Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] As many of you know, I struggled forever in both my entrepreneurial and sales world to find my footing. I firmly believe if I can figure this out, so can anyone.
[00:00:13] Listen, Everything, and I literally mean everything, changed in terms of speed and outcome when I learned this one thing that makes the whole thing work.
[00:00:25] And it's not technique. That's what we're going to talk about today. This is sales confidence. Fix this. Grow Fast. A podcast for high performing entrepreneurial women who are in their own coaching or businesses. Direct sales, network marketing. Bring me all the people who aren't playing and who are tired of the bro hype and the outdated sales scripts that just sound like, but you want dependable income and, and you want to show up authentically. I'm GENV of Scorey, by the way. I'm a former C suite executive and just all around fun gal who's been a sales executive for over three decades with like sales strategy, sales techniques, all the sales things. And I've taught thousands of women how to show up authentically and actually love selling because it feels like them. So if you want to make more money, you gotta be better at selling. That's what we're here for. So stick around to the end because. Because I have a special invite for you.
[00:01:21] Okay, so now when I say it's not technique, what that sounds like, because for years, friends, I have thought it was and like many people, I thought, you know what if I could just have a better sales pitch, a better clothes, if I could learn how to handle objections better. Oh yes, it's absolutely the right script or the framework or the right person telling me the right things, I felt like that would make it all finally work.
[00:01:51] Now some of it did and it helped for a period of time, but like none of it was actually the thing because underneath it all, there was actually something else going on that I wasn't really aware of or willing to admit at the time.
[00:02:09] And as a result, for a very long time, starting with almost my first sales job. Now I did my very first sales job. I had a great sales manager.
[00:02:17] But after that, nope, prior to that, nope after that. It was after that that I really just didn't get it. Like, I was like waiting for my sales manager to teach me how to do better.
[00:02:30] I wanted someone to show me more appreciation for what I was calling effort.
[00:02:36] And yeah, there were so many conversations at the water cooler about how we weren't being paid fairly and how we should be paid more.
[00:02:45] And then when I started in network marketing, I did the same thing. Y', all, like I'm not proud, but I honestly and truly thought like, hey, it's my upline's fault. Oh wait, it's my upline upline's fault. No wait, it's the company's fault. Sometimes it was all of their fault. Maybe it was because they hadn't launched anything new or they didn't launch what the other companies that seem to be moving fast we're doing or they hadn't changed the comp plan or the technology didn't work.
[00:03:14] Listen, it was all of those things all the time. And I want you to look at what I was actually doing because every time it didn't work, I shifted the responsibility up one link on my ladder.
[00:03:34] So sales manager Upline uplines. Upline Corporate. The comp plan.
[00:03:42] In the corporate world, it was my sales manager, it was the district manager, it was the vp, it was the executives, it was the company.
[00:03:51] And I just kept climbing up this little chain until I ran out of people to blame.
[00:04:01] And there's a name for this.
[00:04:04] I call it the blame chain. And I want to be really clear about something because people get this wrong all the time. The blame chain isn't your upline or company.
[00:04:17] The blame chain is your internal belief that somebody or something above you or outside of you is responsible for your outcome. Done there, I said it. What no one else is willing to say to you. Why? Because I have no agenda. I'm not here to hype you. I remember thinking if I could just connect in my network marketing business, I remember thinking if I could just connect with that one woman at the top. She was this top earner, income earner, she was always on stage.
[00:04:55] And I bought into this whole like oh, we help each other out thing. We're here to support one another.
[00:05:02] Which if I'm being honest, I had quietly translated into something much bigger than it was ever actually meant to be. So I reached out. Now when I look at it now, I'm horrified. Like I was a little nobody and she was this one making a lot of money. But you know, I reached out anyway and she responded back.
[00:05:19] And I wouldn't say that it was like a flower, a flowerly message, but it was kind, it, it and actually it was very revealing to me. She said basically that she couldn't actually do one on one calls with everybody in the company.
[00:05:38] But she also said there were plenty of things that were recorded that she had done or that other people had done that I should be looking into.
[00:05:52] And I read between the lines like I felt the door close. It stung a little bit.
[00:05:59] But honestly, because I read between the lines, she did me a ginormous favor, and she probably has no idea that what she taught me in that email was the biggest lesson of my career.
[00:06:12] Basically, what she was saying was she wasn't going to position herself as my savior.
[00:06:19] She was never going to be the thing that made this work for me or that made me work for me. And I read, girl, you need to grow up. You need to grow up and take responsibility for your own thing. If you expect this to work, do not look to me.
[00:06:43] Look within.
[00:06:44] She didn't just refuse to help me.
[00:06:47] She refused to be a link on my blame chain. And y', all, that is leadership. And I am talking about this because I still see it today, and I see it every week. I hear women saying, if I just had. If the company would just do. If my upline were this or if my upline was different.
[00:07:13] And can I just give you a little peek behind the curtain here?
