70: Overcoming Money Objections

You’re listening to the Mastering Money in Midlife podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 70.

Welcome to Mastering Money in Midlife, a podcast for midlife women in business to overcome financial anxiety and make more money without burning out or sacrificing their families. Join Certified Life and Money Coach Debbie Sassen, as she shares practical business strategies and mindset shifts that help you dissolve the money blocks that keep you stuck in a cycle of underearning and undersaving, sabotage the growth of your business, and prevent you from building the wealth that you desire.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. It is the middle of March; I don’t understand how we got to March so quickly. I feel like we should be back in January. I just went on a trip to the United States to celebrate a family wedding and went on a holiday with my husband in Puerto Rico. How did we end up in March?

That means the year is 1/3 finished, almost. And that is a mind-boggling sort of concept; that were just started the year and we are already three months, almost three months, into the year. My mind is blown.

So much has happened for me this year. I have two announcements for you. The first one, is my son had a baby boy, my son and my daughter-in-law, five days ago. Mazel tov to my son, Yehuda, and my daughter-in-law, Sara Liba.

They will be having the bris, the circumcision ceremony, in two days from now. And so, next week, when you listen to the podcast, that baby will have a name already. Now, they’re the parents of two little boys. This is my couple that got married during Corona.

We’re going to talk about them a little bit during the podcast. It’s going to be so much fun because we’re going to talk about money objections. I always assume that people have money objections when they come to a sales conversation, or when they come to a consult.

I don’t think it’s a problem, but so many entrepreneurs think it’s a problem that people have thoughts and questions and objections to their prices. I just assume that that is one of the things that’s going to show up. And so, I never, ever make it a problem or difficult.

I always love to coach myself and come up with answers ahead of time for what I might think or say, when a new issue or a new type of objection comes up on the call. We’re going to talk about some of them today, including, of course, my son and his Corona wedding.

The second announcement, and this is, I don’t know if it’s more important than the first. No, no, it can’t possibly be. A new grandchild is the most delicious thing in the world. But I want to let you know that my group coaching program, Wired for Wealth, is now open for enrollment.

Wired for Wealth is my signature nine-month program. It is a $6,000 investment, and you work with me and a small group of entrepreneurs to grow your business during the next nine months.

We work on your signature offer; what you offer your clients. We work on marketing; we’re not talking about Facebook ads or Instagram ads or fancy funnels. I want you to get out into the world and market organically, in a way that feels comfortable and aligned for you.

For some people that’s in-person workshops. For others, that’s webinars, it’s podcasts, it’s blogging, it’s social media posting, it’s joining WhatsApp groups. Whatever feels good and aligned for you, that is the organic marketing that is going to be best suited to you and your personality.

We’re going to work on your marketing and sales conversations. I love sales conversations. I have been selling everything since I was a little girl. I have sold lemonade, donuts, coffee, and VCRs, if you remember what VCRs are. And of course, I sold derivative products when I worked on Wall Street. I love sales conversations.

That is why today, we’re going to be talking about money objections. But we have to be masters of sales in order to grow our businesses. And we work on that in Wired for Wealth and specifically, overcoming money objections and any other objections like, time objections or husband objections or anything else.

We have to be sales masters in order to grow our businesses and serve. I always believe that selling is serving. And when you show up with a servant’s mindset, selling is never sleazy, or grasping, or sort of used car salesman-ey. Selling is a beautiful way for you to serve your best clients.

The fourth pillar of Wired for Wealth is money. Because you know, if you have been listening to my podcast for at least the last three minutes, I love to speak about money. Money is the underlying thread of our entire businesses; we are in business to make money.

So, we have to work on our money mindset. We have to work on the embodied experience with money that is coursing through our nervous system. And of course, we have to manage our money so that we have a profitable business.

Those are the four pillars: Your signature offer, marketing, sales, and money, that we will be working on in Wired for Wealth. We start on May 1^st. There’s going to be a live event in Jerusalem, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. And if you can’t be there in person with us, of course there will be a virtual option.

