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Courage & Clarity
200: (SECOND HALF SERIES) How to CLOSE More Sales: 5 Things No One Else Told You
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Hey there. Before we get into today's episode, I want you to know the sold out group programs. Mastermind is open for enrollment until Friday, July 17th. This is our cohort that will be kicking off this August for an entire year of all of the curriculum and trainings, twice weekly coaching, regular feedback and more that you need to start sell out and scale your group program. Whether you have a group right now or you don't have one yet, but you think that's something you want to go to here in the near future, I want to invite you to put in an application you can go to stephcrowder.com mastermind now is such an amazing time to join us in SOGP because the price is going up by $2,000 in our next enrollment period this fall and we are also doing our first ever live clients only event in October here in Louisville, Kentucky of my hometown. It's a optional event, it's just a bonus, you don't have to come, but it is included in your enrollment. So again, Steph crowder.com mastermind get that application in. Even if you're not sure and you're just thinking about it. It's something that you and I can discuss and kind of make a plan for what it might look like to work together so you can decide. All right, let's get into today's episode. Welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go. Welcome to today's session. This is day three of what we are calling the second half series. So this is a podcast drop that I have been putting together all week where we are really going item by item for five days this week, Monday through Friday, talking about the five key areas I would inspect with you if I were your business coach, if you came to work with me inside the sold out group programs. Mastermind, which is currently open for enrollment. We are open for enrollment through Friday and it's Been so exciting having so many great conversations with business owners across all different industries. We've been welcoming new clients. Some of our current clients have been resigning. So it's been a really exciting time. And I wanted to create this series knowing that it's July and we're halfway through the year, which is so wild. It's going to go so fast from here. It always does. And we're calling it the second half series because, of course, it's the second half of the year. And I love the idea of asking the question, what are the things that you would do that I would instruct you to do or coach you to do in your business? If you told me, I want to finish the second half of this year stronger than the first half, I want to double my results over the next six months. What are the things that I should do? And so I really sat down and came up with five key areas that, again, if I were your coach, I would want to be diving into with you. I'd be coaching on with you to make sure that you kind of have these on your radar and that you're working on these actively to create the result of being wherever you want to be at the end of this year and kind of picturing yourself on that, like New Year's Eve with the ball dropping. And you've just made yourself so proud. You've made your wildest dreams come true. And you're like thinking back to where you were in July and thinking to yourself, I cannot believe I was able to have something such a strong second half. Okay, so we've covered two days so far. You can catch those. I'm doing this on Instagram Live and I'm also recording this out on a as a podcast. You can go back and listen to days one and two on the podcast, the Courage and Clarity Podcast. You can search that up wherever you get your podcast. But for today, we are getting into day three. Okay, so the third area that I would absolutely like, no, non negotiably, be working on with you if you wanted to create this result of having a super strong second half is you've got to work on your sales fundamentals. Okay, so let's break this down. We're going to get really brass tax and I'm going to share some really solid, like, tangible things that you need, kind of like a checklist of things that you need to make sure you are really strong in in order to be sure that you're doing everything that needs to be done on the sales fundamentals side of things. Okay. So what I see all the time when I'm having conversations with, again, you know, online business owners, coaches, creators, online teachers, course creators across all industries is you would be amazed how often successful business owners actually have really shaky sales skills. Okay. It's actually the most common gap that I see when I first meet clients. And I think that's probably really surprising for you to hear because you're like, they're making money. How is that possible? In a lot of cases, they're actually working two times as hard, five times as hard, ten times as hard as they could be, or, you know, harder than they need to be to get the results that they have. And that's because they're trying to overcompensate for a deficit in their sales skills. So this is how you can end up feeling like you're working like a dog and not really getting the results that you want, or your. Or your group is underperforming, or maybe you feel pretty good about where you're at, but you feel maxed out in terms of your effort. You definitely want to take a look at your sales skills, because think about it. If you could be converting better, if you could get more of your leads and more of your prospects to actually become paying clients, that's going to solve a lot of your issues. Because it's. I think the hardest part is getting leads and prospects. Right. Once you can get good at converting, if you've gotten them that far in the process, it's a real shame to be fumbling. Half of the people that come to you or 60%, 70% of the people who come into your