Full Episode Transcript

“I’m Not a Salesperson”: How to Sell Wellness Without Being Pushy

I'm not a salesperson.

If you are in the fitness or wellness business and you've ever said that, or, "I hate sales because I don't wanna be pushy," this episode is for you.

You're listening to Wellness Means Business with Casey Conrad. I'm Casey Conrad, and for almost 40 years I've been helping fitness and wellness entrepreneurs turn their products, programs, and services into stronger, more profitable businesses.

So let's get down to business.

I wanna start out today with a heartfelt thank you. Although I'm in the very early stages of this show, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your comments, your follows, your shares, even the messages you've been sending me saying what you're enjoying most and things that maybe you'd like me to talk about in future shows.

Know that I read every single one of them, and I'm weaving those requests into the calendar. I'm already about a month, a month and a half out, so just be patient.

And if you're not getting my Thursday newsletter, the Wellness Means Business Brief, remember, it is completely different content than what we cover on this show, and you can go to caseyconrad.com/wellnessmeansbusiness to register.

Now, in our last episode, Episode 9, we talked about finding where the yeses stop in your customer journey. And many businesses, of course, find out that the leak is happening early in that process.

I do, however, have some clients who will say to me, "Casey, people are finding us. They're booking, they're showing. They're going through what they believe are well-thought-out presentations where they are showing them how they can help them, but their closing rate is still too low."

And maybe this is your situation. I don't know. Maybe you talk to a lot of people, you clearly know that they need your product or service, but you're not making the sales you want, or in some cases what you need to stay economically viable.

And in these instances, it's a conversion problem.

And that means we have to talk about the one topic that many wellness and fitness people prefer to avoid, and that's sales.

Let's face it, whether it's a wellness or fitness entrepreneur, the vast majority of us entered the business because we wanna help people. And I'd say that most don't identify themselves as a salesperson.

And perhaps even more challenging is that many associate salesperson with someone that's pushy, manipulative, or that tries to talk someone into something even when they don't wanna buy it.

And of course, we've all had the experience, say, at a car dealership or maybe a timeshare presentation where we get the hard sell. Heck, as a sales trainer, I'll be the first to admit that that's never a nice situation.

I wanna stop here, though, and ask you an important question.

If you're a parent, have you ever persuaded your child to do something? Maybe something they didn't wanna do? And I'm not talking about forcing them because, you know, "I'm the parent."

And what about with your spouse or your partner or even a friend? Maybe they wanted to go to a certain restaurant or a movie, but you wanted a different one, and you convinced them to do what you preferred. Again, not in an aggressive way, but just in a convincing way.

Well, guess what?

That was a sale.

Yep, it was.

Every moment of every day a sale is happening. Because at its core, I really believe that selling is nothing more than influencing a conversation.

It's getting someone to see something from a particular perspective, and that's often a different perspective than their initial one. And you do this persuading, if you will, so that the person can make a decision.

But there's an important distinction here.

Influencing a conversation is not controlling the outcome.

Your job isn't to make somebody buy. Your job is to help that person in front of you to make a decision about something they've already expressed an interest in or maybe a need for.

And let's bring this into an actual industry situation.

Let's say you run a physical brick-and-mortar business. Maybe it's fitness, maybe it's wellness, maybe it's a combination, and maybe you're trying to sell a higher-end personal training program. It could be any of those situations or others.

And you've added recovery or wellness services, and you're trying to get someone into a monthly package.

Maybe it's red light, an infrared sauna, PEMF device, some wellness technology. And people are for sure interested. They're trying it. They're asking questions, but they're not buying the package, the program, or the actual device that you would like them to.

And you're not having a consultation problem, right?

They're coming in for a single visit, so they're actually trying it out. They say they're interested. Maybe they even sit through a presentation, watch videos, and they're actually engaging in a conversation that indicates a sincere interest.

So these people are in front of you by choice. It's not like they're locked in because you've signed up for a timeshare presentation to get the free dinner or the free three days, right?

They have a real reason. They've got a need, and they believe that your product or service can help them.

Now, if you genuinely believe that what you offer may help them, not asking them to take the next step is actually a disservice.

And I know what some of you are saying right now: "But Casey, I do ask them to take the next step, but they still don't buy."

Well, if your conversion rate is low, then we actually need to look at how you're asking, and we're gonna do that over the next few episodes.

But for now, I want you to know this: asking for the sale is literally just one step in an eight-step process. And although this is not a training on that, let me go over the eight steps so you understand them.

Step one, we get a prospect.

Step two, we move to rapport when we first interact or meet them.

Step three, we take the time to qualify them. Get to know them. What's going on with them?

Then from there, we move into step four, which is the actual presentation, and that's any number of different things depending on the actual business that you're in.

So that's steps one through four.

Asking for the sale, i.e. what we call the close, is the fifth step, followed by overcoming objections, getting referrals, and establishing a course of contact, whether they buy or not.

So those are the eight steps, and for years I have trained that you divide those steps in half.

That makes steps one through four the front end of the sale, and steps five through eight the rear end of that entire journey.

And in any situation, you wanna have a better front end and less of a rear end.

I say it like this in seminars: "Hey, it's better to have a bigger front end than a smaller rear end," right?

