There's two types of people who hear consensual sales in the first go, Oh, Eww, Shawna, that is not what you want to say. There are better words to use and the second type here, consensual sales and say, you know what? You're right. I don't want to talk my way into the sale. I don't want to memorize a script. You just want to work with clients who are excited to work with you. Now that's consensual sales.
For me personally, it's important that I sell something every single day. Like I just had this obsession and I love it. Sales I want to sell. It's important to me. It's like a goal that I have that I'd be able to sell something every single day. But a lot of times, not every single person that I speak to is like ready for my signature offer. Right? But that doesn't mean that I can't help them and it doesn't mean that I still don't have a solution available to them.
(00:52): So from time to time I have these backdoor offers where like, I'll show you how to create offers on the fly. Actually should I share how you can create offers on the fly? In my signature program speakeasy. And I do it too. I do it right alongside you. And so a couple of weeks ago I created one of these backdoor on the fly offers to a small group of people who needed help with their emails, right? So people who are like, I'm sending emails but I just like, I don't know what to say and, and I wish that somebody could review them. So once a week they submit one email and I review it with them and then we rewrite it together. And so it's meant to help you improve but also really learn some fundamental principles about copy. And I realized that not all copy is the same, right?
(01:36): But I'm talking about the kind of emails where you're like, you're trying to get somebody to do something to take action. And so I want to talk to you about some common mistakes that came up in the small group that I want to share with you specifically around copying your emails. And you can take this and run with it and do with it as you please. So I've got three common mistakes when it comes to writing emails where you want someone to take action. Okay. So I love Minnesota. I lived there my whole life before my husband relocated us for work purposes a couple of years ago. My whole family is there. I went to school there, I met my husband there, his family's there. We bought our first house. They're like, we love everything Minnesota. And those of you who don't know, Minnesota also is the state that has mall of America and the mall of America is super awesome.
(02:28): I don't know, I've never fact checked this. So somebody fact check this for me, but I have heard that mall of America gets more tourists than like the grand Canyon and Disneyland. What's the other one? Oh, Mount Rushmore. Like all of these major American tourists attractions, like combined, like if you combined all of them, all of America still gets more tourists there every single year. So it's a great place, right? Like there's just so much awesome stuff to do there. Anyway. The first floor of a mall. America has these kiosks, right? It's like a kiosk little like sales shops where there's people standing there like trying to make eye contact with you as you're navigating through the mall and they sell it. They'll still like pillow pets. They'll sell calendars. Maybe they'll sell Sterling silver, like whatever. But there's one in particular who always has those curling irons and hair straighteners and be like, anytime I know exactly where they are in the mall, maybe you do two of your from Minnesota or have visited mall of America but you like try to avoid eye contact with those people and you don't want them to touch your hair.
(03:32): Like I don't need my hair straight. I don't need this one random curl. Like please, Oh my gosh. Just like it's so awkward. And this relates to your copywriting because the first mistake that I've seen in this email club is your speak like your offer when you are talking about your offer comes out of nowhere. And I want to talk about this. When you're writing, it's easy to just start talking about like what you want to talk about. You want to talk about your offer. Like that's the point of view selling your email. And so a lot of times that's how we'll start our emails. Like, Hey, I have this special, or Hey, I have a promotion, or Hey, did you know that I'm opening the cart for this thing? Or right now his enrollment period, it's all about you and like what you're doing. Or in this case it's like the kiosk person trying to curl your hair.
(04:22): Like, Hey, I'm here. I can curl your hair. It's like, what? So the very first thing is, is that your offer, do you need to set the stage? Your offer has to have some place to land in the conversation. It has to make contextual sense. You have to get the reader in the right frame of mind to receive what you are saying. Right? So this happens with me and my kids too, right? So maybe I'm not like, I'm not even out of bed. And they'll come into my bedroom and they'll be like, Hey mom, what are we having for dinner? Hey mom, can I paint? It's like, what? No, like you cannot ask me that right now. Like I have to get up, like I want to get dressed, I want to have my coffee, I want to like, I want to have a moment to think.
(05:13): And so there's things that have to happen before you can even like speak about your offer and it has to come from their perspective, right? It can't come from yours and it can't come out of nowhere. Just like comedians have to set the stage before they tell a joke. You have to do that too with your audience. So, okay, so that's the first mistake, which leads into the second mistake is how do you set the stage, right? And it's, there's a lot in this second mistake that I needed to, I mean, and maybe this one should be split into three different mistakes. So how do you create the place for it to land? And this is the second thing. Is that what you're leading with? Does it create curiosity? It doesn't get anybody to go, Oh, that's me. And for you to set the stage, like for somebody to give you attention, they must read what you're saying and say, Ooh, that's me.