If you would like more information, go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/wired-for-wealth and sign up for a consult call so we can talk about it. All of the information is on my sales page. And of course, if you want further information, be in touch with me directly by email, Debbie@debbiesassen.com

All right, let’s talk about money objections. It was sort of fascinating to me that I talk about business, and I talk about money, and this is podcast episode 70. How could it be that I have never yet spoken about money objections? I decided it was time to speak about money objections. So, here is the thing, I believe that most people come to sales conversations with money objections.

As I said at the very beginning of the podcast, I never make it a problem. Because money means safety and security to us, in our nervous systems. We hold on to money. It is the way we have been brought up, that we feel safe and secure when we have money in the bank.

Now, this hasn’t always been the case, that people wanted it in the bank. There were people that went through the Great Depression, that was nearly 100 years ago in the United States, and there was a domino effect throughout the world. And so, they kept money in mattresses. They kept money hidden under the floorboards.

But there was always this belief that money needed to be held in a safe place so that if you needed food, if you needed to escape, if you needed shelter, if you needed something, you could get it with money. Because we have this primal need for money. Money is a core survival instinct. I believe that most people are going to have a money objection when they come to a sales call. So, I just expect it.

I don’t show up at the sales conversation or the discovery call, consult call, whatever you call them, expecting that it’s not going to be there. If it doesn’t show up, that is beautiful. But I expect about 80 or 90% of the situations, people will have something to say about money.

They don’t have it. They can afford it. That’s a lot of money. They’re going to have thoughts about money, and that is okay. The question is; what is happening with you, inside your mind and inside your body, when people say things about money?

If you start getting twisted up in your brain and thinking, “Maybe my price is too high. Maybe I should lower. Should I give them a discount? I don’t know, they’re going to say no.” When you start focusing on you, and all the thoughts in your head, your potential client can feel that energetically.

Even if you’re on the phone, even if you are on a Zoom call, they can actually feel that your focus has shifted from them to you. And that creates a distance between you and your potential client. That is going to be a breakdown in your connection, a breakdown in your communication, and that could be the reason why they said no.

Because they no longer felt that you were on their side. You were in your court, not in their court. We always want to be sitting next to, energetically speaking, we always want to be sitting next to our potential client. Be on their side and be listening with an open ear.

So, that is number one. Notice if you are in your head thinking about you, or if you are always focused on them. You might also notice some scarcity energy vibrating in your body. That is another indication that you should just slow down, ground yourself, and get back into your body, into your safety so that you can focus back on them.

The second thing that I want to say about money objections, is that you might be believing your potential client when they say that they don’t have money. And I, again, always think that that is not true. Because people come to sales conversations, if they know the sales conversation.

I recently coached one of my clients on this, one of my Wired for Wealth clients, she wanted to give people an option to sign up for a free 30-minute call with her. The question was about should she coach them? Is it a sales conversation? And I said, “You have to be very specific about what you’re offering your clients. If it is a free coaching call for 30 minutes, it is a free coaching call.” It’s not bait and switch.

You don’t bring them to a coaching call and then try to sell them on something. Be in integrity, be honest with your clients, and don’t try to do a quick switch on them. If they got a lot of value out of the free 30 minutes, and they want to know how to continue. If you guys have time, you can discuss it.

But I actually think it’s better, 90% of the time, that you schedule another time to speak. Because you have your coach brain on, and that’s one brain, and you want to sort of ground yourself and give yourself a different time and a space to have a sales conversation. It’s like a different hat. Although having a sales conversation is a lot like coaching, not everybody is a coach.

But you really want to have different spaces. So, just go into your calendar, you can do it on that call, and schedule a different time. Because you want to prepare yourself differently for a sales conversation.

If they show up to a sales conversation that is scheduled in your calendar, and they know with 100% clarity that this is a sales conversation and it’s not a free advice session, then they’re showing up for something that they want.

We get into our heads about this belief that they don’t have money. One of my clients said to me, “People are struggling,” she was talking specifically about the recession, “People are struggling, they’re going to pay for bread and rent and tutors for their children before they pay for coaching.”

Here’s what I want to offer you unless somebody’s eating out of a soup kitchen. And unless they’re sleeping on a couch at their parents’ house or their best friend’s house. They’re always going to pay for bread and rent before they pay for coaching, or before they pay for whatever it is that you offer.

I believe that 99% of the people who are listening to this podcast are offering extras. They’re not offering basic needs; your bread, your milk, your eggs, a minimal roof over your head. Those are basic needs. But if you are listening as an entrepreneur to this podcast, whatever you are offering is a want, it is an extra.

