A New Strategy for Selling the Intangibles

No matter what you sell, you're always selling the intangibles. Listen in as Master Coaches and Superabound co-founders Erin and Steve share a new strategy for selling intangibles that may help you. 

To discover your business bottleneck with the free Business Growth Grader, click here. It takes about 5 minutes and will unlock new growth possibilities for you.

Video Transcript

Steve Haase  0:00  
Hey, everybody, nice to see you here behind the scenes.

Erin Aquin  0:04  
It's truly behind the scenes, our kids are home for a day off school. I'm in my workout gear, we're just like hanging out. So thanks for being here.

Steve Haase  0:15  
Today we're going to talk about a new sales strategy that we are testing out. And it is around the topic of episode 222 from the podcast, around selling the intangibles.

Erin Aquin  0:27  
what we talked about on that episode, if you haven't watched it is that basically everything you sell, comes back to some kind of intangible, it comes back to something that your potential customers your clients want to feel when they buy your product. I had a really cool experience, I was watching ads on Instagram, as I was scrolling the other day, and there was a video talking about, like a composter that sits on your counter. And I've seen this product a million times, it's been like shown to me on the various websites that sell it. I have never ever once considered buying this. But in the video, the person talking about it said, Listen, I know what you're thinking, How is something that plugs into your wall, better for the environment than just putting something on the curb? Getting your compost picked up every week. And then they kind of talked about the trucks that have to come and drive it and like where does that compost actually end up versus this little thing that sits on your counter that you can take the compost when all the food is I don't know, decomposed, decompose, yeah, in a couple of hours, you have like fresh soil for your garden. So I didn't buy it yet. But knowing me, I probably will. But they did such a good job at selling to me the intangible, when people had just shown me a product and told me what it does. I was not that interested, because I was not in the market looking for that specific thing. But when you told me a little bit more about how we could be more environmentally responsible, and how it could help my garden be better in the summer, I was more bought in as a potential customer. And probably because I watched that ad, they will be sending me more ads as we know how social media marketing works.

Steve Haase  2:30  
But it's fascinating how the thing they sold was not grow better flowers, or even be a better steward of the Earth. It was speaking to that single objection that Erin had of well, how does this make sense? Right? I don't get it. Right. And so they're they're putting a puzzle piece together in the mind of their prospect after having had lots of conversations with people to understand, what are the hang up to what is it that you actually want. And in this case, it's having a great garden and being environmentally responsible in the process.

Erin Aquin  3:07  
So that brings us to the topic of what we wanted to share with you for our behind the scenes just for our collective. Really talking about strategies for selling the intangible, we are coaches, and we help people create a more harmonious business and life. We do not teach tools that have people burning out. So we do not specifically teach like aggressive sales strategies to get people to their next milestone, we kind of look after we're the stewards of the whole business, and we help our clients become better stewards of their own business. Because we work with so many impactful business owners, we want to help them create legacy businesses. So when I tell someone that they might not know what that means, that maybe is a hard sell. So there are definitely some clients who get it immediately. And they will join something like our mastermind. But if I tried to sell you like, hey, come hang out with us, me and Steve, who you may not know that well, for six months, and we're going to spend that six months talking about your vision and your values and letting that inform your your decisions. And then probably because of that you're going to make more money and you're going to have a happier time at work and you're going to see your family more. It's very intangible. It's very nebulous. And for us to say like, do you want to spend $10,000 to do that? The average person, the moment they meet us probably it's probably no.

Steve Haase  4:54  
And so to help deliver some of that value before they spend that money and also get a sense of what that means in their life and their business, we have created a new tool that we're calling the business growth grader, to walk people through six of the fundamental areas of running a business owning a business, to help them understand what their bottlenecks in those areas might be, and which one of them might be causing the most impediment to their growth.

Erin Aquin  5:27  
And this is a strategy that I think anyone watching this video can use, you might not need to create a growth grader. That's a really specific to the next course that we are selling and the products that we have. But if you think in your mind's ear or in the minds of your potential customer, what are some of those objections? What are some of those things that are bottlenecks in your business, maybe that you're not articulating, in a way that someone could come in and understand. And I want to be clear, we don't ever go out and say, like little quippy sentences like we help businesses go from six to seven figures in 30 days. That is like very icky to me, I don't like being sold those types of things. And it's never our sales approach. But because it's not super direct, sometimes. The intangible takes a different kind of relationship. So you have to think about what you are selling, and how your clients, your customers, potentially, what kind of journey they need to be walked along, to create a safety device with you.

Steve Haase  6:46  
Speaking of safety, it's time to go watch after those kids, thank you for getting there getting around getting rambunctious. Take a look at the business growth creator, we would love to walk you through it as well get an experience of of what we are putting out into the world and see how that can help you grow your business as well.

Erin Aquin  7:05  
And then take that back and think about like, what is the strategy? What is kind of the puzzle piece that I might need to solve for my potential clients? And how could I try that? Like this is not just an invitation to go through our Grader I would love for you to do that. But also to think like, what, we'll bring this home so people understand how we do business, what we're really giving them, how can we create a process for giving that intangible or giving a little glimpse of that intangible thing that our clients and customers want? How can we give that to them before they ever spend a cent?

Steve Haase  7:46  
Awesome. Thanks for listening.

Erin Aquin  7:48  
See you around. Have a great week.