Resources in this Episode

Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hi Gorgeous. This is episode number 120 with our wonderful alchemist entrepreneur Dov Gordon.

Dov Gordon [0:10]
Hi, this is Dov Gordon, and you are listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy.

Christine Schlonski [0:17]
Hi Gorgeous. I am so excited to have Dov Gordon on the show. Today we are going to dive into understanding how and why people buy. So this is essential to each and every business. I’m so super excited. Stay tuned. Before we dive right in, hop on over to https://christineschlonski.com/. Find the podcast tab, there you find obviously all the podcasts, transcripts, show notes, resources, and links. But also, you can sign up for the empowerment notes. This is my weekly empowerment to you right into your inbox, where I share stuff that I usually do not share on social media and where you have all the updates about Heart Sells! Podcast. Hop on over to https://christineschlonski.com/. Find that podcast tap, have fun. Let’s dive in with the amazing alchemist entrepreneur, Dov Gordon. Dov, helps consultants and experts get ideal clients consistently. There are millions and millions of consultants and coaches who are really good at what they do. But they are not charismatic guru types. They never want to be. They love their work. All they want is a consistent flow of great clients, clients who value their experience and who value who they are as people and pay them well for it. Dov and his small team take a tactic-agnostic approach. They will help you build a strong strategic foundation. They will help you to apply it and build a simple client getting system that best works for you. I’m really, really excited having Dov on the show. Let’s dive in. Well, I am so excited to have you on Heart Sells! Podcast today, Dov.Welcome.

Dov Gordon [2:16]
Thanks! Great to be here as well.

Christine Schlonski [2:18]
Yes.

Dov Gordon [2:18]
Had a good chat with you the other week when we first met and I look forward to talking again.

Christine Schlonski [2:24]
Yes and I’m really excited because, somebody who dedicated their entrepreneurial endeavors to really help consultants and experts to get their ideal clients and to keep them and to have this constant stream of clients coming their way, it’s such important work in the world. How did you get to that space? What made you choose, I’m quite sure there were more opportunities to choose from, to pick that path?

Dov Gordon [2:59]
Well, it was an evolution. That’s the short story, that’s for sure, it was an evolution. I’m self-taught, I kind of discovered the business and self-help sections in a library as a 13-year-old, I believe. I think the first book that I discovered was, ‘Million Dollar Habits’, by Robert Ringer, I came across him. That just, that opened my eyes to certain things. I just spent the next years reading more and more and studying. At some point, I heard about business coaching. I enrolled in some coaching school, as I think they call them. I learned enough to get started, which was very helpful though. Several years ago, I found the materials from and look through it and I was thinking, “Wow, this is so basic.” The tools, the ideas, were not very sophisticated, but still, it gave me what I needed at the time to get started. It did not really help me understand how to get clients. I don’t know how many people have been through coach training listening to us but one thing that I think they teach that’s doing people a disservice is this idea that you don’t need to be an expert in order to be a coach. And my opinion is that it might be true that you don’t need to be an expert in order to be a coach. But you do need an expert to be an expert if you want to have clients. Because the fact is, clients are looking for some kind of expertise, clients are looking for somebody who’s going to lead them from A to B. And that always boils down to a problem they haven’t don’t want or a result they want don’t have. And sure there’s there is a place for the process, and I’m very much about the process. So I totally understand that. It’s not all about being an expert in Facebook ads, necessarily or so on. There is a place for being a really good coach, and you can help people with a variety of situations. However, you do need to understand how and why people buy. I think that is something that I didn’t understand for too many years. And just to answer your question. The first seven or almost eight years that I was in my coaching consulting business was a real uphill battle, a real struggle. Towards the end of that period, I started to really understand a lot of what I didn’t know. And at some point, I realized that there are a lot of people like me, not natural marketers, not natural salespeople, not looking to be an online celebrity type. Although, this is going back to 2008. And before I started in 2002, so probably about 2008, maybe 2009, that’s when I started making that transition. And I realized that one of the things that I’m good at is suffering through something and actually deeply understanding it. What was the underpinnings behind it, and then being able to explain that in a simple and clear way. Nobody could save me or you from our own journey in life. No one could save us from the pain and the lessons that we have to learn, that’s for sure. But other people can certainly help us reduce some of the unnecessary pain or the unnecessary suffering or figuring it out for ourselves. And when you’re really good at something, and you know you have a lot to offer, and you just cannot figure out how to reach the people that you know you can help. When you reach them, and you have a conversation with them and you can’t figure out, “What did I just say that totally knocked this conversation off track? I know I can help this person but I know that I just blew it”, and they’re not seeing it. It is a deeply frustrating feeling that I remember all too well. Learning the how-to kind of show up every day and really how to think about it, what to do about it is, it’s a huge surface, surface of people. I literally just got this, just popped into my head right now. I got this today. This is a post from somebody who was a client of ours for our, ‘YOU: A Force To Be Reckoned With’, program. He left employment, left the job, wants to become a consultant to restaurants. We were helping him get started, figuring how to get started, very tight on cash though, very tight on cash. He scraped it together to join the program, and he’s really sincere and he really wanted help. He just posted this overnight. He said, “Hi, Dov!”, and Shana Shin is working with me. “I just want to check in with you guys. I want to let you know how much the program helped me to clarify ideas. To have a bigger yes than my No”, I’m not going to read the whole thing because it reads like unsolicited testimony, which it is. But there’s a part that I just feel like, was that, he ended up going off a little bit in a different direction. But he just goes on talking about how the thinking and the skills that he learned. He did get a client in restaurant consulting. But he also, he ended up starting off. This is just in the last couple of months, he had been doing some work in construction alongside you have to pay the bills. He ended up getting a contract to build a restaurant, as well as help manage, help consult on the management of it, which wasn’t at all what he was originally going for when he came to work with us. But all the skills that he learned. I believe that what we need is not more information. I imagine that anybody listening to this has already read books, taking courses, attended events, working programs, we know enough, what we need is to more deeply understand the things that we know. And that comes through some kind of experience, right? Ideally, it’s a series of architected experiences that are architected for you. I can’t teach you what you most need to know. What I might be able to do is lead you through certain experiences that you come to understand it on your own because we’re not talking about knowledge at this stage, so much, or information, whether we always need to keep learning and so on. But what’s really going to make the difference. At some point, what’s really going to make a difference is not more knowledge, more information, it’s a deeper understanding of the things that you already know. And that’s the approach that we like to take.

