Get More Sales With Help From A Personal Sales Coach

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Ever thought about working with a personal sales coach?  Would you like to know if it will be worth it for you and your business?

In this post, I will be interviewing a sales coach and her name is Marian Hobson. She is a Conscious Sales Guide for consultants, coaches and alternative health practitioners.

Marian helps clients communicate their message to persuade those that need them most to desire to work with them.

A lot of people try to prove themselves and prove how much they know.  However, this ends up pushing away the people they are here on earth to serve.

Marian loves to call herself a guide because a guide is like a trail guide who has been there before and they are on the path with you.  A coach, on the other hand, may or may not have actually walked the path.

She has walked the path of sales both as a consultant and in several other industries.  She has worked in sales for 30 years.

Her first job was a sales job.  So she is a conscious sales guide because she really wants her clients to be aware of how they are selling and what they are selling because it affects how easy or hard it is to sell.

So many people say that they hate sales because it is hard.  Once a person becomes conscious and they realise that what they hate is rejection they then find that they love sales and love the process.

They start playing the game using that process and so they really learn to enjoy sales.

Disclaimer: please note that this post may contain affiliate links which means that if you buy one of my recommended products I get paid a commission for sharing the link.  I only recommend products that I have tried myself and have experienced success.

Why do you do what you do?

So many entrepreneurs have hang-ups about sales, they have this great idea and they have a plan.

They have a solid message that they want to share with the world. Yet when it comes to asking for money for what they are offering it becomes like this wall.  They are unable to decline that wall successfully.

Especially, those who are selling services directly, like coaches, consultants and alternative health practitioners.

They are selling themselves, so all these blocks like negative and positive thoughts that they have about themselves affect the process.

She came from real estate sales, pest control sales, advertising sales and then started coaching it was like a whole new experience of trying to sell herself that opened a whole new world for her.

She has the experience and knowledge of both worlds that makes her conscious selling coaching unique.

What do you enjoy most about what you do?

What she loves most is the game.  Because the people who need her the most are the people who resist her.

She has to be gentle and play with them in their game.  They would try to avoid every call and connection she makes with them.

This is great and she loves them for it because she knows that this is their process.  So she will stay in the game and continue to follow up.

She would continue to see where they are so that she can get them to where they want to be.

When you view it as a game instead of “oh no I just got rejected again”.  Then you can see it as them going through that process instead of you just following up.

She did not want to be a salesperson as a child growing up

Who inspired her to get into sales and why?

As a child growing up she imagined herself teaching and training groups of people.  However, she did not put two and two together or realised that it could actually be a career until she was old enough.

It was only when someone said to her, “well, what was your dream as a kid?”  It is at that point that she realised that she should be talking to lots of people.

She also wanted to be a doctor so that she can help people feel better about their lives.

In terms of sales, she discovered that she could not be a doctor because she was not good at maths and science.

So, she decided that she was not dragging herself through it regardless of how much she wanted to help people.

Marian had to look at what she had the most credits in while in college,  she really enjoyed middle east history.  This led to a degree in Near Eastern studies.

Studying history so that she can get done with college was her plan.  Upon completing college with a history degree.  She needed to decide what she wanted to do.

Teaching was an option but she really did not want to teach.  However, she needed a job and had to pay rent. 

One of her friends in sales encouraged her to join sales because he thought that she had the personality for it.

She gave him her resume but she could not get a job at his company.  He triggered something in her and helped with interview preparation.  She eventually got the job in sales.

What exactly in sales did she enjoy the most?

When she started her first job, she did not enjoy it.  She knew that she had to pay rent and buy food.

As part of her job, she was required to call 25 people a day if she wanted to keep her job during the first 3 months.  She needed to call 25 people a day so she did it.

There was a guy who was hired around the same time as her and his name was Larry. He would spend hours preparing for one phone call. 

Larry would then make the call and get a voicemail. Following this he would then spend hours preparing for the next phone call because he wanted it to be exactly perfect.

She knew that she did not need to prepare for a phone call.  Because she knew that the things she studied would come to her mind.

However, when she became a coach she found herself as a Larry trying to prepare for the call.

When she told herself “bag this” she is going to make the calls.  She suddenly realised that she knew what she was doing.  She just needed to get out there and connect with people.

Who is the person in her family was the role model?

That person is her grandfather on her Father’s side.  He was a go-getter and he just kept trying.

Her grandfather started his family the very same year that the depression hit in 1929.  He was in college at the time and he needed to provide for his family and pay for college.

One thing he did is he took every job possible even though they did not pay him.  He decided to go back to college full-time.  So, he went to each of his employers and negotiated with those who did not pay him his wages.

“This water company you have not paid me but the lumber company has not paid their water bill.”

“If the water company gives an equal amount of pay to credit the lumber company.  Also, because he has not paid his rent, the lumber company can give lumber to his landlord.”

He just did that thing throughout his life.  Also, he had various different businesses and he had a variety of jobs. 

Her grandfather was super creative because he just wanted to solve that problem.  That’s why he is her role model.

What is the best advice you ever received?

The best advice she ever received was when she was still a teenager.  She was told, “You have to learn from history or you are doomed to repeat it.”

