At the end of the seminar, after helping folks learn how to handle their own neediness and to truly connect to the heart of the client, something emerged from the group.

If you study sales and selling, you know one of the big topics is on “overcoming objections.” I have sitting on my desk right now a well-known book that has dozens of answers to objections.

However, what we found is that there is only one answer needed for any objection, and you don’t even need to say anything. It’s your heart, shining in it’s brilliance and strength, bowing in complete service to your potential client.

In dyad after dyad around the room we saw potential clients who were wary, scared, suspicious literally couldn’t hold onto the contracted, judgmental feelings when their partner went through the exercise. And people tried. They reported trying to hold on to their skepticism… instead they involuntarily melted into a mushy ball of love and trust for the other person.

It’s an amazing exercise (which will also transform your love relationship if you try it with your partner), and is the essence of the sales conversation.

But it can be hard to get to it, to feeling like you can truly access your core strength and gifts and shine with them when you are facing a potential client, and then to bow into service from a place of strength, instead of collapsing into a doormat.

Luckily, there’s an answer. You can join in on the exercise, and all the preparation we did leading up to that, with the home study version of the seminar. And we have it for a special price now through the end of the month.

Click-> The Sacred Moment Home Study “During the Live Seminar” Special

Here’s Pace and Kyeli Smith, of Connection-Revolution.com, telling about their experience with the seminar yesterday:

(By the way, the video has their URL wrong- it’s http://www.connection-revolution.com. Sorry! I’ll fix it after I teach today!)

A Special “While the Seminar Is Happening” Price Through the End of the Month

If you need to finally start earning a living instead of just having a lot of people “interested” in what you do, I invite you to come get the Sacred Moment Home Study. It’s where the rubber meets the road and you get and paid, and it’s a profound heart-healing.

The Sacred Moment Home Study “During the Live Seminar” Special

If you have any questions, please ask. Okay, time for me to get going. I get to hang with everyone for Day Two!

Peace to you.

You worked hard, and now you have to try to make money appear that you no longer have.

It’s the kinda thing that makes you swear off guarantees. “You pay me; I got your money; that’s the end of the story.”

Unfortunately, that kind of attitude makes it hard for people to want to give you their money in the first place. At the very least, it makes for a very unfriendly atmosphere.

Introducing the conditional guarantee. But, first, let’s talk about guarantees in general.

Hardly Anyone Requests a Refund

It’s just rare that people ask for a refund. It stings when it happens, but thankfully it hardly ever does, and here’s why.

When someone becomes your client, they are rooting for you to be great. In making a significant purchase, they’ve invested a certain amount of money and psychic energy in you—they’ve joined your team.

In the event things don’t go perfectly, they don’t want their money, really. They want the results you offered. They want to feel good about their choice. They’d much rather you made things right than force them to the ultimate last option, which is the refund.

Unscrupulous business folk exploit this by making it really hard psychologically to ask for their money back. For you as a heart-centered person, it just means that you can take a breath knowing why refunds are so rare, and that if something does go south with a client, you’ll have many opportunities to make it right before you have to dig into your bank account.

Side note: Now might be a good time to muse for a few minutes about what kinds of things might go wrong and how you might make it up to the client besides the refund.

Because of this, guarantees are a good bet for the business owner. They create more safety and good will for the potential client, the truth is that if someone is really super upset you’d give them their money back anyway (right?), and when you offer a guarantee, you can set the terms.

Set the terms? That’s right, you can set the terms, which is the first of the two reasons to offer a guarantee.

The Two Types of Guarantees

There are unconditional guarantees, the “no questions asked, you have a bad hair day and decide you want a refund and we honor that.” It’s a good guarantee to offer on lower risk, lower-investment offers.

We offer unconditional guarantees on all of our home study products, because it costs us very little to offer that and it creates big safety for someone knowing they don’t have to justify to us in any way.

Then there are the conditional guarantees. The guarantees with, you know, conditions to them. Meaning you can’t just have a bad hair day, you actually have to meet certain guidelines before the request for a refund is offered.

For high-priced offers or services where you put in a lot of effort and time, conditional guarantees are the way to go. As I said above, you create conditions and that protects you from refunding someone who is just cranky or “out to get you.”

Recently I bought a new kitchen faucet and installed it. Afterwards I realized that our water filter looks like poop next to the new faucet, making us want to install the filter under the sink. This means we need an extra hole in our sink for the faucet filter. Oops.

I had the bright idea to call up the hardware store and ask about their refund/return policy. I could get a different kind of faucet and have an extra hole for the filter. They have a nearly-unconditional guarantee with just one condition—after you install it, it’s yours forever.

Totally fair. I had no bad feelings toward the store for having that policy, and I was just asking to see if they were crazy enough to accept the return of an installed faucet. I bought a new (to us) sink from The Rebuilding Center for twenty-five bucks, and will, God-willing and the creek don’t rise, install it without too many unSufi-like curse words.

But there’s another reason, beyond protecting you, for offering a conditional guarantee for your services.

How Do People Know What It Really Takes?

A really common question for potential clients is, “What will it take for this to work? Is it a magic pill, or how much blood, sweat and nap time do I have to sacrifice to be successful with it?”

Savvy service providers will spell this out somewhere on the sales page, so folks get a realistic view of what’s required. Somehow, though, it really hits home when it’s in the conditional guarantee.

“If you’ve followed through with three out of the four assignments, if you’ve listened to three out of the four classes, and have done the readings, put in a true honest effort and it still hasn’t worked for you, then heck yeah, we’ll refund what you’ve paid us for this course.”

