You Don’t Need To Be Good At Sales — Here’s How Clients Decide To Buy
Many self-employed coaches, practitioners, and creatives believe that if their income is not where they want it to be, the missing piece must be their sales skills.
They assume they need stronger calls to action, they need to invite people to work with them more often, or they need to get better at discovery calls so they can improve their conversion rate.
But in my experience, people decide they want to work with you long before any sales process takes place.
That’s what I want to unpack here.
— In this article —
Clients decide to work with you on their own
Contrary to popular belief, we don’t need to be great at sales in order for people to buy from us. We don’t need to do ‘shameless pitches’ at the end of a workshop, and we don’t even need to have a ‘call to action’ on everything in order for people to want to purchase our offerings.
People are actually quite capable of going to our website of their own accord, checking out what we offer, and deciding if it’s a fit for them, without our prompting or input.
Think about your own buying decisions for a moment. If you track the journey, you’ll likely find that you decided to work with someone before checking out what they offer.
It was something about what they said, how they said it, and how that made you think or feel — and that made you naturally interested in what else they had to say.
How clients decide to buy from you
When we share our epiphany journeys and lived experiences of our ideal buyers’ challenges and goals, when we articulate something they were not able to name for themselves — this is how people decide to work with us.
I had always believed that people would want to work with me based on the results I had helped other clients achieve. But time and again people tell me that they chose to buy from me because of how I think.
And this revelation highlighted something interesting about my approach to content creation. My writings and videos are less about sharing “how to” steps, and much more about helping people see how to think differently about a challenge or goal.
Communicating how I think places me in a category of my own.
It means people are not weighing up whether to work with me or three other mentors.
The buyer that leads themselves
Here’s how the typical buyer journey plays out in my business.
They come across one of my discoverable content pieces while searching for answers to a question they already have.
Within that piece of content, I communicate a concept that helps them see their challenge or goal with new clarity. In a few simple sentences, I’ve articulated something they have been struggling to define for themselves and others.
That moment creates curiosity and they begin to wonder what else I have to say. So they read another article or two, and eventually the thought arises: “This person could probably help me.”
This is where they go looking for my offers.
Because they discovered me through a question they already had, they are ready to act. They lead themselves to my checkout and buy — without any prompting from me.
The quiet buyer
We're often taught that people only buy after they have been led through a sales process.
When you see the world through that lens, the focus naturally turns to conversion.
Cue writing stronger calls to action, booking discovery calls, following sales frameworks, and asking for the sale.
But not everyone needs or wants to be led through a sales process.
Many of the people who enter my world through my discoverable content ecosystem are what I call ‘quiet buyers’.
They do not need to be reassured, persuaded or taken through a discovery call. They are capable of making their own decisions about whether my work is right for them.
This is the nature of a quiet buyer. They find a person whose thinking feels aligned, and move towards them. They read, listen, and explore what is available. And when they are ready, they buy.
If you try to capture them with NLP-style sales tactics, they’ll quietly step away and you will never see them again.
Do people know how you think?
One of the questions I often ask clients is this — Do your ideal buyers know how you think?
The look on their face on hearing this question says it all. No, their ideal buyers do not know how they think.
And it’s not something they give much attention to because they’ve been taught to focus only on their clients’ problems and not talk about themselves. So they produce helpful tips or step-by-step guidance, while keeping their own perspective largely mute.
But when you make your thinking visible, readers can recognise whether it resonates with them.
They can sense whether you understand their world. And they can choose you over others doing similar work.
Without exposure to your thinking, the decision to work with you keeps getting put off.
Can people discover you outside of social media?
This is the next pivotal question I’ve been asking clients for the past decade — Can people discover you outside of social media?
And the answer is the same. No, the people who would most benefit from their work are not able to find them outside of social media, because there is nothing to find.
I’m sure you’re seeing the solution I'm pointing to here.
Build your own ecosystem of discoverable content so you can have a quiet army of content working to bring aligned and ready clients to your door.
In closing
If you’ve been thinking that your lack of sales skills or calls to action is what has been preventing sales, I hope this article has helped you question this belief and offered you a different way to increase sales.
And if you’d love my support with creating your own quiet marketing ecosystem, start here.
Finally, I’d love to know what’s been most useful for you here. Let me know in the comments. ⤵
Danielle Gardner
The Quiet Marketer
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