Barbra: Hello. This is Barbra Sundquist from HomeBusinessWiz.com. I’m here today with Flo Shell who is a business coach specializing in sales coaching. Flo also has expertise in franchises.
In fact, prior to starting her coaching company, Flo was a major player with Sylvan Learning Systems. You probably recognize the Sylvan name as a very well known name in the education business and they’re actually a franchise, one of the leading educational franchise systems in the world.
While at Sylvan, Flo developed a franchise sales strategy that had the incredible result of doubling the amount of franchises at Sylvan from 300 to more than 700 over a seven-year period.
So, Flo, you obviously know a lot about sales and sales coaching. I would really like to welcome you today to talk to me about that.
Flo: Barbra, I am really thrilled to be having this conversation with you today. Thank you.
Barbra: Flo, I must admit that sales is not one of my areas of expertise so I would like to ask you some questions and learn more about it if I could.
Flo: I’d love to hear them, thank you.
Barbra: Great, let’s get started, then. Let’s start with that word “selling.” I know that so many people are afraid of that word. Why is that, do you think?
Flo: You know, that’s a great question, Barbra. If you were to look at the definition of selling in Webster’s Dictionary, for example, it is quite a bland definition. Actually, the definition is something like, “exchanging products or services for money or something else of value.”
Barbra: Okay.
Flo: So when you listen to that definition, you say, What makes it so nasty to so many people? And yet there is a magic word in that definition that I think can explain it for us in many ways and that word is money.
I think that we all have very emotional feelings about the money we spend and the value that we’re getting for that money. So that may in part create that image of nastiness.
But I think it’s much more than that, Barbra. I think that all of us at one time or another and many of us more than one time or another, have had very uncomfortable selling experiences. Would you agree with that?
Barbra: Yes, definitely.
Flo: So, we tend not to remember the pleasant sales experiences. But we definitely remember the unpleasant ones where we may have felt manipulated by a sales professional or we may have felt that we were not smart enough to make a good decision or we may have felt cornered in some way.
Barbra: It’s kind of like that pushy used car salesman scenario, right? Or the telemarketer who just won’t let you off the phone because they’ve always got a comeback.
Flo: It is. That kind of selling really originated back in the ‘50s when vacuum cleaner salespeople were coming into our homes and housewives were allowing them to come into their homes and offering them coffee.
We’ve come a long way since then and today’s consumer is far more educated, far more savvy, and far more cautious, for good reason. In fact, we’re in the age of the “do not call” registry, which I’m sure you’re aware of, which I think is our consumers’ way of saying, We need for salespeople to back off. We want to invite sales professionals into our lives.
Barbra: That is exactly how I feel about it as a consumer, Flo. It’s that, there are things that I want to purchase. But I want to be in control. I don’t want somebody pushing something on me or trying to manipulate me.
Flo: Exactly. I think the consumer is asking, first, Is this something I need or want? Is it a value I feel is worth it? In other words, is it worth the money that I’m going to spend for it, and is this sales professional somebody that I want to invite into my life?
Barbra: I guess one thing that I’m learning already from you, Flo, is, as a small business person, it would be good for me to think about how I like to interact with a sales professional.
Flo: Absolutely. And selling in its best, best sense, in my mind, is about relating to another human being, it’s about investigating whether what I have to offer is something that that human being needs or wants. It’s about setting up a conversation so that we can become acquainted well enough for us to say, Yes, I would be the good person to provide that to you.
Barbra: Right. So, Flo, do you have some advice for small business people that might be listening to help them get over that image of the nasty selling word or that image of the pushy used car salesman?
Flo: Yes, Barbra, I really do. Actually, this book that I have recently published called, “Stop Selling and Start Clicking,” was really created with coaches in mind. I’m not sure if you knew that.
When I first started in my own coaching business, I was meeting so many wonderful coaches on my coach training calls, for example, who were truly wonderful at what they did, truly had magnificent backgrounds for what they did, had suitable training and yet were really frightened of the idea of having to promote or sell themselves to the world. The whole reason for creating this body of work was to help that small business owner to realize that they already have most of what they need to really sell effectively and authentically.
Barbra: Now that’s an interesting concept, Flo, that they already have most of what they need. Could you say a little bit more about that?
Flo: Absolutely. I think that all of us at one point or another in our lives have created long-term wonderful relationships. We’ve taken some new person that we’ve met and we’ve built that initial acquaintanceship into a long-term relationship. In order for us to have gotten down that road together and taken that journey together, we would have had to compromise with one another. We would have had to trust one another. We certainly would have had to problem solve together, forgive, come to conclusions together, fix things that aren’t working. In my mind, if we know how to do that, if we know how to create that long-term relationship and make it work, we already have the skills that we need to create a wonderful sales experience for our customer.
Barbra: That’s very interesting. That’s interesting in theory and yet I’m having a little bit of a hard time thinking about it in practice. Could we talk about an example? Could you take someone who’s selling a service, say a coach or a consultant or a website designer, how is all that that you talked about, the compromise, the communication, the problem solving, how does that all work into the selling process?
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Part 2 of the Flo Schell interview is here
Part 3 of the Flo Schell interview is here
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