Because you’ve put the conditions in your guarantee, it tells the reader you are serious about the effectiveness of your offer, and you are really clear about what it takes to be successful.

People aren’t dummies, they know there’s no magic pill, much as they might long for one. If you spell out what it takes to be successful in a guarantee, connecting the dots between their financial investment and the effort they need to be responsible for, somehow the whole picture becomes more concrete.

Examples?

Do you offer a guarantee, conditional or otherwise? What great conditional guarantees have you seen? What conditional guarantee could you start offering for your clients?

Share’em below. Let’s help each other ease our worries about refunds and get the message across to clients.

p.s. Do you need a deeper heart connection with your business?

We have three star practitioners, Judy, Jason and Yollana, ready to help you one-on-one with your business.

Check out the Organic Business Development program and schedule a no-cost call with one of them.

I get it. You want to bring in clients more easily. You want to stop hearing people tell you, “Well, I can’t really afford it right now.”

I always sigh and take a deep breath. On the surface it makes so much sense, “Thirsty? Go where there’s water.” But it just doesn’t work like that.

Unfortunately, you’ll hear the exact thing from someone with a fat wallet. Someone with a million dollars in their bank account will still tell you, with a straight face yet, that they “can’t afford it right now.” And they can’t. They way they have their money budgeted, they don’t have any money to spend on something they don’t want.

Just thinking about this topic takes me back in time… (the screen gets blurry, all kinds of wah-wah music, cut to a scene of the eighteen year-old me…)

Back in 1986, I was a volunteer with the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad. Aside from running around on ambulances and blanching when the lieutenant told me, “Silver, go get the finger” (a story for another time), we had to do fundraising.

You see, the BCCRS was and continues to be nearly completely self-funded, with very little cash coming from the government. Money was donated by people living in our response area during our annual campaign.

The annual campaign? Get in your uniform, grab a donation book, and hit the sidewalks, knocking on doors and asking for cashola. “Hi, I’m with the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad, and I’m here to ask for your support so we can continue to show up when you call 911.” A pretty darn compelling ask.

If you aren’t familiar with Bethesda and Chevy Chase, it’s an interesting area class-wise. It’s in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is one of the top ten wealthiest counties in the United States. Our response area covered both extremely wealthy neighborhoods, as well as blue collar and lower-income.

Here’s what I learned: in the poorer neighborhoods, people nearly always had a kind word and cash for you. Hardly anyone said no.

The rich neighborhoods? There were nice, generous people there, too. However, there were also long, wide gaps between the houses, so you had to do a lot more walking to cover many fewer houses.

And the houses themselves? Long driveways, locked gates, often no one was home. I can remember how many times I pushed a button at the end of a locked gate, and instead of being able to smile and look in someone’s eyes, a disembodied voice came out of the security speaker, “We’re not interested.”

I don’t remember the numbers, it was way back in 1986, and I was a clueless eighteen year-old, but I do remember bringing in a lot more money from the lower-income neighborhoods.

Why the Rich Are Rich

In the Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley includes demographic research that explains how people who are wealthy stay wealthy by living below their means. In other words, just because someone has a great deal of money doesn’t mean they spend it more easily than someone who has a small deal of money.

In fact, they might spend it less easily.

You, of course, do want your clients to have their basic needs met. Food, shelter, clothing, enough so they can function a little higher on Maslow’s hierarchy pyramid. And if you’re offering truly premium products or services that cost tens of thousands of dollars, income absolutely plays a part in who can afford it.

If that’s not you, then please resist going after wealthy clients as a way to save you.

I Hate To Tell You This

There are no shortcuts. Wanting rich clients is just another version of Lottery Syndrome.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting ease and momentum in gaining clients. There’s nothing wrong with wanting clients who don’t flinch at the amount that nourishes you.

Although I could go into a bunch of tips here on how to get clients, I won’t. Instead, bookmark and read last week’s article. Or this one. Or this one.

For now, let’s indulge. What are some of your favorite escape or rescue fantasies in the world of business? Mine is: “The spiritual message just catches on like wildfire. Some little article I wrote goes viral without any effort, suddenly hundreds of thousands of people flood in, and we ride off into the sunset.”

Of course there are real steps to making that happen, but let’s not ruin it with that.

How about you? What’s your fav escape daydream?

p.s. Tired of living in a daydream?

We’re more than halfway through the Momentum course and it’s wonderful to see dozens of folks getting breakthroughs in their business. But I don’t want to just tease you.

We’re offering the home study of the Momentum Course. Well, actually it’s been out for a year, but we’re making a special offer now.
For the next week you can get the Momentum home study version with three cool things:

• A healthy during-the-live-course discount. (We changed the logo and the cover this year, and we have copies of last year’s home study left with the old cover. Same content, same everything, just a different cover.)
• All the Q&A PDFs from the current class, so you can read the extra questions and the answers I write in response
• In the premium version, you can get our Heart-Centered Article Writing home study course for a bit more.

Check it out: Momentum Home Study: Three Journeys to an Ongoing Flow of Clients and Money.

We scheduled this now intentionally knowing that she has no big launch or upsell coming up. It’s simply about listening to her, getting to know her, and the next time she offers something you’ll know, whether you want it or not.

For right now, just soak it in. Time to go register. (The link is an affiliate link, so if eventually you buy something from her, we receive a referral fee.)

And if you’ve already registered, make sure you’re there.

Article: I’m Being Consistent: Now What?

Last week I talked about why I never hired that guy to patch my driveway: the main issue I was hammering was consistency in marketing and showing up. Show up consistently, I explained, and you’re going to have an easier time getting clients.