[00:07:17] In the same week, I will talk to someone who refers to the ultimate upline. Let's call her Wilma.
[00:07:24] They're like, if I were just on Wilma's team and Betty was not my upline, I know I would do better.
[00:07:31] And on the same day, I will have a conversation with someone on Wilma's team complaining that Wilma isn't all that and a bag of chips. Same company, same upline, same day.
[00:07:46] So let's be honest about what that means. If the upline were actually the reason that people succeed, then everybody on that team would experience the same success, and they don't.
[00:08:04] Your upline, y'. All. And I'm gonna say the thing. You may not like it. Sorry for stepping on your toes. But, like, listen, if you're listening, you want the truth, And I'm here to tell you, your upline is not the variable.
[00:08:15] The variable is which end of the blame chain you're holding.
[00:08:22] Now, I'm gonna say this, too.
[00:08:25] You don't know what you don't know. That's why you're listening to a podcast. You probably inherited some of this thinking, and it was passed down to you by other people who didn't understand that the blame is not good for anybody.
[00:08:39] And typically, this is fostered by people who don't own really, honestly, and truly how much power they have in their business. They don't understand that they're not just the company's secret sauce.
[00:08:55] They're the secret sauce for their own success.
[00:08:58] We are done with the days where People buy from companies and brands.
[00:09:04] Statistically, it is proven people buy from people.
[00:09:10] So nobody handed you this chain out of malice. They handed it to you the same way it was handed to them, usually wrapped in some sort of thing that was true, like let's help each other, which is a good thing. But then it got bent into something it was never actually meant to be.
[00:09:27] Somebody above me is responsible for me and that's how the chain gets passed. The blame chain is not done through cruelty. It's through a good idea that gets altered in a weird way.
[00:09:41] And I do want to be honest with you because I have been both in the field and on the corporate side of things. I'm not interested in selling you hustle. But the truth is, is that some of this is real.
[00:09:54] You don't get to set the comp plan. You don't get to control the product line or when new things are released. And you don't get to decide when things get updated or rolled out or what the prices are, when they launch new things, when they don't. And when they fix things or don't fix things that have been broken for years. Right? That's all true. So pretending that it isn't true is its own little lie that I'm not going to buy into.
[00:10:18] So I'm not going to stand here and tell you that those conditions don't matter.
[00:10:22] They do. Those conditions are super real.
[00:10:26] You just don't get to give those conditions the responsibility of your outcomes. Do not surrender control to the conditions.
[00:10:40] So the only question that actually matters is this one.
[00:10:43] What actually do? I own what's actually mine. And these are things that most people do not fully own as empowering. You own your voice. Nobody assigns it, nobody approves it.
[00:11:00] Corporate can change products and all the things, but they cannot touch how you show up and how you talk about it.
[00:11:10] Can I also talk about the value of your audience?
[00:11:13] You built that. Not the company, not the people who listen to you. Your audience is yours. You built that. Not the company.
[00:11:23] The people who listen to you like they listen to you. Do you get that the recruit you know is going to flake the customer who was never going to buy the event that cost you a weekend and returns nothing. The meetings that don't bring value.
[00:11:43] You get to say no. And your no is a strategy. It's not failure. And your conviction is yours. And your conviction is very powerful whether you say the thing or not, whether you say the thing out loud or you shrink. So nobody thinks you're salesy.
[00:12:04] That's not corporate.
[00:12:07] And your conviction is yours. And that matters more than, than you can possibly know.
[00:12:14] That's not corporate's call. That's not your uplines. You own that. That is yours. I want to share a little story here about conviction.
[00:12:23] So I've been going to exercise classes lately and I will tell you, I love exercise classes because I love to follow someone that is going to push me a little because when I'm left to my own devices, I will find reasons to not finish my sets or to not hit or to not lift heavy enough.
[00:12:39] There are several different instructors that teach several different classes. And the first time I took this class from this one woman, it was so incredibly boring, I couldn't even stand it. She was this. She talked just like this. Okay, everybody, now we're going to do this. She would stand there for two minutes and explain every exercise before we actually got into it. The lights were there, the music was there, and this woman would not even lift weights to the beat, which, just in case you don't know is a problem for people of color. Let's stay on the beat. But like, literally the whole entire time when I first started training with her, I was like, oh, I don't know if I can keep doing her class.
[00:13:21] But then what occurred to me and what did finally seep through to me was her conviction.
[00:13:29] She legitimately cared. You could see she cared. You could see she was trying.
[00:13:36] You could see that she was dedicated to my success.
[00:13:41] Her conviction, she owned. And it changed everything for me and my experience.
[00:13:49] And now I love going to her class. It's not the hypey girls class that I also like, but it just goes to show, conviction more than personality is what draws people in.
[00:14:03] So no, you don't control the system, but you do control who you are inside of the system.
[00:14:15] That's the whole thing. That's what nobody told me for years.