Christine Schlonski [9:36]
I love it. And it’s so important because while I remember when I was sitting in coach training, you learn all these amazing tools, and it was perfect at the time because you had to start somewhere. It was really well done. But when it came to the part where we learned how to sell ourselves as coaches that were like more than basic. You could see in the people’s faces that they didn’t like it. That they were not comfortable with it. I think it’s so important that you are stepping in and supporting people on that journey was orchestrating that knowledge, and then putting it out in a way that their ideal client can understand what they do. And because he or she understands the value they’re receiving, then they can make an informed purchasing decision, which before when it’s like a weird conversation that’s confusing, it confused mind can’t even buy or it’s not going to buy. I think that’s such an important piece.

Dov Gordon [10:47]
Absolutely.

Christine Schlonski [10:48]
Do you believe that there is this thing like a natural salesperson?

Dov Gordon [10:51]
I think there are, I think they’re absolutely are. To me, sales is leadership. I think that there are people who are naturally born with certain skills, certain talents, certain abilities that are in higher or lower proportion to others. I also think that we can learn and improve our natural tendencies. Just somebody just posted something on LinkedIn yesterday that was basically saying, “Entrepreneurship is not something you’re born with. It’s something that you learn and blah, blah.” Anyway, his point was, if entrepreneurship is something that you’re born with and people are, I don’t remember exactly what he said. But it didn’t make much sense, because I just turned it around the opposite and said, “Well, if that’s what you’re saying, then that means that people don’t learn very well, because entrepreneurship, obviously, people are struggling with it. 90 95% of businesses fail.” I mean, anytime people take an extreme position, it’s attractive in many ways to an audience and helps build an audience, I’m kind of talking on a number of different things right now bring it together. But you know, you asked me if I think people are born as salespeople, right? Are they born with certain natural tendencies? And the answer, I think, is yes. But it’s a combination of things. And I generally try to avoid the arguments about nature, or nurture or taking an extreme position, because my view is that, that they’re all it’s all true. There’s something valid and everything. And interestingly enough, and this is a struggle this around bringing, getting back to the other the related point. One of the things that people like me as I said, I’m not a natural-born marketer salesperson, but that’s what I’ve been doing for many years now. And we’ve been helping others do it better because you don’t have to be what I think of as the charismatic guru celebrity type. There are two paths to thrive as a consultant expert, so on half, the first is the path of the charismatic guru. And the other is the path of mastery. And they’re both legitimate, as long as you’re being ethical, and so on. They’re both legitimate. The problem is that the path of the cosmetic Guru is probably only correct for 10% to 15% of people who have what to share and expertise, consultants so on. But for the other 85% or so percent, it’s the wrong path. And that’s when people start walking down that path. Because that’s what most visible to us. And that’s what we’re being told you should do, and we get stuck. So you need to kind of recognize that there is another path and there’s a path of mastery. And that comes from a deep understanding of when people buy, why do they buy? And then how can I talk about what I do in a way that makes it clear that I could lead them from where they are to where they want to be because sales is leadership. What I found to be a little tricky is that on the path of the charismatic guru-type, there are people who have no trouble getting up and publicly making proclamations about this is how it is. And they have a certain certainty and a certain absolute quality to what they’re saying. The rest of us who unsought in that area in some way, whatever happens, to be, we’re looking to be led. And when someone gets up, there was such certain total confidence, said something. There’s a temptation to nod our heads and agree, just because we are not as certain about that. We’d like to agree with them for whatever reason. For many people who have the, who don’t have that type of personality, but are more able to see that. Well, sometimes that’s true. It’s a struggle to, “Well, how can I get up and be like that or just talk like that?” We have to recognize there are two paths, so it’s fine for the charismatic guru-type, to get out and make those types of proclamations. But don’t try to be something that you’re not comfortable with. You got to know that there is another legitimate approach that really does work and can work to help you get what you want.

