EP 212 Stop Selling Hours: Sell Results Instead!

Foreign Prioritize your family and stay true to your vision. Get ready to transform your life and business one episode at a time. This is the Align your True north podcast and I'm your host, Brooke Elder.

What made me think of today's content is I was talking to an operations director last week and we were talking through some of her client proposals that she had sent. And as we were going through this, she kept saying like, I don't understand why my clients are rejecting my proposals.

I mean, have any of you ever felt that way that you are sending out these proposals and either like no one ever hear, like you don't hear back from them, they ghost you, or they just come back and they're like, maybe not. If that is what you are feeling or experiencing, by the end of this training, you are going to know how to have clients start chasing you down.

And I have a worksheet that you can get that will walk you through exactly how to create an offer that is going to get clients really wanting to work with you. So first, let's talk about the common mistake that I see. There's a common mistake where when you're sending out a proposal, you're listing out all the things that you're going to do for them, you're listing out all your skills, the services that you offer. This is how many hours I'm going to do all of that.

Here's the thing, business owners really don't care about that. You may think that they care, but they actually don't. And the reason why most people think that they do care is because business owners are going to ask like, well, like, how many hours per month are you going to be working for me? Because they're in the head. And I'm speaking this way from like, I built a seven figure coaching business and I've hired a lot of operations people, admin help, all of that.

And one of the ways that they are thinking in their business is they're thinking, thinking like, okay, how many hours can I afford to pay this person? So they're kind of in that mindset already, but you need to switch that if that it's not about hours.

And we've talked about this on other different trainings and things like that. It's not about hours, it's about the outcome that you can provide for them. So as I was looking over this proposal, it was all like, here's the amount of hours that I can do and I'm going to do this and this and this and this and this.

Like the business Owners, when they look at that, they're like, okay, but if they aren't really understanding how doing those tasks or offering those services is actually going to help their business, it's harder for them to say yes. As a business owner, they get more in their head and they start thinking through like, well, do I really need this? Because I'm just helping you start seeing inside a business owner's head. They're thinking like, well, maybe I don't need to spend the money on this.

I can just continue answering my emails, I can continue doing XYZ that you have on your list. But if you then position it differently and you, you switch that to more of this solution based, you start talking about how by hiring me, you're going to be able to xyz, you're going to be able to have more free time. You're not going to have to worry about like having your emails, your email inbox getting awful and that you aren't getting back to people.

You aren't going to have to worry about funnels not working or whatever it is that you're doing. You want to paint that picture of what does it look like when you are done with these services and they have this dream life and we have talked about this before, but I really want to like dial this in on how do you actually create an offer around this specifically?

And so when you are creating your offer, you want to very first identify what is that problem that you're solving? What's the one thing? Now you can solve lots of problems, which means you just have lots of like little mini offers, and maybe you're putting like three of those, like many offers together to create one proposal that you're sending them. So I want you to think, what is one problem that you solve? And I'm just going to take podcast production as an example.

So let's say that the problem that I solve is I help business owners be able to get their podcast produced, because the problem that I'm solving is they have a podcast, they don't want to produce our podcast anymore, or maybe they don't know how and they're looking to hire somebody. So there's the problem that I'm solving. So that problem goes in the middle. And like I said, you can get the worksheet.

If you want to go get the worksheet, you can go to align your True North.com/offer solution, all one word. So align your True North.com offer solution, and that will get you this worksheet that you can fill out. But you can also just do this on a normal piece of paper too. Just draw a circle in the middle. It's kind of like doing those like, web that you would create when you were in elementary school.

So you are going to write down the problem in the middle, draw a circle, and then you're going to draw lines out from that, and you're going to have a bunch of other circles that go around that. And I want you to start thinking, what are some of the solutions you can offer to that problem? So some of the solutions you can offer. So remember, our problem is that we, that the business owner doesn't want to produce a podcast or doesn't know how to produce a podcast, but they want a podcast.

So we can produce a podcast. That's pretty easy, right? We can edit it, we can add the intro, the outro, get it uploaded to whatever software they're using to be able to push that podcast out. Like, we can do that for them. But what other solutions can you also offer? Maybe you could take that podcast and then you can turn it into a blog post. So now you have both the blog post and you're also producing the podcast.

You can also take that podcast, you can turn it into maybe six or seven different social media posts, and you can offer them that. Maybe another solution that you can offer is getting guests on their podcast or getting them to be guests on other people's podcasts. So that's another solution that you can offer. So as you start looking at this, I want you to start thinking at different angles of how you can offer different solutions.

So now once we, we have all of this mapped out, all around our one problem that we're solving, we have lots of different solutions that we can then offer to our clients. From there, once we have all the solutions mapped out, we have the problem, we talk about the solutions.

Now, what's the outcome? This is the most important part. And this is where I would say 90% of people who are trying to market themselves, they miss the mark because they just talk about problem solution, problem solution, and then they're expecting their audience to bridge the gap between the solution and the outcome. And when you are making people think what the outcome is based off of your solution, it's creating more work for them. And so it makes it harder for them to say yes.

That is like the biggest issue that we are seeing is that people are just talking about problem solution. Because so many people, when they're teaching marketing, it's like you talk about the problem, you give them the solution. When you're doing a discovery call, you find out what their problems are and you give them your solution. People are missing what is the outcome of that solution? What comes of that?

So you look at all of your solutions that you have written around your one problem, and then I want you to write out what is the outcome?

Really think. If you are the business owner and you have all of this happening for you, what does that mean for you? One, it's going to make podcasting fun again, because all they have to do is get on and record and that's it. So that makes it way more fun. Interviewing people, sharing your thoughts like that makes it fun because all the rest of the hard stuff that they don't want to do, you were taken care of. But what does that do for them?

And that's what I want you to keep thinking of, like, well, what does that do? Well, what does that do? Keep asking yourself that question and you are going to get it much, much deeper on what this outcome actually is going to do. So if they have a podcast, one, maybe it's also that they are going to have a podcast that comes out every single week, or if they are doing it like twice a week, you have consistency. So that is also going to then build trust with their audience.

Well, what happens when they have trust with their audience? They're going to be able to sell more, so they're going to see their sales increase. What happens when their sales increase? Well, they're going to actually make more revenue. When they have more revenue, what is that going to do for them? It's going to make it so that way they can start reaching their goals, they can start spending more time with their families. All of this because you are taking all of this off their plate.

Do you see how you can create this by just keep asking yourself questions and talking about the outcome? So when you create a proposal, it's going to be all about the outcome. When they hire you, it's not about what are the tasks, what's the solution that you're offering them. It's not about that. It's about the outcome that they're going to get by working with you. That's the thing we need to focus on.

So I want you to look at your offers and today what I want you to do, I want you to identify what is one problem that you solve, what are some of those solutions that you can offer, and then what is the outcome from those solutions. And if you can articulate that now, like you have social media posts, you have ideas to put into proposals. When you're talking to people through dms, you can ask them, what's their problem? Then you can say, what kind of solutions are you looking for?

And then say, great, this is the kind of outcome that I provide if you decide to work with me. And when you can clearly articulate that you are going to have clients just running to you, that is the key.