I did have one caveat, though:

“You may need to tweak your sales process. You may need to make your offer more compelling.”

Being consistent is critical, but it’s not enough. Your sales process has to work.

Sales Process? Isn’t That Just Chewing People Up?

If you’ve got a heart, you might feel sick to your stomach every time you try to systematize or create consistency in the parts of your business that need delicacy and caring.

Sales is one of those places that needs a LOT of heart to be successful without leaving a bad taste in someone’s mouth. So turning it into a process might cause you to worry about it being scummy.

There are two things I want to say to that. First, never forget that a business exists to help people with some problem they are facing. It has a goal and an endpoint. Second, if you’re just hanging out with friends, you don’t want to turn that into a process (though if you want to get all beepidy-boppidy on me, you can say that looking at you calendar, looking up your friends’ number, then calling and inviting them over is a process.)

Your potential clients want to enjoy connecting with you, but they aren’t just hanging out. They’re struggling with something. If you don’t have a clear sales process, a way for your potential client and you to evaluate whether you fit together, and whether the offer is what they want and need, then you’ll end up wasting their time and yours.

Over the years people have pitched me on ideas or services and kept coming back, and back, and back to check in with me. If the process is dragged out, or nonexistent, then it all feels floppy. The potential client ends up having a decision to make taking up space in their brain and life, but no way to make the decision. It becomes a painful, incomplete interaction that drags on and on.

Yet, when there’s a clear way to evaluate it, and it all happens in a few days or a week or two, it’s easy to say yes or no without hard feelings and move on.

So yes, you do want a sales process, because of the mercy and compassion it brings to you and to your clients.

What does a sales process look like? Here are the elements:

The Elements of a Heart-Centered Sales Process

First you need a clear offer. The offer is clear on four things: who it’s for, what problem it solves, what the client gets when they buy, and how much it costs.

Any lack of clarity here will stall your process indefinitely.

Example: “Struggling with digestion issues? For people whose stomachs are delicate and always upset. It includes a 30 day cleanse with an initial assessment, then four weekly appointments, specific menus and herbs, and a follow-up assessment afterwards. It costs $750.”

That’s not intended as marketing copy, it’s just the bullet point clarity of what the offer is. There would be even more detail listed there—how many menus and recipes, what are the herbs and how much of them. How long are the appointments and what are they for.

Second, you need a way to assess the potential client’s fit. An assessment is a series of questions that reveal to both you and the client whether the offer is a match for them. You might ask these questions outright, and some of them you might just hold in your heart and observe how the answers are revealed through people’s actions.

• What is the situation now?
• What have they already tried?
• What kind of progress have they made without your help?
• How important or critical is this to them?
• Do you and the client share relevant values?
• Do you all click?
• Do they have the time to follow through?
• Do they have the resources to commit?

You may well have other questions. What do you need to know, and what do they need to know, to evaluate whether it’s a fit or not?

Third, you need to ask the question. You know what question I mean. The question, “Uh, so do you want to buy it?”

It can be awkward asking the question, but if the conversation or process flows well and naturally, and if you’ve kept a good heart connection throughout, then asking them if they want to buy or enroll or sign-up won’t be as painful as you think.

The truth is that they are dying a little waiting for you to ask. They know the question is coming, but they don’t know if you have more to explain, or what the next step is. If you show leadership here, simply by asking the question, they can lean into you more.

Your heart knows when to ask. Trust it.

Fourth, you need to know when to let go. It’s hard for people to say no. If someone says yes or maybe but doesn’t show up time and time again with a commitment, stop chasing them. Let them have their space.

Know that they respect you too much to want to upset you with a “no.” Yes, it’s a little dysfunctional. No, you can’t do anything about it.

Let them go. They’ll come back when they’re ready, if it’s right for them.

How Clear Is Your Sales Process?

Time to take a look. Of course each step has nuances and details, but if you get the minimum in place, then you are going to find the consistency of your marketing start to pay off.

Aside About Our Next Course: Almost a Sales Pitch

I can’t help but mention that the first week in August we’ll be opening registration for our next course, Momentum: Three Journeys to an Ongoing Flow of Clients and Money. One of the modules is all about the sales process. I just thought I’d mention it because if you need more in-depth help with this topic, it’s coming up.

More on the course later.

Where’s Your Heart?

Sometimes it’s all too easy to think that being in your heart in business is just about being squishy and full of love and goodwill for everyone and everything. It’s all too easy to forget that the heart is the strongest, most enduring muscle in the body. It works constantly from before birth until you die, and it gets a LOT done every day.

Having your heart in business means that you care for people in grounded, practical ways. You don’t disappear on the people who need you most; instead you show up consistently for them. You don’t waste their time with long, drawn-out, vague sales processes. Instead, you put clear offers in place, have clear assessments, and move them along. You don’t leave them dying inside wondering what the next step is. You ask them if they want what you’re offering.

Tell me, did I leave anything out? Any nuances or details that you would like to add? Or maybe share where you struggle the most with this.

p.s. Need Someone To Dig In And Help You?

We have three fantastic practitioners ready to roll up their sleeves to support your heart and your business with love and the nitty-gritty of getting clients. Check them out and see if you click with Jason, Judy or Yollana.

Organic Business Development Program.

A few people have asked about working with me directly. I work with very few individual clients, since most of my time is spent supporting our team and our class participants. I do have limited slots for one-off business assessments. If you’re curious you can read this page:

Work with Mark.

Yet, it’s been shown over and over again that for complex or significant purchases, you need to give people enough information to feel safe enough to buy.