And although I'm joking about that, all joking aside, I want you to see the process with the eight steps from a perspective. The key is you want a nice, comfortable sales process or journey that doesn't feel pushy, where you're spending the majority of your time on the front half.

Now, that doesn't mean you don't focus on the back half, but it should be front-end heavy.

Then look at the rear end. Closing is only one of the four steps.

So closing—and this is a misconception—people say to me, "Well, give me your close, Casey. What are the clever things that you say?"

That's not what closing is.

It's not just a statement or an angle that you take at the end of the sale.

No.

If you've been a good listener, you've asked great questions, you've uncovered what this person wants, why they want that thing, and discovered what might be holding them back from having what they want, asking a person to buy is literally a logical ending to a journey that you've been taking with them throughout that entire process.

Maybe you've presented this person with one or more options that provide a solution to their issue, and in essence, the close is just an invitation.

It's an invitation to give them permission to get what they told you they wanted.

And I really hope you can see that perspective.

It's funny, when I'm training on sales, someone in the audience invariably says to me, "Yeah, but Casey, you're so good at selling. You're natural."

And I don't know, maybe that thought has crossed your mind, especially if you've been to one of my trainings before.

But to that comment, I'd say two things.

First, no one pops out of their mother's womb and the doctor says, "Look, it's a professional salesperson."

No. No, no, no.

Sales is a learned behavior.

And yes, before you come back with the response, I understand that certainly there are personalities that are more suited to sales than others, and that's why we have many different professions.

But anyone who has a passion to help people can learn how to sell and do it in a way that is very natural, very comfortable.

And the second thing that I say, and one that I'm much more serious about, requires a quick story.

So I have traveled a lot, and although I don't travel as much anymore, I still continue to find myself on trains, planes, and automobiles all the time.

And being the shy, reclusive person that I am, I often find myself conversing with a total stranger.

Now, when the conversation invariably turns into, "What do you do?" and they find out that I'm in the fitness and wellness space, almost always what happens is this person starts to be almost in a confessional.

Total strangers start to tell me how they wanna get back into shape, or how they wanna lose weight or change their diet or whatever. Maybe they've got some wellness modality at home that they're not using.

And when that conversation opens up, my one and only goal in that moment is to try to convince that person that they need to make their health a number one priority.

And so I just ask them, "Well, what are you doing? What have you been using that for? How is it working? What are your goals? What are your roadblocks? What don't you maybe understand about that?"

I am trying to sell them, but just one thing: to do whatever they can in the fitness and wellness arena to improve the quality of their life.

And look, I don't get any financial benefit from that conversation, but I so passionately believe that our industry is the most powerful in terms of getting people healthy, that my mission is to sell them on making that change, making the commitment, making it a priority for themselves to take care of them.

And you may find that a little extreme in terms of my perspective, but I wanna tie that back into our conversation here.

When you have someone across from you and you know you can help them, I want you to imagine that they're one of your best friends from high school who you haven't seen in years, and they tell you everything that's going on with their health, and you know that your product or service can help them.

You also know that if they continue to do nothing, they might have some consequences, and they genuinely have expressed to you that they're concerned about those consequences.

So if you approach every sale with that perspective—i.e., that this is one of my best friends from high school—and you're gonna give that person in front of you the same level of care and enthusiasm, do you think you'd get different results?

Yeah.

I'd bet on it.

Now, let me tell you why I encourage you and every person that I train to approach sales the way that I just explained, which I call, by the way, the long-lost high school friend approach.

Because sometimes your product or service isn't gonna be the right choice for that person.

Yeah, I know. I said it.

And of course, you'd never try to convince a good friend to buy something that wasn't in their best interest, that wasn't gonna help them.

And guess what?

You shouldn't be trying to do that with a prospect.

But if you're passionate about getting the person in front of you to make the right decision for them, you're gonna be wildly successful, and you're gonna build up some good karma in the process, right?

So you do not have to become some stereotypical salesperson to become good at sales.

You need to become good at conversations that lead to decisions.

And sometimes those decisions will be yes to what you're selling, sometimes no, and a lot of times it'll be maybe, maybe in the future.

And all of that is good.

So I encourage you to take a moment and think about your last few sales conversations.

When it came time to ask for the sale, did you confidently help this person make a decision or at least move in the right direction?

Or did you hesitate?

Did you soften it?

When you asked for the sale, maybe you gave this person an out because you were a little uncomfortable.

Maybe you avoided asking it altogether.

And all of those things happen all too often. I see it when we record salespeople and are doing training in-house.

Because even when you understand everything that I've talked about today, there's still that moment when you cross into what I lovingly refer to as the Money Zone.

For so many people, and even some who have come to the conclusion that selling doesn't have to be pushy, something in them changes when they're about to ask another human being for their money.

They suddenly get nervous. They get tongue-tied.

Maybe you've been there. I don't know.

You start anticipating the money objection and you literally stop listening.

Maybe you fill the silence with words or you rescue the customer before they've even had time to think about it and answer.

Well, if you can relate to any of that, you're gonna love Episode 11 because that's where we're going next.

Until next time, make a difference, make a profit, and remember, wellness means business.

This is Casey Conrad.

Ciao for now.