A savvy business owner sees a hole in the market, and figures out a way to fill it.
A savvy and compassionate business owner sees a pain in the world, and finds a way to ease it for those who suffer from it.
These are the people we all know, and their products and marketing (good as well as bad) are there to be found wherever we look.
And then there’s a third kind of business owner.
This type isn’t in business just because there’s a need, or a hole in the market, or because they found a way to make money:
Instead, they’re in business because there is a deep and overpoweringly compelling motivation – a reason why – that keeps pulling them forward, because they see something in the world that isn’t right, and they’re on a mission to make it right.
People like that, they see a status quo that they refuse to accept, and they make it their mission and their purpose to right the wrong that they see – to change the status quo.
For me, the wrong that I see, and that I want to fix, is that ‘the nicest people, those most concerned with making things better, are often those who struggle most to sell their work or grow their business’.
AKA: the Good-egg Problem.
That to me is wrong, because it means that the less nice, the more aggressive or less scrupulous, they do move forward, and get the sales, while the good eggs don’t.
I stand against that, and my mission is to make the good eggs – those business owners who actually care – grow and profit the way they deserve.
Which does of course raise the question: how do you grow your business and sell your work, in an ethical way, while not compromising your values?
The answer is actually quite simple:
Your values don’t have to stand in the way of your growth. Your values shouldn’t be the reason you don’t sell enough.
They can – and should – in fact enable your growth, and impact, and sales and revenue.
Don’t worry about your values and how to protect them – instead, make use of them, let them work for you:
📄 Lead With Values and Sell More Because of Them
That’s how you solve the good-egg problem: you get to enroll more buyers not despite your values, but because of them.
To lead with values in your sales process, a really effective approach is to slowly, thoughtfully, review the people in your pipeline, one by one, before engaging with them.
Quite a different approach than the popular "Let’s automate followup messages to 1000 people!" methods we see on LinkedIn. (A wrong, which, incidentally, Sales for Nice People is here to right).
So if you want to do that thoughtful review on the people in your world, in order to generate new opportunities, there’s the Mine Your Network for Opportunities workflow.