My stance has been that sales pages are not “long” or “short” but simply “complete” or “incomplete.” Have you given the information your potential customers need or not?

It gets complicated because different personalities need different things. Some people love testimonials and stories, some don’t. Some love facts and figures, some get bored by those. Some love bullet points, others fuzz out. And everyone wants a particular combination, and no one wants everything.

Add the simple fact that it just takes a certain number of words to get the point across, thus you end up with a good deal of copy.

Up until fairly recently, the only way you could provide the information people wanted was in a single long page. Thankfully, newer technology in web design has made it easier to organize all that copy.

Here are three examples.

Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guides

Chris Guillebeau blogs at the Art of Nonconformity, and part of his business includes what he calls “Unconventional Guides.”

The example I picked is for his “Break Out of the 9-5″ Guide.”

He and his web designer Reese cooked up a unique way of presenting the information. By having a series of panels that slide sideways you get the information you need easily, without having to scroll through a long page.

It seems really short, but let’s total it up. He has an overview page, a What’s Included page, a Guarantee page, and a four-minute video which transcribes into about two pages of copy. Then when you click “buy” you see another two pages of the versions you can buy.

All told, about seven pages of copy for a $50 product. It seems super short because of how it’s presented, but it’s still a solid amount of copy.

What’s missing: He includes no testimonials. Which is an okay decision at the price point, except for those in his audience who need to feel connected to other people through their stories in order to feel safe to buy.

He’s been fabulously successful with it, so who am I to tell him to add one of those sliding panels for testimonials and case studies? Still, that’s what I would do.

Nice job, eh?

Tad Hargrave’s Radical Business Intensive

Tad teaches marketing for hippies, and his main site is Radical Business. What caught me was the way he presented his Radical Business Intensive.

The Intensive is a three-day, in-person training, and so is a considerably higher commitment than a digital product. Similar to what Chris and Reese did above, Tad spreads the information out over several pages. The difference is he dedicated an entire website to this offer.

There are seven links on the site, Home, which is the overview of the course, Testimonials, Is It Right For You?, Course Materials, Free Stuff, Price, Bio.

There is a LOT of copy on the site, including several videos, all of which obviously took a lot of time and care to create. Tad takes the Intensive on the road throughout Canada (hopefully he’ll bring it to the U.S. as well), and so this serves as a permanent information center for each time he does a tour.

You’ll notice the testimonials are separated out, and there’s an entire web page devoted to explaining the “Pay What You Can” model of pricing. I really like how each reader can zero in on the kind of information he or she needs.

A big part of what causes negative reactions on sincere and honest sales pages are when someone gets too much unwanted information. If you don’t give a hoot about testimonials, scrolling through a bunch of testimonials is going to raise red flags, no matter how sincere they are.

If you need to read stories, then a long list of bullet points is going to bore you, making you wonder if what’s being offered is going to bore you, too.

I think Tad does an excellent job separating it all out, and presenting the amount of information someone would need to decide whether to spend three and a half days at a training of his.

Our Own Opening the Moneyflow Year-Long Course

This year we’re running the sold-out year-long Opening the Moneyflow course for sixty people. When I went to write the sales page, I struggled with how to get folks the information they needed without overwhelm.

Thankfully, our designer Adam Kayce told us about a collapsible elements plug-in for WordPress. Collapsible text means that if you click on a link, instead of taking you to another webpage, more text appears instantly. Click again and it disappears.

Adam uses the same plugin brilliantly on his own services page.

Aha! We used it in three ways on the sales page to provide some relief. First, I wrote a “short story” version of the sales page and put it in collapsible elements at the top. Click the link and six short paragraphs, including the price, appear and give you the overview.

Second, I put all the testimonials in collapsible text. If you want’em, there they are, easily accessible without any delay. But since good testimonials tell a story, they take up space, and this way they don’t lengthen the page.

Third, near the bottom of the page I describe the curriculum for the year which is divided into different classes. Each class has a short overview, with, you guessed it, more information in collapsible text. You can scan through the entire year quickly, and yet at any moment dive in for more information.

Finally, in the side bar near the top, we have a link “Do you want to jump right to the price?” In case the reader hasn’t opened the short story version. Clicking that link that will take them to the summary at the bottom to see what’s included and the cost, with another link to jump back to the top.

Copy Is One Thing, Organization Is Another

I’m always impressed by great copy, so it was a real struggle for me to lay that consideration aside and just focus on organization.

Do you have an example of great information organization on a sales page, or some interesting ways web technology and programing was used to make the flow easier?

p.s. The Heart of Money starts tomorrow.

Last chance until 2011 to jump in. The Heart of Money Transformational Journey.

p.p.s. Hey, did you know we have three fantastic practitioners ready to roll up their sleeves and help you with your business?

Well, one at a time, of course. But they’re there. Come meet Judy, Jason, and Yollana.

Some in the audience are swooning, credit cards out. Others are crestfallen, knowing they can’t buy in. Still others have a disgusted look on their face.

I’ve been at many of these kinds of pitches over the years and even delivered them myself a time or two. I just recently gained an insight into why they often feel so gross and how to make them more ethical.

What’s Happening At An Event

At nearly any event you have a tribe gathered. Meaning people who feel like they belong to a group. If the event is done well, there can be a powerful sense of community created, where people experience a high of intimacy and belonging that may not be present in their day-to-day life.

This sense of community and belonging is even more powerful at events that focus on transformational, spiritual, or cause-related work.

These are potentially dangerous waters for any business. Belonging is such a core human need, and it is so lacking in much of modern culture that it can overwhelm folks. When you make a pitch from the front of the room, it affects people strongly.

