Why Providing Value Isn’t Enough to Make Sales

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, episode 172.

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic under earner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach, and then on to multiple six figures as a full-time money and business coach. 

I help entrepreneurs create money making businesses and build wealth using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let's dive into today's show.

Hello my friends and welcome back to the podcast. Today we are going to be speaking about sales. We spoke about sales conversations last week, and that's what happens when you actually have somebody on the call with you. And today we're going to speak about what happens even before your person gets on the sales call.

We're going to be talking about why providing value, which is what everybody talks about, You need to provide value ahead of time. You need to help your people ahead of time. You need to give away free content. Why that strategy is broad, it doesn't tell you enough and it doesn't help your people enough to feel activated to actually get on that sales call that we spoke about last week.

But before we actually go into today's episode, which is going to be detailed, it's going to be juicy, and you might wanna get your pen and paper out and take notes, I do wanna let you know that I'm going to be going into this topic much more deeply on March 24th, 25th, and 26th. I'm going to be running a three-day masterclass called Piping Hot Buyers: Messaging Shifts That Turn Crickets Into Paying Clients.

So my Piping Hot Buyers webinar masterclass will be happening for three days the last week of March. Go now to my website, debbiesassen.com/pipinghot, that's one word, P-I-P-I-N-G-H-O-T. Debbiesassen.com/pipinghot, and get yourself into that masterclass because there is so much you really need to know in order to get those people who really want to work with you to raise their hands and say yes, to get them feeling like you are calling them in.

We don't wanna call people into us who are not our dream clients, but if your dream clients don't know that you're actually talking to them, if your messaging is too broad, too vague, too fluffy, and we've spoken about that before on the podcast, your people won't know that you can actually help them get the results they want.

So we're gonna touch base on this a little bit today. I'm gonna give you an excellent example that comes from one of my clients and you're going to be able to see yourself in his story. So buckle up and let's go.

So you have probably heard the phrase, just provide value, value ahead of time, give, give, give, freebies, lead magnets, opt-ins, right? And your people will come, people will come to you, sales are gonna come your way. But it often happens that people love your content and they never buy. 

And it's fascinating, right? You're working so hard, you're posting, you're consistent. You go out there with your emails, on the interwebs, posting, posting, writing, writing, talking, talking, you're doing all the things and you're not converting or converting enough of your potential clients into paying clients.

So as I said, I want to share the story of one of my clients and we were just working on this today, how present that today's my podcast recording day and we just had this session. So my client is a coach. He works with couples on their marriages, improving their relationships. And he's gonna be running a group program soon. 

So we were looking at what he is writing in order to explain his upcoming group program to his potential couples and clients. And it was very vague, which is why exactly we were working on it. About relieving tensions in your marriage, having a better relationship, very sort of top-level problems. But it wasn't getting down into the nitty gritty.

And as I was explaining, like people couldn't actually see themselves in their problem. And this is what happens so often is that your value can talk about, yes, creating relationships and having a better marriage and relieving tension. And that will create a lot of people who are gonna fangirl you or fanboy you. They're gonna love your content. It talks about all of these great aspirational goals, but it's not converting. 

And it's because the words that you are using are not specific and they're not clear enough. So your audience just sees you as an inspirational person putting valuable content out there that's like, yeah, we can do it, but they don't actually see that you have a solution to their problems. 

Maybe you're giving quick tips, you know, before you come home from work, do deep breathing in the car before you walk in the house, it's been a long day, you're tired, your boss has been on top of you, the phone has been ringing and you've got this problem, you've been deep in this problem solving and you're just feeling on edge. So sit in your car at home, do some deep breathing, do some mindfulness and that way when you get home, you're not gonna bite your wife's head off, right?

But if you're just vague, like, oh, I can help you improve your relationship so you and your wife don't have tension when you come home from work, or you and your spouse, your husband, are not feeling tension at the end of the day after you've been showing up and working in your business, maybe you're online, maybe you're in person, and then you're dealing with food and laundry and the kids and bath times, right?

If they just see you as a friend, someone that you can be there for them, they can lean their head on your shoulder, they can cry a few tears, right? You're just like their bestie when they're feeling, you know, really stressed out at the end of the day. They're not going to be ready to say they need to work with you, and they're not gonna be ready to pay you money.

So you don't wanna get into this trap of posting and posting and sharing very vague content. You wanna break it down into as specific as possible. And you wanna make it clear to your people and the more specific you are, the more clear to them it becomes that you actually know how to solve their problems. You actually position yourself as the answer to their problems rather than someone who is providing valuable, vague content on the interwebs.

So your client needs to see that they have a problem and you know exactly how to talk about it. You know, for example, if you're coming home at the end of the day after you have been working and you've had a stressful day, you've been working in your business and now your children are calling you and they're like, let's say your children are married and they're out of the house, they're calling you. They want you to come and babysit.