(06:14): Because the only way to get your potential clients attention is to repeat back what they're thinking and feeling. It's just imagine if, imagine that I woke up this morning, I have to get five kids to school, but one open the fridge and took out four eggs and I had to clean it all up and then everybody was late for school. Right. That could easily happen for, it's happened, I'm sure. But let's say now that I'm scrolling on Facebook, I'm looking through an email and somebody says, are you a mom who woke up this morning with eggs on your floor because your kids went into the fridge and threw them out on the floor for like no reason. And then it turned out that you had scrambled to get them to school and everybody was late. Like, what do you think is going to happen as a reader?
(07:04): As I'm reading that I'm going to stop and I'm going to say, Oh my gosh, that's me. And then what if that thing said, you must be, are really stressed out. You must be or feel really overwhelmed because not only do you have to deal with the eggs, you gotta deal with this and that and that. Right. And they start to repeat back to me what I'm thinking and feeling. How easy is it going to be for me to buy from somebody where I feel like they get me Holy crap. They understand me. They've explained my feeling better than I have ever been able to describe it before. It will instantly create trust with your people. So a lot of times what ends up happening is for the second writing mistake is we think that we have to, I dunno what it is that you're thinking.
(07:53): Exactly. It's again, it's like perpetual feeling of like, we've got to be loud. We've got to get attention. We want somebody to notice us. We want to be like, rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr. I wouldn't really, the best way to write is to whisper in somebody's ear, right? They will hear that most of the time people aren't responding is because they don't even know that you're talking to them. So when you're writing, man, it has got to land right there in their brain where they go, man, that's me. That's how you're going to set the stage. If you're not sure what those things are, if you're not sure what somebody is thinking or feeling, you're not having enough conversations and you're not asking. You got to ask better questions when you're talking to them. And sometimes you'll just have to tease out the answers a little bit.
(08:41): But when you have so many conversations with your ideal, with clients who could benefit from your service and only when you start to see patterns, when their answers become redundant, do you know that you are like onto something and this is like 2.5 this is like another little common mistake is that when you're speaking you must speak in visuals. Okay? Our brains are hardwired for story. And so when you're telling a story and we can see that story play out in our mind, it sticks. We remember it, which are all really important parts of what you need to be able to sell successfully. We can't unsee it. We can't see those things. So it would be something like just going with this example, it's like you woke up, you walk to the fridge and there were eggs everywhere, right? That is not how you want to write it.
(09:36): You want to write in a way where it's like, it doesn't have to be like super creative writing, but just enough where they say, Oh man, like I feel that, right? Like you're half asleep in your eyes or barely awake by the time that you get to the fridge and you step into something slimy and icky and nasty, right? It's slightly icky and nasty that is create this. You know what I mean? That's about as creative as you need to be dog's getting. But if you can walk them through the motions of what is happening and just look at a couple of succinct sentences that is going to be great. And it doesn't have to be necessarily like word for word exactly how it's happening, but the closer the better. And the good thing is when you're using story, like when you're communicating in this visual manner, not all the details have to be perfect, but you do want to give a visual representation of like what is happening so they can feel it and be a part of the story.
(10:33): And the great thing about when you're telling a story like this, experiences don't have to be identical, right? So what if your reader doesn't go to the fridge and it's not eggs, but what if instead, if it's ketchup, like are you going to lose sales because it's not a perfectly aligned story? No, that's not true. You're still using the story because people can identify with certain elements, right? That's like why we all identify with what's a good story, the feelings movie by Disney. I know you guys are going to make me say Lord of the rings, but I'm not going to say Lord of the rings. Okay. Gunner's going to be mad at me cause I know how much he loves Lord of the rings, but it's inside out, inside out. If you've ever seen inside out and you watched a movie and you felt that story and you could relate to the story even though maybe your family didn't move across the country, right?
(11:23): Like you could still relate to the elements of the story even though it wasn't identical to your experience. You following me here? Is that a good example or was that crappy? But nevertheless, all I'm saying is don't fuss over every single nuance of the story. If you can get the major themes right, you're going to be fine. Okay. The third and final thing is at the end of the email or at the end of this bit of copy that you are trying to write is your call to action teeters off. It just gets really, really weak at the end. And there's a couple of sort of fundamental things that you need to understand about why even putting a call to action at the end is really important. And I was one of those people too, for the longest time where it's like, it felt, so just, do I really have to say by now, do I really have to say messaged me today?
(12:13): Like it just feels, so just feel like a furniture salesman, right? To just throw that in at the end. And there's a couple of things. So the very first thing that I would need you to understand is that people have lived their entire lives from the moment that they were a baby or you know, they are told when to eat, what to eat, when to go to the bathroom, every part of people's lives. Even when you're an adult and you have a job, are told what to do, when to do it and how to do it. So in these pieces of copy that you are writing, if you are not telling somebody the next natural step, they won't do it right. Even if they want to do it. Like you really need to show up in a way that leads them through that process where, Hey, if you're interested, here's the next thing.