Nobody needs a coach. Nobody needs a web designer. There are a lot of people that do DIY, they figure out how to design their websites all by themselves. Nobody needs a copywriter. People figure out how to put copy on their websites all by themselves. Nobody needs a photographer.

And here, we’re going to get back to my son’s Corona wedding. We didn’t need a big hall. In fact, it was a beautiful garden wedding. There were about 50 or 60 people there. There was no band because it was in somebody’s backyard. So, there was a lovely singer with a keyboard. We didn’t have fancy food and catering; it was much more scaled down simple menu.

I didn’t get a new dress. I wore the same dress that I wore… Actually, I have to be honest. I’ve worn the same wedding dress for all five weddings, because I love it so much and I only get to wear it at a wedding. So, I’ve actually enjoyed wearing it for wedding after wedding. We did have a makeup artist to do my makeup and my daughter’s makeup.

But there were so many things that we did not need and did not have because of the restrictions during Corona. We had a 50-60 person wedding, and there were a lot of things that we’ve had in the other four weddings that we were just unable to have.

So, there are things that we are all selling, that are always extra. If people are showing up on a sales conversation, they already have, in their minds, that they’re going to be paying for something above and beyond their basic needs.

We should never make it a problem when somebody says, “I don’t have money. I can’t afford it.” Because they were thinking in their minds, when they agreed to get on this call with you, that they were going to have to figure out how to have access to money.

Which brings me to point number three. And that is, people may not have the money. They might not have the dollars in their wallet. They might not even have money in their bank account. But people have access to money. They can take a loan from the bank. They can use a credit card. They can take it out of savings. They can take it out of a retirement plan. They can borrow money from friends and parents.

I’m not suggesting that you show up on the call and tell people, “Oh, by the way, you could do this or this or this.” But I want you to have it in your mind that people have access to money.

I have worked with so many people on their money issues over the years that I have been doing financial planning and money coaching and business coaching, that I know all the ways, maybe not all the ways, but I know a lot of ways that people have access to money.

In fact, recently I was coaching one of my clients, and she got herself into some credit card debt. I mean, she has a very lovely, thriving business. But on her personal account, she got herself into quite steep credit card debt because her partner had his 50th birthday.

Both of them got married later in life, and they had been married for a few years. They’re never going to have children together, because it took them many years until they found each other and got married. And this was a very big occasion for her. She really wanted to make it special.

They didn’t do the 30s together. They didn’t do their 40s together. But now, they’re going to be doing their 50s and the 60s and, God willing, the 70s and 80s together. She really wanted to mark this occasion with a special event. And as a result, she went into debt to do it.

She had a lot of shame around her choices and her decision until we worked through it. She really loved her reasons for going into credit card debt. Because they were never going to have the baby showers, they were never going to have the bar mitzvahs or the weddings for their children, or anything else; those life cycle events.

This was a very big deal, and she really did love her reasons. After we worked on it, it really only took one session, but she was able to dissolve the shame around going into credit card debt.

Which just brings me back to the point that, I know people have access to money. So of course, if somebody is showing up on your sales call and is saying they don’t have the money, you can believe them that they don’t have the money right now in their bank. But don’t necessarily believe that they don’t have access to money. People find ways to get money when they find it’s really, really important, and valuable.

I mean, we can go to the extreme and we can say if it was a medical emergency. And again, I’m going to remind you that what you offer isn’t a medical emergency type thing. But people are showing up because they want what you have.

And so, allow them to choose, allow them to be adults, allow them to figure out how to gain access to money. And don’t decide ahead of time that they don’t and they’re not going to be able to afford what you offer, and they’re not going to be able to work with you. That’s number three.

Let’s move on to number four. Number four is your thoughts about your price. This relates very much to what I said with point number one, when you’re in your head thinking about, “My price and maybe they’re not going to be able to work with me.”

When you show up to the sales call, it should be clear to you what your price is. And my philosophy around pricing is, there is no right price. There is only the price that you make right. It is your responsibility, as a business owner, to think about your price, what your price means to you, what your price means to your client.

When your clients pay you money, they pay attention. They get better results when there is an energetic exchange of money for the value that they receive in return.

