Episode 75 | August 1, 2017

Feel Great Selling! with Jennifer Diepstraten


A Personal Note from Orion

I talk a lot about the importance of confidence, and it’s not just for your love life. When it comes to our careers, and especially if you are an entrepreneur, having confidence in yourself, what you are selling, and your ability to transform your client’s lives is so crucial to your success.

Jennifer Diepstraten coaches everyone from entrepreneurs to multi million corporations on how they can effectively sell their services through transforming the way they market their message and their belief in their product. If you’ve been struggling to find your message, to tell it to the world, and to believe in yourself enough that you start seeing sales that reflect your confidence, you have to check this episode out!

 

 

In this Episode

  • [05:24] – Jennifer introduces herself and talks a bit about who she is and what she does. She also shares a story about what her husband said to her on their second date.
  • [07:06] – Orion takes a moment to talk about the fact that some men know very quickly when they find the right women. Jennifer then elaborates on this in her situation.
  • [08:11] – What is Jennifer’s mission, and what is her passion?
  • [10:48] – In Orion’s experience, it hurts inside and she feels unfulfilled when she doesn’t share her gift with people.
  • [13:12] – What are some of the common struggles that Jennifer sees in her clients when they first come to work with her?
  • [15:17] – Jennifer offers advice on how to figure out what makes you unique, and how to communicate that better. In the process, she shares part of her own story.
  • [18:27] – Jennifer’s suggestion for her clients is to start at a high price point, she explains.
  • [20:29] – In the past, Orion used to sell her mentors more than she sold herself. She then shares insight into how she starts off conversations with her clients, and why she spends time discussing their breakthroughs.
  • [23:53] – Similarly, Jennifer usually starts conversations by asking “what are your wins?” or “what are your accomplishments?” Orion then points out that we listen better when we’re listening to teach, rather than listening just for ourselves.
  • [25:49] – Jennifer is an auditory learner, she reveals, and talks briefly about the way that she learns best.
  • [26:53] – When it comes to topics like relationships and spirituality, how does Jennifer quantify what she’s offering in the sales process?
  • [29:35] – Jennifer addresses the question of how to raise your fees without giving more stuff away. In doing so, she uses a metaphor about selling kids’ toys at a garage sale.
  • [34:52] – Orion relates her experiences with doing Jennifer’s exercise.
  • [36:10] – We hear more about how to apply this to selling services that don’t have a monetary ROI.
  • [37:49] – Jennifer provides a specific and detailed example about a client of hers to illustrate what she has been saying.
  • [43:34] – Knowing what your quantum benefits are helps you figure out exactly what it is that you help people with, Jennifer points out.
  • [45:31] – What is the conversation like when Jennifer has just met someone at a conference or a seminar and is trying to attract them to her offer?
  • [47:32] – Orion starts a roleplay session with Jennifer to demonstrate how the process works.
  • [49:27] – One of the things that Jennifer teaches is to know who is in the room, and to use that information to make the decision about what to lead with.
  • [51:33] – Orion focuses on the topic of intention, asking Jennifer what someone can do to purify their intention.
  • [54:19] – What are Jennifer’s three top tips to living a stellar life? 1: Be crystal clear about what it is that you want. 2: Allow yourself to have it. 3: Pay attention to what you’re grateful for.
  • [56:20] – Jennifer generously offers a gift to Stellar Life listeners: her book 9 Secrets to Increase Your Fees and Magnetically Attract Top-Dollar Clients. To get it, go to highticketsellingbook.com.

About Today’s Show

‏‏Hey, welcome to Stellar Life podcast. I’m so happy that you’re here. I really appreciate you for listening. I know that there are so many podcasts out there and you chose this one so thank you, thank you, thank you. I appreciate you. Today, you are in for a treat. Today, I want to introduce you to my own sales and business coach, Jennifer Diepstraten. Yes, I said it correctly. It’s a very long last name and I made it. Jennifer is one of my favourite coaches. One of the favourite people I’ve ever met as far as teaching and coaching. She is so good. Believe me, I’m out there. I go to conferences and seminars twice or three times a month. I just came back from a very long travel where I went from Portland and I spent some time at World Domination Summit to Lake Tahoe where I spent some time with Big Table, which is my financial mastermind and then I arrived to Reno where I had a TV appearance. My life is pretty unusual. I travel a lot. I go to many seminars and conferences. I meet a lot of amazing people and lucky you, you don’t have to travel that much because I bring these people to you. It’s very interesting how this podcast is in some ways reflecting my life and my interests, the choices of people that I like to hangout with. Jennifer is definitely, definitely one of them. She’s so brilliant. If you ever struggled with selling, with sales, or ever felt a little awkward doing the sales process, or even if you are very good at selling and you want to take it to the next level, then stay tuned because she is not only good at sales, she’s good at teaching sales. The fact that someone is a good salesperson doesn’t mean that they can teach you but Jennifer has her own way to break it down using stories and metaphors to really help you get how good you can be, definitely helped me with my sales process. Jennifer teaches the most successful coaches, experts, and niche service providers how to get paid top dollar for services and close big sales with ease. She’s grown her own coaching and consulting business to multiple six figures in less than two years and this is amazing. It’s all over $14 million in sales with her own sales conversion system and coached for one of the largest personal development companies in the world. She is awesome. I’m sure you will enjoy it. If you enjoy it, please leave me a comment, review the podcast. If something happened in your life and if you really enjoyed it, let me know. If you didn’t enjoy it, don’t let me know, don’t let anybody know ever. Now, onto the show. Hey, Jennifer and welcome to Stellar Life podcast.

