Sacred Wealth Podcast Transcription

Episode 23 “Shorties” | Aligned Sales in the DM's

PODCAST INTRO:

You are tuning into the Sacred Wealth Podcast. I am your host, Meaghan and I am so excited to have you here. Throughout my 10 years in finance, I have come across so much anxiety and fear surrounding money. It is now my purpose to help women become rich, unapologetically.

The goal of this podcast is to empower you, to love your money, to be so ecstatically grateful for what you have, and to feel safe to ask for more. Together, we will figure out what your luxury is and get you on the path to financial freedom.

EPISODE INTRO:

Hi, spiritual business owner. Welcome back to the Sacred Wealth Podcast. Today we have an episode jam-packed about sales, and how people do sales on Instagram, and how people slide into the DM's, and what I think about that. And also some mistakes that I've made. And I wanted to really, I know I emphasize this a lot in the episode itself, but sales are all about alignment and it can take quite a bit of self-discovery to figure out what is in alignment and what is just a trigger and maybe something you need to figure out. So I wanted to offer some tools for how to figure out what is an actual trigger and something you can work through and get better with on the other side and what is actually a misalignment in your code. So I'm going to give you some journal prompts that will help you to do this self-discovery.

The first question is what feelings are coming up, negative or positive? When I think about sales, in general, what feelings come up? And then go down the list of specific sales tactics that you know of, cold DM-ing, inviting people into your space voluntarily, DM-ing current followers. Go down the list. What feelings are coming up when I think about each one of those? Where do I feel these feelings in my body? Is it a tightening of the chest? Is it an expansion of the chest? Is it a deep gut, like a rock in your stomach? Where in my body do I feel these feelings? What is the difference between where I feel the good feelings and where I feel the negative feelings?

Identifying where in your body you feel good feelings versus where you feel bad feelings, will help you tap into your intuition in the future. So you can very quickly say, "Okay, where in my body am I feeling this?" And you'll know immediately whether or not it's in alignment or out of alignment. And if feelings such as shame or fear are coming up, I invite you to dive deeper into that. Shame because of what? Fear of what? And if it's simply a, "I know there's a better way to do this", then exploring that feeling as well. I hope that's helpful for everyone. So that was that.

And now I want to move on to one of the things that I say in the episode, talking about my new team member. I realized, first of all, I want to talk about my motivation for hiring somebody to warm up people in my DM's. So we had hopped on a call and what she presented was very intriguing to me. I had never thought about having somebody, having conversations for me in my DMS. What would that look like? And so I thought about it for a while and I realized that if I didn't try it, I would be thinking about and wondering what would have happened forever and I would regret not trying it.

So we gave it a try and she was with me for about a month. And what I realized was it's extremely important to someone who can adapt your tone, who can adopt your values when it comes to talking to your people. My specific values include consent-based questions. So, "Do you mind if I send you this link?," "Do you want to hear more about this program?" Because if they don't even have the space, they're already not going to be willing to listen. They're already going to be coming at you with a brick wall. So it was important to me to show my people that they had the say so in what I was sending them in their DM's.

And it was also very important to me that we not be cold DM-ing people who were not already in my audience. At first, because I have about 500 followers on my current Instagram profile and I have about 1,800 on my old Instagram profile. So it was really important to me to go through and warm-up, figure out why those people followed me because in my opinion, in my view, they're subscribing to my vortex. And when you unfollow you unsubscribe. So I feel like it is acceptable for me to slide into your DM's if you already follow me because you have subscribed to my vortex. You've subscribed to my posts. You've subscribed to seeing me on your feed. And so that means that I have an opportunity to come in and introduce myself and ask you what you're looking for, as you have followed me. What are you hoping to learn? And maybe I can help you with that.

So I found that this new team member, the cadence that she was employing in her strategy, was not up to my standards. So I gave her some corrections here and there, flexed my CEO muscle a little bit, my boss mode muscle. And that felt really good, but ultimately I felt like I was paying her enough that I shouldn't have to adjust these types of things. She should know how to have a sales cadence in a sales conversation in the DM's, that's her whole pitch. So, unfortunately, we did have to separate ways because I no longer felt good about spending that amount of money per month. And it was quite a lot. It was like $1,800 a month. And so we worked it out and we signed a new contract relieving each other of the responsibility of the first contract sign. Get your contracts, y'all.