(13:08): Like the moment that you make them think like what do I have to do here? Oh my gosh, what should I do? They're not going to do it right. And I know that you know this, if you have ever been to a restaurant and you decide, says like please seat yourself and you're looking around for the houses still and you're like, you don't know what to do. It's super stressful. This actually happened once at the doctor's office where they wanted my driver's license and they wanted the health insurance card and they only gave me my health insurance card back as like, what's going on? There's like this moment of panic where I was like, why aren't you giving my card back? Like what's going on? Like do I need to stand here? Do I need to sit? Are you going to give it to the nurse?
(13:44): There was this moment of panic and frustration and I didn't know what to do and the person that I blamed was the receptionist, right? The person in front of me. And so this is sort of a long way of saying that when you aren't maintaining a level of expectations of what to do next, your reader, one is just going to bail. They're not going to pay attention anymore. Or two, they're going to get like frustrated, right? Okay, you are going to get frustrated at you. Like why don't you just sell me something, right? Like what am I supposed to buy here? Oh. And then the second fundamental thing is, I don't know if you guys know Todd from the growth suite, but he's really amazing. He's a marketing mentor of mine and he said this to a while ago, is it the same sort of thing? Right?
(14:24): Where people have lived their whole childhood and gray being indoctrinated that you do not take anything from strangers. You don't take anything from somebody that you don't know. And so now they're in this conversation with you where they, I mean they vaguely might know you just through social media or online and you're asking them to like take something. There may be some resistance around that and end up usually, I mean a, hopefully not your definitely not you after listening to this is we end up creating this really weird urgency like buy now, buy today, do it or lose it. Right? And so again, this causes our call to action just to like fall so flat. It just sort of like piddles off. Is that the word that it just gets pedaled like a just sort of dribbles out. Just sort of like penalty piddles out.
(15:19): And am I saying this right? Fiddles out. I think it fiddles right? How it fiddles out. Maybe I should look this up on my phone quickly. Hang on. Potter's out. Potter out. That's not it. That's not right either. So a couple of ways that you can create urgency. The way that you create urgency isn't you manufacturing it. It's created by knowing your ideal client is created by knowing their circumstances. It's created by knowing their true desires. Right, and you speak to that, you can speak with conviction at that point, right? The more that you know somebody and the more that you're having this back and forth exchange where they're saying, yes, that's me. Yes, I want that. Yes, that's what I've thought. Oh my gosh. Like this is everything. At that point you say, get your ass in here. You know that this is going to be so great for you because you're going to finally be able to A, B and C and X, Y, Z.
(16:11): You can speak with that conviction and authority. The more that you know your ideal client and the more that you are in this conversation together, and that's the urgency, like they created that, not you, that's their own desire and now you're just giving them permission to go get it. Say you know how great you're going to feel as soon as you click buy because you're finally going to be able to A, B, and C man, that is going to be one really awesome piece of content. Okay, so these are just the common mistakes that I noticed in our, I don't want to call it random, but like our random email club where we are reviewing and rewriting copy and it's again it's your offer like just comes out of nowhere. Nobody is in the right frame of mind to receive what you're saying. The second thing is is you have to be repeating back what people are thinking and saying and then the third is your call to actions are just so weak and I think that's part of not having like real urgency like feeling like you've got to kind of manufactured this urgency to get them to buy and I don't need you to do that.
(17:15): Oh shoot. You know what? Every episode I read off a review. This is from Rebecca Carmona. Rebecca, you are smart lady for listening to the consensual sales podcast and wanted to say thank you for leaving a review and subscribing. Here's what she had to say about the podcast. Shawna is gold and I love how straight forward she is and how she is able to give real life examples combined with knowledge from different experts and also give you ways to easily implement what she is talking about. Emoji heart. Thank you Rebecca. I think the world of you and I appreciate this review. All right, thank you guys for listening next week. Oh my gosh. What is next week? I think we're gonna talk about price. Okay. We're gonna talk about pricing. If you're charging too much or too little, how to talk about it. Not exactly sure which angle we're going to go with, but I mean pricing, it's like time to get paid.
(18:09): Okay, let's get you paid. Let's get you paid more than a couple pennies so you can go grocery shopping without a budget, right? Would that be the dream life? Okay. Knock knock, who's there? Clients are banging on your door, are ready to give you money and book your services, but they're asking hard questions like how much is it? Are you qualified and how do I know you can help? Your brain melts and you feel a lot like a deer in headlights. You've worked way too hard for this opportunity. You can't let it slip away. Here's what you need to do right now. Get on the phone with me. All you gotta do is text consensual sales. That's one word to five, five, five, eight, eight, eight. Again, it's consensual sales. One word, five five, five, eight, eight and I'll tell you exactly what to say to close those deals.
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