‏‏Thanks for having me. Hi Orion.

‏‏Hi. I have to say it. I love you. I think that you are one of the best business coaches I’ve ever had in my life. I love how amazing you are, you have this beautiful energy about you, you know how to bring the best out of people, and you’re so good at teaching. I have learned so much from you. You completely shifted the way I do business, the way I sell.

‏‏Wow, thank you, Orion. I was not expecting that. I was not expecting that. Thank you. I am humbled.

‏‏Let’s start by you sharing a little bit about yourself, who you are, and what you do, with the listeners.

‏‏My name is Jennifer Diepstraten. I run a company called High Ticket Sales Success, which means I teach people how to sell their services for premium pricing. I have a family. I have three sons, 14, 5, and 2. I’m married. I have an amazing husband. He always makes lunch for me every single day but today, he made such a spectacular meal, I had to take a picture of it and put it on Facebook. I used to work in a corporate environment. I really enjoyed aspects of that work but there became a time, not too long ago, where I felt like I was called to do something greater. At the time, I was the only breadwinner for our family of then, it was four people, my husband and my two sons. My third child hadn’t been born yet. I just took the leap out of my corporate life and I started my own business. It’s just been expanding and extraordinary. My husband said to me, when he met me, he said, “You are going to have an amazing life. I believe I can do that best at your side as your husband.” That’s what he said on like our second date.

‏‏Wow.

‏‏I said, “What? You don’t even know me.” He said, “I know me.” I ended up asking him to marry me a couple of months later and I am having an amazing life. It is true. So, I’m really excited to be here to share. Thanks for having me.

‏‏No, thank you for being here. Thank you so much. I mean, listeners, this is going to be freaking amazing. This woman is unbelievable. I just wanted to share that sometimes, the guys, they know immediately when we are more hesitant. My husband proposed to me nine days after we met on a hot air balloon in Vegas. I said no and then it was a really awkward 20 minutes descending to the Vegas strip.

‏‏That’s what I said to Peter. I said, “How do you know?” He said, “You’re going to marry me.” I said, “How do you know? You don’t even know me.” I was divorced. At the time, I had one son. I wanted to find the right partner. I had a lot more wisdom than I had before. I was watching what he was doing and listening in this position of we’ll see. Let’s see what you got. He said to me, “You’re going to be so comfortable with this idea that you’re going to ask me to marry you.” Which I did.

‏‏Wow, yes. What is your mission and your passion?

‏‏Our company’s mission is in a broad sense, really to change the world. In a more specific sense, my mission is to work with people like yourself, entrepreneurs. Mostly, I work with small businesses, or coaches, consultants, persons that has some kind of expertise or life experience and they are turning that expertise into a business. I had been in corporate sales for about 15 years. I came from BioTech and medical diagnostics. I was selling for some very, very large fortune 500 companies. I worked with scientists, doctors, veterinarians and I loved aspects of that work. Mostly, I loved the relationship part of it like the human aspect of getting to know people and helping them to make really wise, good decisions with the money that they had so that they could buy the right equipment for their medical office or for their science lab. Along the way, what I realized is that I wanted to make a bigger difference for people on a more personal level. My skill set was in sales and sales training, especially for high end products, and I thought I could either go into corporate selling and help people there or I could work with this other group of people who I just met. I didn’t even know that whole market existed of entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners. I didn’t really know anybody but I started meeting them and I realized, “My God, these people have a gift, a talent. They’re so incredibly talented people but if they don’t learn how to sell and communicate why people should pay them, they’re going struggle in their business forever.” I made that my mission because what I see is that when you, Orion, take you for example, you have this incredible ability to work with people in their ability to have a relationship. What I believe number one is that there’s somebody for everybody and there’s lots of somebodies for each person that owns a business. But if you can’t communicate why you’re special and different from everybody else from your category, your person can’t find you and they can’t do business with you. They need you and so if they can’t find you, they can’t do business with you. You don’t get to do your work and impact their lives for the better. They don’t get the positive impact in their own lives. But when it does happen, they become a better person and that actually impacts the world becoming a better place.

If you can’t communicate why you’re special and different from everybody else from your category, your person can’t find you and they can’t do business with you. Click To Tweet

‏‏Right. From my own personal experience, when I don’t share my gift with people and when I am the best kept secret, it hurts inside. It’s almost like there is some kind of a gift, like you said, a calling, a destiny that is not being fulfilled just because there are some limitations in the sales process. Also, I’m a giver. I give a lot for free. It’s impossible just giving your gift for free all the time. It doesn’t work. It’s not even a spiritual exchange because people do not value your services if you are not charging or charging enough for it.

‏‏Exactly. I know what are my triggers, so to speak, and I like to get on stage and have people listen. That’s why I’m a good teacher because I really think if I’m going to have people listen to me, I better come up with something good to say. I also really like to get paid for that. There is something really, really validating, I mean wrong or right, I don’t know, but there’s something incredibly validating and fulfilling when you get paid money, which is our means of exchange of value in our country. There’s something really special about that moment when you get paid for something like what you do.

