Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Simplified Kaleidoscope Podcast. It's Jake here. No bells and whistles. I really like this no bells and whistles business. Today we're talking about attraction over promotion, how a way of being touched and transforms or touches and transforms through a heartfelt heart-based sales process. Now, to many people, this is going to sound a little bit woo, and that's okay because what I've seen, look, let me give you a little history. I started as a door-to-door salesperson in Lewiston, Maine. I sold for this kids magazine products company called Olympia Sales Club, and I went door to door selling as a 12-year-old or 13-year-old. I was the top sales person for this, whatever it was, multi-level marketing scheme in the country. In my little town of Lewiston, Maine, in an apartment complex for welfare families, I was able to convince people on welfare At 13 years old, my neighbors in this apartment complex to buy and buy and buy.

Now, I really wanted money. That's what I was motivated by. I would say that that's what a lot of kids are motivated by, and then they grow older and they still continue to be motivated by it. It's our responsibility to be able to make it mean more than just about the money eventually, but a lot of people don't grow out of that. We'll get to that in a second. What this taught me, going door to door, selling to people that were on welfare. I mean, it was the wrong side of the tracks, y'all. You go search tall pines in Lewiston, Maine back in the nineties, that was the wrong side of the tracks. Now it's a lot nicer actually. So I learned in those days that money has nothing to do about whether or not someone buys, and that's why objections now on our contracts, which can be 50, 60, $70,000 if it's about the money, I know it's not really about the money, even though it's about the money, even though I know it's really not about the money, and I learned that as a 13-year-old.

So imagine the things that you learn when you're young, whether it's a language and sales is a language. They tend to stick with you when you get imprinted on it. So while other salespeople or other people in business get perturbed when someone says no or gives them a money objection, I know that that's just the first step to a yes because the money has nothing to do about whether or not someone's going to buy something, even though it has everything to do with it, but it actually has nothing to do with it. And if you're confused about what I'm saying, it's called living in the paradox. Live in the paradox people. So I started as a 13-year-old door-to-door salesperson, which sounds crazy to say. And then I became very interested because I became influential in my little community. And then I went on to become a

Magician, and I sold my services all over the state of Maine, New Hampshire. I did a show in San Diego when I was like 14. I found myself a mentor and he taught me everything he knew slowly, slowly. So then I started figuring out the power in personal branding and mentorship and sales because then I had to sell my services as a 13, 14, 15-year-old, I did walk around magic at a steakhouse in my hometown. I did birthday shows for $300 a birthday show. This was in 2000. That's when $300, who knows what it would be today, I did a hundred dollars an hour as a 15-year-old walk around magic, and I learned that I could promote, I could push, I could close. It was very much about myself, will not about higher power's, will not about a power greater than Myself's will. It was my own self will that propelled me.

And I think that that's what a lot of people in America, in the United States of America, I think that's what a lot of people buy into is. If I work hard enough, I'll be successful. Well, I got news for you. We're scaling Imiloa right now, and if I work harder instead of smarter, that is not the way to scale a business. So if it's not the way to scale a business, why is it the way to start a business? Why is it a way to start sales? It's not. There has to be a smarter way. I went to New York City when I was 18. I went to college just so that I could justify writing off some loans that I would need to go to college and live in the city so that I could live in the city. I attended classes, but I would end up dropping out three years later.

And I started reading books of people who were highly influential, and then I started going to their homes with their permission of course, to learn from them. That's how I ended up learning from Paul McKenna, master hypnotist in London, or Dr. Richard Bandler, the founder of Neurolinguistic programming Tony Robbins. In my early days, I learned the sales mastery with him. And again, I started to now learn techniques that could be equally matched with my propulsion, my self initiated propulsion. And throughout my twenties, I learned all these Jedi mind tricks that could get people to sell, excuse me, get people to buy. But what I realized as I went into it, y'all, is it was empty and meaningless, and I really only got this at the end of my twenties into my early thirties, after losing everything in a hurricane, my house got washed away, my TV contracts got canceled.

I ran out of money. I had to move into my grandma's basement. And so I started going on a major inquiry in terms of my way of being in the world. And one of the things that I grappled with for the few years at the end of my twenties was could create from a place of surrender instead of hustle, which is what the other episode dealt with. But in that place of creating from a place of surrender, could I create a sales process that was attraction based or attractive instead of promotional? And the distinction here is, could I get people through my way of being to lean in and get curious about what I was up to rather than trying to promote or hustle or sell or close like everyone else around me was doing and still is doing. The key components of this attractive based method is questions.

