the discovery conversations,
Speaker:in the convert and close part of my funnel.
Speaker:To uncover what is valuable to them, research, right?
Speaker:And to go from seeing sales as like, oh, I'm afraid they're going to say no,
Speaker:to how can I best serve this client, if I can even serve this client.
Speaker:So it takes a lot of pressure away because I went from selling like fear-based
Speaker:sales, let's say, to seeing sales as an extension of my service.
Speaker:An extension of my service. Or how would you say, a precursor of my service.
Speaker:I think a lot of you who are listening, if you're doing services or if you've done services,
Speaker:you know that the discovery call is often very valuable because you apply your perspective,
Speaker:you being you showing up has value in the
Speaker:sense that you reframe their problem in a
Speaker:way that they might not have thought about before right so
Speaker:a lot of service people
Speaker:are sometimes disgruntled i would love to get
Speaker:paid for that you know for the discovery call in
Speaker:itself because it's so valuable and they often hear
Speaker:that like i often hear that too like that that
Speaker:first call already has so much value um but
Speaker:if you look at that as a precursor or an extension of your service you start
Speaker:to see that as just a way to co-design value and it allows you to actually shape your main service.
Speaker:And I think this is one of the big distinctions, the big transformations that
Speaker:I also went through is that, yes, one day I might monetize discovery calls.
Speaker:But for the moment, if I would put a paywall on those, I would actually learn
Speaker:less and less quickly from those discovery calls, which would hurt my main product.
Speaker:My main product is I sell
Speaker:coaching services right I do
Speaker:that in a productized way I package that in a predictable process because I
Speaker:know which problem I'm solving for whom and how I'm solving that right and that
Speaker:creates a delightful service but I need those discovery calls to continue feeding that.
Speaker:And as soon as my first product is running smoothly, which I think it is now
Speaker:already, then I can think about a second product.
Speaker:But for me, that wouldn't be necessarily the discovery cause.
Speaker:A product that holds much more potential would be something else.
Speaker:And I'm working on two different, validating two different products at the moment.
Speaker:But in any case, the thing is that You just move from going into this precursor service mode,
Speaker:like where you're really acting as a researcher and looking at sales as a fun
Speaker:way to turn research into revenue, basically.
Speaker:Then you start to go from this Swiss knife mentality where you can do anything
Speaker:for everyone and your solution is a hammer to any nail.
Speaker:You move from that to being much sharper about your value proposition because
Speaker:you are asking more relevant questions.
Speaker:Because you are trying to nail more specific goals like conversion or like closing. Right?
Speaker:And so another big transformation that happened because of that was that,
Speaker:remember I said that I felt like choosing was losing?
Speaker:I feel like this is relatable for a lot of you listening now.
Speaker:But when choosing feels losing, and you start to structure the way that you
Speaker:do your sales as a research project basically,
Speaker:then making a choice just becomes a temporary learning tool.
Speaker:It's just a tactic, one tactic, making the choice.
Speaker:It's just a tactic to make my basic diligence of crafting a value proposition
Speaker:easier. What I mean by that is that.
Speaker:Putting a stake in the ground and saying, this is what I offer to people,
Speaker:and this is how I know it's valuable, is really my responsibility as a founder.
Speaker:So if you're listening and you're still like serving
Speaker:five different segments and always explaining your
Speaker:value proposition in a different way or you
Speaker:feel like you have a hard time communicating what you do and why it's valuable
Speaker:then reframe that responsibility to yourself or at least that's that's what
Speaker:helped me I was like yeah if I'm not making it easy for people to buy from me,
Speaker:if I look at it in a very simple way,
Speaker:then the question becomes, how else are people supposed to buy from me?
Speaker:What hoops do they really need to jump through to buy from me?
Speaker:People buy things that are easy to buy, that are predictable.
Speaker:That are, yeah, they don't buy from vague things, you know, then they just give a vague answer back.
Speaker:Yeah, yeah that sounds super interesting yes yes yes let's
Speaker:definitely circle back on that you
Speaker:know so this is really what um
Speaker:what helped me understand the function
Speaker:and the purpose of making a choice of saying like okay I'm gonna validate whether
Speaker:this segment or that segment has most need for this type of service and then
Speaker:I didn't feel like I was committing to a niche like every business coach will tell you to do.
Speaker:No, it's not about making a permanent choice. It's just about what are we trying
Speaker:to learn here and what is important to learn about at this point in time.
Speaker:And that to me, to conclude, is the big shift.
Speaker:The big takeaway for me is to stop overcomplicating by making it vague and abstract,
Speaker:what you saw, but start treating sales as paid learning, as research.
Speaker:The big shift then is that you stop to see actually sales as pushing or pretending.
Speaker:It becomes about learning, about managing your funnel, getting better at one
Speaker:part of the funnel, learning how to do that.
Speaker:It becomes about how do I structure my conversations, my discovery calls.
Speaker:It becomes about how can I feed my sales with a sharper value proposition.
Speaker:So I think the key takeaway for you in this, like what you could apply today,
Speaker:is to check in where in your funnel, in your sales pipeline,
Speaker:remember that's attract, convert, close, delight, where in your funnel are you
Speaker:most stuck thinking instead of testing?
Speaker:Because the fastest way to get to unanswered, to get to your answer, to get to a clear answer,
Speaker:isn't in a strategy deck or a new pitch deck version 52. It's in the market.
Speaker:So testing those things in the market, real people, that's the fastest way to learn.
Speaker:Because you can strategize in the mirror as much as you want.
Speaker:You can talk to ChachisBT as much as you want, but it's the actual market that
Speaker:will tell you whether or not this resonates and creates value or not.
Speaker:How you increase that value, how you articulate that value, all of those answers are in the market.
Speaker:So a call to action to you is look at your own funnel. Where are you stuck?
Speaker:Is it in attracting people?
Speaker:Is it in converting the people you talk to into a lead?
Speaker:Is it into closing the actual deal?
Speaker:Doubt it's in the light because most of my clients are super big experts and just deliver.
Speaker:But after that, then look at your value proposition through four simple questions.
Speaker:What am I selling? To whom am I selling it?
Speaker:What value does it bring? And what will drive them to pay? AKA, what's the problem?
Speaker:These are the basic questions that you need to answer and that you can help
Speaker:answering by seeing sales as research.
Speaker:And the best thing is that the founders that I work with, impact founders,
Speaker:they tend to be super good at it.
Speaker:If you're an impact founder, you are a value-driven entrepreneur with deep domain
Speaker:expertise or technical expertise.
Speaker:That means you're, by nature, you're analytical, you're a deep thinker,
Speaker:you try to understand problems really well.
Speaker:And this makes your this
Speaker:research approach becomes actually your
Speaker:superpower which makes sales a strength
Speaker:of yours in a way that intuitively fits
Speaker:your personality in a way that it feels natural that you don't need to become
Speaker:something you're not a commercial sales shark so if you need help with that
Speaker:i'm julie from rebels and geeks i'm impact started coach i'm very very happy
Speaker:to be your coach in this podcast, but also in real life.
Speaker:So if you like this, if you think this content is relevant,
Speaker:come on over to rebels-geeks.com and subscribe to my newsletter or just click
Speaker:on the first link in the show notes and drop me your email.
Speaker:I will share more about the convertible research method, which is exactly the
Speaker:step-by-step toolkit that you need to put everything we just talked about into practice.
Speaker:The next episode will introduce that method. So stay tuned. Bye. Thanks for listening.