‏‏I love that once you told me something like, sometimes, helping the person to take on the challenge and do the purchase is the exact breakthrough that they need because it’s almost like they’re finally committed to themselves.

‏‏Exactly.

‏‏What are some of the struggles that you see in your clients when they first come to work with you?

‏‏They come in two flavours. One is they’re not making as much as they’d like to because they can’t figure out or they don’t know how to sell their service. They come at all varying levels. I have the brand new entrepreneurs. They’re not even really sure exactly what makes them different or who is their client that they’re really trying to reach. I have large multimillion dollar companies. They know what their market is. They know what it is that they want to offer but there’s something not quite right about how they’re talking about what they have and so people don’t comprehend why they should pay for it. These are what I call sales issues. Some people would call them marketing issues. I think of it more as a sales issue because when you have even a little bit of exposure, but you have the right way of talking about what it is that you do, it penetrates through the noise. It’s like a hot knife. For many years, I had a pretty small list. I didn’t have a lot of people following me and we were doing hundreds of thousands of dollars because we knew exactly what needed to be said that attracted the exact right people who are ready to buy. To me, that’s better than marketing.

‏‏Right. How small was the list?

‏‏About 1,000 people.

‏‏Really? Wow.

‏‏I just realized that a couple of months ago when I was looking at our list size and how much money we had made. These are people so I had to boil it down to numbers but when you look at it from the business standpoint, it’s much more powerful to have the right people on that list than lots of people on that list. The right people that you know how to convert, talk to, and help, really powerful.

‏‏Wow. How can one figure out exactly what make them unique and how can they communicate it better? I know we worked on it for a while but if you can give the cliff notes of how to do it.

‏‏This is the foundation. One of the things I teach is that in order for you to be able to sell well, you have to be able to do two things. The first one is you have to believe in what you’re selling. This is pretty basic stuff but if you are selling your own intellectual property or something you’ve created, this can be one of the hardest things to do. I remember when I had left my corporate life and I started as a coach, I was actually helping people with relationships. My husband and I had started a relationship coaching company. The very first sale I made was to this gentleman. He was 73 years old. He paid me $450 for six hourly coaching sessions. They were $90 a piece, only I didn’t sell six. I sold five and I gave the sixth one away as a bonus. I remember doing cartwheels in my living room over this $450 sale. I thought, “Man, what is with it that I was so excited?” A month ago, I sold a microscope to a research scientist in my corporate job for $200,000 so why was I more excited about this $450 item? It’s because it was my own intellectual property. I got to do my passion, my work, my mission and there was something about that. Luckily, I had 15 years of sales knowledge and sales experience. We grew that price point to $4,500 in about 6 months.

‏‏It’s worth every penny.

‏‏Oh, yeah. People were happy to pay it. They were thrilled because of the results. When you have the result of a completely better relationship or a different life, it doesn’t really matter what the price tag is as long as you can somehow pay for it. It was definitely worth it. I was able to deliver a higher quality of service. It was in that time that I think of myself as in the crucible. I had to learn all over again the things that I already knew but apply them to my own product or my own service and know how to raise my own belief in what I had and sense of its value.

‏‏How do you do it? Because it’s almost like the chicken and the egg because people are like, “Well, I don’t have confidence in what I’m selling but I need to sell to have more confidence in what I’m selling but I don’t have confidence in what I’m selling but I need to sell because if I’ll sell, I’ll have more confidence.” How do you get over that?

‏‏It’s funny because one of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of people make is that they’ll say, “Once I get a few more clients at this price point, I’ll raise my fees because I have more confidence.” But the problem is, the people that you get at that lower price point, you end up either resenting them because you didn’t charge them enough or they end up not being very good clients because they didn’t pay enough. They’re not committed. They’re not committed enough. It doesn’t raise your confidence. In fact, it makes it worse. What I tell my clients is go ahead and start at the high price point. Just start there. They say, “How do I do that?” Well, to answer your question, Orion. I’m going to talk about the mechanics of this in a little bit, what happens is you take very specific small steps that encourage you and give you confidence so that pretty soon, it’s very easy for you to be selling and have a higher price point. Let me just be more specific. I think a really good analogy, I used this marathon analogy. If I was to want to train for a marathon and do a marathon three months from now, the farthest I’ve ever run in my whole life was two miles. I wouldn’t say, “Okay, this month, I’m going to run a marathon.” I wouldn’t just hop off the couch and go try to run 26 miles because I would probably hurt myself. I would be really, really disappointed because the farthest I’ve gotten was two miles and I would probably go back and sit on that couch for another month until I have enough courage to get up and do it again. That’s how most people approach selling. They go for the big thing, they literally don’t know what they’re doing, they’re not conditioned for it and then, they get knocked down, they feel rejected and then they don’t go again. They take another month to get over it. If you were going to run a marathon, what would you do? Really, to train wisely. The very first thing I would do is I would get a marathon training coach or I would Google marathon training system. Each day, I would be taking one small action in the direction and then in three months, I would have no problem running that marathon. You know what else has happened in the process? My confidence has gone up. I always tell my clients that confidence comes after the action.

Confidence comes after the action.

‏‏Right.

‏‏Always. It always comes after the action.