Talk to my friend, Nina the Lawyer on Instagram. I get all my contracts from her. I was just on her podcast. You guys should really check her out, get yourself squared away and protected because it's so important. So I wanted to make that clear. And if you are listening to this right now and you do DM warming up, you do conversations in the DM, even social media management, I would love to have a conversation with you because it's becoming clear to me that social media is something that I need to have a very specific strategy for. And my strategy has served me well so far, but I'm feeling like I need to get more narrowed down, more specific. So please reach out if that sounds like something that you'd be interested in.

Okay. That's really all I wanted to say in this intro. I hope that this episode is super informational for you. And if you want to disagree with me, or argue with me, or agree with me, or have a conversation, please send me a voice memo through the Anchor link in the show notes. I think those are so fun. And I will feature your question, your prompt, your disagreement, in the next episode, so that we can have a dialogue because this is important. This is important stuff. And a lot of people are confused about how to do sales. I was confused for a very long time, and there's so much information, we're inundated with information that's exactly contradictory to the other side. So enjoy this episode and I'll see you next time.

MEAGHAN WALL:

Hi, everyone happy Wednesday morning. I hope everyone's having an amazing day. And if you're on the other side of the world and it's Wednesday evening, that's exciting too. Hello to the future people. How is the future treating you?

Let's talk about sales because there's a lot that I want to say. So first off, my sales are not your sales. And there's no right way to do sales, but there is a wrong way to do sales. And the only wrong way to do sales is to sell out of alignment with what feels good to you because the universe knows. The universe knows when you're operating out of misalignment and things will not work for you if you are out of alignment in your sales. So there are a few things that I want to say about what I've heard and what I've been taught about sales over my four years in business and it spans the spectrum.

So I've heard that cold DM-ing is like sexual assault. I've heard that it is nonconsensual, that it is rude, and that it's akin to being assaulted. Somebody I followed has said that and they used the R-word. I'm not going to use it for trigger warning purposes. And then on the other side of the spectrum, I've heard that cold DM-ing is the only way to be successful in your business. You must cold DM if you expect to get any clients. Both of those are not true. Both of those are very clearly, to me, a trigger and a block for those people in their businesses and in their alignment. So if ever you feel a trigger around anything in your life, that is something that you get to look closer at. That is something that you get to magnify and identify and work through.

So if you are so triggered by somebody sliding into your DM's and offering you support or trying to get you to join their program or their free challenge or whatever it is, that is something that you need to look at. Okay? Because most likely that person is just doing whatever their coach has told them to do. It's not a bad thing. They're trying out different sales techniques to see which one is in alignment with them. So I'll tell you how I react when somebody slides into my DM's.

So there are two different ways that I see cold DM-ing happening. So the first type of cold DM-ing that I see happening is somebody literally who has never interacted with me, never liked any of my stuff, never commented, never messaged me before, sliding in and sending me an entire pitch of like, "Hey, I'm doing this free challenge. I think you might be interested", yadda yadda, yadda. That's one way. I don't hate that because that's somebody who is unapologetic with their sales and that's someone who has prepared a statement. It's like an elevator pitch and a lot of people sell this way. A lot of people do, and it's not a bad thing. It can be a little jarring, to me, but for the most part, I'm like, "Wow, you did that. You chose to face your fear of rejection and slide into my DM's. Congratulations. I probably don't need your service, but I appreciate it."

The second type of cold DM-ing is interacting with somebody's posts and commenting and liking, signing in, and saying, "I love your stuff." Get to know them a little bit, have some niceties back and forth and then ask them if they need support around their money or whatever it is that you do. That to me is perfectly acceptable, as well as the first one because me offering support with their money is something they do not have in their real life. They've never had access to a safe space to talk about money.

So when it comes to money and really when it comes to any services that deal with shadow work, that deal with supporting somebody in their shame, supporting them their lack or in their blockage, there are people out there who simply will be thankful and let out a deep breath and a weight off their shoulders for you simply offering them support, regardless of whether or not they need it, regardless of whether or not they want it. Simply offering someone support around their shit is a lot more than a lot of people have.

I will say the third type of cold DM-ing is somebody who follows you. So I do this a lot with new followers, they're entering into your vortex. They have subscribed to your posts, those types of things, and simply jumping in and say, "Hey, thanks for the follow. This is what I do. Can I help you with that?" For me, that's super aligned. Someone following me, jumping into my vortex, and me reaching out to them. That is perfectly aligned.