store, so to speak, right. Your online store, they just walk right back out the door without buying anything. That's a real kind of like leaky bucket that you have in your business. Okay, so we're going to talk about, specifically when I think about sales fundamentals in tomorrow's session for day four, we're going to talk about enrollment systems, which, which is how you sell at scale. But when I talk about sales fundamentals, I'm actually talking about individual sales conversations. Because even if you are a business owner who is a hundred percent in group offers, you're going to be needing to have individual sales conversations. Sometimes that happens on sales calls, sometimes that happens in dms, sometimes it happens in the chat box on your webinar. There are going. People are going to have questions, and you want to be able to close them in conversation. Okay? So really understanding the mechanics and the psychology of what is a high converting one on One sales conversation is going to absolutely be the thing that just skyrockets your ability to close. So I think that's another way to think about today's session is about like, how good are you at closing? Right? Like you might be somebody who's great at attracting. You might be somebody who's got some traffic and got some eyeballs. But if you're not so strong on closing again, your business is going to underperform and it's going to be way more work than it needs to be. When I think about my own story and my own success, my sales call skills are the real reason that I'm, I think that I'm really successful and I think, you know, becoming really, really good at the mechanics of these conversations, which I'm going to get into, has been the superpower that has allowed me to have back to back six figure launches every time I go to launch, even though I don't have a huge audience, right? Like my Instagram following has been around 5,000 forever. My email list has been around 3,000 forever. That might sound like big numbers to some of you, but it's really not, not in the scheme of things. If you think about having six figure launches every time I launch for the past four years, right? So, so when I think about closing and when you think about closing, I want you to think about this analogy of like hand to hand combat. Please forgive the violence, but just go with me. Like if you learn, I don't know, like different fighting styles or something, hand to hand combat versus some other, you know, like if you, if there, if you were fighting off a crowd of people, there's a lot of ways that you could do that. Hand to hand combat would be one, right? Not that we're fighting people in our sale, in our sales conversations, but just go with me, right? It's like that's the individual, sort of like one to one, you're like in the ring with one person. This is that skill that you would need, right? You have to know what to do if you're in that scenario. So closing individual sales is a skill, it's not a personality trait. And that's the first thing that you need to know. I think that's the first like lethal mistake that I see business owners making is believing the lie that, oh well, that person's just really good at sales because they look a certain way or because they have a certain extroversion or they have a certain just kind of magnetism to them. And I don't have that. Okay, super disempowering for us to think that way. Because if it's a personality trait, I guess you just have to wait to be reincarnated to see if you're good at sales next time. There's nothing you can do to control it. And it is a hundred percent my experience that you can learn, you can learn to be amazing at sales. The best salespeople are not always and are often not the person that you're picturing when you think about who's good at sales. I always tell this story that when I was in my sales training days back at Groupon, I think about some of our top sales reps and some of them were the schmoozy wolf of wall street type that you're thinking of. But some of them were so opposite. They were kind of nerdy, they were kind of soft spoken. Some of them would have genuinely surprised you. You would have been like, really? You're a like multi million dollar sales closer. And when you would get in there and listen to the way that they conducted their sales, they were actually the best listeners. They were the best at asking questions. They were the most curious, they were the most charismatic in so being really great at sales and being able to close people in a one on one setting. I'm not talking about one on one offers. Just so we're clear, like you, like, I have one on one sales conversations for my group programs. Okay? So this is a skill that everybody needs. I need you guys to know you can't outwork this. You can't outrun this. I know a lot of us are like, I don't want to have to do that. But the truth is, and if. If other coaches won't tell you this and won't be honest enough with you to share this, I will be the one to tell you there is no getting around this. People, especially in 2026, they want to have a conversation with you. Maybe not everyone, maybe some people are, you know, so magnetized by your marketing and your marketing's doing a great job and you have killer messaging and you have product market fit and all of these amazing things. There will be some people who are ready to go and they don't need to talk to you. But we have, we are. We find ourselves in a moment where buyers are very discerning. They have been burned before. They have made investments that they don't feel great about. They need to be sure that they're not gonna repeat those mistakes. And a lot of them want to speak with you again, whether that's a sales Call. Sales calls are personally my favorite way to do this. I know it sounds like, oh my gosh, there'll be so much time to do sales calls, but it's actually paradoxically ends up being the most direct way to close people. Sometimes