And you have to love your price. If you don’t love the price that you are charging for the work that you do, then it’s your responsibility to figure out why. Do you just resent that price? Do you think it’s too low? Well, if you think it’s too low, you’re not going to have a great relationship with that client. Because you’re going to resent that client for coming to you and paying “too little” money.

Or, maybe you’ve just been whittling down your price, little by little by little, over time, and you just don’t feel good anymore about it. Because you’re like, “Why am I working for such a little amount of money, when what I offer is so valuable?”

Or maybe you don’t love your price because it’s too high, and it just makes you uncomfortable every time you get on a sales call. You sort of mumble these words out of your mouth and hope that they’re just not going to outright reject it.

And you don’t love it because somebody gave it to you maybe, or you thought that there was another person that was charging this price and so you should, also. But it just doesn’t feel aligned and grounded in your body when you’re saying this price.

Find the price for your offer, find the price for what you give to your clients, the results, the solution, the transformation that you offer to your clients, and make that price, right?

I want to offer you that there will be people who do something very similar to what you do, who charge twice as much, three times, four times, maybe it would have been five times what you charge. And there are going to be people in the market that charge a half of what you do, or a quarter, or 1/10 of your price; prices are all over the map.

And so, you have to find out what the right price is for you, for the service or product that you offer. And you have to feel good about it, first.

Point number five, if your clients have money objections, they might not see the value in what you’re offering at that price. And it could be that you have not been clear in the sales conversation about exactly what you’re offering and how it solves their problems, or how it gets them the transformation that they are looking for.

And so again, if they are having negative thoughts about what you’re offering; they say no, or it’s too much, or they can’t afford it, or why is it so expensive? Then again, it’s your responsibility to understand the value of what you offer, be able to transmit that information to your client, and help them understand how your service is going to solve their problems and give them the result that they want.

If it is a match, that what you do solves their problem, then they are going to say yes, because they’re on that call with you. They showed up. They’re actually paying you with their time. Our time is a very valuable resource.

And when they show up and they have a 30 minute or 60 minute conversation with you, they could have been doing something else for those 30 or 60 minutes. They’re paying you with time. They want to work with you, just keep that in mind.

Make sure that you understand their problem clearly, and you understand how your services solve their problem and get the results that they want.

The sixth reason… I think I should really write this down. The sixth reason why your people are having money objections, is because there is an emotion that they don’t want to feel. Meaning they don’t want to feel scarcity. They don’t want to feel lack. They don’t want to feel uncomfortable.

They don’t want to feel like, “Oh my gosh, if I sign up with Debbie, and I work with her, in her Wired for Wealth coaching program, and I don’t make my $6,000 back, I’m going to feel like a failure.”

So, first of all, I love that my program is nine months long because I believe that everybody can make their $6,000 back. And so many people double or triple or quadruple their investment. My client Davii Mandel and I, we did a podcast interview in November 2022.

When she joined Wired for Wealth, in May 2022, her business was about $40,000- $50,000. In 2023, she is going to make $150,000 or $160,000 in her business. Which means, in a year and a half, she is going to 4x her business. I can’t even tell you how many times she is going to exponentially increase her investment. I think if I do 150/6, oh dear… It’s at least 20 times her investment. Okay, maybe 25. I can’t do that math quickly on the podcast in my head.

But anyway, you get the idea. When people invest $6,000, I am 100% confident that they will be able to make their money back. And there is no reason for them to experience that fear of failure; that they’re not going to be able to make their money back.

Here’s what I want to offer you: One of the biggest resistances for women when it comes to investing in their business and in themselves, is going to their partner and letting them know that they would like to make this investment. This has been shown through research. These are some fascinating numbers for you.

Eighty percent of financial decisions in the household are made by women. That means things to do with the shopping and the clothing and paying the electricity bills and the phone bills. And even figuring out which phone company or electricity company or gas company has the better deals.

Eighty percent of the day-to-day household decisions, when it comes to finances, are made by women. But the 20% of decisions that really make a difference and an impact, in terms of our long-term wealth and building wealth and having money for retirement, for our wellness, for personal development, for our self-help, for career advancement, and other self-improvement, that 20% we don’t make.