Their kids are sick, they need some help and they're not getting things done. And you're like, but what about me? And then you take it out on your husband and then he comes home and he's always feeling like he's walking on eggshells because there's so much going on in your life, and he's like tiptoeing around, he doesn't want to ruffle any feathers, he doesn't want to upset you, and maybe he just like comes in and he goes out and he like disappears, and you feel almost like there's two ships passing in the night.

You might feel like you guys have become roommates and there's no romance between each other anymore. You see what I'm saying? When you're able to speak that specifically about what's going on in the lives of your clients, your people will be nodding their heads and they'll be saying, oh my gosh, she knows exactly what is happening in my house and I don't wanna live with my husband as a roommate anymore, I really want to get back to that relationship that we had 20, 30 years ago when we got married and there was intimacy and there was passion and there was romance. You see how specific that's getting?

So what you have to start thinking about in your mind is shifting to how your audience sees you. You want them to shift their idea from you being valuable, you're a great resource, you might be able to connect them. Maybe they're looking for some help with their marriage and you might be able to connect them with the right person, but they don't see you as irresistible. They don't see you as the one who is going to help them solve their problems.

Okay, so this is - let's break this down a little bit. How can you actually help them see you as the solution, the person that they need to work with? You're going to build their desire and you're going to have that piping hot buyer. Shameless plug that you wanna come to my masterclass at the end of March.

So what you wanna do is help them see that there is actually a real underlying problem. They don't think it's the problem, right? If we've got a husband and wife thing, it's usually we're going to blame the other person, right? It's all because of him. He does this, he does that. He never thinks of me, right? It's never about us. 

We're all self-centered. It's okay, nothing has gone wrong. But that's exactly what we want to expose. It's not that he's not doing X or she's not doing Y, it's that we are both at full capacity. And when we see each other at the end of the day, our bandwidth has been stretched almost to the point of snapping.

And so what we really want to do is be able to just re-look at the situation and be like, oh, it has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with him, right? He comes home at the end of the day, he wants to collapse on the couch and go to sleep. She's just put the kids to bed. She wants to collapse at the end of the day and go to sleep. It has nothing to do with either one of them being wrong. Both of them want the other spouse to help and do the heavy lifting to put the kids at home or wash up, clean up, do some laundry, whatever it is.

But we have to see that what's keeping them stuck is the fact that they are at full capacity. They really are living a stressful tense situation. We're not making them wrong for it, but realizing that when each person can actually slow down and take a deep breath and remember that, oh yeah, this is perfectly normal. This situation when we're working, when we're raising kids, and you might even be the sandwich generation where you've got parents that you deal with, right? It is perfectly normal.

And then you can show them what's possible when they actually work with you, when they learn your method, right? When I teach you my mindfulness method, and you're not gonna explicitly give them the detailed information, it takes way more than that. By the way, if you've ever tried to build a meditation or mindfulness practice, it takes way more than explaining it in a blog post.

But when they work with you and they learn your mindfulness approach and how to de-stress at the end of the day, then what happens is both husband and wife stop blaming the other person. They start taking responsibility for their own actions, for their own way that they're showing up, and they improve communication. And once they have improved communication, that will reignite the passion in their marriage.

So that's how specific you want to get with what is happening. Call them out that believing that your spouse is the problem is why you're not able to get the results that you want and have this passionate marriage after all. And when you can be so specific and they really see that you understand them deeply, that is what moves them towards desiring to work with you. That's actually what moves them to seeing you as the answer to their problems, the answer to their situation.

They're like, oh, I see that they understand me. They understand exactly what I'm going through and I really, you know, I like what they've said. I see exactly how they will be able to help me. So what you've done is you have positioned yourself as the best choice for the people to work with.

Again, it's, and just remember what I said, it's the words that you use. When you're using vague words, like I'm gonna help you relieve tension in your marriage, your people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've seen that a hundred times before. We see a lot of ads. We see people that are talking in these vague terms. They don't even notice they're seeing it. They're just scrolling on by because there's so much vagueness.

Like you being able to speak exactly to the desire your person wants is going to get them to like, all of a sudden they're gonna lift their head up. They're gonna open their eyes. They're gonna lift their eyebrows. And when you write something like, how to stop feeling like roommates and rekindle desire in 30 days, you could use that if you want to. But that will actually make them really believe that you understand what they're going through.

Also, I'm going to point out another point here that when I use the words, right, rekindle desire in 30 days, when you use numbers, when you add texture to what you're saying and what you're writing, it helps people to connect. We do like to connect with numbers. We don't want something that's vague. It's gonna go on forever.

So if you tell me, for example, that you're gonna help me lose 10 pounds in eight weeks, I'm like, oh, I could do that. That makes sense to me, right? You'll help me lose 10 pounds. You'll help me maintain it. You'll speak about that afterwards as like a maintenance offer, but I don't want you to just help me lose weight. That's vague. I might have 10 pounds to lose, I might have 20 pounds to lose, but people want to hook themselves, hinge themselves on a timeframe. It's that texture. 