[00:14:21] And I finally realized that whenever things went well for me, it was because I believed in my ability to do the thing.
[00:14:32] Now I want to be completely honest. Sometimes I did it very poorly. Sometimes I did it embarrassingly, Sometimes I'm not going to lie, I did it selfishly.
[00:14:41] It doesn't matter. Because what happens is when you believe you don't need permission, when you believe you're allowed, you act badly, awkwardly, imperfectly, until something shifts and then it feels better. And when it feels better, guess what? You're going to do it more. And doing it more is what everybody calls consistency. Do you know that consistency isn't the cause?
[00:15:15] Consistency is the outcome, everybody tells you to be more consistent. The truth is, is that nobody tells you that. Consistency comes after you decide you're allowed to do it without anybody else, anything outside of you, you're allowed to do it and you should do it and you want to do it. You can't discipline your way into belief. Belief will hand you the discipline for free. Now, I have been in businesses where we have run out of product. I remember being in the field and our leaders would say, we're out of X. And of course, those of us that were not really great leaders, we would natter about it. And we spent more time talking about how disappointed we were that we didn't have X, Y and Z. But inevitably, the same leaders would step forward and they would say, and boy, oh boy, I didn't like hearing it at the time, sell what we have.
[00:16:20] Sell what we have.
[00:16:22] So when we wanted a better skin care line, the line that this other company was running, we wanted better technology in our skin care.
[00:16:30] We got the same advice.
[00:16:33] Sell what you have, because you can't sell what you are wishing for. You can only sell what you have. And I want you to sit with that for a second. Because it's not just about product. It can also be the upline you wish you had, the comp plan you wish they'd fix, the launch that you're waiting on. The version of the business that looks so much better, if only, or the days gone by.
[00:17:07] You can't sell anything that doesn't currently exist.
[00:17:12] So, oh my gosh, I could shake every salesperson to get stuck in this.
[00:17:19] Sell what you have.
[00:17:23] And by the way, what you have is you.
[00:17:29] So a lot of people think they're behind, and the truth is they're just stuck waiting. You're stuck waiting for a signal that, that honestly is never going to come.
[00:17:39] No one is going to hand you a signal. Not because they're withholding it, because it's actually not theirs to give you. It's always you. You are the signal. You don't need a signal outside of yourself.
[00:17:55] You are already allowed to show up and you are already allowed to. To be you. And one more thing, because this matters for the women coming up behind you, the chain ends with whoever decides to stop passing it down.
[00:18:16] And that can be you.
[00:18:18] That's what a leader actually is.
[00:18:21] A leader influences a leader, provides perspective, and a leader goes first. So when we didn't have product, guess who was selling? The leaders were. When the systems were down, guess who was showing up? The leaders were.
[00:18:39] When the other company. And we all have other companies.
[00:18:44] Guess who doubled down on what we had going on?
[00:18:48] The leaders did. And it wasn't just telling us. They were showing us.
[00:18:54] There's a time in every business. And typically when I consult with high performers, we are always talking about systems and structures and all that kind of good stuff.
[00:19:05] And I will very often say you need to focus on different things. But when there's something standing in the way that provides the leader to show up differently, it's these moments.
[00:19:18] It's these moments when people are waiting or where you are like, wait if you want. I'm not. And you go out there and you do the thing, even though you don't have to. Even though in your head you're like, I don't make as much money doing this anymore. You do it anyway because you are breaking the chain. And also, I'm going to say it while I'm here.
[00:19:40] Leaders don't let other people make them the savior of their business.
[00:19:46] I see this all the time. Oh, if I could just be in your group. Oh, if you could just let me on this. Oh, if you. And I'm like, listen, listen, Linda, grow up.
[00:19:56] You want this, you gotta be okay with understanding.
[00:20:01] You are your secret sauce.
[00:20:04] So here's the invite I promised you.
[00:20:06] I want you inside the Network Marketing Confidence Studio.
[00:20:11] When you join, I get on a free one on one call with you.
[00:20:16] That's a $297 consultation and it's yours. Because I want to look at your actual business, not the generic version of it. I want to look at your business and I want to get inside of what you're experiencing and help you turn things around.
[00:20:35] And the first seven days are free. So there's nothing here to trap you. And beyond every month, you can cancel at any time. I don't recommend it, but you can. You are not locked into anything. And after your first seven days, it's $33 a month, which honestly. What? Come on.
[00:20:57] That's not a cost. That's going to stop anyone who's a real leader in the business because you already have an audience.
[00:21:03] You already have a voice.
[00:21:05] You already have an offer that you can position today. You have just been waiting for someone to say it's okay to go.
[00:21:14] So here it is.
[00:21:16] Start your engines.
[00:21:18] Let's go.
[00:21:19] I'm Genevieve Skori. This is the Sales Confidence Fix Us Grow Fast podcast.
[00:21:25] Go fix your thing.
