I can’t problem promise that selling will ever be easy… but it sure as hell is going to be a lot easier when you stop telling yourself stories about your buyer and about how likely they are to buy.
And we all do it. A buyer shows up with urgency and money and a costly problem, and you’re talking to the decision-maker as well… and they even said yes! What’s more, they asked for a proposal, which you carefully crafted and shipped off with a little bow on it…
And then it’s crickets all the way down.
You sit there, reloading your email inbox, wondering where it went wrong.
I can tell you where it went wrong:
You told yourself a story, and you believed it, and unfortunately that story was your own fiction, and not at all your buyer’s reality.
And because of that, your words and actions made sense in the context of what you thought was the status of the deal… but your buyer had a completely different view on where the deal was at:
You thought "Ready buyer, almost over the line", but for them that wasn’t true. For your buyer it may have been a case of, for example, "It’s a terrific offer, but maybe that proposal from the competitor suits us better".
And that’s a real shame, because now you’ve created a disconnect because you communicated based on what you thought was true for them, but it was only true for you.
And now your buyer is no longer responding, and you have yet another stuck deal cluttering up your pipeline (see here for tips on how to get rid of the crud and the deadwood)
The solution?
Strategic deployed empathy. As in: taking the time to properly understand your buyer – AKA learn your people, based on the information you’ve gathered, and creating Messaging and a sales conversation based on your buyer’s reality, not your own fiction.
This is why I created the Deal Diagnosis X-Ray, because once you ask yourself empathy questions, and you externalise all that you know about your buyer and their world, your understanding of their situation will improve dramatically, and every word you say or write will be far more relevant than if you just go by the mechanical budget/urgency/decision-maker qualifiers.
This process of asking empathy questions and creating calibrated messaging, that’s what I’ve been doing for years with my clients and students, and it’s remarkable how effective it is.
No more endless free coffee meetings. Buyers who reply instead of going ghost. Going from hourly to project-based pricing. No more haggling and pushback on pricing. Sales that get my people to earn what their work is actually worth.
These are all real results from real people, and they can be yours too if you want, provided you get yourself in on the Deal Diagnosis -Ray coaching programme.
It’s a fairly new format for me, I’m running this on a subscription-basis, where you can cancel the programme any time.
And, also a first: this is not a fixed-price programme, but instead your investment is commensurate with the value it generates for your business. So if you’re a bootstrapped startup founder it’s going to cost less than if run a multi-million dollar business.
It gets you weekly meetings, text-based support, spot-coaching calls, and work-sessions for developing email sequences, website copy, slide decks, or whatever else you need to build in order to attract and convert buyers.
I’m excited about this because I know how well the DDXRay method works, and this is the most accessible offer I’ve created to date.
So to find out more and see if it’s for you, have a look here.