Anybody?

Anyone?

I know there are a few of you out there — but if you didn’t immediately put up your imaginary hand, you’re not alone. I love sales now — but I didn’t always.

When I started my coaching business, I was focused entirely on working with retreat leaders. It was the perfect way to use both my mastery as a math educator and my passion for spiritual transformation.

I worked with brilliant healers, coaches, and spiritual teachers helping them plan and execute transformational retreats that had a huge impact on their participants.

What I discovered through the process was a startling trend in my clients: they lacked experience, resilience, and mastery around sales. My clients wanted the people to just show up — as if by magic. They also had major blocks around doing the math and charging what they were worth — and the combo of these blind spots with their resistance to sales meant that they consistently struggled to fill their programs and retreats or make enough money to sustain their businesses.

Not having full programs led to them doubting their purpose and themselves. It ate away at their confidence and self-esteem and intensified their feelings of imposter syndrome.

And it honestly didn’t matter how good their curriculum was, or how beautiful the retreat center if they didn’t fill the room.

So, I started teaching sales in a way that truly resonated for my clients. And demanding that my clients master sales. Which meant a daily routine.

I taught my clients how to approach sales as a spiritual practice — a service to others, an expression of their spiritual leadership, and a self-development tool.

Here are the three main pillars of this teaching:

1. Sales is a Service

Sales are about helping another person make a clear decision about what they want to experience in their lives. This is radical and powerful because most people are used to tolerating a lack of clarity and messy decision making (or total indecision) in most areas of their lives.

Your job as a salesperson is not to get someone to buy what you’re selling: it’s to help them make a clear decision about what’s next for them. If part of what’s next for them aligns to your product or service, great! Then it’s your job to sell that to them.

That’s service.

Let me say it again: your job is to help people find clarity — not buy your product.

When you change your mindset to approach a sale as service, you automatically make the sale about what will serve the other person. You also understand that if hiring you or buying your product does not directly serve the other person’s vision then there’s no need for a sale. It’s your job to celebrate their clarity and release them with love.

The next time you’re entering into a sales conversation, ask yourself, “What would need to happen to allow this sales conversation to deeply serve the other person?”

Then do it that way.

2. Sales is Saying “Yes” to Change

Anytime you make a clear decision to purchase any product or service, you are doing so because you want something to change.

Let’s look at some examples:

• When you buy dinner, you want to feel nourished.
• When you buy a TV, you want to be entertained.
• When you buy a session with a spiritual teacher, you want to go deeper, experience less suffering, claim more freedom, know the truth, etc.
• When you buy a book on marketing, you want to learn something new that you can apply to your life and business.
• When you buy a six-figure coaching program, you want to completely transform your relationship with your partner, business, money, self, etc.

These examples have a range of intensity and scale, but the heart of each purchase is about saying “yes” to some type of change in your life. Whether big or small, internal or external, short term or long term, spiritual or material — sales is about change.

When you have that clarity in mind, you can easily see who truly wants change and who doesn’t.

If your potential client or customer wants the change your product or service makes possible, it is your job to help them create that change by buying what you’re selling.

3. Sales is a Spiritual Practice

As we’ve discussed, the sale is an offering to a potential client or customer. The sale is also the practice for you to become a more powerful leader, teacher, healer, guide, or coach. Why? Because each moment of a sales conversation demands that you stay in service — and all the moments you’re distracted, resistant, judgmental, codependent, or emotional show you the next place you have to grow and give you the opportunity to release it.

In my experience working with spiritual entrepreneurs, sales isn’t the best spiritual practice — but it’s the “next” one, the next meditation, the next growth opportunity. Sales takes us deeper by holding up a mirror to our egos, our co-dependencies, and our emotional dysfunction. Sounds fun, right? LOL. It is truly uncomfortable to look at this stuff — AND it’s one of the fastest and most effective tools for getting free.

When I first started sales, I was constantly thinking about myself. I thought, “Will the person say ‘yes’ or ‘no’? Am I doing this right? Am I going to get a ‘yes’?” I was constantly spinning out and believing that the content of my thoughts needed my attention. It did not.

The only thing that truly needed my attention was the person in front of me. And what I learned to do — and do well — was wake up when I was not being attentive to the person in front of me, and pivot my attention back to them instantaneously.

Hence, spiritual practice.

Doing sales requires stepping into your most generous, unapologetic, conscious, and mindful self — the perfect spiritual practice.

Do you want to go deeper into sales and spirituality? Join me June 29–30 for a virtual 2-day retreat, “Sales as a Spiritual Practice”. Click here to learn more and sign up!

The post Sales as a Spiritual Practice appeared first on CEO Medium.

A journalist and communications expert with a decade’s worth of experience before turning 30, Julius together with his team are focusing on disruptive communication models to help young entrepreneurs make more noise, acquire more customers, and scale quicker with fewer resources.

Tell us about who you are and what you do.

My name is Julius, and I like to think of myself as a business accelerator. I’m a business strategist and I essentially help businesses go from starting to standing out. I run a branding and marketing service that helps entrepreneurs launch their business and gain acceptance in the marketplace from day one. 