And then there's this type of sales where you just stay on your page. You stay with your blinders on. You invite people into your program. They join if they want to. There's not much access reaching out. There's not much interaction with the audience, other than talking about your offer on your page. All of these are acceptable if they align with you. And I want to make that so clear because the only way you can sell in a wrong way is when it doesn't align with you. And how do you know that it's not going to align with you unless you try it?

So I'm going to tell you ways that I've fucked up when it comes to sales and maybe you can take these as learning opportunities for when you go forth into the world. So being too persistent is one thing that is not okay. When someone says, quote-unquote, "No", or, "No, thank you." Or, "I don't need you right now, but I'll reach out when I'm ready." And you continue to pitch thing after thing, after thing. Offer, "Hey, I have this group", "Hey, I have this freebie", "Hey, I have this challenge." That's only going to turn them off further. What I simply do is say, "Thank you so much for your time. It was an honor to meet you. I hope to stay in touch with you." And then maybe in a couple of weeks, if I'm thinking about them, I'll reach out and say, "Hey, I was thinking about you. I hope you're doing well since we last talked. What's new?" Simply, for the purpose of getting to know this person better and because there's only so much you can learn about somebody in an initial interaction.

So that's one way that I fucked up. So I'll give you a specific example. So there was this woman that I was chatting with. This was a couple of years ago now. She was very open with me about her money struggles. She was very transparent with me that she was not in a good place, financially and I sent her a message that was insensitive to that. I continued to ask her if she wanted to purchase bookkeeping services or whatever my program was at the time. And she immediately was like, "You're disrespecting my trust. You are disrespecting the container that we had set. I thought this was a safe space. I shared that with you with confidence and you took that and you disrespected it."

And that really hurt me. I was so distraught that I had done that to her and disrespected her space and disrespected her money and disrespected her story at the time. So I take that experience and I inform my everyday strategies with it all the time, every single day I think about that experience. I hope that you can take that and form your own story with that. I think that would be really important for you to do. Another thing that I will say is that I hired somebody to warm up my audience in the DM's. So if I've reached out to you in the last month or so, it was probably my new team member. She is reaching out to people that seem like they'd be in my niche so that I can reach more people and help more people. This is not about making more money. This is not about numbers in the bank.

This is about me reaching more people with my message. And as long as I believe that and as long as that is my purpose and my motivation, then that is aligned with me and I feel good about the way I sell. Everything I do, everything I am, everything I say is unapologetic to my brand mission, which is, be rich unapologetically. So how can I be timid or unsure or apologetic for the way that I sell and expect you guys, expect my clients, expect my audience, to be confident in their own sales, to be confident in their own message. I know that I can help you with your money because I know that I offer support. My beliefs do not have to be your beliefs for me to help you with your money because this is not me teaching you how to sell. This is me giving you the parameters to be able to figure it out on your own because how I sell, in the DM's, cold DM-ing people, trying to get to know people, networking and often I will buy from people that I'm cold DM-ing.

So I literally cold DM'd somebody the other day and was like getting to know them, "Hey, how are you? I loved your last post. What's going on? She was like, "Oh, hey. Yeah. I'm an executive assistant in New York and I am trying to break into the intuitive online space." And so we hopped on the phone and I was like, "You know, I've been looking for an assistant and I'd love to see if we fit." The initial intention of this conversation was for me to figure out if I could help her, but it ended up that she might have something that I wanted or that I needed. I've been manifesting and calling in an assistant near me. So she was in Brooklyn and I was like, "Oh my God, you're so close. Let's hop on a call." So it ended up not working out. We weren't aligned as far as like what she wanted to do and what I needed to be done, but I was able to add her to my permanent network. I'm going to be finding work for her to do because I have connections who need executive assistants, that need event coordinators.

So, it's not all about me. When I go into a sales conversation, it is a give and takes, it is reciprocal. And I truly believe that if you are sliding into the DM's, willing to sell somebody on your stuff, you should be willing to be sold back. I truly believe that if you slide into someone's DM's, wanting to help them, wanting them to buy from you and you get upset when they try to pitch you when they try to offer you something in return, that's not okay. You need to look at that. Yeah. So if you'd like to ask me any questions, I can do a Q and A style thing. Just drop them in the comments below and I'll talk to you later. Bye.

PODCAST OUTRO:

Thank you for listening to the Sacred Wealth Podcast. If you want to attract more money into your life, subscribe or follow Sacred Wealth wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you leave a five-star review on Itunes, it could be featured in a future episode, and be sure to share the podcast on social media when you listen. I'll see you next time.