103: Heather Havenwood – Empathy and Authenticity in Sales — Chris Spurvey

“At the end of the day, we all want to be and feel perfect, but we don’t want to buy perfect – unless we’re buying a Mercedes.

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Today’s guest is Digital Marketing Sales Expert, Heather Havenwood. Heather mentors coaches, experts, & service providers how to get media exposure to make more money.

As a sales and marketing expert, she helps entrepreneurs define the messaging, the marketing, the positioning, the packaging, & the media that is best for their business & life.

Read Heather's Full Bio

In this episode, we talk about:

her transition from being an employee to an entrepreneur,
the two things that people buy,
the two things entrepreneurs should focus on first before doing content marketing or Facebook ads,
moving the free line, and
empathy and being authentic.

I enjoyed every minute of our conversation and I hope you do too. Click that play button to listen!

Learning By Doing

I learned by doing; I didn’t really have a sales process. It wasn’t until years later that I started in the information marketing business and the seminar business, where I was traveling around the country doing 40-50 events every year, that I had to learn a process.

In that sales environment, I’m sitting in front of a room of strangers, and I had 90 minutes to get $3,000 out of their pockets. And if I didn’t get that money, we’re eating ramen noodles tonight. If we got that money, we’re eating Ruth’s Chris Steak. That was the choice I had.

That’s when I started to learn direct response copy, know, like and trust, connection, and how do you move someone in from the fence to closing the deal – all those little nuances got really fine-tuned there.

Two Things That People Buy

There are only two things that people buy: hope and confidence. It’s hope and confidence.

If you think about it, you’re sitting in a room, we say whatever we say, they give us three grand, and they walk out with a piece of paper, and they walk out with the potential in making money.

It’s the exact, same sales process that every university on the planet sells to the kids.

“If you go to our university, the potential of you coming out with a job, potentially, maybe, at $75,000/year, is higher than if you go to that university.”

Right? At the end of the day, a piece of paper.

Message, Market, Media

I work on three things with my clients: message, market, media.

The first thing is that message, which is all the sales side. And then who’s the market? Is the message and market matching? Where are they? Is it on Facebook ads? Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s on a thing called a phone call. Don’t go crazy on me, but it could be on LinkedIn; it could not be. It could be at trade shows; it could not be.

Before we ever get to where they are, you’ve got to make sure of the message and market.I work on those first two, and sometimes we’re on those for a long time because they’re not matching.

I can work on those for a while, until we get to the media buying. You can’t really get to media buying, which is all that is – the funnel-making, the Facebook ads, the email marketing, podcast – all those things are media. All those are media; all those are tools.

Email marketing, podcasting, Facebook ads, YouTube ads – those are tools. But if you don’t have the message and market right, step 1 and 2, it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it. It just doesn’t matter.

I work a lot on the first two, and then when they’re ready, I allow them to go to media buying.

Empathy

At the end of the day, we all want to be and feel perfect, but we don’t want to buy perfect – unless we’re buying a Mercedes.

If we’re hiring a coach or a consultant, we want to know that they’re going to give us the results, but we also want to know that they can understand our struggles and our concerns.