So strongly that it’s not possible for many people to make an individual choice based on their own heart. Instead, groupthink is a tide that can sweep away their sense of groundedness, no matter how good the seller’s intention.

Selling into a crowd is a fundamentally different dynamic than having the same conversation one-on-one. It has to do with the three levels of human existence.

The Three Consciences of Human Existence

In the first, which is called the personal conscience in Systemic Constellation work, we experience individual choice. A lot of personal development and healing happens at this level, where you’re working with personality dynamics and beliefs.

The third is the Divine conscience, where Source trumps everything. Miracles, grace, sudden healings. It’s hard to make personal or individual progress without connection here.

In between the first and third is the family system conscience, which often gets ignored in group sales situations. I became aware of this conscience through the work of Bert Hellinger and the book Love’s Hidden Symmetry.

A group has an energy to it that is analogous to a tide. No matter how strong your sense of sovereignty, when a group moves in a certain direction, you get pulled along with it.

I’ve seen people do tremendous personal healing work and deep spiritual surrender, and STILL be ambushed by ancestral patterns. They’re caught in the energy of the family. It’s happened to me. I had to do some very, ahem, “interesting” work with my Jewish family line before I could feel love and blessing on my endeavors, despite repeated messages from my heart’s connection to the Divine, and my own sense of clarity in my self.

Let’s look at how this operates in a group sales situation.

Who is Catching the Pitch?

A respected, cherished teacher is at the front of the room. It’s cost each person hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars to be there between tuition, travel, lodging and food. There’s a glow, and nearly everyone’s been pretty darn happy with the event so far.

The exercises, the teachings, the hanging out in each other’s presence has woven folks together. This happens on the personality level, where people just like each other and want to be near; folks eat meals together. It’s a hard decision just to take space for yourself to rest, because it can feel so good hanging out.

It also happens on an energetic level where hearts become woven together. There is a group heart that emerges in an event. Everyone becomes emotional or spiritual family to some degree or another.

When the pitch comes from a presenter, it’s not just a simple choice of whether to buy or not. The pitch represents a pathway, and the leader is traveling in that direction.

For everyone in the room, the choice of buying the program or not is really to some degree a decision of whether you are going to continue to belong to the group or not. People who are less vulnerable to this are the ones who already have a strong sense of belonging with the leader or elsewhere. For instance:

• long term clients who have enough of a personal relationship with the presenter that they know their sense of belonging isn’t at risk;

• peers of the presenter, those who have their own communities, know that their sense of belonging and connection to the presenter exists at a different level;

• “visitors” to the community, those who have a strong sense of belonging to another community or family, whose need to belong wasn’t high when they came to the event.

There are also people who have a personality with a strong rebellious or independent streak who may be cranky about the pitch, so will probably not buy.

If the presenter has done a good job connecting with their right people, the room is going to be full mainly of folks who belong to their community, and many fewer of the exceptions I list above.

You can see the problem, can’t you? For someone in the room, it’s going to be hard to tell how much of their decision to buy into the pitch is coming from a real sense of Divine guidance, a personality sense of “Yeah, I could really use that.” or being moved by the tide of group energy, “I really want to continue belonging!”

This is often exacerbated in these situations when individuals stand up to announce their decision to buy and frame it as a choice of commitment and courage. This can be absolutely true, yet if the group ends up applauding, it reads in the group as “Buy, and you receive approval and belonging.”

This dynamic is well-known in the seminar field and is often used manipulatively to drive greater sales at events. Painful! Many people avoid or are uncomfortable making pitches into a group for this exact reason.

It’s a Problem Even When You’re Sincere

If you aren’t aware of this dynamic, even if you go to great lengths to make it okay for participants to choose from their own hearts, people can still end up manipulated by the group energy.

No matter how strongly you stress individual choice, if you don’t address the dynamic of the group energy, it will be an invisible tide sweeping people along. Because it’s invisible, someone can think they are making a decision for themselves, and yet like swimming in a tide, they can end up somewhere far from where they would have ended up without the tide’s influence.

Of Course You Can Go Overboard

If you get so nervous about this dynamic and take all the responsibility, you end up disempowering people to make their own choices and sabotaging your business. After all you aren’t committing a war crime, you’re just making an offer.

What to do? What to do?

I don’t have a perfect answer, but I do have some ways to work with the energy. Let me give you fair warning: you probably will be sacrificing a certain number of sales on the altar of morality. But if you’re providing good stuff, you can still have a healthy number of buyers.

Keys to Making an Ethical Offer to a Group

• Name the dynamic. Presenters have the right idea when they assure folks the decision’s theirs, it’s just not addressing the middle level of group existence, the power of collective consciousness.If you take time to let people know that you’re aware of the dynamic and that people’s belonging isn’t at risk if they don’t buy, it can help simply because it’s acknowledged.

• Make the purchasing decision private. Instead of a stampede to the back table, how can you make it so the purchasing decision for each person is a private matter? Can you have folks turn in applications or order forms to an assistant later in the day?Also, you can intervene when someone wants to announce that they are signing up, and the crowd applauds. As a presenter, you can ask for people who aren’t signing up to stand up and have the crowd applaud their decision as one of courage of the heart and recognition of their own path *within* the group.

• Provide other ways to belong. Whether you provide an online membership site or distribute a participant contact list with supporting structures to have people remain in contact, providing ways for folks to get their need for belonging met after the event ends will help.

• Sell away! Go ahead and make your offer. Someone may still have a reaction despite your best efforts and intentions. That’s okay.