Christine Schlonski [14:56]
Yeah, so true. The person who is really convinced of what they do, who really has that outgoing personality like that conviction. They usually sale more, because people wants to believe.

Dov Gordon [15:12]
Yes.

Christine Schlonski [15:13]
So let’s talk about confidence a little bit, confidence in sales. What is your experience when you take a look at your path and your clients? What would you say is one of the most important elements that people can learn to make a bigger impact in their business?

Dov Gordon [15:36]
You just brought up a really good point and that is that point about how that relates to the confidence we’re just talking about. Getting up and saying, “This is how it is.” Everybody should be building a Facebook ad to Evergreen webinar funnel, or whatever. Everybody should be doing whatever, LinkedIn or Podcast or webinars like that. This is the kind of thing that we see all the time, right? Everyone has to rebrand, everyone’s to publish a book. They’re all the different, these are all just tactics, but we need to understand is that every tactic can work and every tactic could fail. When you understand that every tactic could work, and every tactic could fail, then the question to ask is not what is working or what should I do. But the question is, first, you want to ask when it works, why does it work? When it fails, why does it fail? Because when you have that understanding, then you can build your own simple repeatable marketing funnel your own simpler people marketing and selling system, which is simply I do A, then I do B, then I do C, and it brings me D leads and become clients. And I’ll just give a quick answer, just a quick kind of glimpse of what I mean by the path of mastery and how this works and how this ties into confidence. Stephen Covey from the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he said, it’s really it was it goes like this, it was the defect, “In order to say, “No, no, no”, with all distractions on the outside. You have to have a deeper Yes, burning on the inside. It’s only when you have that deeper Yes.” When it comes to a consultant coach expert, in order to feel to say no to all distractions, that everybody’s telling you, “You got to be doing this. Gotta be doing that”, and so on, you have to have that deeper Yes, in the form of a simple marketing system that actually brings you, clients. Because until you have that, you will constantly be doubting yourself. You’re kind of, not tempted, I can’t think of the word but you’re in a situation where you’re likely to jump after the next thing and the next thing and the next thing instead of looking at what you already know and say, “How can I get better at this? How can I make it better?” What you need is you need the most basic, a very basic, simple, repeatable system. I’ll just say this. Most people, when you think about what is they, you ask them, what’s the purpose of a marketing funnel? Everybody talks about the jargon marketing funnel, they need a marketing funnel, sales funnel, of course, “Why?”, anytime it’s a system, right? Anytime you’re going to have a system is gonna have a reason and purpose. Why do you need a marketing funnel? Well, to fill your pipeline, to get leads to close deals. Great. We nod our heads in agreement because it makes a lot of sense. Except it’s very superficial, we’re skidding across the surface. I like to get below the surface, I want to peel off layers, I want to see the underlying structure. And to me, the underlying structure is this. The purpose of your marketing system is to help your ideal client answer yes, to the only three questions they ever asked. There are three questions that your ideal clients ask from with. They never heard of you, your total stranger to where they’re happy to pay you money. I’ll say what those are. Then, we can go deeper or sideways or any way you want to go. The first question that they asked doesn’t matter what tactic you use, get in front of them. The very first question they always ask is, “Should I pay attention, is it interesting?”, and the first job of your marketing system is to lead them the answer, “Yes, that is interesting”, and then instantly, they have a second question, which is, “Okay, you got me interested, but can I trust you? Are you for real?” The second job of your marketing system is to lead them to answer, “Yes, I can trust you. Yes, you’re obviously for real. Yes, you really seem to know your stuff, and you actually seem to care.” When they answer yes to that second question, then instantly, they have a third question, which is, “Okay, you got me interested. I really think I can trust you. The last question is, what you recommend right for me?” Is what you recommend right for me? At that point, as soon as their brain answers, “Well, yes, what you recommend is right for me.” Now, you have a new client, congratulations, because they’re ready to buy. Whereas, when you think that my marketing funnel, the purpose of it is to fill my pipeline, “I wake up in the morning, I don’t know what the hell to do. And that’s why I’m susceptible to all the different advice from all different directions and all the angles, and I’m all over the place.” But when you realize that the true purpose of your marketing funnel, your marketing system. All you need to do is lead your ideal clients to answer three Yeses. Now I know exactly what I need to do, “I need a few pieces as possible, to put in place help them answer yes, the first question as little as possible, to help them answer this yes, the second question, and for the third. If I can put in as little as possible, I don’t need overly complicated systems.” Most people are not looking to make multi seven figures in scalar, most people are looking to be doing great work with great clients making a nice income, a great income. For most people, that’s somewhere, probably mid-six figures and still, have a life. That’s mostly who we’re working with, and we’re helping them get to that place. For that, you really don’t need complicated. That’s also why I say the question isn’t, what’s working? or What should I do? Because when you say, “What should I do with our, we can be pulled this way that by the latest gurus like, well, do this, do this, no, do this.” Instead, we say, “When it works, why does it work?” And then we understand it, “You understand it works because you’re helping them answer yes to three questions. Ah, good. Now I know exactly what to do next.” That’s what we talked with the difference in the path of the charismatic guru or the path of mastery. Path of mastery understands why things work when they work. Understand why your ideal clients buy when they buy. Understand how to talk about that to them in a way that leads them to say, “Yes, yes and yes.” Understand the things you already know that you heard so many times that you just nod your head as if, yeah, but don’t yet deeply understand. get to that point. And it’s not that difficult, but it’s also not that easy. And when you understand what you’re trying to build and why it becomes a lot easier to focus on the few things you get to the point where like Stephen Covey said, “You have that burning, ‘Yes’.” That burning ‘Yes’, in our case, is that simple, repeatable marketing and selling system. When you have that you’re free to focus. You no longer pulled in many different directions, you’re not overwhelmed. That’s a magical place where people, especially people who know their good book struggled to make sales consistently, to get ideal clients consistently.