[click_to_tweet tweet=”You have to learn from history or you are doomed to repeat it” quote=”You have to learn from history or you are doomed to repeat it” theme=”style3″]

It is the main reason why she started taking all those history classes.  As she has gone through her life she has realised that she needs to learn from her parent’s history, from her country’s history and from her own history.

Otherwise, she will continue to go back into the same cycle over and over.  So that is the most valuable advice she ever heard.

What is the one thing that has impacted her life to date?

The experience that she had when she was four years old when she became a victim.  It was a really tough and intense situation that her Mother did not understand what was going on.

Her Mother did not protect her as she should have.  It has caused her to work all her life to become a hero instead of a victim.

To be someone who has overcome a great amount of pain.  Someone who has made the best of what life has to offer.

She can now say, “hey, because I have overcome these difficult things I can be a great person who can support others, wherever they are in life.”

This has had a great impact on who she is as a person today.

What do you do exactly in your role as a sales guide of personal sales coach?

For alternative health practitioners, she believes that they have such amazing gifts to give.  Because of the scenarios in the alternative health space, they need to be careful about how they speak and what they promise.

They need to speak about the results and not focus too much on the symptoms.  The same applies to coaches and consultants, they need to focus on the results.

“This is what you are going to see when you work with me and this is how you feel before you work with me.”

Not to be too specific by saying, “you are feeling terrible because of….”.  The process is similar for both.  However, the reasons for each group differs.

How did she mentally decide to move from being an employee to become an entrepreneur?

It all happened when she became pregnant the first time.  Marian did not want to work full time so she decided to jump in with both feet.

So, she became a real estate investor initially but the transition from investor to coach is where the journey was for her.

Interestingly, she realised what her parents had done and had told her what she needed to do to make a living part-time.

Marian tried dozens of work from home opportunities out there.  Some worked for a variety of reasons but none of them felt right.

That is until she happened upon a coaching certification program.

Does she check to ensure that her clients are passionate about what they do?

Yes, she finds that many of them are passionate but once she gets them into the process she discovers that some of them find obstacles challenging.

So, she gets them back into that place of passion as it is one of the key services that she offers.  She will keep their passion going which makes the obstacles easy to navigate.

To be successful with the sales process her clients need to deeply feel it and connect with that passion then it is easy to achieve goals.

Does she help prospective clients to move from being an employee to become an entrepreneur?

Yes, she spends time with her client and they make a plan which outlines step by step what needs to happen.

Each time she asks her clients when would they like to be out of their jobs 97% of them say “yesterday”.

Some of them say 6 months but to add a level of realism to this ‘magic wand’ she believes that it is more realistic that it is going to take 12-18 months.  This is because of other commitments like the job, family and the side hustle.

This perspective help on the bad days when it seems like a little progress is being made.

She likes to compare it to when you get into a car with the intention of driving across the United States.  You’ll get there eventually as long as you keep going.  You just cannot turn off the car.

Over the spring she went to visit her son who is in college in Utah which is 32 hours of driving.  She did it in 36 hours because she took breaks.

If you want to replace your job you have to be the same.  You can be diligent and not take any breaks at all and even if you feel like taking a break, keep going.

It really depends on her client’s current situation.

Who would she trade places with for a day?

Jack Canfield or Tony Robbins are her top two choices.  She just wants to experience what it would be like at their level of coaching.

She believes that what they do is her ultimate goal but she would like to experience it for a day so that she can know for sure if this is what she wants for her life.

What is something that she long believed to be true but later found out that it was not true?

Her parents thought her so many things that are good and true but there are other things that are not exactly the way her parents said it is.

What is something she wished that people would pay attention to globally?

She really wished that as humans we would pay more attention to each other.  She loves a song from her teenage years entitled, “I hope the Russians love their children too” by Sting.

It was written during the cold war.  If the Russians love their children and realise that we love our children too then they would have no desire to bomb other countries.

If we pay attention to each other in our hearts we all have the same desires for good things.

For love, for happiness, for recreation time and for a little bit of work.

Something on her bucket list

She would like to hike the Appalachian trail doing a thru-hike.  It will take about 4-5 months to do it.  Her husband has agreed to do it with her.  She just needs to get her business to that level of independence.

Guilty Pleasure

She took a personal development course a few years ago and she discovered that for some people a guilty pleasure could be nagging their children.

She does grabbing a handful of chocolate chips, coconut and marshmallows.  Taking a bite of each just to enjoy it.

5 Key Lessons In Entrepreneurship

1. You need to know yourself and know how things can affect you.  Get processes in place so that you can get grounded when things happen.
2. Know your audience.  Be very conscious and very aware of what they are looking to achieve and be continuously curious.
3. Take time for spiritual things.  Take time to connect with who you are as a spiritual being on a daily basis.
4. Self-care.  Whenever you make a sale go reward yourself.  Whenever you do something really courageous even it is to pat yourself on the back.  Give yourself a big hug and be conscious of it.
5. Continual growth. Set yourself up to accomplish new goals and become a better person.

Where can prospective clients find her?

Her website address is profitonfire.us, you can find her on Facebook and on LinkedIn.

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