Your offer is still coming from your heart as a way to serve. Don’t let your knowledge of the group dynamic stop you from offering.

Just take some time to acknowledge the dynamic and work with it. The people who do buy will be the right ones for you, and those who don’t will stick around longer.

I’m just starting to dig into this topic, and I’m very interested in your thoughts and insights. Would you bring them to the blog?

Come share your thoughts in the Tent.

I have two intentions: one is to have you as a reader benefit from any insights they share.

The second is that if you’ve been considering getting the home study version of the seminar, that hearing about what people are learning might inspire you to go ahead and get it. Especially since we’re offering a $100-during-the-live-seminar-week discount through this coming Monday, March 29.

It’s 6am now, and I’ll be seeing the participants in the next few hours. So hopefully you’ll start seeing some comments popping up over the course of the day.

And, of course, if you’ve taken the course in previous years or have the homestudy version already, please share your experiences, too.

Even after you’ve made a great heart connection and there’s been some real trust built, they still ding and ditch, say yes and poof into thin air.

What’s up with that?

Stage Diving Into Your Business

I spent my teen years in the punk rock scene. You know, ripped clothing, funny haircuts, loud and angry music. Stage diving.

Stage diving is an awesome twist on the whole “fall and catch me” trust exercise. You climb up onto the stage with the band, usually three to five feet above the floor. Then you dive out into the crowd. And they catch you.

And they always do. In years of going to punk rock shows, I only ever saw one person kinda hit the floor, and he was too big, too drunk, and there weren’t that many people in the crowd. People still broke his fall.

When someone says yes, that’s what they are doing—they’ve climbed up onto the stage and are ready to dive into your business.

How’s your dance floor lookin’?

Quick Switch of Musical Genre: Frank Sinatra

Frankie was a crooner, and his well-deserved reputation for heart-felt singing came from a little-known secret: he practiced. A lot. I read in a biography of his that he would practice each song up to one thousand times before singing it on stage.

Why so many times? You’d figure a few dozen times would be enough, eh?

After singing it so many times, Ol’ Blue Eyes knew each note in the song the way most singers knew the entire song. There was such a deep familiarity with the details of the song, that he could forget about the song.

And just sing.

What Happens After the “Yes?”

What does happen after someone tells you Yes? Do you know? Are you clear? Because if you’re not, that may be why they aren’t jumping in.

It can be an awkward moment with your new potential client. You’ve been in beautiful connection up until this point, the heart energy is flowing, there’s a lot of inspiration about what’s possible.

And then *ding,* you switch to things like contracts, payments, agreements, scheduling. What a speed bump! Painful.

Do what Frankie did and your clients will stage dive with you. How’s that for a mixed metaphor? At least it was all music.

The Details

Because money, payment and commitments are such uncomfortable topics for so many people, it can be easy for a business owner to pay them scant attention. When it comes to that point in the conversation, that discomfort and lack of familiarity with the details of their own sales process surfaces.

Some years ago I was going to hire someone for help with my business. It was a $1500 service, and I was happy to pay it. I said, “Yes.” Then he was slow getting back to me. And then the details shifted. And then… and then…

Enough shifted and changed that suddenly the stage was looking an awfully long way from the floor, and no one seemed to be there to catch me. I wasn’t going to jump.

Another time we were hiring an electrician to upgrade some of our home’s wiring. You know, the wiring that was installed in 1930 and wasn’t really up to snuff for a wired-up home office. Yeah, that wiring.

When it came time for the estimate, he went on and on and on talking about every little detail. Totally overwhelmed us and our eyes glazed over. Thankfully, I got that he was just unskillful with the sales process, but still seemed like an uber-competent electrician. We gave him the benefit of the doubt and had him do the work. He was fantastic.

But you’d never know that from how he handled the conversation. If he had been as sloppy with his electrical work as he was with how he handled his explanations, we would’ve been living in Not Good Land.

Painful.

Write Your Song

It’s time for you to sit down and really think through what happens after someone says “Yes!” What steps have to happen? What do they need to know? How does your business catch them once they jump?

There’s a lot more to this than you might think. Do you need emergency contact info? How do they schedule with you? Is there a cancellation policy? What if they are unhappy? What do they get and when?

You want to spell it all out. Right now, take a few minutes and brain-heart-storm it all out onto paper.

Then begin to think about delivery. What do you need to tell them right then, after they say yes. What do you say first? What do you say next? And what of it all gets delivered in written format? When do they need to get the information back to you. How long do they have to complete the payment?

Take a few more minutes and contemplate your list. What gets delivered when? And how? What can wait, and what do they need to know immediately?

Now Practice

Once you get it all sketched out, go over it. Practice saying it in the mirror, even. “Great! I’m glad you want to jump in. Okay, first we need to schedule your first appointment, and then we handle payment within the next 24 hours. We can do that right now if you want. And third I have a packet of information that I need you to read, sign and get back to me so we’re clear on how this all works.”

It’s going to sound funny. It’s going to be strange and weird. It’s going to come out of your mouth as inauthentic and disconnected.

That’s okay. It’s just the first time. Practice it multiple times. Get really clear about what you need to say.

After all, that’s what you’ve done with everything else. You’re really comfortable talking about the issues your business addresses because you’ve spoken about them and worked with them so much. Months and years, maybe decades.

Meanwhile you’ve practiced speaking the details of your business arrangement with a new client…how many times? And how many times after gaining some clarity?

It’s okay. Be strange, at home, alone. You don’t even need a mirror. Just get clear enough on your details to not have to think about them.

