Rarely is it a money problem. It’s an understanding problem.
You’ve heard “no budget” more times than you can count. And then, weeks later, you find out that same client hired someone else at five times your price. They didn’t have a money problem. They had a “you didn’t make yourself the obvious choice” problem.
This episode is about fixing that so it doesn’t continue to happen.
Note: This is step three of my five-step process for making money as a wellness consultant. If you haven’t listened to Step 1 (One Way Forward) or Step 2 (One Thing, Done Brilliantly), start there. Everything in this episode builds on the direction and the offer you set in those two.
Now, back to the episode.
For the first two to three years of my business, clients weren’t hard to find. I was living off relationship equity, the trust I’d built while I was still employed, the results people had watched me deliver, the network that already knew my work. That equity is what carries you in the first years of your business, and it carried me too.
But relationship equity runs out. It’s not an infinite resource. And when mine did, I had a choice: learn how to sell, or crawl back to full-time employment. I’d already done that twice. I wasn’t doing it a third time.
Here’s what horrified me about “learning to sell”. I thought it meant becoming someone sleazy (like the stereotypical car salesman), someone pushy, someone I didn’t want to be. Give me a P&L to build any day. Selling myself? No thank you.
Then I found Donald Miller’s StoryBrand. And that is when the penny dropped for me. If we imagined your client’s property or project to be a movie, your client is the hero of their story. It’s their story, and your role as a consultant is to be the guide. Your client has a problem and you have the solution. So selling isn’t about manipulating your client or forcing them to buy something they don’t want. Selling is telling them, clearly, “I understand your problem, here’s how I solve it, here’s why my process works, and here’s the result you’ll have.” That’s not sleazy. That’s clarity. And clarity is what makes you impossible to say no to.
In today’s episode, here are the 3 things we’ll cover:
1.- Why relationship equity always runs out — and what to build instead so your business doesn’t stall when it does.
2.- The sales framework that made me stop feeling sleazy about selling — and how understanding your client’s entire journey, not just their wallet, eliminates price objections.
3.- Why people don’t hire you for who you are — they hire you for who they become. And once you understand that, your marketing and sales process becomes one of guiding your client to the point they’re ready to solve their problem.
By the end of this episode, you’ll know exactly why “no budget” is almost never the real objection. You’ll understand how to map your client’s journey — before you, during you, after you — so you can meet them exactly where they are.
And you’ll walk away with a new definition of what it actually means to sell: not convincing or chasing, but connecting so deeply that you become the only name they think of.