You’re justifiably passionate about the products and services of your business, which is a good thing. On the other hand, passion without profit leaves you feeling less like a warrior queen and more like the queen of worry.
Learning to consistently close deals will fuel your business and unleash your inner warrior queen, but first you need to get into a sales mindset built on a rock solid understanding of your business model and an actionable marketing and sales plan. After all, warrior queens aren’t just tough, they’re also savvy.
How to Sell Like a Warrior Queen
Read on to learn more about how you can be the best salesperson possible and boost your revenue in the process!
The Sales Mindset
The fact is, if you are a business owner you need to sell. Businesses aren’t businesses without revenue, and revenue can only be generated by winning sales. So you might as well get good at selling.
What If You Don’t Like Sales?
There is a small minority of people who naturally love sales and are good at selling simply because they love it. The rest of us are afraid to sell. Our fears are many, including: we will be bothering people, we don’t know how to do it, we will be rejected, we won’t be good at it, prospecting and cold calling are boring, and we don’t want to be “sleazy.”
All of these fears are actually just excuses. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s true. If you really don’t like selling, then you either need to have a business partner who does, or you need to move into a job where selling isn’t one of the duties.
If, like me, you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to learn to sell — and sell with your heart, soul, and savvy — like a warrior queen.
Commit to Selling
How do you overcome your resistance and commit to selling? When I started in sales, it was an act of desperation. I was newly divorced and needed to pay my rent. Fear drove me beyond my comfort zone. In fact, when I heard people talk about the comfort zone, I laughed and thought to myself, “What comfort zone?” At that point, I’d left my comfort zone so far behind I couldn’t even tell you what it looked like anymore.
After a while, Colibri Digital Marketing became more successful, and I had less reason to worry about the rent. Strangely, this turned into a bit of a crisis. Without fear to drive me, where would I get my motivation?
Things like willpower and fear can only take you so far. At a certain point, you need to do a thing because you love it — or at least some aspect of it. I love Colibri Digital Marketing, my team of Colibris, and all of our fantastic clients. As a certified B Corp, I want Colibri Digital Marketing to have an impact on the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. In other words, desire has replaced fear and now what drives me is the desire to make my company as successful as I can in order to make a difference in the world.
Learn to Sell
Learning to sell is like getting into shape after a long illness. At first, the muscles aren’t strong and each workout session is a grind. The path to success requires consistent action. The bottom line is that in order to sell, you have to sell. There is no substitute for action. So jump in because, like all warrior queens know, you can’t win if you don’t fight!
How to Build Sales Confidence
In order to be successful at sales, you need confidence. Confidence comes from understanding your business, building great relationships, and knowing that you are committed to not only your success but the success of the people to whom you are selling.
The first step in building sales confidence is defining exactly what your services include, what you need to charge in order to have a sustainable profit margin, and the staffing you need in order to deliver consistent awesomeness. If you don’t have this basic understanding, you will be stuck scrambling to deliver your services and unsure about exactly how you will pay for your overhead.
This type of insecurity negatively impacts your sales process and limits your ability to be as successful and happy as you can be. It’s not about nailing down the details, it’s about understanding your business. Without understanding your business, you will not reach your full potential and you’ll often feel stressed out and unsatisfied. And who needs that?
What, Exactly, Is the Product or Service You Offer?
To fully unleash your inner warrior queen, you need to quantify and qualify your service offerings. You cannot be all things to all people — nor would you want to. Clarify your company’s purpose and what your company is already GREAT at delivering. Then, edit out the rest and leave it for someone else’s awesomeness.
Productize Your Services
If you’re selling a product, that’s great. You need to understand who the product is for, what the product is, and what its benefits are. And then sell, sell, sell.
If you are selling a service that will be implemented by a team, things get a little more complicated. You do not want to constantly reinvent the wheel or live with ongoing chaos. Create replicable and trainable service packages and, if customization is needed, couple those with à la carte items (also replicable and trainable). For most businesses, a Goldilocks strategy, with small, medium, and large packages is a good place to start.
Creating these packages allows you to set expectations and boundaries for and around your clients and the scope of work you will deliver. Adding à la carte items allows you to upsell and flexibly deliver results for your clients.
At Colibri Digital Marketing, we offer a strategic branding package that positions our clients for success by creating an actionable digital marketing plan. Too many companies are hopping in their boats and rowing out to the open sea without knowing where they are headed. As warrior queens, we want our clients to be successful and we want to feel confident that results are maximized. What do you know leads to success for your clients?
How Much Do You Charge?
To decide how much you should charge, you need to figure out how much you want to earn. From there, you work backwards to figure out how much your packages must sell for and at what volume so you can meet your goals.