Now Sing Like Sinatra

The end result is you’ll be able to maintain your deep heart connection through the “Yes” and into the details of the agreement, without getting distracted by your own lack of preparation. This means that your new client experiences no bumps or drops after “Yes.”

And isn’t that really what it’s all about: a seamless flow of love from potential into relationship?

p.s. We’ll help you sing like a punk-rock Sinatra March 25-26 in Portland.
The Sacred Moment Seminar is a two-day event blending the practical
nitty-gritty with the heart and healing of sales conversations. It’s beautiful. It’s profound. It’s effective at helping you make and maintain the heart connection with potential new clients.

And it’s more than 2/3 full with an early-bird deadline coming up March 5. We’re having a no-cost call on the Sacred Moment, March 3. You can register here.

I hope you can join us.

p.p.s. Need some hands-on help, like, now?
We have two official Heart of Business practitioners ready to roll up their sleeves and help you with your business. Check out the Organic Business Development Program and see if Jason or Judy resonates more strongly with you.

• Say “Yes!” and take their money and get to work?
• Say “No way, are you crazy, have you been stalking me?”
• Say “Whoa, let’s slow it down a bit.”

In the early days of this business, when I was really hungry for clients, I would say Yes to anyone and anything that came in, because, err… there wasn’t very much there.

This is a totally fine approach in the beginning. As one of my teachers has told me, “When you’re hungry, it’s okay to eat.” There’s advice out there about having your perfect client, and saying no to everything else, but when you’re new, it’s not always clear who your perfect client is. And besides, if you gotta eat, you gotta eat. It’s okay.

However, over time, this can lead to trouble.

Why Get Good At Marketing

Near the top of the list of why I enjoy having a successful business is the real ease and freedom I feel in letting potential clients go. In a networking meeting, I don’t *need* a client. Someone applies to our high-end program who isn’t a right fit, I feel great about dissuading them from signing up.

Of course, this feeling of freedom and ease is always available in the heart, and I could access it when I was still struggling getting things going. But for some odd reason or another, it’s easier when the potential client in front of you isn’t the only thing around except for the cold eastern wind and some tumbleweed.

Signs of An Approaching Door

Here are some of my top signs that tell me to slow things down, even when someone is really excited and ready to hire us.

• They’ve known about us less than a week.
• They haven’t read our free workbook and so don’t know anything about our approach or use of spirituality.
• They are showing some signs of desperation. *Note- the desperation isn’t bad–their heart is clearly aching. I just don’t want someone spending a lot of money, especially if it puts their basic shelter and food needs at risk, thinking it’s going to “save” them or somehow work magic.
• My heart just doesn’t settle into it.

When any of these signs are present, I take a deep breath, slow down, and ask this question: “So, there are a million people teaching about business, what brings you to Heart of Business in particular?” I also ask how long they’ve known about us, whether they’ve read the workbook, and what’s their experience with spirituality.

I sometimes ask point-blank about their financial situation: “Are you on an edge? Would buying from us put your shelter and food needs at risk?”

There’s a bit more to the conversation, but this is how I start to assess if someone is coming to us from a grounded, centered place, really wanting to work with Heart of Business, or if they have some illusion about who we are, what we do, and what’s possible.

If it doesn’t feel right, I ask them to go read our workbook, and to take a few days to really listen to their heart. What are they truly needing? Do they have a strong sense of clarity about working with us, or are they truly needing something different?

The Most Recent Door

Someone had applied for our Opening the Moneyflow year-long program. Super-nice person. Super sincere. Ready to sign on the dotted line. But, the more I spoke with her, the more something just didn’t settle in. She had several of the signs of an approaching door.

I asked my questions, including the financial situation question, and told her my reservations, and she asked for some time to think it through. We agreed to speak in a few days.

Oh my goodness! She came back with such clarity about what her path really is, and it didn’t include our program. We both felt such palpable relief and openness, it just felt beautiful. And off she went on her true path, and I was moved that our encounter supported her in that.

Sweet, sweet success. That’s what I call a successful sales conversation.

The End Result

What comes out of this kind of honesty are clients that are totally jazzed to be here, and really clear about what they want. And I have a clear conscience that I’m not taking money from people who really need something else.

One Caveat

If you’re new in business, you may not have a lot of internal confidence yet in what you do. You may feel uncertain, or that you don’t deserve clients, or that there are a million people better than you, and so everyone should work with someone else.

If you’re working with these issues, I would err on the side of taking the client, even if it wasn’t exactly right. It’s too easy to undermine yourself with false humility that is really fear about showing up.

In time, as confidence grows, it will be easier to distinguish between true discomfort in the heart, versus your own fears.

Where’s Your Door?

Take a moment now and think about it: what are your signs that perhaps someone needs to be shown the door so they can find their true path, or at least that you need to slow down the sales process?

I’d love to hear what you come up with, if you’re willing to put it in the comments below. Or anything else this brings up for you.

Confession time: we’ve been selling a lot recently. If you’ve been reading this newsletter over the last weeks, you may feel similarly to the reader who asked, “Can you tone it down a bit? Love your offers, but just a little less.” A few echoing sentiments have been less polite.

I wanted to let you know that I’ve been having the same “errr errr” in my heart, and thinking “We’re on an overdone edge here.” And I wanted to talk openly about how and why this has been happening. As always, there have been lessons we’re learning as a result, which means there are lessons to offer. I also want give you a heads up about the rest of the year and ask for your help and advice.

Some People Say You Can’t Sell Too Much

When I asked folks for feedback on Twitter about our promotional schedule, some told me, “Hey, you can’t sell too much.” “People who are upset wouldn’t have bought from you anyway.” “You’re just thinning the herd.”