‏‏Sometimes I still do it, but in the past, before Jennifer, I used to sell my mentors more than I sold myself. Meaning I could talk about other people’s programs. Talking about other people’s programs was so easy. I got my friends into other people’s programs many, many times. But when it came to  speaking about me and what I do, it is so weird because I have evidence, people are telling me what I’ve done for them, and still, there was this insecurity of I cannot bring myself to “sell myself.”

‏‏This is a common thing. It’s easier for people to sell other people’s stuff than their own. It’s not just a matter of making the money and having the client. It’s almost like a personal development passage, rite of passage, so to speak, because you do have to confront those things. I have a yearlong sales mastery circle program that I do where even now, today, with the experience that I have, there are still things that I get stuck on and then my sales go down. Luckily, I have my own coach, mostly, my husband. We talk it out. We have the tools to work through that. If somebody says something negative about your service or they didn’t get the result that you thought that they were going to and you feel disappointed, guess what? The wind goes out of your sales. You can’t sell.

‏‏What do you do?

‏‏You have to put the wind back in your own sales. You have to know how to do that.

‏‏One thing that I’ve noticed for client retentions and really helping my clients understand the value of what they’re getting while coaching with me, this is good for me and it’s good for my clients, our brains, from pre historical times, we are conditioned to look for the cyber tooth tiger and for what’s wrong. We forget to focus on what’s good. With my clients, what I do is I always start the conversation with, “Let’s recap your breakthroughs and what happened before, what breakthroughs you had, what epiphanies did you have.” We spend time thinking about the breakthroughs and I have them journal the breakthroughs because A, they see more of my value as a coach of like, oh my God, just a week past and look at all these amazing things that happened in your life in a week. At that moment, they are ecstatic but a week later, they’ll completely forget about it. I also have them journal. I get my value as a coach for what I do for them but also for them, the more they journal, the more they talk about it, A, they change their focus into what’s good and they also anchor what’s good in their subconscious mind.

‏‏Absolutely. You know from being around me, I usually start conversations with what are your wins, what are your accomplishments, what do you want to claim as an accomplishment for yourself. I start all of my accountability calls for myself like that as well as with my clients because of that exact reason. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience but it came to me from doing a lot of personal development work and going to a lot of different kinds of training and conferences, you can get so excited and have a lot of ahas and breakthroughs. It’s really in the sharing of what you got, that you really understand what you got. That’s why when I get home from something where I’ve had a lot of openings, my husband just knows to sit there while I basically pour out for the next hour and a half because it’s almost like my head’s so full of all this amazing stuff. I just know it was awesome. But when I have to say it and then I’m pouring it out and I’m telling somebody else, it’s, “Oh my gosh, that is what I got.” Now, I actually realize what I realized.

‏‏Nice. What you’re doing is so smart because the way we listen can help us retain more of it. If we are listening just to listen for ourselves, we will retain some of it. I forget the exact percentages but it’s really significant. But when we are listening something and we’re thinking about teaching it to somebody else, we will listen better. You’re a natural. That’s what you do. You’re listening away. You know that you’re going to come home and you’re going to share with your husband so your listening is in a way of, “I listen in order to teach.” Also, because you are a coach and you know it could help someone.

‏‏I know that I’m an auditory learner. I know some people are more visual and kinaesthetic so they’ll write down what they learn. For me, I take notes when I’m at a seminar but then I say what I got and then I never look at the notes again because I hear myself say what I learned and I learn it again.

‏‏That is so, so cool. You demystified it for me but I want to share it with the listeners. In some ways, it is true because if I say, “Come coach with me and you will learn how to make $1,000 instead of $100.” Then it will make sense. I pay a certain amount of money and I’m going to make more money. But when it comes to topics like relationships, spirituality, getting over depression, stuff like that, how can you quantify it in the sales process?

‏‏You’re going right in there. Okay. There are two parts and I’m going to do the second part first and then we’ll come back to the first part second.

‏‏Let’s do it your way.

‏‏You want to do it in order?

‏‏Your way and your rhythm because I just wanna talk about everything at once.

‏‏I think this will make more sense for people. Definitely, if I go on a tangent and I don’t answer your question, you remind me, okay? One of the things that people ask me a lot is really that, it’s another version of the same question. How do I get people to pay me for my service? Another way people say that is how do I raise my fees? How do I have a higher percentage of people saying yes when I’m making offers? How do I do that? Another thing people say is I can’t really communicate why I’m better or why people should pay me more than other people in my industry. I just was speaking to a woman the other day. She said, “I’m a writer. Everyone in my industry makes $70 an hour. That’s just how it is and I want people to pay me $100 an hour and I can’t really communicate why.” I’m laughing. I’m thinking, “Shoot. If my copywriter knew how inexpensive it was, it would be a whole different story.” People charge a lot more than that but she wasn’t aware that it was possible or even how to do it. I’m going to break it down for you. When you want to raise your fees but you don’t want to give away more time and if you’re selling a service that’s your own coaching service or your own time, then you might be charging a certain amount per hour but if you raise your fees and you also raise the number of hours you’re giving away, it doesn’t really give you a raise. Like if you’re charging $100 an hour for 6 hours but then you charge somebody $1,200 dollars for 12 hours, you’re not really making more money. I’m talking about how do you double what you actually are making? Like $1,200 for six hours. You with me?