it's like, you know, oh, you can close people in the DMs I've had. You know, I have a lot of experience with that as well. And sometimes we'll be DMing back and forth with people for like a week. Right. Whereas you could just get on one 45 minute sales call and have a buyer with a decision at the end and they buy from you like the second you send them the link after the call. Okay. So don't be so quick to think like sales calls are unsustainable or sales calls don't fit on my calendar. You might actually be really surprised when we compare it to other forms of closing and how those might actually be more expensive, both in terms of your time as well as just being ineffective. Right. So, okay, I want to talk about why this matters. Whether you have a one on one offer or group program. Okay. So inside of sold out group programs, I teach, I, we have a sales call training. I'm going to get into a little bit of what makes it so powerful. This one training that I have has made my clients thousands and thousands of dollars. It's the sales call process that I use to have an 86% close rate on average. And so we're going to talk about, like I said, some of the mechanics of that. But the reason why, just to hammer this home, I touched on it a little bit. But why you want to be thinking about these, being good at closing in this environment and being good at sales calls, whether you are doing one on one or a group is because like I said, people are going to have questions. People are going to want to make sure it's the right fit for them. They are going to want to feel like they've cleaned up all of their objections and all of their garbage and all of their concerns. So, so that you can get off to a great start with them. I actually love, I don't require sales calls and some people will sign on with me without doing them, which is totally fine. But when people do take me up on having a sales call, it often becomes what feels like the first, like my first coaching session with them. Right. Like I will think back to that first call. It becomes foundational for the work that we're going to do together. Okay. So to get into the inspection that I want you to do. Because remember, this whole series is about helping you finish this year stronger than you started. And if, if you were to sit down and be like, okay, I hear you, Steph. I want. I get it. I want to get better at closing clients. I need to get better at closing clients. How do I do that? I want to walk you through the stages of a sales conversation. Okay. There are five key elements that happen. I'm thinking about sales calls in particular. So let's just talk about sales calls. You could apply these if you have a closing mechanism that is different than a sales call more to you. But for my clients who are selling, you know, offers that are above $3,000, I think it's really worthwhile to have a sales call available. Okay. Again, whether you're selling one on one or group programs. And there's five areas. Is it five? I'm looking at my notes. Yes, there's five. Five areas. These really mirror my five step sales call process that I teach. Again, this comes from Groupon training days. This comes from me standing in front of hundreds and hundreds of people every single week and being on so many phone calls to help you really understand how the psychology of the sale will flow so that you can increase. Like, if you're gonna take the time to have the conversation, we want it to go. We want it to be. If it's a good fit, right? It's all about finding the right fit. And sometimes it's not. I've been having sales calls this week and there have been multiple people where I've said, hey, I don't think this is the right fit for you right now. And that's perfectly okay. So it's never about forcing anybody to do anything. It's never about convincing any. Is never about that at all. It's always about finding a fit and helping people get to the yes. Because one thing I want to tell you before we get into the five things that I'm always reminding my clients of, and I'm reminding myself of as well, is that if somebody is taking the time to have a sales call with you, they most likely want to be able to say yes. Right? Something is preventing them from being able to say yes. It might be a big obstacle, it might be a small obstacle, it might be just logistical questions, or it might be really big scary thoughts that they're having. But if they are spending time in their busy life getting on a zoom call with a stranger, I promise you, they are hoping that they're going to be able to say yes. Okay. I think even just starting there, knowing that you're on the same page, you want to work with them and they want to be able to work with you, but something's getting in their way that will create a different energy and a different confidence from you to be like, okay, this person wants to be a yes. I'm going to go into this conversation and see if I can help them get there. Right. Okay. So the first thing is I want you to inspect your leadership of the call and how you frame it. Okay. Specifically how you are framing the call to. And ask yourself, am I being really clear with the person on the other side that this is a decision making call? This is one of the number one things I see when my clients will come to me in Solacu programs. They're like, you know, I'm getting maybes or I'm getting people who are like, let me follow up. And I'm having to do follow up calls with you. My sales call process, there's no follow up calls. Okay. There's one call and it's a decision call. And if you have people who are not coming to a yes or no by the end of the call, you have an issue with how you are framing it. So I want you to inspect that. I want you to look at what is coming out of your mouth in those opening minutes when they're looking at you like, okay, so like, what are we doing on this call? And that's your opportunity to lay out the road map. You want to be able to