What Is “Sales”?
In May of 2022, I had the fantastic opportunity to be a guest on Nathan Chanski’s podcast, “Passion with Purpose.” We talked about sales for over an hour—from my philosophy and approach to sales, to how I prepare for the sales call, even to how I tackle upselling and more. Over the next few months I’ll be posting parts from that conversation that I feel are important to share.
You can listen to the full podcast here.
*The dialogue has been edited for clarity and brevity.
_______________
Nathan Chanski: Let's talk sales. You talk about the fact that sales is so important. It's a bedrock of everything we do. For photographers, for service-based creatives, what does sales even mean for our business? What's the importance of it? How would you like encapsulate that?
Ellie McMakin: So, there's the standard textbook definition that you could look up on Google, but I'm framing everything from my perspective on what it means to me personally. I'm such an emotional person that I feel like everything I do and everything I try to teach is almost within the realm of sharing a little piece of me and what I personally feel about sales and my personal connection to it.
For me, sales has always been the art of winning over a HELL YES client, someone that maybe has never heard of you and then comes to know, like, and love you.
It’s the idea of not coercing someone, but connecting with someone. And I think that's where a lot of the confusion could lie, where it's almost a naughty word.
And listen, I will have people readily judge my TikTok or my Instagram, because of that negative connotation with it, and I'm totally fine with that.
My goal is to try and really change the way we view sales from something that's about sneakiness and coercion, into an opportunity to connect with people that we could have a really great relationship with. It’s really taking these people that we think we could do a killer job for and allow them to feel comfortable, to relate to them, and to inspire them for what's possible for them.
Nathan Chanski: Absolutely. We've all had situations where we think to ourselves, "Oh, I had a very bad sales experience with this person. And they sold me on this." And so some of us can tend to immediately go back to those places in our head, and then we associate that bad experience and that sleazy “they deceived me” experience with how we sell to people. When in fact, conversely, what we should be doing is remembering a situation where we were sold to by somebody, and then we had an incredible experience. Just reflect on that and be like, "I am so glad that that person was so persistent with me. And that person was gutsy enough to tell me, 'Hey, you need this.' And just kept coming back."
And so you have to get to that point where you're like, “Okay, I had an incredible experience with this brand or this person.” And you have to associate sales with that experience, because then you can really get to the point where you're like, “No I'm selling this person something that's best for them.”
Ellie McMakin: Absolutely. Similarly, we often tend to be so hard on ourselves, especially with the sales calls that we're in—but, man, when you're able to reach out to someone and connect with them in that way, just by being open to self-promoting in that way, doors open.
_______________
Did you enjoy that? This is just a taste of what’s to come!
For more help winning your HELL YES clients, I have a whole training on sales called “Effortless, Ethical Sales” going over how to do so (and more)! Check that out here.
For more from Nathan Chanski, you can follow him on TikTok or on Instagram.
Stay tuned for more updates from this conversation!
let’s meet up
follow for more
