I talk about the concept of soulful selling a lot, but I haven’t actually explained the term. This week I’m diving into the concept of soulful selling, and how you can use Soulful Selling to create a fabulous business that has your passion at its heart. This is the key to finally figuring out how to make your passion your paycheck, and you will be amazed by the transformative power soulful selling can have in your business.

The Hard Sell…

We’ve all been the victims or the hard sell at some point in our lives. You walk into a shop, quite content to browse a few things that you’re interested in, and you’re immediately accosted by a random stranger, who’s decided that you’re going to buy a specific product they are trying to sell. They proceed to shove that product down your throat. You likely have no interest in this item and, even if you did have an interest when you walked in the shop, you suddenly lose interest the second the sales rep start talking.

How about the cold calls that we all get? Out of the blue, on our personal mobiles, at peculiar times, from people expecting us to just hand over our money to a company we’ve never heard of before, and for a product or service, we know nothing about.

Even in the world of online marketing, we still get the hard sell. Random advertisements pop up for products that you’ve never expressed an interest in. You get emails from people you’ve never heard of before, never interacted with, and never seen. People who have scraped your email address off your website and randomly sent you a sales pitch. All of this is hard selling.

Courtship In Marketing…

[Tweet theme=”tweet-box-shadow”]#HardSelling is expecting somebody to buy from you without taking that time to #woo them first. It’s bad #marketing.[/Tweet]

Yes, we’re talking about the age-old concept of courtship.

Courtship really is the heart and soul of marketing. If you want people to buy from you, to hand over their hard-earned cash, you need to have a relationship with them first. It’s very rare for people to buy things from a person or company they don’t know, or to purchase a product or service they have literally only just heard about at the point of purchase.

Your customers need to get to know, like and trust you before they will willingly part with their money and buy from you. That applies to products, services, low-cost items, high-cost items – it applies to everything. In the world of online marketing, it’s really easy to get caught in the trap of thinking that all you need to do is build a website, set up an advert to drive people to your landing page, and the sales will come rolling in.

It’s not that simple.

The problem with that method is that it is a hard sell. Unless you are only targeting an audience that already knows you with your adverts, the people looking at your adverts, clicking through and seeing your landing page, are doing so without ever having experienced you and what you can do before.

They don’t know you.

They might like your advert, but they don’t know you well enough to like you (or your company/product/service) yet. They certainly won’t trust you. Their entire opinion of you is based on one advert and one landing page. Even if you have the best landing page in the world, if you haven’t taken the time to build a relationship with the people you’re trying to sell to, you’re not going to get very far.

Soulful Selling…

If you haven’t taken the time to introduce yourself and your business to your audience, and explain to them the value of what you’re asking them to pay for, you’re going to find it very, very difficult to sell to them. Soulful selling is the opposite of the hard sell. It doesn’t rely on you drawing in random people, who have never heard of you before and pitching a product or service to them. Instead, you take the time to create a place that your ideal clients are naturally drawn to.

You produce high quality, valuable content, completely free, targeted at a very specific audience – the people who you most want to work with. You grow an audience made up entirely of your ideal clients. Over time they get to know, like and trust you, through reading or watching your content. You have the opportunity to explain to them who you are, what you do, and why your products or services are valuable to them.

They come to understand the value your offerings will bring to their lives.

If you’re selling a particular product, explain to them what this product will do to transform their lives. Paint a vivid picture.If you’re selling them a service, especially a business service, you want to sell them on exactly what your service can do to transform their business, to earn them more money, to make their lives easier. These are all things that you cannot do on a hard sell. Once you get the hang of soulful selling, it actually becomes a very easy process, a very natural process. Your audience grows quite organically. You have to put a lot of effort into it, in the content creation. And in getting your content out there so the people know that it exists.

If you’re selling them a service, especially a business service, show them exactly what your service can do to transform their business, earn them more money, or make their lives easier. These are all things that you cannot do on a hard sell. Once you get the hang of soulful selling, it actually becomes a very easy process, a very natural process. Your audience grows quite organically. You have to put a lot of effort into it, in the content creation. And in getting your content out there so the people know that it exists.

It’s very difficult to create a vibrant, detailed, and believable picture when all you have to work with is a hard sales pitch.

How To Make Soulful Selling The Passionate Heart Of Your Business…

Once you get the hang of soulful selling, it becomes a very easy, very natural process. Your audience grows quite organically. Content creation requires a lot of energy, passion, creativity and time. Soulful selling is by no means the easy route. It’s also not enough to simply create fabulous content. You have to get your content out there, so people know that it exists.

But, once you start that ball rolling, you’ll find it snowballs quite quickly.

Compare the benefits of soulful selling to the spray and pray method of marketing. On the one hand, you have an ever-increasing tribe of ideal clients who know, like, and trust you and understand your value and the benefits of your products and services. They’re happy to hear your sales pitches when you make them, because the rest of the time you give them so much valuable content. On the other hand, your marketing rests on literally blasting out your message to everybody, and hoping that some of the people you reach are going to like you, even though they don’t know you.

By making soulful selling the passionate heart of your marketing, you can change your marketing message.

The hard sell is slightly cringe-worthy. It’s a random advert that might get clicked but is generally ignored, or quickly abandoned, because people don’t know you enough to care, or trust that you can deliver what you’re promising.

Soulful selling allows you to create a message that truly reflects your abilities and the benefits of your products and services. It’s a message your tribe anticipates and eagerly click on to learn more.

Make Your Passion Your Paycheck…

Soulful selling is the perfect way to infuse your marketing efforts with your own passion for your business. Your passion for your niche, for the one thing that you do, that nobody else can do quite like you do it. That, my friend, is what sells.

When people can see how invested you are in a particular subject, a particular area, a particular ‘thing’. Whatever your ‘thing’ is, let people can see how passionate you are about it, how much you love it, the depth of your understanding of it, and how invested you are in ensuring your business, products and services are the best they can possibly be. Let them see how invested you are in making sure that the members of your tribe have better lives as a result of your work.

Nothing compares to content marketing when it comes to achieving this.

Creating free content may at first seem like a bit of an oxymoron. Why would you give away your knowledge and expertise for free? It seems like you’re wasting your time, money, and resources, and spending and an awful lot of energy creating something that’s not really going to achieve anything for you. A lot of people think, “I can just run a Facebook ad. I can just run an email marketing campaign. I can just post some Tweets, and it will have exactly the same effect.”

But there’s a huge difference between creating a place that your ideal clients naturally come to, wanting more from you, and a sales pitch that you blast out and pray someone responds.

Now there’s more to soulful selling than just content marketing. There are concepts that run to the way you run your business, your ethos, your standards, your ways of delivering and ensuring that you’re always putting your customer first. But where marketing is concerned, when it comes to soulful selling, content marketing is the key to ensuring your marketing efforts are thoroughly soulful.

Soulful selling is the way you will propel your business forward and completely transform your marketing from spray and pray, hard sell, to a place that people just love to be, where they can’t get enough of you.