Or maybe you'll say, I will help you get back into your size eight by the time summer rolls around. And here we are in the middle of March, and we know that summer is June, July. We can think about it in our minds and be like, oh, in three months I can get back into a size eight. I mean, if you're a size 16, it probably isn't gonna happen. 

But these are the sort of details that make people all of a sudden show up and be like, oh, this is actually speaking to me. And that is actually what sells your offer. People have a desire. They wanna see, they wanna feel, they wanna have an experience where they're feeling pulled to you. They're feeling magnetized to you. 

So again, you wanna use that texture that we talked about. You can use dates, you can use timeframes, so people actually don't see that this is an unlimited path that goes on forever and ever and ever. You wanna help them see what is possible. 

Again, you wanna help them rekindle desire in 30 days. You wanna help them lose 10 pounds in eight weeks, right? We can see what's possible rather than, I'll help you to feel less stressed about your marriage, I'm gonna help you and your husband communicate better. It's vague. 

But when they say relationships, desire, passion, intimacy, in 30 days, people believe that something is actually deadlined and it's possible. And if they don't see that there's a possibility for them, if they don't feel themselves called in, they're not gonna feel activated to want to work with you. 

And that is exactly what we're gonna be working on in my upcoming masterclass. It's gonna be helping you through very specific examples, whether it is on a relationship in marriage, whether it is in working with your children to help them learn better in school, right? That's every parent's dream and desire is that your kids learn better.

And if you need to have more structure at home, maybe there's too much distraction, maybe there's too much, you know, like going on and not enough boundaries around bedtime, not enough boundaries around food and what they eat. But these are all like the specifics of the way you deal with your clients. And what we wanna make sure is that when you are going out there to speak with your prospects, the potential clients who are really looking for solutions, that's what we have to remember, is that people are in "pain".

You might've heard the phrase that you need to agitate their pain points or speak to their pain points. And the idea isn't to like rub salt in the wound. The reason you want to agitate their pain points is so that they actually see that you understand where they are. And when you agitate them in a benevolent way, again, it's not to hurt them, it's not to cause them more pain and more problems, but when they're like, oh yeah, ooh, that doesn't feel good. She is totally talking to me. She totally understands where I'm coming from. 

And then you have shown them what is possible very specifically on the other side. That is when they feel like there is hope for me, there's possibility for me, there's something better than where I am right now and I would really love to work with this person.

There are so many people that I've helped to refine their messaging. And this is something that, I mean, I've been writing for years in my blogs and in my emails, and I mean, I've spent thousands of hours writing, and this process continues over and over again. 

The way we have to keep refining our messaging, keep going deeper. And as you evolve in your business, because probably the business that you have today is not the exact same business that you had two, three, four years ago, so you might need to start also up-leveling, right? Elevating the way that you're speaking because you might be speaking to a new audience. 

And these are all slices of the nuances of refining your messaging so that your marketing actually lands with your ideal people. Okay, so let's just go back and recap exactly what we wanna talk about is number one, is that vague messaging puts you in sort of like an inspiration, motivation kind of box.

And that's not where you want to be because inspiration doesn't sell. What you need rather than general information is to ignite that urgency that your people want to solve their problems. And not everybody wants to solve their problems now, but some people do.

When you show your people that you understand their problems, they feel an emotional connection to you. There's a lot of clarity between what you understand about their problem, and you might have even been able to talk about their problem better than they've been able to articulate it themselves. And then what you actually do is you trigger them. You are like a catalyst that gets them to move. 

You've ignited them to want to work with you. And then they become those hot buyers who maybe they've been following you, but now you have said something very specific and they're like, ooh, they totally get me. They understand my problem and they have presented to me a clear solution, a clear framework for how they're going to help me get to the next level.

So I hope that that was helpful. If you read anything that you've written, really go back and look at it. Ask yourself, how can I make this more clear? What else can I say? How much deeper can I go? Even if you're reading it, you can say like, why does this matter? Keep asking yourself, why does this matter? Why is this important?

And so many times our brain wants to say, I don't know, but your brain does know. You just have to challenge it. And this is the difference between having messaging that is so refined and targeted is not letting your brain get away with, I don't know. Your brain might be, I don't want to like burn up calories thinking, but your brain knows.

When you sit back, maybe even get away from your computer a little bit and ask yourself, well, what do I really know? Your brain is such a genius. Your brain has so many answers and that will help you to really refine your messaging and help your people move from crickets to paying clients.

And I wanna remind you that next week, I'm gonna be running a masterclass on March 24, 25, and 26, Piping Hot Buyers: Messaging Shifts That Turn Crickets Into Paying Clients. And I really do hope you're going to join me. Go to my website, debbiesassen.com/pipinghot and I look forward to seeing you on the masterclass. Bye-bye for now.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth. 

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.