Today I want to talk to you about how sales feels—how it feels to you and to your team. Because right now, if selling feels like you are chasing people, like you’re convincing, if sales feels like it requires a lot of effort, tons of follow-up, and constant pressure and pushing, then you might be talking to the wrong people. Selling gets way easier when you speak to buyers who are already ready. You don’t need to convince them when they are already bought in. And I want to talk about what I mean by buyers who are already bought in. These folks are already primed to say yes. They already have a higher level of awareness of their problem. They’re already looking for a solution. They might even already be working to solve their problem.

And when you speak to them, when you connect with those folks, it makes selling feel so much smoother and simpler. There’s no proving or pushing or convincing because these buyers are self-led buyers. Self-led buyers don’t need more information from you. They don’t need to be convinced. They just need alignment, and that means they need to feel seen. Self-led buyers already have a higher level of understanding and awareness of what you offer, and they need to see messaging that reflects what they’re experiencing, how they’re thinking, and what they’re feeling. When they experience messaging that is relevant and specific to them, they are going to trust you more quickly. And that means you need to meet them where they are and use their language.

You need to connect with them on a deeper level. You need to speak to the people who, again, already understand that there is a problem, and they feel like you’re speaking directly to them because the things that you’re saying in your marketing feel like you’re reading their minds. It feels like you’ve been following them around. It feels like you’ve experienced it yourself—because you probably have—and all of that builds trust. So buyers who are bought in are buyers who aren’t completely unaware of the problem that you solve. I want to use this example for you. It’s unrelated to business, but I think it’ll illustrate something really helpful for you. So I love to read books, and there’s a book that I started reading. And then I saw that there is going to be a movie released later this year that’s based on the book.

And I thought to myself, “Oh, that’ll be fun to go watch,” and immediately wondered who would want to go with me. Now, I could go ask my husband if he wanted to read this book with me and then go to the movies, but my husband does not like to read. He doesn’t enjoy it at all. Like, one of the very last things he would ever want to do would be to read a book—much less likely the books that I like to read. So if I went to him and said, “Would you like to read this book with me so that when this movie comes out we can go watch it together, having already read the book, and then we can talk about it afterwards? How fun would that be?”—it’s going to be a lot harder for me to get a yes from him compared to my daughter. My daughter really enjoys reading, and when there’s a movie that’s come out about a book in the past, she has suggested to me, “Why don’t we read the book together and then we’ll go watch the movie?” And so there’s also a history, a pattern, of her saying yes to this before—of her already being bought into this idea, already having a desire for this. When I think about those two scenarios, I could try really hard, and I might be able to convince my husband to go to the movie with me. It’s going to be really hard for me, though, to convince him to read the book, and it’s going to take a lot more of my time and effort.

It’s going to bring up a lot more objections because he’s going to give me all of the reasons why he doesn’t want to or can’t, to try to get out of it. It’s going to make the whole process more painful. It’s not going to be fun for me to have to explain why this is so important or fun or entertaining—whatever it might be. And so the process of communicating about it is going to be way more complicated for me and less fun. It’s less likely to result in the result that I’m actually hoping for. And when I compare that to what it would be like to ask my daughter, it would be almost an immediate yes. There’s not much that I’d have to talk about with her at all to get a yes from her because she’s already bought into the idea. I don’t have to convince her to want to read or to want to go see this type of a movie.

I don’t have to even tell her much about the movie or the book. I don’t have to answer a million questions. We don’t have to have long conversations, and I don’t have to explain myself. And I want you to think about how this applies to the sales process. When you talk to one type of person who isn’t bought in, it makes the sales process so much harder. But when you talk to the person who already knows that they have that problem or that desire—or both—they’re already searching for or solving that problem, it’s a much easier process. Again, they’re already bought in, so they’re already primed to say yes. So what’s the difference in those two buyers? There are beliefs and desires and awareness and readiness already in them, and I’m simply reflecting that back to them and giving them an invitation to take another step, to do something together.

And there’s a benefit of doing it together. But if you’re trying to sell someone on every step of the way from the very beginning—if you’re trying to sell them on even wanting what you’re selling, if you’re trying to sell them on even seeing that this is a problem for them—then they’re not bought in, and you’re definitely talking to the wrong person, and it’s definitely making sales that much more difficult. So again, buyers don’t need to be convinced. They need to feel seen and understood. And when you meet them where they are and reflect back to them their thoughts, their feelings, their pain points, their desires—the things that they’re already feeling and thinking about and experiencing, not the things that you just want them to think and feel and experience—they’re going to move faster. You’re going to activate them more quickly. And that buy-in happens long before the sales process ever starts. Most people assume that selling starts much later than it actually does.

And maybe that’s just because they think of selling as what happens when you’re giving a pitch, but selling someone starts with getting buy-in in the marketing process. If you’re trying to sell someone during a pitch who isn’t bought in, again, it’s going to be painful and difficult and take forever. But also, that means that you’re working way harder in your selling than in your marketing, and your marketing needs to be working harder for you. Your marketing should do more of the work so that your selling can feel simpler. So buy-in needs to happen earlier, long before the pitch. Ideally, buyers are already bought in. You meet them where they are in your marketing, and you reflect their thoughts, their feelings, their pain points, and their desires back to them. And then you invite them to a next step, and they say yes. They see your offer, and they say yes again.

And so your marketing should do the job of confirming that you’re talking to the right people in your sales process—that you’re attracting the right people to take further steps with you. Your marketing has to do that work. If you’re selling to people who are cold or lukewarm—in other words, aren’t bought in yet—you’re always going to feel like you’re chasing. And you want them instead to be bought in and ready to buy before an offer is ever made. The right audience is further along than you think. They’re already searching for answers to their problems. They’re already taking steps to solve those problems. They’re already making progress. And so you’re not trying to convince someone to start; they’ve already started.

That’s a big difference. Who you’re speaking to isn’t the person that needs to be convinced to take the first step. They’re the person who is already moving. They’re already committed, and they want a better, faster way to get the result that they want. So I want you to think about your audience right now. I want you to think about recent sales interactions, whether that’s directly with you or with a team member. And are you speaking to people who are at a lower level of awareness, who don’t even know that they have the problem? Or are you speaking to people further along who are already committed, searching, and solving? How could you shift your messaging to speak to the people who are further along? It’s actually very, very simple. When you describe their thoughts, their feelings, and the actions that they’re taking day to day, those are very different for the person who is already committed and making progress compared to the person who isn’t even thinking about this at all.

Go look at your recent marketing. Go look at your recent sales pitch. Where are you talking to someone in a way that is convincing them to care? And how could you instead shift the language to talk to someone who already cares, who is already bought in? When you speak to the wrong audience, when you try to sell to the wrong audience, it’s going to make you question everything. You’re going to think that you must have the wrong offer, the wrong price. It’s going to make you think that you’re not good enough. But you don’t need to question all of that. You just need to shift who you’re speaking to in your marketing. Speak to the buyers who are already bought in. They’re already bought in on the fact that they have a problem and that they want to fix that problem.

And in our next episode, we’re going to talk about what you can do to take that one step further and ensure that they’re already bought in on working with you. So remember, sales should not feel like chasing or convincing. It should feel way simpler. And that happens when buyers have buy-in long before the pitch. If you don’t love how selling feels right now in your business, you don’t need to sell better or harder. You need to market better. And that starts with shifting who you’re speaking to and then tailoring your messaging to them to capture the people who are already bought in.

And then your job is to have them buy in on you, which, again, we’re going to talk about in the next episode. I’ll see you there.