The quality of the questions determines the quality of our lives. If we're not asking the right questions of prospects or people that we're doing market research with, forget about being able to even try to sell them. We've got to ask the right questions in order to elicit the responses. This is why one of the main focuses of the Kaleidoscope membership is cultivating the capacity for having conversations that matter. How do you make a conversation matter? It needs to be based on you asking questions of the other person so that they can feel understood, seen, heard, and valued and validated. How in the world are you going to sell anyone anything? If you're just talking about your features, benefits, histories, testimonials, give me a break, you people, and yet people do this all the time, they think just because they're talking about something online or on their Instagram that people are going to suddenly take off their clothes and fire a rocket.

It's not going to happen. You're not going to get someone to spend three, four, $5,000 on a retreat, 10, 20, 30, $40,000 on a mastermind just by you telling them what you've got or what you've done. We've got to get insanely curious about what it is people are up to, why they've done what they've done. We need to exaggerate and disturb the pain points that they're coming to the table with. I'm sorry, but it's true. You can disturb people's pain points without being coercive. You can come from a place of heart-based selling without strong arming anybody. You just have to know how to do it. You need to know how to do it well. We have a whole section on the program called Sales Mastery, and we're going to go into that. This is an overview of how to touch and transform people's lives through attraction, over promotion, sales, and you do that by having their best interest in mind.

You do that by having a solid funnel. If I have a solid funnel that's giving me a consistent amount of leads, no matter what the quality of the leads are, but if I have a solid funnel, when I get on the phone with each person, I'm not worried about whether or not they're going to close. You have to do a little bit of the upfront work in order to create an environment where you can create an attraction based sales process. Part of the upfront work is to make sure that you have a solid funnel. If you don't know what I, you'll go through the funnels genius pathway and we'll teach you how to create a variety of funnels. And we also have calls that are available throughout the membership where you can get this information. But if you have a solid funnel, you should be being delivered.

A consistent amount of leads that you can interact with, however you choose to interact with leads, direct messages through your sales team, one-on-one discovery calls, whatever it is. But if you have a dedicated amount of leads coming in, you don't need every person you talk to close. And if you don't need every person you talk to close, guess what happens? You get to become powerful. Your presence is your power. Suddenly, you're not trying to get everybody to say yes. You're trying to sincerely understand what the other person's about, what they see in you, what their pain is, how they think you can solve it, what their history has been with regard to trying to solve whatever X, Y, ZA, b, C is. You become insanely curious about the person in front of you. Guess what that does? It opens hearts. Suddenly if all possibility lives in a conversation, you're having a conversation from the heart and their hearts opening as well.

Now, this doesn't mean that you don't go for the sale. It doesn't mean that you're just fucking around on sales calls, just having conversations. There is a method and a system, but it's rooted in heart because you don't have to hustle because you've done the work on your side to make sure that you have a consistent amount of leads coming in, whatever source that was determined to be, when you're able to be in this authentic and really vulnerable space. And by the way, I don't love all these people that are out there talking about how vulnerable they are and how much they share. Vulnerability is not disclosure. Just because someone shares something about themselves that appears personal does not mean they're being vulnerable For me, true vulnerability is sharing something that can hurt you and trusting that all is well. So I'll give you an example of this.

We recently had some dates available at Imiloa within the context of four months from when we were talking to people. The reason why we had those dates open is because the sales team decided to overlook the dates because they were selling dates in the next year instead. And so what happened was we ended up having four or five dates open within a four month window between when we discovered this and when the retreats would have to be. Most retreat hosts if there worth their worth, their weight in gold need at least four to six months to prepare just from a bandwidth perspective. So it was very unlikely that we were going to sell those dates to anybody that we would want to. I mean, we can sell anything to anybody, but we don't want people to be unprepared or just be phoning it in. We want people to do good retreats. We want people to be successful. So I got on some of the sales calls that the team was on with people that had expressed interest. These people were already our clients before. We already had good relationships with them. We were doing very much of a make an offer, which we would never normally do because we don't discount our stuff ever, and we'll talk about why in sales mastery or sales genius rather.

I got on some of the sales calls to, again, all possibility lives in a conversation. So I wanted to see how these sales calls were going to do and also help guide the sales team in terms of the conversations that we had to have. One of the things that I shared is the story that I just shared with you. Hey guys, we really messed up. We actually overlooked some dates that we had to sell. So now we have those dates available and that's why we're doing make an offer, make me an offer. Now, most people would be like, don't say that. That's disclosing too much. That's sharing too much. That could hurt you.