‏‏I’m with you always.

‏‏I know I’m going fast so if people are listening to the recording of this, they’ll have to get the replay.

‏‏You can do it in a slow speed. If this is too slow for you, then you just heighten the speed. Sometimes, I speak a little slow so yeah.

‏‏Sometimes, I get going so fast so if I go too fast, tell me. Alright, so how do you raise your fees without giving more stuff away? That’s the question. I use this analogy. I want you to imagine that I have a living room full of toys. I have my three sons. It’s a pretty common occurrence. That’s where this analogy came from. I’m going to have a garage sale so I decided I’m going to take all of these toys and I’m going to put them out on the driveway and have a garage sale. I look at my pile of toys and I think, “Man, how much are these worth anyway? I’m going to have a garage sale tomorrow. What should I charge?” I think, “Ah, I don’t know. $200. $200 seems like a pretty reasonable amount.” What I want in my story here, in my analogy here, I want you to equate to your current pricing. My current pile of toys is worth $200. That is your current pricing whatever your number is for your service. What I do at this point, this is what I do with my clients, is I do something that I call the quantum benefits process. It’s a longer conversation but I’m going to give you a little taste of it here. What I do is I look at the pile of toys and I see legos. I start pulling out all the legos in the pile and I put them off to one side. Awesome. Then I look back at my original pile and I’m looking for something that’s unique and interesting and could be of interest to my ideal buyer and I see dinosaurs. I pull out all my dinosaurs and then trees and the rocks and I put them in a pile. Then I look back at my original pile and I see hot wheels cars. I take the hot wheels cars and I put them in a separate pile and I pull all the tracks and the flags and all the things to go with the hot wheels when I put them in a pile. I keep going until I eventually have five piles, each with different stuff. I’ve got the legos. I’ve got the dinosaur pile. I got the hot wheels pile and then two more. Now, I look back and I see in my lego pile all of these amazing things. It’s just a pile of bricks in different colors but I start thinking about what did I pay for that. What’s the stuff you can build with all of that? And then I start thinking about all the fun that we have, every Wednesday night at our house is family night, which means we don’t have any electronic devices, we usually sit around and build legos.

‏‏I wish I can join you. It sounds like fun.

‏‏It’s amazing. Sometimes, we play cards. Sometimes, we play fenopoly, that’s what my five year old calls Monopoly. He calls it fenopoly. I think about the times we build legos and my husband and my teenage son and the five year old are all building stuff. I’m the person that finds the bricks, the shapes. And then the baby comes through and he stomps on everything and wrecks it all. We laugh. You know what? This pile of legos, all by itself, it really is worth $200. Just the legos. Then I look at the dinosaur pile and I think, “Man, that one dinosaur right there, I paid $30 for and then there’s that set and this is all the fun.” Really, to replace it, I think how much the replacement cost. I realize, “Oh my gosh, this pile of dinosaurs is worth $200 all day long.” Hot wheels cars, $200. I look around at my five piles and I realize that each of those piles is really, by themselves, each worth $200. Suddenly, I realize, “Oh my gosh, I have $1,000 worth of stuff here.” I used to have $200, but now I’ve got $1,000. I’ve got five piles, each worth $200. What I want you to notice is that I didn’t give anything more away. I didn’t give any more time away. I didn’t print out the instruction manual. I didn’t even teach the person what to do with it. What I did in this process, I actually recognized what was unique and specific and really, highly attractive to my ideal buyer. That’s how your pricing goes up. Right now, you probably think of your service as having a benefit or one outcome or one main thing that it provides for people. But when you really get into the nuance of the different things people get because of the work you do, you’ll find that there’s actually four or five, what I call quantum benefits, about what it is that you do. The reason they’re called quantum is because they quantumly increase your ability to charge more. The way you know you’ve hit on a quantum benefit is that that one thing is worth the entire price of admission all by itself.

The way you know you’ve hit on a quantum benefit is that that one thing is worth the entire price of admission all by itself. Click To Tweet

‏‏Yeah. I just love when we did that exercise together. It took a while and I remember sitting for a few hours thinking about my quantum benefits and writing it all down. All of a sudden, just looking at it, I felt the surge of energy. I felt my value in a deeper way. I looked at them and I was like, “Wow, I do all of this for people? This is pretty awesome. I should totally charge more.”

‏‏Exactly. That’s exactly what happens. It’s, “Oh my gosh, I totally see how come it really is worth it.” This is just the tip of the iceberg. We go into deeper and we really articulate it. We have examples and we go into all of the details of what it is that you need to have to communicate. In principle, that’s exactly how people have a higher level of belief in what it is that they do and it’s also how we raise their fees.

‏‏Right. How does this specifically apply to the idea of I can only see the value when I help people make more money to I see the value when it comes to something more that you can’t put a price tag on like relationship, or spirituality, or Reki?