Once you have created your packages, load each stage of the project or package into a spreadsheet with fields for:
- Activity
- Person Responsible
- Estimated Time
- Rate
- Actual Time
- Materials
- Overhead
- Markup
- Client Cost
If you have people on salary, consider how much time they actually spend working. Most people who work an eight-hour day actually only work six, what with trips to the water cooler and time spent playing Pokémon GO (if you’re reading this in 2018, is Pokémon GO even a thing?).
Calculate your profit margin for each product or service and for your business as a whole, which will let you know whether your pricing is working for you.
How to Calculate Profit Margin
This is how to calculate profit margin:
- Subtract your expenses from revenue to get gross profit.
- Divide your profit by your revenues to get a decimal number.
- Times by 100 to get your profit margin as a percentage.
Example:
The Yummy Candy Co. makes $100,000 in revenues each year. Each year, they spend $75,000 on employees, marketing, and supplies. $100,000 – $75,000 = $25,000 (gross profit). Dividing $25,000 (gross profit) by $100,000 (revenues) = .25 (profit margin). Times .25 times 100 = 25% profit margin. Not bad!
Having a clear picture of what your products cost will help you feel confident during the sales process. You’ll understand what you are offering, what the results will be, and how much it costs to get there. As a result, you can communicate clearly with your leads.
How Will You Prove You Can Deliver Awesome Results?
The best ways to show you can deliver awesome results are:
- Case studies. Case studies are a great way to show the before and after of a project and what kinds of results you achieved.
- Portfolios/samples of your work. If you sell a product or something else that is tangible, you can create a portfolio or share samples.
- Testimonials/other social proof. Let your clients speak for you. Add testimonials to your website and request reviews on review sites.
- Referrals. Ask your happy clients to refer you and use them as references.
Having proof that you deliver great results builds confidence and improves your sales process.
Practice Your Sales Process
Another thing that helps you sell better is practising. Great salespeople create scripts and practice them alone and with others. Practice sharing the benefits of what you do and also responding to objections. Money, for example, is often an objection. But if you can show that you deliver results that create value, money isn’t a problem. Who wouldn’t spend $10,000/month on digital marketing if they were earning $20,000/month in additional revenue? $10,000 is only a big number if it doesn’t get results.
Take Consistent Action Now
Now that you understand your own business requirements and what it takes to show that you can generate results for other businesses, it’s time to take consistent action.
The reason I say consistent action is that sales is like sleep, exercise, and diet — you have to sleep, eat, and exercise everyday in order to function. In order for your business to function, you have to sell. Consistently.
Sales consists of two basic activities:
- Researching your prospects
- Reaching out to your prospects
Each day, set aside time to figure out who you will reach out to and learn about them. Most sales experts agree that researching and reaching out should be done separately, because research is more of an introverted activity, while sales is an extroverted activity. So, dedicate time to research.
Once you have a list of prospects, create a systematized approach to reaching out to them. Most of the time, you will have to reach out several times (like at least seven) in order to clinch a meeting, let alone a deal. This is where confidence becomes key. Know your value, and feel confident that your offer benefits clients. If you do not have that mindset, it will feel uncomfortable to reach out over and over and over again. Create a quality product or service that you can believe in, and reaching out to people becomes easy. They are busy and they do not yet know you, but when they do, Oh boy! They will be so glad they do.
Your schedule is, of course, up to you. Monday could be research day, and Tuesday could be reach out day. Or, you can set aside a time of day for each activity. Hubspot research shows that reaching out to prospects between 8 and 9 am and 4 and 5 pm gets best results. And, being the first person to respond to a lead also generates results (the research showed that 35 to 50% of sales go to the first responder). Use a spreadsheet or a client relationship management (CRM) tool to keep track of the actions you have taken with each lead.
How to Take Care of Yourself Like a Warrior Queen
Like I said at the very beginning of this post, sales is a mindset. Consider yourself, as the revenue generator for your business, one of its most precious assets (the other one being your production manager — you know, the one who makes sure s*** gets done like a warrior queen).
The reason I’m using the warrior queen metaphor is because selling is tough and not for weaklings. Warrior queens, although they don’t show this part on TV, need quiet time to rest and reflect and get pedicures.
If you sell, you will face rejection. If you sell, you will get tired. It takes a lot of work, even for extroverts, to do as much talking and explaining as salespeople do. So having a self-care routine is essential. You want to not only look and feel your best, but feel fit and strong physically and emotionally so you can be as effective as possible. Know your product inside and out, but also know how to treat yourself like the gold that you are!
How to Sell: Conclusion
Selling like a warrior queen doesn’t just happen. You have to understand your business, get over any resistance you have to the sales process, and then commit time, energy, and the necessary self care to getting good at sales and being healthy enough to stay in the game.
I know you can do it!
Want to check in about your own sales process? Schedule a no-obligation digital strategy session with Colibri Digital Marketing CEO, Anna Colibri.
It’s fun 🙂