We’re permission-seeking; we need somebody else to give us permission to make those choices in our lives. And this is a very well-known documented statistic. We outsource these very important decisions for our long-term wellness, growth, financial sustainability and career advancement.

This is where we as women need to take back our power and learn to really advocate for ourselves. When we go to our partners, and when we ask for permission to invest in our businesses… I’m not trying to create any marriage problems here. I’m not saying that you should do something and not tell your partner, and invest in your business and not tell your partner.

But believing that somebody else can make that decision for you, or help you make that decision, means that you are giving up some of your own strength and resilience and resolve. You’re outsourcing the decision and your results to somebody else because you don’t want to feel uncomfortable just in case the decision, your choice, doesn’t work out.

I think that it was a bit of a convoluted way of saying everything that I want to say. But if your potential client is afraid of feeling uncomfortable, afraid of a negative emotion, because maybe sometime in the future they could fail, that will show up in the sales conversation.

You want to make space for that to happen. Just allow them to understand and drop into their body and feel what they’re feeling, which is the fear of failure that maybe it’s not going to work and create a safe space for that and let them process that emotion on the call. So, I think that was number six.

But here’s the last point about overcoming objections, and that is, sometimes people will say no, and they’ll say it’s too much money or they can’t afford it because somewhere during the sales conversation, they felt unsafe. Usually, it’s because they felt judged. Like they said something and you had thoughts about them like they were doing it wrong. “If only they would do things differently. That was a stupid mistake.”

And again, we talked in the very first part about that energetic distance that you create between you and your potential client when you’re in your head thinking about your price, and you’re not in their court thinking about them and their needs and how you can help them solve the problem.

This is something that might have only been a blip during the conversation and you didn’t notice when it happened, but this is why I always encourage my clients to go back and evaluate their sales conversation. But you want to find out if there was a time during the sales conversation that you’re in your head judging them for something that they said, or that they did in the past.

I always come to the sales conversations believing 100% in the wholeness of my clients. And whatever they say, again, if they spent money and got into credit card debt because of a 50th birthday, that is never a problem. That’s a decision that they made. They are 100% complete and whole in their decisions.

But this is why we spend so much time, in Wired for Wealth, evaluating our sales conversations, and figuring out how we can say things differently. How we can overcome objections. What do we want to do when the money objection comes up.

There’s a lot of different ways that you can think through what could possibly be, if you had slowed down in taking the conversation in a different direction. And it’s never a problem if you were judging the client, or if you were believing that they didn’t have money, or believing that they didn’t have access to money, or thinking that your price was too high or too low, or you didn’t know how to articulate the value we learn through doing.

That is what I want to offer you, is that when you go through your sales calls, if the money objection comes up, just go back and evaluate and figure out what went wrong, and figure out what you want to do differently on the next sales call.

When you join Wired for Wealth, this is what we do. We have a Slack channel, and you can post your valuation in the Slack channel. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I ran a pop-up masterclass. I offered it on a Sunday afternoon to help my clients get even better on their sales calls.

Because things were coming up; the struggling and the recession and different thoughts about money, were coming up. And I really wanted to help my clients nip it in the bud and find out where they were having thought errors about their potential clients.

Because I believe that even in the middle of a recession, there is an unlimited supply of money in the world. And whatever you are offering, which we’ve already agreed is not a basic need, it is an extra, it’s a want, it’s a desire. It’s even a luxury item.

There are people in the world who have money, who want what you’re offering and they can pay to work with you. If selling better and overcoming objections more proficiently is something that you know that you need to work on, I invite you into my nine-month group coaching program Wired for Wealth. It is open now for enrollment.

Go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/Wired-for-Wealth and have a look. Apply for a spot, we start on May 1^st, and we’re going to go through the end of January 2024. That is a beautiful, delicious amount of time for you to really turn up the fire on your business, refine your offer, work on your marketing, work really, really well on your sales.

And then, your money mindset, and on your embodied experience with money, and manage it better so that you can take care of yourself better, your family better, and build long-term wealth.

Thank you so much for showing up today on the podcast. I look forward to seeing you next week. Bye

Thanks for listening to Mastering Money in Midlife. If you want more information on Debbie Sassen or the resources from the podcast, visit MasteringMoneyInMidlife.com.