I have sometimes seen a similar fear and limited tunnel vision that blocks sales success among salespeople in every walk of life.
Here’s the ever-so-subtle secret to building sales as an entrepreneur: it’s never about focusing on building your business. That’s the irony: to build your success, don’t focus on the sale. Focus instead on serving your clients and your community, and your prospective clients and/or customers. In other words, develop a commitment to become the solution to the problems being faced by the people in your city (or world, depending on the range of your market). Become an oasis in the parching desert of pain and struggle. If you do that, you’re halfway to your success. I say halfway, because commitment to serving others puts others before yourself, which is fundamental number one to great client service. And great client service is top secret number one to success in any business.
The other half, however, that is just as vital, is being willing to let these people support you, too. In other words, become a truly master giver and a truly master receiver. Become the best you can possibly be in terms of solving the problems of the people in your world. Then become as innocent as a small child in terms of receiving new clients and referrals. Become like an enthusiastic child as far as inviting people to your store, or office, or website – not to build your business, but to relieve their pain, solve their problem or fulfill their need – and inviting them to invite their friends, family, coworkers, and clients, etc. to visit you for similar solutions, as well.
Merely focusing on building your business invariably turns other people into numbers – $100 per hour if that’s your rate – rather than human beings with specific issues that cause them pain, headaches and agita, and hamper the freedom that they can feel in life. If you’re thinking more about how you’re going to make the rent on your office, or pay the mortgage on your home, than you are about how to provide the very best solution to the problems that your business addresses, you’re shooting your business in its foot. I’m not saying that the customer is always right – in fact sometimes, they’re dead wrong. But they have a right to get the very best service that you can bring forth.
And if you come from fear and lack, they can smell it. They can sense you adding those 100 dollars in your mind when you’re talking to them about possibly becoming new clients. They can smell your financial fears. Nobody wants to do business with that kind of person. And deep in your heart you don’t want to be that person either.
The entrepreneur who wants to serve others, but forgets to break down her resistance to thriving in the process, winds up volunteering too much, giving away too many products, discounting, and sliding scaling her way into needing another job to augment her business.
If you stay in your heart and master serving and master receiving, you’ll be charging the Master-Cards of so many people, charging those 100 dollars more frequently than you could have possibly imagined.
You’ve heard of the Chinese oracle, the “I Ching,” which attempts to tell you how your future will turn out; well, if you serve your clients the way I’ve described and avoid worrying about your rent or mortgage, your cash register will be going “ka-ching ka-ching.”