‏‏Sometimes people will have this question and so, to illuminate this, I’m just going to rephrase what I’m hearing. If you’re in business and you sell business services that can have an ROI, you invest X number of dollars, it’s going to return you Y more dollars. It seems easy but even people in that space have the same challenge because do you know how many people sell websites? Do you know how many sales coaches there are out there? Even if you have the ROI on your side because what you do helps people make more money, you still have the same problem of being able to communicate why should people buy from you as opposed to somebody else. If you’re in what we call making a soft offer, which is what you do, where you’re helping people with relationship or health or other things that don’t directly return money, this leads to your question that you asked me, how do you help people to show a quantitative value or how do you feel people connect to the value? What I tell my clients is I ask them, “When you’re working with your client and you’re doing your sales consultation or your strategy session with them, your discovery session, where you’re really looking to see if and how you can help them, if they’re a fit for what you do and how you would help them if you wanted to work with them, one of the things that you need to do is you can ask some very specific questions.” I like to teach my clients to ask some quantitative questions. I’m going to use an example from the health industry because I think this will illustrate this point really well. I have this client Kristen. When she came to me, she was really in the category of fitness trainer. She used to do these fitness boot camps where every month people would pay her $179 and they would meet with her once a week in a group setting and she would do a fitness session with them, a fitness boot camp. She had a really nice business, doing fine. The problem is that when she came to me, she said, “Jennifer, I have over 10 years of nutrition experience and really specialized training around helping people to get stronger and get over injuries. I want to charge $7,000 for a 6 month coaching program with me.” I didn’t laugh at her. I said, “Awesome, that’s great.” She said, “The problem is I don’t know how to sell it and I don’t think any of these people who are paying me $179 dollars a month are going to buy it. It’s like how can these $179 boot campers pay me $7,000? It’s crazy.”

‏‏Right.

‏‏The value doesn’t seem to be there. We went through this con and benefits process. In the process of doing this, she saw that one of her quantum benefits is that she has this ability to test whether or not a specific exercise is good for you or bad for you, whether it would make you stronger and fitter or weaker and more fatigued. That was really amazing. I thought, “Oh my gosh, you can do that?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “Do you think that there’s anybody in your boot camp that might be able to benefit from this?” She said, “I don’t really know. Most of the people in there are women. They are moms, a lot of them. They’re not especially overweight. They’re in decent shape. I don’t know.” From a superficial marketing perspective, you might think that she couldn’t sell this thing because her people didn’t have enough of a problem. They’re not especially overweight. They’re not especially sick. There’s not enough of a problem. But when we took a little closer look, I said, “Who in your boot camp isn’t really getting the kind of results that you would want for them?” She told me about a couple of people. I said, “Do you think that those people might be interested in knowing exactly what exercises would actually be better for them?” She said, “Actually, now that you mentioned, I think they would because they’ve been coming for a couple of years. They pay me $179 every month but they’re really not making progress.” From a superficial point again, that would be a horrible thing for a business owner. I’ve got these clients that are not making progress. But for us, it’s where the money is. It’s gold, actually. I told her, “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go and ask them how things are going in boot camp. When they tell you that they’re not going that well, ask them if it would have value for them to have more support.” This is how the conversation went. “Hey Jody, how’s boot camp going?” “Oh, it’s fine.” “Oh, yeah? What’s good about it?” “Well, I like coming.” “Is there anything you’d like to see better?” “Well, the thing that’s frustrating for me is that I’ve been coming for two years and everybody else seems to be really getting stronger and they look so much better and I really don’t feel like I’ve made that much progress and I don’t know why because I keep coming.” And then she says, “Okay well, you know, there’s something that I haven’t been able to do in boot camp because it’s a group setting. But I think it might help you. I actually have a way to test whether a particular exercise can make you stronger and more fit or make you weaker and more fatigued. Do you want to talk about that?” “Okay, yes.” Can you see how this person, how because they’re so committed to their fitness, they’ve been coming all this time but they haven’t been making the progress that they wanted. How knowing that one thing might be worth $7,000 to them.

‏‏You don’t need too many people like this. You just need a few because that’s the same money she’s making for the boot camp probably three or four months.

‏‏Exactly. In terms of the quantitative questions you’re asking me about, she can even go so far as to say, “How many years have you been trying to get fit? How many different programs have you tried?” The reason I’m asking how many is because when you get a quantitative number, if this person says, “I’ve been coming for two years here but before I came to you, I had three trainers and I’ve been trying to get fit for 10 years. It’s so frustrating. I’m thinking about quitting.” Now, when you go to make an offer, “Well you know what, to do this with me is $7,000.” If like, “Okay, this is actually going to solve my problem once and for all.” It becomes a no brainer.

‏‏When you show the real value and you hit on the pain points, and you show them exactly that they have to tell you their pain. You can’t tell them what their pain is. When it comes from them, then they are confronted with it and they understand the value.

‏‏It’s exactly right. By knowing what your quantum benefits are, it actually helps you to figure out exactly what it is that you help people with. You don’t need the whole world to be your client. You just need as few people who have that set of problems. This is why most marketing doesn’t work. If you don’t know what is the set of problems that you need people to have in order for you to help them, you don’t know how to market. How many people do you really need at $7,000 to pop to make $1 million business? Not very many. It’s like 54 people or something. It’s just not that many people. Out of the world of 7 billion, not that many people. For Kristen, right after we did our quantum benefits, she sold a $3,500 program. I helped her to get really good at having the rest of the conversation, the whole sales conversation from front to back. From hello to this is what I’ve got to offer you. I coached her on that. Now, she’s at I think $8,500 for 6 months She actually closed her booth camp a few months after we started working together because what she wanted was a particular lifestyle. She loves to travel and so now she actually trains people over Skype.