Too many businesses are stuck in the phase between launching and being profitable, and I try to bridge that gap. The secret is in launching a product that commands attention, generates buzz, and ultimately leads to transactions. It’s a whole process and I try to guide business owners through the step-by-step procedure.

Tell us how you created this brand and what was the sole idea behind it.

Once I left my job as a journalist with the largest television network in Africa, I started working as a media and communications consultant, more like a public relations expert. It wasn’t long before I found that many businesses didn’t need a PR solution, they needed image and brand positioning as the solution to their customer attraction and retention problems. So, I started pitching and applying outright branding strategies and the results were amazing. So rather than do a PR campaign, we started running branding campaigns with the effect that customer acquisition was increasing and sales were shooting higher as well.

Branding and marketing are functions of communication, so applying communication strategies led to visibility and conversions. And just like that, the Julius Omokhunu brand was born. 

At the moment I am delving deeper into one-on-one coaching with small business owners as I realize they need more assistance to be able to grow and scale their businesses on the small budgets that they have. And rather than having an agency like mine does the heavy lifting, it is economical for them to learn the tricks of the trade and apply the knowledge with expert guidance. So far, it’s been amazing and I’ve worked with around 100 entrepreneurs in the last year along.

In the new year, I’ll be convening the first pan-African business security summit as a response to the unprecedented assault of the coronavirus pandemic on small businesses in the global South. The Summit will chart a way forward for SMEs to be able to compete on a global stage through digital tools and by adapting to groundbreaking trends around the world.

But most crucially I’m launching two game-changing initiatives that will redefine business operations. The Master My Business Academy is a free virtual group for entrepreneurs to learn and master aspects of their business that yield the most results in terms of revenue. And of course, my signature course called The Business of Your Business (Brand it, Market it, Sell it) will be launched to train entrepreneurs on the nitty-gritties of branding and marketing that work.  

Go in detail and tell us about how your brand works.

My practice is very growth-focused and at the risk of sounding cliched, I ultimately help entrepreneurs attract the customers that are crazy about their business and chase their products every day. And that means creating and implementing strategies for customer acquisition and retention. We do that by giving businesses an identity first and foremost, and then communicating that identity to prospects in a targeted manner that they accept the business identity. That’s branding is so many words. The icing on the cake is getting those prospects to become loyal customers of a brand through disruptive marketing techniques that require a huge investment in terms of creativity but very low expenditure in cash. That’s what I aim for – being creative about the marketing strategies that may not go viral but will ultimately lead to sales and more money for the bottom line.

What is your giveaway idea through this interview?

The reason a lot of businesses fail is that they don’t make enough money, and the reason that happens is that they don’t have enough visibility. And the reason for that is because such businesses are not investing enough time and resources in showing up to the right people. Visibility, therefore, is a targeted way of putting your business in the faces of the people you want to notice it – not random people. Because making your brand visible to random people is the same as not being visible at all!

Business is first a popularity contest before an ability contest. For buyers, visibility equals credibility: if they don’t know you, they won’t choose you. So the single most important investment is in branding and marketing.

Explain the challenges you went through while you were working on brand creation. What are the challenges you go through on an everyday basis?

The biggest challenge while I was starting was acceptance. There are lots of gurus and experts out there, each claiming to be the next best thing since sliced bread. And many of such so-called gurus have been so hugely disappointing that clients are wary of any consultant or coach. So, it is a lot of work having to constantly stand out and excel so that clients are convinced about my ability to help them. But I just put my head down and get to work, and I let results speak for me.

How do you manage your finances through the services you offer. Any fundings etc received?

The business is fully self-funded. At the moment my team and I are working on increasing revenue streams by diversifying our product and service offerings. We intend to hit $100k in annual revenue in the next year and that would help us with our expansion plans.

Tell us your future vision about the brand. How far do you want to take it? What is your dream about taking it to the next level?

I desire to work with 1000 entrepreneurs in the next 12 months; that’s a short-term goal. And that’s because I wish to help as many businesses as possible to go past the survival stage of business and get to the thriving stage, and then the boom stage.

To achieve this, we’re incorporating a new agency in 2021 that will handle all branding and marketing consulting work. The Julius Omokhunu Company will then be able to focus on bespoke corporate and personal training and coaching. That would help us help more businesses while growing our bottom line simultaneously.

My dream for the brand is to become so super structured and niched that we’re able to have separate entities that handle specific aspects of a business. I’ve got it all worked out right now but we’re executing step by step and Kreativ Solutions (our planned marketing solutions agency) is just the first step. I’m in this for the long haul.

What message would you like to give to anybody who has a plan of creating something of their own and making a living through it? 

Start, and don’t stop. The hardest part of living a dream through business is starting. Once you start, never entertain the thought of giving up. And most importantly, seek help. Get a coach who has been in the trenches and is battle-hardened. They will fight in your corner and you will know the difference.

The Julius Omokhunu Company

For more information visit: www.juliusomokhunu.com

The post Branding and Marketing are Everything: Innovative Business Strategist, Julius Omokhunu, is Giving Entrepreneurs a Chance to Succeed With Disruptive Solutions to Visibility & Sales appeared first on CEO Medium.