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.

How did Jeremy find such success in his work? The celebrated entrepreneur and video maker sit down with us to discuss the secret to his brand and how he was able to innovate a popular new sales technique that has transformed the world of video media. From start to finish, Jeremy was motivated to create his own versions of sales success and the motivation that drives him even today.

Before pioneering the Salesumentary method, Jeremy was just another video guy who had some marketing knowledge he could bring to the table. His first experience with documentaries was actually when a client requested one personally.

Knowing the power of video media, Jeremy agreed, but the issue was that he’d never worked with documentary video before. He had no idea how to make one, but he wanted to try. He did what many people do in a moment like that and hopped on Google. He googled video documentary guides, found some old guiding documents lurking in a quiet corner on the internet, and figured it out on his own. After two months of hard work, he’d created a documentary that generated millions of dollars in sales and catapulted a movement from obscurity to global, legendary status. Today, that same Salesumentary is still bringing in business, 7 years later.

He realized after that first successful documentary that the standard industry tactics in video marketing were starting to fade out of relevance. Automated webinars were all the rage and then stopped pulling the weight they used to. Ugly VSLs have bit the dust. Long sales letters by world-class copywriters are few and far between and have been replaced by 15-second TikToks that only work on people who don’t have the capital to hire you.

Best-selling book funnels lost their bite when customers realized that the books were nothing but glorified transcripts or a hodge-podge of blog posts that just pitched products and added no real value. Facebook and Instagram Lives were only targeting small sectors of the sales economy that don’t have the bandwidth or capital to support long-term marketing services. Only one form of video media was outlasting all of these industry changes: the Salesumentary, a tireless champion of lead generation, brand positioning, and sales multiplication. 

Jeremy’s goal is to shine a light on the hidden parts of a company or industry to help expose the incredible work they’re doing behind the scenes. Lots of companies do incredible work, but the outside world would never know it. What his team does is show the world what these leaders have built in a way that’s undeniable and inspiring. They call it world-building, and they do it through video in a way that no one else can.

Jeremy’s background is in music composition, so he took the same formulas for composing a score or soundtrack and applied it to video. The results speak for themselves, as each video is a rich and diverse message that creates its own world of media and marketing management.

The trick to a great Salesumentary in Jeremy’s mind is to combine key messaging from marketing material with the rich experience of film. The result is an entertaining and inspiring documentary that builds trust, establishes rapport, converts viewers into customers, and turns customers into raving fans. 

Pricing was a big obstacle for the team early on. Many small businesses have the tendency to underprice their work and undervalue their time. It took Jeremy a few clients to realize he was charging far too little for his services. Jeremy actually had an old mentor who insisted that he raise his prices. So he did. And then he raised them again. The demand is there, and you deserve to only work with people who properly appreciate your work. 

As Jeremy says, “We don’t work with folks who are brand-new anymore. We work with those who are the best at what they do.” Making his services exclusive to top-tier companies helped him focus their intentions and work on only producing top-quality work for top-quality clients he trusts to provide good services.

Today, Jeremy is content to keep his Salesumentary team small, bespoke, and focused on serving the best of the best. There are plenty of other areas of his life where he can scale –– with his software company, Quantum, with his music –– and those areas are best for large, grandiose visions of business success. Salesumentaries are a small and personal vehicle to work with awesome people, produce some serious funding power, and get to learn from world-changers as he helps them build a world for their brand.

The post Jeremy Finlay: His Secret to Sales Success appeared first on CEO Medium.