say and tell them in words that are natural and not weird and not pushy, that this is like, what's gonna happen on this call is that by the end they're gonna have the clarity they need to have their decision. Now inside of sold out group programs, in my sales call training, I teach you exactly how to say this. The words that you can use. You can borrow my way of framing it. It's very popular and my clients will hear it and they're like, okay, that's so natural. I can totally do that. That right there will change your sales call conversions right away. Okay? So that's the first thing your leadership of the call. Are you driving or they. I always say being in on a sales call is like going for a ride where your prospect is in the passenger seat. And prospects do this thing when they get nervous where they're going to reach over if they don't think you're driving. They're like, who the. Who's driving this car? You got to show them you are driving the car, you know where you're going and everybody's safe. If they get the sense that you don't know how to drive, they are going to do what any of us would do. Sitting in a passenger seat of somebody who didn't know how to drive. You're going to reach over and grab the steering wheel. We don't want them to do this. As soon as they've done this, you've lost control of the call. You can get control back. So don't panic. But you want to start out by signaling to them, I'm driving. I know how to drive. I've driven many times. And I got you. You don't need to reach over here, Sit back, relax, look out the window. Right? That's the vibe that we're wanting to give off. Okay. That's the first thing. The second thing is you need to assess your ability to conduct a thorough needs assessment and ask the right questions. You may have heard it said before that whoever is asking the questions in a sales call is the person with the upper hand. Okay. You want to be the person asking the questions. Not that they're not going to ask questions. They are going to get to ask their questions, but you are going to want to ask more, even more questions than they are. Sometimes people get on sales calls and they kind of just let it be like a free for all of like, okay, what questions do you have for me? Again, that goes back to leadership. That's not you leading the call. If you want to be non sleazy and you want to have sales calls that feel really great and that your people actually are like, my people will tell me, I have been to sales calls and I hate sales calls, but I loved yours. And that is because I think of the work that, that the needs assessment does. Okay. When you do a thorough needs assessment, this is all about getting to the bottom of their actual problems so that you can come up with a plan that they will be really excited to work on with you. And they're like, oh my gosh. Yeah, I, that's, that's what I want. Right? You're not going to offer up the right solution if you're not customizing it to their problems. So you have to know how to do that very thorough needs assessment. And again, with my sales call training inside of so gp, I show you exactly how to do this and then how to map what comes up in the needs assessment to sharing a game plan with them. Okay. The third thing you need to inspect is how good of a job are you doing? Getting all of their questions out. And when I say questions, I really mean objections. A lot of times objections are framed as questions where they're like asking you a question, but there's something behind it. Like they actually have a thought about it, right? So an example of this might be for group programs. It's like, how many people are in your group, right? And it makes you wonder, like, why are they asking that? Have they been in groups that were really small and awkward and nobody was like ever. It was like dead? Have they been in groups that were hundreds and hundreds of people where they felt lost and they never saw the head coach? Like, what is actually behind their question? If you are letting people get off the call with questions that they didn't ask and questions that they didn't get answers to, that means that there are objections still hanging out there that you have not cleared. And people cannot be a yes if we don't clear out all their objections. So that one is huge. The fourth one is definitely a favorite of mine. And this is a big skill to learn. I guarantee most of you are going wrong with this one unless you really know what you're doing. But getting an answer on the call, if you're having to do a lot of follow up, if you're having to have a follow up call, if you're having to chase people down, you're not getting an answer on the call if they need to go. Think about it. If they need, if they're a maybe. Right? And getting an answer on the call is not like forcing. I want to be so clear. It's not forcing people. Yes or no. Right. Again, it goes back to how we framed it where we are just doing everything we need to do on the call to the point where there's no further deci. Like, why delay making the decision? Now sometimes people will say, I'm a yes or I'm feeling really good about this, but I want to sleep on it. Okay, that's completely different and totally fine. If that's like someone's personal policy, we're not like asking that. I don't really believe in asking people to get their credit card out and buy right now. