Listen to the full episode here: Apple, Spotify, and Amazon.

Our Main Points This Week: 

• The 4 common buyer types translated as buyer lover languages. Buyer lover languages that you can speak in every piece of content you create to influence your customer to MOVE in the customer journey

• The link between speed and trust to increase sales. Building speedy trust that you and your potential clients can immediately say check, check, check, that’s the person I want to work with

• 3 key steps to thriving in your sales strategy. Looking for clues in the sales conversations you’re having (and starting some, in case you’re not having any and your referral sources have dried up, word of mouth ain’t mouthing, and affiliates are busy promoting their own businesses)

The 4 Common Buyer Types Translated as Buyer Love Languages 

Thinking about buyer types can feel really overwhelming when you’re putting together a business strategy, a sales strategy, a marketing strategy and then applying consistently quarterly plans to achieve those goals.

It can feel like whatever your worst subject in school was where the teacher isn’t speaking in your learning language – maybe all audio and talking without slides or chalkboard work or vice versa. You’re left rushing to write down the words they’re saying while your brain is still trying to process them after hearing them auditorily.

Then you’re trying to grasp the concepts in the class and it feels like trying to swim against a strong current, with each stroke feeling like a battle against drowning in confusion.

Or perhaps understanding the material felt like trying to build a house in a hurricane, with each gust of information knocking down the fragile structure of comprehension before it could take shape.

Many clients have come to me with illuminated fear in their eyes because they’re interested in understanding their sales strategy and application better, but after an experience with another advisor or too many courses that have gone to die in their course graveyard… they’re hesitant to try again.

All of those experiences felt as though they were walking a tightrope with no safety net, trying to balance the weight of understanding while sweat dripped down their back with the heavy burden of embarrassment for falling behind.

I completely get it because I had this funky little wound growing up that I wasn’t smart or intelligent. Certain subjects were seen as more important in my household than those I was interested in. I’d excel with every English essay and superbly round my R’s in Spanish class. I’d ace psychology and garner my love for the world through the lens of science. My street smarts would keep me safe and/or get me out of safety before something worse happened, but math would be the thing that would influence me to feel like a little failure that was still sitting under the bright lamp at 9 pm trying to understand how to apply an equation enough to pass a test. 

This intelligence wound isn’t rare for female founders and if you’ve ever felt like you had to be the smartest in the room, you don’t. If you’ve ever felt like you should already know this then you’re actively putting yourself in a hyperactive state that’s aroused in a painful way. If you’ve ever felt like you should have known better while you missed some steps in your live launch that an expert would usually add in or double-down on then just know that you’re safe to not know something, to learn something, to learn some more, to fail forward, and deepen your language of knowledge within that subject. 

Bringing this conversation back around to buyer types and what I lovingly call buyer love languages, I just want to open this dialogue to start your thought process about buyer types, but we’ll bring more of this up in our next episode. And if you don’t want to wait for that episode, feel free to peruse our website and navigate to our sales course here. I love teaching about this subject and I know it’ll support your sales goals. 

Buyer Types as Buyer Love Languages:

• The Power Buyer
• The Friendly Buyer
• The Logic Buyer
• The Attention Buyer

The Power Buyer is interested in seeing how the purchase they make with you will elevate their status in the social playground. They’re interested in being seen as an authority in their own right, they disown hierarchical relationships, and they’re quick to share their points of view. They sit in the more logical stance of purchasing power and will be interested in social proof, analytics, case studies, and hard evidence that your process and products are working in the market as you proclaim they are. Luxury markets are often rooted in this buyer, as well as the Attention Buyer.

The Friendly Buyer is interested in being led. They’re interested in hearing your opinion and why you believe they would be a good fit for an offer and service. I see this buyer often fall from the customer journey before conversion because female founders may not invite this specific buyer to be in an experience to be led because there’s a desire for folks to just jump in and join without the handholding. Friendly buyers enjoy the hand-holding with online services in the same way that we might ask a boutique owner if they like one dress or another better on you or if they think this purse and these shoes go together.  

The Logic Buyer is interested in much of the same that the Power Buyer is, but if you try to console the logic buyer with emotion, persuade them, or stroke their ego then you will lose the sale. Whereas the Power Buyer has such an interest in status and exclusivity that they will be interested in an ego stroke more often than not. The Logic Buyer is all data in visual aids like graphs and spreadsheets and percentages. They’re going to ask about ROI more than anything else and they’ll very much consider their return on time as much as the return on investment. 

The Attention Buyer is interested in, you guessed it, attention. They want to feel like they are your VIPs, your OGs, your day 1’s regardless of where you go and grow. They’re interested in being seen, heard, and invited to be a part of the process of creating offers, marketing offers, selling offers, and are often your best affiliates and referral partners. Luxury markets love to market to this type of buyer, as well as the Power Buyer. 

The Link Between Speed and Trust To Increase Sales

A mini-guide to trust to speed up the conversion for you as a business owner and yet still handle the customer journey with best-in-class experience and service. 

There are expectations from your potential clients before they are ready to engage with a product or service, right? You have expectations in your own unique customer journey when you’re personally purchasing from other folks. 

Before you guide someone into an offer, service or product, consider these insights when you’re communicating directly with them:

• Engage in horizontal relationships instead of hierarchical relationships. 
• Don’t hide your body language.
• Pause on oversharing: unloading everything in your sales calls is overwhelming. 
• Silence/pauses/detailed listening: for the love of all sales, record your sales calls to review them like basketball games for errors.
• Little favors = reciprocity 
• First and last theory: first piece of info, last piece of info = remembered (similar to an interview) (first and last for sales calls) 

There’s a framework I teach within our sales course called speedy trust.