Christine Schlonski [22:09]
Yeah, yeah, I just love that. That’s why I think our messages are so aligned because that’s the work we are bringing to the world, where we don’t need to get or help produce the next guru, just somebody that’s doing a really, really good job. That has a wonderful gift to give to the world, support those people to give more of it. Because often they get frustrated so soon, because they’re all these shiny objects, right? They don’t know what to do. So everything seems so appealing. And then they get overwhelmed. And I for sure have been there being overwhelmed.

Dov Gordon [22:49]
We all have.

Christine Schlonski [22:50]
Buying one course after the next to joining one mastermind after the next. That still not knowing what to do. I love that clear path and those questions, especially, I think where people probably miss out if somebody buys from them. If somebody says, “Well, yes, you are my next coach, or my next consultant or your product is going to help me.” I know very, very few people who actually asked the question, Why? What made you purchase? What made you say yes to you, so we can work together?

Dov Gordon [23:29]
That’s a great question.

Christine Schlonski [23:30]
Yeah. Do you have any insights? I mean, I know you teach people that. But do you have experienced that they asked the question naturally, or it says a certain way to ask a question so the answers get better?

Dov Gordon [23:45]
Well, you mean, like when you have a new client, asking them? Why did you decide to do this?

Christine Schlonski [23:50]
Yeah.

