I’m currently reading The Way of The Wolf by Jordan Belfort, and he gives a great analogy for salespeople (but also valuable for coaches):

You are a sifter, not an alchemist …

When you’re selling your services, he says to imagine yourself as a gold prospector, kneeling at the edge of the water with a tin pan and waiting to find a gold nugget while sifting through the rocks.

You aren’t sitting there trying to turn water itself into gold. That would make you an alchemist, and that’s pretty hard to do.

In sales, you can’t use up all your energy trying to convert someone who is never going to buy regardless of what you do.

Instead, you have to sift through the tire kickers and time wasters until you find that gold nugget (the hot buyer).

This is especially hard to do in today’s online world, where there are a lot of prospects to sift through (and many of them disguised as being motivated to buy now when they really aren’t).

However, the better you get at differentiating between hot buyers and tire kickers the better you’ll be.

I start my sales calls by telling prospects that I’d like a “yes” or a “no”, but no “maybe”. This one step has clarified things and saved me a lot of time.

I’m not saying that people who aren’t ready to buy now are bad people. The timing may be off, or they have something else going on in their lives that’s commanding their attention.

I’m also not suggesting that you don’t follow up with people who aren’t ready …

But don’t be afraid to disqualify prospects sooner rather than later, so you can put your energy into the right people.

At the end of the day we only have so much of our energy to go around, make sure you’re spending it on the right people!

If you need help getting your first gold nuggets (coaching clients), I’m putting my best-selling Your First 5 Clients online program on sale for the remainder of this week.

You can get your new year kicked off in the right direction for 50% off the usual price by heading here:

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