These were people of integrity, not quick-buck sleazy marketers. However, as comforting as those answers were intended to be, they didn’t have the “clunk of truth” in my heart.

Many people with big hearts, you included perhaps, are nervous about promoting at all. Not because of being shy. Not because of fear of sales.

I believe it’s because you sense what I sense–that there is a line you can go over, and you don’t have an accurate way to judge where that line is. The stakes are too high in your heart, around integrity, generosity and caring, to risk crossing it.

Had we gone over that line?

Where Is The Line?

My father had an email list of 7000 people for the family retail store, and he would send out three emails a week. Three sales emails a week promoting products. People loved it and it brought in customers in droves.

If we did that, we’d maybe have three people left subscribing–Kate, me, and my wife Holly. Although I don’t think Holly would be reading them.

What I’m saying is that there is no hard-and-fast rule about where the line is. You just have to listen.

Your Heart’s Ringtone

Despite the umpteen promotions I’ve run over the years, I still get nervous before clicking “send” on an email promotion. I also hear that even veteran actors are still susceptible to stage fright before walking out into the spotlight.

Popular wisdom encourages you to face your fear and let it go, but I think for me that nervousness is healthy. It means my heart recognizes that there is something at stake, that it matters. That what I do affects people. That what you do affects people

Although that initial fear is not your heart, it is your heart’s ringtone. Are you going to pick up and listen?

Louder and Louder

Over the last few months that ring tone has been getting louder. And I keep picking up and listening. At first, and for quite awhile, it was just my usual nervousness before a launch, and checking in with my heart allowed me to settle into clarity and ease.

But more recently a different message has been coming through. The message of “enough.” I’m tired of asking and want to be giving more.

When people I trusted and liked, people I had personal connections to, started giving feedback of “too much” that was one signal. Another was the  qualitative difference in the message in my heart. The fear of being on stage I’m all-too-familiar with. This was different. I wasn’t feeling scared or unnerved, but rather feeling a quiet certainty in my heart. “Enough.”

This listening is so important. Sometimes fear signals the opposite message of the truth. Sometimes it points you right at the exact message of the truth. But the fear is not the messenger you want to follow.

When you hear the ringtone of fear, take a breath. Stop. Remember the Divine, that love is always available, and that you’re okay. And then pick up and listen.

For me, the message was this: “Enough.”

There’s a problem, however. The business is on a track we can’t easily get off.

When Heart and Business Collide

You see, we’ve been wanting to change the focus of our business model for awhile. In the last several years, I’ve been accustomed to offering an intimate, small-group six-month program, and not selling a whole lot else in between, so there was a lot of spaciousness between.

This year it became really clear in our hearts to reach more people. That meant no small groups. Starting at mid-year we began offering larger sized classes over fewer weeks and at lower prices. This shift in structure and presentation has been fantastic. I’m so glad we’ve done it.

Obviously, the courses haven’t been lasting six months. They’ve lasted six or eight weeks. So suddenly this year we, and you, found ourselves in a much shorter promotional cycle.

I can assure you that 2010 will be different. For one, we will have a year-long program for those who are interested. For another, we’re planning how to do it all a differently. For a third, I’m getting past the brand-new-parent overwhelm thing.

That said, we do have more offers coming down the pike for the rest of this year, and we just can’t not offer them. My question is how to follow through with our offers while honoring you and honoring what my heart is saying?

Following my heart message of “Enough,” the one I shared with you at the beginning, came one of those noggin knocking suggestions from my gentle amazing friend Martin Rutte [www.martinrutte.com]. He asked, “Why don’t you just tell people what’s going on?”

Of course.

So let me wrap this up by telling you one thing we do to keep promotions from going over the line, one big mistake I made, and one request of you all.

Keys to Stopping Short of the Selling Line

• Make promotional emails super clear.

There is a school of thought that says make the promotional emails look like your newsletters, so people will read them. I hate that.

Every Wednesday the weekly article goes out with the subject line “Business Heart: Title of Article.” Our promotional emails don’t have that. Plus, in the first line or two of the email itself, I mention the name of the offer.

I do this explicitly so that if you’re not interested you can just delete it quickly, without feeling as if you’ve been “suckered” into reading a promotional email. At the same time if you are interested, you don’t miss any deadlines.

• The mistake–didn’t use the opt-in list.

I ran the No More Square Wheels teleclass as a way of gauging interest in the subject. I also made it explicit that I was going to promote the class through that opt-in list.

Then I forgot. I did. I sent out a few emails to that list, but then proceeded to send all of the promotional emails out to the general list. The original idea was to do the opposite– a few to the general list, and more to the opt-in list.

You could say I was being an evil marketer just manipulating you. But in reality, I just goofed up. Gah.

Don’t do that.

• Our request for your advice:

We do have a few more offers planned for the rest of the year:

- The home study version of the current course–Heart of Business Momentum.
- Our year-long program, which starts in January.
- A soft re-launch of the Business Oasis, which has received a face-lift.
- Our usual end-of-the-year product promotions.

Four things, and only three more months. The things we’re doing to listen to the “enough” voice include: the Oasis is actually a “soft” launch–meaning we’re mentioning it, but we’re not pushing it in any kind of campaign. And the home study promotion and the end-of-year product promotions will be relatively short, one or two weeks each, maximum.

My request for your advice comes in two parts: What would you do if you were in our shoes? What would feel good to you as one of our readers?

These are purposefully open-ended questions. We’re eager to listen to any and all sincere feedback.