#34 Serving Rather Than Selling

#34 Serving rather than selling
Welcome to Different Points, episode 34, with my host, Roy Colan, myself, Catherine Llewellyn. Today we're talking about serving rather than selling. And the question is, how can you serve today? So, Roy, what's your take on this one? I mean, where my mind goes on that is I look at, say, a lot of, say, Americans on stage when they're doing stuff and they're just, everything is about the selling.

Or if you're going on to, say, the coach in Boston about selling, I do it differently. It's like, even with the virtual assistance business, I never tried to sell. I can tell you what I'm doing and I can kind of tap into where you are and where I can bring you, but I'm never doing the hard sale where, oh, you have to make this decision now.

Or, hey, if you make a decision today, it'll be 10% cheaper or 20% cheaper. And I don't have the bandwidth. There's more clients that'll come in.

So it's, yeah. Do I know that I would get probably 10X more clients from doing that? Probably because I see how it works with a lot of people, but I never want to do that because I see when people do it to me and sometimes they're all happy and nice and friendly. And I just say, I never make a decision on a call.

I always have to sleep on it and think, and you just see their demeanor changing. And then they go into kind of attack mode and you just see the real person. So for me, it's, I think, just remain calm and don't do that.

If you're a coach, if you're a business owner, and if you're trying to get the sale, treat every person like it's your parents with love and empathy. And then you're never trying to ram it down your throat. And if they need your service, they'll get it.

And then if you provide the value that you've told them, they'll tell their friends and they'll get more. And I prefer working like that than using sneaky techniques and being 10X more on income. Completely.

I completely agree. Because in the end, you know, at the end of the working day, guess who's there when you go home? You. With yourself.

And I remember years ago, I was working in an organization and they brought in the sales expert. And this guy, um, this guy had all these techniques, right? And he made a very big mistake with us as a group. He tried to, uh, he was trying to illustrate to us how you can kind of trick people into buying.

So he did this, this process with us, where we were all sitting in rows and he was at the front and he said, we're just going to do a little process. What I want you to do is turn in a moment, you're going to turn around and shake hands with the person behind you. So you can imagine what happened.

Everybody turned around and there was no one behind them because everyone had turned round to behind them. So we immediately knew he tripped us. Immediately.

He didn't know how close we all were with each other. We were actually a community. A lot of us lived in flats together.

Some of us were in partnerships together. Some of us were brothers and sisters or even parents. He made a very big mistake because we instantly as a group, like a hive mind hated him.

Now that was a really good example of somebody trying to trick people into something, not serving. And he was just dead in the water from then on for the rest of the session, absolutely dead in the water. And our boss who brought him in could see what had happened.

He was a very, very sharp, bright guy. And he could see what had happened. He could see the mistake that had been made.

And he could see that this guy's whole philosophy of selling, which he then explained to us, actually wasn't going to work with us because we wanted to be honest and truthful. He was doing this whole thing of the first thing you've got to do is disturb somebody. You've got to make them upset about their current situation.

And then you've got to tell them that you're going to help them feel better. And we're like, no, we're not doing that. Get out.

And I've seen so many people trying to do that with selling. What's wrong with the person that you can fix for them? What awful is going to happen to them if they don't buy your service? And I saw one of my colleagues actually trying this on somebody in the UK. I don't know if it still exists.

There used to be this car insurance company called Direct Line. Have you heard of it, Roy? Direct Line. OK.

So this guy was just about to sort of start Direct Line. And we had a marketing business that could have helped him. And we were at some sort of networking.

And my colleague who was in sales walked up to him and said, yeah, you should work with us. If you don't work with us, your business will fail. And he looked at her and said, let's see, shall we? And he didn't work with us.

And his business took off and did really, really well. And I'll never forget that because she was coming from the wrong place. If she'd come from the right place of saying, I think your business is a fantastic idea.

It would be an honour to help you. I'd love to help you. Can we have a conversation? He might well have signed up because our service actually would have been really good for him.

So I think this is a really important thing. And. One other thing I want to say about it is I think this belief that you have to trick people and upset them in order for them to buy comes from this idea of scarcity, that there's a very limited amount of business out there, a very limited amount of money, a very limited amount of people that want to expand their business or whatever it is.

It's just not true. There's there's nearly 8 billion people on the planet. There's going to be plenty of them who actually want my service, Roy's service, your service.

If we let them know what we're doing and if we approach them with a bit of dignity and in service, there's plenty, plenty, plenty to go around. So I think this is that that meant that belief and recognition that we don't have to be scrabbling and tricking and manipulating. And also that when we do do that, it's not good for our soul.

So as you can tell from that rant, this is something I've thought about before. Roy, anything else you want to say before we close this episode? One of the tricks that they do is they go, you're in this place because you're afraid to make a decision. Yes.

They use all manipulation with something that's like NLP at the wrong end of things. And it's always about where do you want to be? Where do you see yourself at 1 to 10 on this? Would you like? And just just listen to what they're saying and just take a breath and then just come back to it. And you realize that a lot of the time, not all, a lot of the time is just trickery to get you over the line.

And most of the ones that use the trickery, they'll promise the stars and the moon and everything else. And then you'll hear crickets. So I think use your intuition, tap into it and also do research, check, check Trustpilot, check different things because those charlatans, people eventually realize it and they vent.

And the good people, you won't find bad things on them. Yeah, absolutely right. So clearly Roy and I both have some opinions about this one.

And I wonder what your opinions are, you know, that there's. Are you out there, you know, desperately trying to meet your targets? Are you out there comfortable, but also growing your business? And are you serving or are you selling? So thank you for watching. Thanks for listening.

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Take care.