You don’t need the whole world to be your client. You just need as few people who have that set of problems.

‏‏That’s so cool.

‏‏She loves travelling. Having a boot camp where she had to show every week really just didn’t work for her lifestyle so she wanted a way out. Now, she’s so happy.

‏‏Nice. Complete shift.

‏‏Totally.

‏‏It goes back to even before the sales conversation, when you just meet somebody at a conference or a seminar, what’s the conversation like when you’re trying to convince them or have them be attracted to your offer?

‏‏I think we went through this, Orion, or maybe you know of this.

‏‏I have. But you know what, even if we pull all the good stuff in this hour, there are so much more and so much in depth for people to learn from you. This is just to give our listeners a boost of amazing confidence and energy and help them move forward. But really, if they want to know more on how to sell better and offer high tickets, then they should talk to you.

‏‏I have a book, actually a free book that they can download, that I wrote. It has a lot of this. I’ll share the URL in a little bit. One of the things that I do is called highly attractive networking training because there are different ways of networking. I’m more of an introverted person. I went into sales in my 20’s because I was actually shy. I was really shy.

‏‏Imagine you being shy.

‏‏Yeah. I still tend to be on the shy side but I have ample coping mechanism. I went into sales because I was shy and for me, I really go for quality over quantity when I’m out meeting people When people ask me, what do you do? That can be one of the hardest questions to answer especially if you’re not totally sure what it is and how to talk about it, it can be really challenging. One of the things I like people to do to attract that client is you really want to know how to take what it is that’s so special about you. Once you know your quantum benefits, maybe you pull your top or favourite one or two, you want to take that and marry it to what is your ideal clients most likely top of mind problem.

‏‏Let’s do a role play.

‏‏Alright.

‏‏I just met you and like hey, my name is Orion. How are you?

‏‏Great. How are you?

‏‏I’m doing great. Isn’t this a fabulous conference, seminar, workshop, speech?

‏‏Yes.

‏‏What do you do?

‏‏What I do is I help entrepreneurs to sell their stuff for twice as much money, twice as often.

‏‏Wow. That sounds great. I wish I was an entrepreneur.

‏‏Great. What do you do?

‏‏I help women awaken their inner goddess so they can stop looking for love in all the wrong places and they can attract their soulmate.

‏‏Wow, that is incredible. Are you some kind of a coach or do you do that inside of a company? Tell me about that.

‏‏I’m a coach, yes. And then, you tricked me into saying that I’m a coach. This is what I’m saying. Let’s say, commonly I say, I help women awaken their inner goddess and they’re not even single or they don’t even care about awakening their inner goddess or feeling amazing and juicy and recovering from trauma and moving forward and awesome. How do I figure out what they need before I even say what I do?

‏‏Okay, this is such a good question. The thing is you do what you do wherever you go.

‏‏In my case, what I can say is I work mostly with singles but I also work with women that are in relationships. But I lead with the single thing and with the attracting your soulmate. But if there is a woman who’s in a relationship or a mom and she needs help, then I help her as well. But if I just communicate my message around being single to a mom that is in a relationship, then it won’t work.

‏‏Yeah. One of the things I like to teach is you want to know who is in the room. If I go to a group of entrepreneurs, you almost have to make the decision before you walk in, what am I going to lead with in this room? If you are talking to a man, you are not going to lead with that. But if you can help men, then you need to pull out a different quantum benefit and a different leading sentence to say to him. If you’ve got two or three of these in your hip pocket, if the first one doesn’t hit the mark, you can always pull out the second one. If you say I help women develop their inner goddess and attract the right person, they go, “Oh wow, that sounds really interesting.” You’ll say, “Wow. Are you single?” “Oh no, I’m married.” “Oh, really? You know what else I do? I help women who are married to have their man make them an amazing lunch everyday. It’s the same tool.”  “Really? How do you do that?”

‏‏That’s brilliant. I did not see that that was the missing piece. But I only say this. How liberating it is to say that I do more than this. Wow. God. That was good. Really good for you too.

‏‏I think when you ask me these questions, I don’t realize that this is sort of an unconscious competence of mine but it’s really what I’m doing. If I go to a room where I know it’s entrepreneurs, I’m always leading with the entrepreneurs sentence. But if it’s a group or it’s a party, then I’ll probably say something else because I could work with corporate sales people and the entrepreneur sentences could help them. I might walk in and say I don’t know who’s in the room. There are some entrepreneurs. There are some people who work in companies. There are some business owners. There are some employees here. I’m probably going to say, “You know what I do? I’m a master trainer. I help people sell high ticket services.” It’s going to apply to both kinds of people.

‏‏Right. Astonishing. Awesome. I love it. Talking about intention. Intention is a big, big thing. It’s the intention that you use before you enter a room, before you go to a conference, before you even go to a family reunion. When you come with a better intention, you will get better results. You won’t just cruise and wait for something to happen to you or somebody to reach you. You become an attractor and you put a certain energy that will get you better results. Now, I remember, I told you that I’m going to one of my prospects, an extremely successful one. She’s a mega star in her industry. I felt so intimidated even trying to do the sales conversation with her because who am I to work with someone of that caliber? What can somebody do to purify their intention before they’re going to offer something to somebody they look up to?

