Momentum Podcast: 478

Don't Take Money From The Wrong Person

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

When you stop taking money from the wrong people, your entire business will change. Early on when you try to sell to everyone, you will be challenged. You will endure pain and suffering by taking money from the wrong people. While it may work for you in the beginning, eventually you will realize you are not getting consistent results. When the product doesn’t fit the avatar, the product doesn’t have the affect you want it to have, they don’t get results, and they end up disgruntled and frustrated, and they leave. And, when customers don’t feel like you’ve helped them, they can be disruptive in a community, class, or group.
As an entrepreneur, you want to sell to the right people 100% of the time. When you learn to stop taking money from the wrong people, everything will start to work. Your marketing will work, your sales will work, you will get consistent results. Most of all, your clients will get consistent results. To do that, you must realize that not everyone is the right avatar for you. When you build a legacy of consistent results, you become the market leader in your category.
When you aren’t getting the results you want, your clients aren’t getting results, and the right people aren’t showing up, you end up in a place where you have to take responsibility and fix the process. Decide first who you are selling to and creating an outcome for and that will allow you to exclude everyone else.


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Full Audio Transcript

Tonight on the health entrepreneurs FX panel I just participated on, one of the speakers said something that hit me so deeply and I want to share it with you and what happened when I stopped taking money from the wrong people. Chris Winfield said, he said, our whole business changed when we stopped taking money from the wrong people, and I remember when we stopped doing that and how meaningful it was, how much it changed, but I also remember the pain and suffering of doing the opposite.

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it.

We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

There is a significant amount of pain and suffering that you will endure as an entrepreneur by taking money from the wrong people. And this is something that I know very deeply and very personally because I've been in the lane where I was taking money from the right people, and then I've been in the events where I spoke in front of an audience where I took money from the wrong people and I remember just how painful and how much work it was. Because, here's what that means. When you first start out selling stuff, you're going to want to sell everybody.

You know, when Cadey and I had the certified distressed property expert designation in real estate, when we started out, I walked into a real estate office, I was saying everything I could to get everybody to buy the product and early on it worked because I didn't share any of the pieces why you shouldn't buy the product. I only told them all the benefits. I didn't tell him what work it was or what they were going to have to do. And so at the beginning it worked because I was getting an early adopters but as soon as I started getting other than early adopters, agents were complaining about how hard it was. I was taking money from the wrong people and we didn't get many complaints in that product. In fact, we sold almost 50,000 units and online there's maybe one or two or there's not a lot of complaints that you can even find.

And the reason is, early on we identified when we took money from the wrong people. So if somebody came in and told us it was too hard, we started talking about how long it took to implement the product. If somebody came in and told us that they didn't want to do it because they didn't really care about helping people out of short sales, we started talking about, we only wanted to work with people who actually cared if they could help their client out with a short sale or might even negotiate a loan modification for free.

So we started in our sales pitch talking about that they might work for free. It was one of the biggest objections we had to come overcome to short sales. So we actually put it into the sales page because we wanted the realtors who actually cared. And what happened was, we stopped taking money from the wrong people, our referral business went through the roof and our marketing worked. Everything works when you do that, when you sell to the right avatar, like in episode 180 of this show up, I talked about owning your avatar. When you sell it to the right avatar, you get consistent results, you get consistent testimonials because it's working.

When you take money from the wrong person, it sets up all kinds of challenges. This has happened to me more than once when we were going through, when I first introduced the entrepreneurial personality type content, we didn't really know who our avatar was. I wasn't clear, it took me forever to get clear on who we should work with and really what effect did we cause, what outcome did we have. We were selling a lot of improvement offers and the problem with improvement offers like come to my event and we'll make you a better businessperson or come to my event and we'll make you a better something. With those types of offers like we're going to give you some type of improvement in who you are is that, if people don't know the specific pain you solve, you get people who are looking for all kinds of improvement.

And I used to do events where it was improvement offers, I would tell entrepreneurs, understand yourself better, stop limiting behavior and create momentum. And I would get everything from CEOs of $50 million companies to people who are just starting out, and then I would try and teach all the same content. What would happen is sooner or later there would be some type of a discussion or comment or something, a question usually that I answered where I lost most of the room and it was because I took money from the wrong people. I also was teaching a group of people that was all over the place. We had people who came and needed specific things that they thought they were going to get and they didn't get. Then we also had people who came in and wanted the improvement offer and really just followed our stuff and wanting to understand it. It was so much work, it was brutal. And also what happened was, we had people who came and then didn't understand what it was and left and it was brutal.

It was ... I mean, honestly, here's what I know about events. The people who came and sat through the first couple hours and it wasn't for them, it was graceful of them to leave. If you're at an event and you know that it's not going to work for you, you should leave. I've been at events where I've known it wasn't going to work for me and I left and I've been at events where I knew it wasn't going to work for me and I stayed and I feel bad for the events that I stayed at, because it's hard to conceal the energy for me of wasting time and being in a room that I didn't feel like or being in the wrong room. And it's hard for me to not like have that boil over, and the people who left did me a favor. It was brutal though.