It could show a lack of planning, it could show confusion. It could show that you're not prepared. So the vulnerability there could hurt, but I want them to know that we made a mistake and I'm inviting them to be a part of the solution, and they also get to benefit because we're able to discount the dates because it's so close. This is what's meant when we're bringing people into an attractive based sales process rather than promotional. You don't need to keep up with the Joneses when you're having an attractive based sales process. You don't need to look as good as the next person or even better. You get to just be more. You get to cultivate this way of being, which is so impactful because then you don't need to remember what you're talking about or what you said. You just got to be you.

There's no keeping track of things. There's no hustling people to a close. You're just being you. Yeah, you have your strategies, you have your strategies. You have your ability to be able to close. You know when to pull the levers, but on the outset, you're focused on being authentic and about being vulnerable and real and truthful and asking questions instead of making statements. Biggest thing that I see with my sales team when they first come in, Imiloa, is they are just in their initial sales calls making so many statements. They're just talking at people, and I'm just like, we cannot be talking at people. We've got to be being with people. How are people's days? What are they really going through? Not a how are you, but a three layer follow up to how are you sometimes a majority of a sales call. For me, I'll start out with how are you doing or where are you in the world?

And I'll go three or four layers deep and all of a sudden we're done the hour and guess who buys at the end of that hour? Those people do. Why? Because we've cared. We've shown that we've cared, and we have a system for caring. I mean, it's a system. It's a sales process. Don't get me wrong. This isn't just asking questions for an hour and praying for a good result. There is a system behind this, but the point is, is that you can cultivate an attractive way of being by focusing on your way of being rather than your way of selling or sharing.

So if you are struggling right now to sell or convert, you have a great product, but you're struggling be in the inquiry of why one of my sales mentors, Joe Morris, Beau, who has touched more than 50,000 people in her transformational work in retreats and event settings, who's also a hosted in Malo and a former landmark form leader, one of the things she says is that if you're not converting, if you are not creating powerful results in your business through sales, it's likely because you have a lack of trust either in yourself, the product, the system, the people that you're talking to, your life. But it has to do with trust. Do you trust your life? Do you trust your product? Do you trust your way of being? If you don't wear the loopholes, are you doing something because someone told you you should rather than what you knew you should be doing?

These are all things to consider, all things to consider. When you are really starting to examine what kind of sales process or enrollment process that you have, what you're doing when you're selling is you're enrolling someone into understanding that what they want in their life is not quite what it is they've got yet. And then as you open your kimono through the context of question asking, so it takes some skill and some patients, when you start opening your kimono, you start to show that there's a better way. That better way likely has to do with you. It has nothing to do with features and benefits yet features, benefits and what I call details. Details. And the last 5% of the sales process. I'm sorry to tell you people because a lot of you people, I see a lot of your retreats and you're leading with features and benefits, and yeah, you need that clearly articulated on a homepage, but in a conversation, if you're leading with features and benefits, you're already sunk.

It's done. It's over for you. If someone gets on the phone with me and starts talking about why their product is the best, I'm done before I even got started, my sales team, they struggle at the beginning. They know how great Imiloa is and everything that we offer, and a lot of people are not trained in this inquiry-based sales process. And so what ends up happening is they start talking at people and then not understanding why they're not converting sales. It's like even if you're the best retreat center in the world, people do not want to buy a contract from,

They don't want to sign anything with someone that's talking at them. Number one, because it's a front, it's an affront, it's aggressive. It's received as aggressive at a human level, but also there's a lack of care and consideration and communication is always the responsibility of the person that's communicating, not on the one that's receiving the communication. So if you have an intention of being caring, but it's received as an affront or as selling, then that's on you, not on the person that it's being received by. So it's very important to understand these distinctions, to begin to inquire about your way of being. How are you showing up if people sell for you or convert for you? How are they showing up? Is the communication aligned? Is the messaging aligned? Are you waiting for features and benefits and details, details, details. Details is like dates and numbers, and you'd be surprised in a value-based sales process, and I know that's the next piece that we're going to talk about.

It's in later pathways, a values based versus commodities based sales process. In a values based sales process, we are not being compared to anything else. We are one of one. And so you don't have to lead with features and benefits and details, details because if people are buying with you or getting curious about you, it's because they want to know how the magic that you've created in your business or sector or in your life. In the case of a lot of retreat hosts, a lot of people study with retreat hosts and educators because their life is a certain way and they want to learn more about that. That person is not going to buy because of features, benefits, or details. Details. We have to first get into who they are, why they are, what their current way of being in the world is, and how we can start to impact that. And we can only do that by truly creating possibility in a conversation.