‏‏My process is called clearing, where you really let go of all of the self concern, all of the self consciousness, and focus on what it is that is your mission or what it is that you’re here to deliver. If you’re thinking who am I to help this person, what you’re not thinking about is how you’re going to help the person. You’re actually thinking about yourself. Really, anytime you’re self conscious or worried or thinking about did I say the right thing, you’re off the mark. It’s not wrong. We all do it. It’s just something to know this because if you really tap into why you’re here, it’s because you have a gift or a talent or an expertise that is not yours to keep. It only is a gift because you get to give it to somebody. You’ve got to look for people who can receive that gift. That’s the purest of intention. Who is the person who is ready to receive this gift? That’s what the whole conversation is about. When you focus on that, all the rest falls away.

You have a gift or a talent or an expertise that is not yours to keep. It only is a gift because you get to give it to somebody. Click To Tweet

‏‏That is amazing. Before we’re finished, I have two questions. One is what are the three top tips that you can share with us for having a stellar life and the second one is where can people find you?

‏‏I love it, three top tips. Number one for me is be crystal clear about what it is that you want. I don’t know what is your process. I meditate. I go for a lot of walks. I journal. But number one, be crystal clear about what it is that you want. Number two, allow yourself to have it.

‏‏Big one.

‏‏Yeah. The third one for me that’s really been instrumental in allowing myself to have the things that I want, I envisioned my husband and I knew who he was and literally two days after I said to myself, it’s okay to want those things, I met him.

‏‏I met my husband 48 hours after I prayed for him to show up.

‏‏I met my husband two days later.

‏‏48 hours is two days.

‏‏Yeah.

‏‏What?!

‏‏Two days. Because I knew what I wanted for a long time but I thought it was wrong that I wanted it. Because I wanted somebody that really appreciated me and would take care of me and that I didn’t feel like I had to work very hard with and then when I realized that that was okay, that he could just appreciate me for who I am, he showed up. Number three for me that really keeps me in that headspace is paying attention to what I’m grateful for. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to be in this life and to just play. To have this business. Just focusing on what I’m grateful for. I do that every single day. When I go for a walk in the morning, it’s actually part of my routine is I go for a walk and my intention is literally looking around and looking for things to be grateful for.

‏‏Beautiful.

‏‏Yeah.

‏‏I’m so grateful for you and I’m sure that our listeners are going to be grateful because you have a gift for us.

‏‏I do. I created this gift. If you are someone that wants to receive it, it is for you. The gift is my book called Nine Secrets To Increase Your Fees And Magnetically Attract Top Dollar Clients. If you want to either increase your fees and/or magnetically attract top dollar clients, it’s a great read. I had a lot of people email me back and say, “I just read your book and then I closed three sales. Thank you.” I just really go into a lot of depth in similar ways that we have here but there’s a lot more in the book. There are my four steps to quadruple your income in four months. That’s a really fun part. I go into how to have a sales conversation that feels good and not icky. It’s a great book. It’s highticketsellingbook.com. That’s where you can get it.

‏‏Beautiful. If you are serious about becoming more attractive, magnetic, and sell more, then go to highticketsellingbook.com and download her book. She is, like I said in my opening sentence of this podcast, she’s one of the most brilliant business and sales coaches out there so do yourself a favor, download her book because she is phenomenal.

‏‏Thank you. Thank you for making me phenomenal. Your questions make me better.

‏‏Thank you, Jennifer.

‏‏Welcome.

Your Checklist Actions to Take

✓ Be clear on what you want and set this as a goal. It’s up to you on what your process is. The important thing is that you get there. 

✓ Learn how to communicate why a product or service you developed is essential and beneficial to your customer to create a stronger impact. 

✓ Find the quantum benefits in your expertise by listing 5 or more factors that can be beneficial to your prospects. Instead of selling them as a whole, offer them in categories.

✓ Start out at a higher price point when offering your services. Let people know firsthand what kind of value they are going to get. Once they realize that it’s worth it, the price will not matter. 

✓ Help people connect with the value of your service by preparing a set of questions that will help you go deeper into what they are going through, giving you answers on how you can help them overcome their obstacles. 

✓ Focus on positive breakthroughs and avoid becoming discouraged if someone says something negative about your service or product. Instead, take it as constructive criticism to find ways to be better.

✓ List your wins and accomplishments to help boost your confidence at the same time giving you more value in the eyes of your clients. 

✓ Understand the set of problems that a client usually has in order for you to help them better. 

✓ Focus on selling to the right audience that are in need of your product or service because they are the ones who are most likely to respond to what you have to offer.

✓ Allow yourself to have what you want or dream to achieve and don’t forget to recognize the things in your life that you need to be grateful for. This type of positivity allows you to be more approachable to people who need your help.

Links and Resources:

 

About Jennifer Diepstraten

Jennifer helps entrepreneurs, small business owners, and mission-driven corporations to package, position, and sell their services for premium pricing. She has 20 years of experience in sales, relationship coaching, and communication studies so she understands what it really takes to inspire people to take decisive action. As a result of her expertise, she’s sold over $14 million in products in ten years in corporate sales, working for world-leading multi-million and multi-billion dollar biotech and medical equipment companies.

 

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