Dov Gordon [23:53]
I have a few thoughts come to mind, let’s see where it takes us. If I’m starting to work with a new client, and I’m having a sales conversation with them a strategy session, whatever you want to call it, but ultimately, it’s a conversation where I need to better understand them, because I first need to be sure that there’s somebody that I can help. Okay, I’m not going to take them unless I’m convinced to that. At that point, you know, by the time we in that conversation, I at least feel like I really understand most of the time, why they’re going ahead. Having said that, I’m listening to you. And I’m thinking that’s, that’s actually a really good idea. And it’s a good question to ask, even after I feel like I understand them. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned is that you never fully understand another person hard enough to understand themselves. And you’ll never fully understand that. Even our ideal client. That’s why I record those conversations, of course, with permission, and usually for them as well, they usually want it, but I sometimes review them and I hear things that I missed the first time. The more deeply I understand my ideal client, the better my marketing messaging is, the emails I send out, the webinar that I could put on. But still, like. There’s definitely a point where we think we understand why people are doing it. But it’s definitely better to ask more often than then to not ask. So I like your question. I like it, I think the whole idea is good. And it’s simple. As for why people don’t ask, I think people are afraid, you know, I one of the things that we lead clients to do is go back and sometimes they want to make sense, not every time but you know, go back to one of your or several of your best clients and ask why did they start working with you? Why do they continue working with you? People are afraid to ask questions like that, because they’re afraid of hearing something like, “Well, actually wasn’t so happy about it”, or whatever they’re afraid of hearing and that’s understandable. But as soon as we realized that the client feels that way, regardless, the information and the feeling is there, it’s just that everybody else knows about it, but you might as well. Suddenly, that the pain of not knowing is greater than the pain of the imagine pain of maybe, maybe what they might say, and then you realize, “I might as well know about that. So I can make things better. Right?”

Christine Schlonski [26:18]
Yeah, awesome. Well, you did bring us a gift, which I would love for you to give us some ideas where people are getting when they go to https://www.dovgordon.net/heartsells. Because I was really when we talked about it, and you said that you will offer that I was really like, “What, seriously?” So I’m very excited about that. And before we, unfortunately, need to wrap up. But I’m glad we have a second conversation where we can go deeper, can you send people to the right way and let them know what they are getting when they go to get that amazing gift?

Dov Gordon [26:58]
Well, it’s https://www.dovgordon.net/heartsells in your honor. And that’s https://www.dovgordon.net/heartsells. And you’ll see there my manual, which I sold for five years for $97. And that’s why and I believe you have to look at it. And there’s zero fluff in this. I did not write this to give away. I wrote this to sell. And like I said, we sold it for five years. I’m giving it away now because, at some point, I realized that people would read it by and then a certain percentage would come and want to work with me to get some help. Because the fact is, if it’s not about more and more information, it’s about more deeply understanding things you already know. And if the way to get that understanding is through a series of architected experiences, many people get to the point where you realize, “Well, okay, I’m for things to really change. I need those architected experiences”, and that’s where they say, want to get some hands-on coaching or help. That’s why we’re sharing and I’m just being very upfront, it’s win-win-win that way. It’s called, How to systematically and consistently attract first-rate clients. It’s about 90 pages. Every week I get messages on LinkedIn, or email, “Hey, I got your manual”, and print that just last week, someone said, “I have it printed out in the car. And between appointments, I’ve read through”, get the coffee and read through it, there’s a way that should be it’s on their desk printed out. So I’m at that’s really great. I mean, we’ve had 10s of thousands. Maybe even more by now, people go through that. Then that’s it. That’s I’m happy to share that.

Christine Schlonski [28:42]
Yeah, I love that I just opted in when you sent me the link. So I’m really looking forward to going through it. Because I love that no fluff. Well, strategy, it’s so aligned with giving from your heart, really providing the service to then attract those clients you truly want to work with. I’m looking forward to, to have the next episode with you. So we can go deep at the no fluff strategy and deeper to those three questions we just started to cover. So thank you so much for having been on Heart Sells! Podcast. And also I will put everything in the show notes, the resources, so people can just go over to https://christineschlonski.com and it’s all the information to connect with you. Just one click away. Thank you so much. I’m looking forward to the next interview. Well, what an amazing episode, I just love the work that Dov does on the spot because it’s so true. Not everybody wants to be the charismatic guru. We just as people, we want to deliver the amazing value we want to serve, we want to have fun, we want to enjoy life while doing good things. And not everybody is born to be a Tony Robbins or a Brian Tracy or Zig Ziegler. So that’s totally fine. There are so many amazing coaches and consultants out there who just do amazing work, but not that many people know their names, right? So I found this interview was so inspiring, and I hope you did too. Please make sure you share the episode with at least two of your friends. And also make sure you subscribe to Heart Sells! Podcast. And thank you so much for leaving a rating and a review. So we can build a movement of heart sellers who are authentic when selling, having fun and delivering amazing, amazing value. Thank you so much for being here. Have a wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world and I’m saying bye for now.