Here are the first few steps:

• I like you
• You seem honest
• You’ve got integrity
• You’ve done research (product/service/person knowledge)
• Proficient with tech and service
• Completely searchable and available platform to lurk (binge me like Netflix*) 

If you’re interested in learning more about applying the framework and seeing more of the framework, I invite you to purchase the course via the link below on our website. 

You’re in some ways already conducting this framework, but usually there’s one or two main points that just need a bit of refreshing and refining before the momentum cascades into potential clients truly paying attention. 

3 Key Steps to Thriving in Your Sales Strategy 

I really want to simplify this, especially if you’re in the season of searching for sales before you call it quits and head back to corporate. 

This market, your ideal clients, will need to study you for more than a few weeks during a live launch to decide that you’re the right fit for them.

While they’re studying your presence, let’s make sure that you’re positioned the way that will invite them to be interested in your work.

The key steps to thriving in your sales strategy, in 2024 and a cautious market, are:

• Overcome objections in your content, not once they’re approaching you to work with you. If you’re constantly overcoming objections on your sales calls, it’s a good time to evaluate those calls by reviewing the recordings or your notes post-call to see which objections need to be addressed through your content strategy, sales pages, and assets.

• Increase your social proof presence. A lot of our listeners use Instagram and Linkedin as their lead generating social platforms. If your featured section on Linkedin and highlights and pinned posts on Instagram are not currently focused on thought leadership to show your authority through third-party credibility, case studies that show how you supported your clients, and video testimonials or written testimonials in some form then this is your key reminder to go and updated those immediately. Please remember that social proof is further down the line in the customer journey, thus if you’re increasing the amount of screenshots you show on your Instagram stories while you’re also sharing your day-to-day process as a founder… you’re really helping the potential customer see you as a person AND as an authority. Both are equally important.

• Dig deeper into your clients’ psychology than ever. One of my favorite exercises to do when I’m stuck on which topic to talk about first within our marketing plan is to consider the last 6 months of data from a high-level view with clients – I like to go back through our consulting notes to see what I wrote down as red flags for content production. Then I love to review more recent data from the last 30-ish days via DMs, email responses, and communication between myself and clients and the communities to pull hyper-relevant problems to see everything in a venn diagram in my mind of what folks were struggling with 6 months ago and what they’re working on right now. Digging deeper into your clients’ psychology then moves from just problems they’re working on to the sentiments and actions or lack thereof that they’re experiencing week over week. 

Here is an example of the third point of digging into clients’ psychology in reference to our clients. We worked with a client for about a year and I noticed that she would set extreme expectations on herself, the business, and her team to the point that they were continuously failing to execute their marketing, sales, and PR efforts. The bar wasn’t just set too high, but instead was set in hell, to be frank. 

The team was exhausted, to the point of asking this client if this was ever going to change.

The founder was constantly in a state of fight or flight and recognized that soon her body would move into freeze – in a state of disease or sickness – because she was constantly in a state of exhaustion, execution, and repeat. 

I started weaving in these stories to our Instagram stories and email campaigns and the responses that returned were immediate and resounding “me too, I’m doing this and I feel like a failure because I know I’m the problem.”

Did I call potential clients and the client the problem? No.

They called themselves the problem. 

Which is actually a systems and leadership challenge that has now been endured for long enough and we’ve got to get out of the war of constantly being on the frontlines instead of the general in tent deciding how to strategically execute their plans.

I’d rather call this reverse-psychology than just psychology alone, to be honest.

This takes time to build, but once you sharpen this skill… marketing campaigns, PR pitches, sales campaigns… all of it becomes a fluid conversation between you and the clients that are waiting for your help. You’ll no longer stare at a cursor on Google Docs waiting for you to write, your marketing plan spreadsheet won’t lack topics that are absolutely relevant to your ideal clients, and your day-to-day exhaustion habit with 2.5 cups of coffee, a HIIT workout, and sob session at your desk will start to be eliminated. 

You deserve to feel at peace in your business.

You deserve to feel productive in your business.

You deserve to see profitability in your business at an all-time high without the high of cortisol and adrenaline shooting through your veins like a sick entrepreneur drug that you can’t go without. 

If you feel called to learn more about sales psychology, how to apply it with a calm nervous system, how to blend it into your marketing plans, and lay the foundation for a legacy filled with clients that stay in the brand and refer their friends, too, then you’ll love our sales course, The Timeless Sales Method® Course. Find the sales course here.

Resources:

Listen to the full episode here: Apple, Spotify, and Amazon.

The Timeless Sales Method® Course

Bio:

Ashleigh Henry has been in marketing, sales, and leadership positions for the last decade and it was exhilarating for Ashleigh to climb the retail, corporate, higher education, and start-up ladder holding positions such as Marketing Strategist, Copywriter, Social Media Strategist, Manager, Editor, Co-Editor…until it wasn’t. Alongside her degree, Ashleigh decided to bring all of her experience into the freelancing world until it became clear that she didn’t just want to pay the bills – she wanted to create a company that was foundationally built on cheetah print, legacy-minded marketing, and sexy sales structures that could stand the test of trend and time. The Cheetah Company, founded by Ashleigh, does this for female entrepreneurs through their education, coaching, and consulting services. Learn more about Ashleigh here.