Dec 20, 2020
My next guest is Christine Schlonski the Queen of the Sales-Success-Mindset. She is a multi-talented leader in the field of Sales, Mindset, Motivation, and Strategies. Christine Schlonski is the Host of Heart Sells Podcast and the Founder of Heart Sells Academy. She shows heart-centred, impact-driven entrepreneurs how to sell with ease, grace, confidence, and authenticity.
Christine says, no matter what happens, to stay positive and focused is so important in challenging times. if you are all over the place and if you are worried all the time for things that you cannot influence, then it is not going to help you as a person, and it is not going to help the business. Stating, I have supported my clients more than ever in maintaining a great attitude and knowing they are the leaders in their fields. As leaders sometimes we do not know what is going to happen next, but a leader shows up for their tribe and helps them to focus, to think positive, to understand what they can change and what they cannot. They do not go into fear or run around like headless chickens, and they focus on what they can do at that moment, I coach my clients was important, to keep the focus and the positive attitude.
Talking about Heart Sells, Christine said, I love this topic because I was in corporate sales for such a long time, cold calling, picking up the phone calling people who have never heard our name before and trying to sell a high ticket event. I discovered that the moment where I connected my heart with my sales changed, I had the opportunity to relax more into the sale. We all know sales is a numbers game, and if we are in the corporate sector, there is a lot of pressure. The higher you raise an organization with sales, the more pressure you probably have. Just connecting my heart, it changed everything. It changed the way I was able to lead the sales teams I built, it changed the conversations with the clients, and at the end of the day, it changed my paycheck as well which is important. If you are thinking like, I have so much pressure I need to call so many people, and I need to do my little pitch, and at the end of the day, I must ask. The more people I call, the more money I will make. Instead, why don't you take a moment for yourself, take a deep breath and think about it? How would you love to have a sales conversation, when you can bring your heart to the table as well as your head? How would that change the conversation, by being aware and by setting an intention that every client you are calling from now on or potential client? You come from that place of love first, and you care. I can promise said Christine, you that mid-term and long term you will sell even more when you go into relationship building and caring for whom you call, even though you might not know them yet.
I asked Christine to give an example of setting intentions. It is what I started doing, and it felt so strange at the beginning. I was like oh this is a lot of woo woo stuff. When I stopped, and I felt into the call, and I imagined that person, so I have a name and the numbers. You are just calling and imagining that person that is another human being; it is not just your next commission, you connect. I said in my heart, I love you, and it felt so weird at the beginning, I was like what am I doing here but being open and going deep in the emotion feeling that I am already connected with the person. If it were not a fit, I made that clear to myself first before I approached from the heart. When you go deep into that feeling when you at the end of the day would love to investigate the mirror and know you had a great day, you made a new friend, you have got a new customer that you deeply care for and that you have delivered value, it changes everything. It was so weird at the beginning, but the more I practised, the easier it became, the better where my conversations, the more authentic I became. I stopped worrying about myself; I stopped worrying about how they perceive the call what they might be thinking about me or if I did show up professionally. I was good enough to have the conversation with this customer, and I just connected with the person from a place of love, understanding and compassion and being opened to having a conversation. If it is a fit, make an invitation, and it just changed. Permitting myself to be authentic and only to speak what was on my mind and that was something I had to train myself to practice because it felt so unnatural as I had never done it before. I had so much more fun. I was able to go so much deeper with clients connecting not just about the product but finding out what are their worries how do they feel what is important to them. This gave me a different position when they had various offers for the same product; they would always choose my offer over other offers because I was connected differently.
I feel in the corporate world there are many lies, and many people say something like they have this product, it delivers this, and then it does not. When people do not approach it from the heart centred space, they take the money and run, and that is how everyone listening has gotten burned at some point. We all have made a sales experience that was not good, and many might even avoid sales. Many of my clients going into entrepreneurship have something unique to offer. But when it comes to selling, they block themselves because they do not want to be that sleazy, slimy salesperson that they encountered at some point in their life or that person that took their money and did not deliver. When you are different in how you show up, you get noticed, and when you care, people will feel that you care. I still have contact with the people that were my clients years ago because we established that excellent relationship. It just makes your life so much easier because you do not need to pretend that you are someone that you are not, you feel like I felt, I had to be professional and that was my definition of what I thought a professional salesperson had to be. When I was able to drop that and identify it as not being true, these things changed, and it was so much more fun. I made a lot of more money because people could identify because people could connect and they felt I cared, and when I said I am going to go back in two weeks, I called back in two weeks.
Christine and I talk about the poor perceptions of salespeople from the likes of Glengarry Glen Ross and Wolf of Wall Street and Christine recommends the book The Go-giver and talks about the impact it had on her and her hero, Bob Burg its author.
https://Christineschlonski.com
https://www.facebook.com/HeartSellsPodcast
https://www.facebook.com/IamChristineSchlonski/
https://twitter.com/newsalesmindset
https://www.linkedin.com/in/Christineschlonski