It was so difficult because we would have events where some people, the people ... We'd have a big percentage, like 80, 90% of the room had followed me and knew enough of what I was going to do and understood enough about our content. They wanted to know more, so they came and they had an amazing time. But here's the problem, and we got testimonials that were off the charts, like people said stuff that was just earth shattering, life changing, but we couldn't do it consistently, and we always had that sometimes 20% of the room that was in the wrong room. It was 20% of the room who, a lot of the times it was the 20% of the room that I would offend, that would be completely irritated with me, that I would make feel bad. And it was horrible because these people paid us money and because we were taking money from the wrong people, that happened over and over again.

So I apologize to anybody who we ever took money from and you were in the wrong room and I apologize to anybody where I was ever in the wrong room and I stayed. Because when you take money from the wrong people, when the product doesn't fit the avatar mix, here's what happens. When you sell the wrong person, the product doesn't have the effect that you want to have. When you sell the wrong person, they have a hard time making the product, getting the product result that you are offering or that you promised. When you sell the wrong person, they ended up in disgruntled and frustrated and if somebody gets into your course or your experience and they don't feel like it helped them, that is really difficult for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs have a hard time concealing that. So when you take money from the wrong person, they will often be disruptive in community, in a class, in a group, in any type of environment.

I know when we stopped doing this, everything changed, and here's how you go about doing this. Like you have to back up in order to take money from the right people, you have to decide first who is it that you are selling a product to and creating an outcome for, who is that? And identify that person so that you can exclude everybody else. And then once you've identified the person that you're going to work with, you polarize your messaging so you only get that person. We're about to put out a report that people can download for free. It's a lead magnet and we're looking at, we haven't figured out the title yet, but the title is gonna be something like the five reasons why companies who should scale don't. Because we are looking for entrepreneurs who know they're in an opportunity where they can scale but are realizing they don't have all the information and all the tools they need to be able to do that.

We're trying to attract just that exact person who's growing a business and growing a team. Because if we have an event and everyone in the room is growing a business and growing a team, and somebody comes in and they don't have a team and they don't really have a business going and they're in that place where they need to figure out what to do, they're incredibly disruptive for the rest of the room. And they're incredibly disruptive for me. So we are really clear on who we want in the room, and that's who I talk to, that's who I message to, that's who I want to hear me. And that's who we want to have come to get into our programs and come to our events because we don't just sell coaching, we sell communities and the communities have to be right. If we sell money to the wrong person, it affects the entire community.

And the way you keep the community safe is you keep people who are in the same culture, who are looking for the same issues, who are willing to approach those issues in the same way, who are willing to work around a central body of content. And that's something we screened for on the way into our programs so that we make sure we don't sell the wrong person because when you take money from the wrong person, you always end up paying. And I've been in the situation where I've gotten on a sales call and I felt uncomfortable and I've been excited about making the sale and telling my team about it and we sell the person and you know what? It's always the person who complains and there's been times where I've wanted to blame that person and I've wanted to say it's their problem they're complaining and they're not implementing. They're not doing it right and all of those things, but here's how I look at it.

If we're not communicating what it's going to take to someone in the right way so that they get into our programs and they succeed and we know their issue well enough that we know we solve that issue, and if they get into our program and we're not succeeding with them, then we messed up somewhere. We have a problem somewhere. I used to want to blame other people but now I know it's us because here's what happens when we find the right avatar, when we find the entrepreneur we're looking for, and then we tell them things like, it's going to take a half hour a day for the first 30 days, business days. So 10 hours over the first 30 days to get to the place where you're on your strategic direction call with us.

That's something we tell people up front because the avatar we call on is an avatar who wants to understand what's really going on, but we also, we can't tell a CEO that it's going to be easy. We can't tell them that it's going to, it doesn't take time. If we don't tell them what's really going to happen and what we really need and what they need and if it's not part of the agreement, then we're going to sell the wrong person. We're going to disappoint somebody, so we share what we feel we need to and the experience so that we know we're selling the right person.

And if you're having challenges scaling or if you're having trouble with the wrong person in the room or if you're not having the right person line up and be referred to you or call you, the issue may be that you're selling the wrong person. I know that in the times in my career where I've sold the wrong person, it hasn't been challenging. It's been near devastating. It's just about as challenging as hiring the wrong person. And either way, you end up in a place where you have to take responsibility, fix the process, and make sure that it doesn't happen again because if you can eliminate that as a liability, you'll grow and scale your company far faster when you're attracting the right person, looking for the right outcome, and you're getting consistent results.

Took me forever to figure that one out, don't let it take you forever to do the same. If you're interested in getting more information from us, join our Facebook group, The Billionaire Code, on Facebook it is a free group. There's three questions to join, please answer all three and we'll make sure you get approved, it's where we share information. There's some really interesting conversations among entrepreneurs. It's absolutely free. So if you are growing and scaling a business, go to Billionaire Code on Facebook and don't just join the community, participate. I look forward to seeing you there.

Thank You For Listening!

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With gratitude,

Alex

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