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about being emotionally closed. I can tell when somebody's emotionally sold. When I say closed, I mean like sold, right? I can tell when they're a yes. I don't worry about them taking a couple days because I'm like, they're there emotionally. They can take. They Need a couple of days, it's fine. Right? But you'll know, you'll know if somebody's at that point or if they're like, thanks so much for the information, I'll get back to you, my friend. You did not get to an answer on that call. Ok? So you've got to have a process for getting there again in a way where you never feel pushy, you never feel gross, you never feel like you're stepping outside of your personal boundaries of what it is to be a good human. I think you can do actually, I know you can do this in a way that is actually so in service to the, to the prospect because they don't need to spend the next two to three days wasting their brain power on this decision. Actually the most service minded thing you can do is help them make the decision right here and now. Yes or no, right? Like it's actually not helpful if they have to go and hem and haw for the next 48 to 72 hours. You're telling yourself that you know that's their right and that's what's better for them, but it's actually not better at all. What would be better is if they had everything they needed to feel amazing about their decision making right there on the call. Okay. And then the last thing you need to inspect is how good of a job are you doing providing next steps and closing with confidence, never being pushy. Okay? By the end of the call, you should have the answer. If it's a yes, you should be providing next steps. They should know exactly what to do and they should be ready to pay pretty much right away. Unless they told you they're going to sleep on it or whatever and you just know that that's going to close and you don't feel weird about it and you don't feel like you're having to like give a closing argument. Like this is some kind of, you know, law and order. It's nothing like that at all. It is literally like they're a yes and you're walking them through the next steps. So those are the five things that if you want to get better at closing, and I believe that you do, okay. I don't think I've ever met a prospect who was like perfect at closing and they didn't need to fix anything. This is very much an emerging skill set for most online business owners. Most of y' all haven't been sales trainers at a top tech company, right? And have this hours and hours and hours of practice at this and So I want you to inspect those five areas. Where are you weak right now? And just know that this is exactly the work that we do inside of sold out group programs. Not only do I train you on exactly how to do this, but you can come to a call and tell me, how did it go? Where did it break down? What are the patterns you're seeing? If you have five calls and they're all behaving like you're seeing a pattern across them, we need to troubleshoot that. If you want to and are able to even record a call and you can submit that for feedback, right? Like we can listen to a sales call for you and give you direct feedback on what we think you should change. So this is such an important skill and it's a big, big part of how you are going to finish the year stronger than you started. A lot of my clients will come in and create the result of three new clients sold, five new clients closed, seven new clients closed in the first couple of months. And a big part of that is because they are getting so good at getting sales calls booked and then closing them, whether that is for their one on one or for their group programs. So you have to know something really important. You. If you're somebody who's like wanting to scale, you can't scale. What? You can't close. Okay? If you don't know how to close, you can't scale, right? If you can, I always say if you can get one person to say yes. If you can sell to one person, then you can sell to 10 people. And if you can sell to 10 people, you can sell to 20 people. And if you can sell To 20 people, you can sell to 100 people. You can have as many clients as you want. But it starts with your ability to just close the one. Too many people are skipping over of this. Too many people are thinking that they can just blast past this and go to group and hope that it all works out. But if you don't know how to close one person, you're never going to reach the numbers that you dream of in your offer. Whether that's a one on one offer, a group offer, or really any offer at all. So my friends, as I said, Sold Out Group Programs is open for enrollment through this week. At the time of this recording, we are open through Friday, July 17th. I am so excited to welcome this next cohort. It's going to be a really, really great time to be in the program because we're kicking off in August. We're getting our cohort together this week. We kick off officially in August and we are going to get to plan the rest of the year together. When we kick off on our very first meeting, we're doing a group VIP together. We typically plan for 90 days, but believe it or not, by the time we get to mid August, we're pretty much talking about the rest of the year. So on day one, you are going to walk away knowing what you're doing, what your goals are, what your money making activities are, and you have started such an incredible opportunity to finish this year so much stronger than you started. Whether you like your results right now and you're really happy with where you are, but you just want more or you kind of wish you were further along and you're wanting to have a little bit of a second half comeback. We love a comeback story. If you're a sports fan. Come on. Comebacks are the best and it's totally available to you. So you can go to Steph crowder.com/mastermind, fill out an application. Even if you're not sure you and I can have a call together, I will be personally reviewing your application. You will have the option to have a one on one conversation with me where we will talk through every nook and cranny of what the next year would look like for you. And if you're listening to this in the future and you see a wait list box, pop your name in that wait list because we will have a special offer for our wait list in the future and you definitely don't want to miss it. Okay, friends, I am wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love. I'll see you next time. For day four.