Episode 9. Overcoming Your Fear of Selling for Your Business

Without selling and without generating sales in your business, it’s extremely difficult to say that you have a business.

I notice this happens a lot amongst entrepreneurs – which is, many entrepreneurs think that they can create amazing, value packed content that will supposedly lead people to want to inquire about their services. They look at hugely successful entrepreneurs who are putting out content on multiple platforms and assume that content is the key to making sales in their business.

Here’s the thing: Content is great, but you still need to make offers. The reason this tends to happen is because people rather spend time doing only what’s comfortable instead of making offers, which can feel uncomfortable a lot of the time.

In this episode:

You don’t need to worry about other people’s opinions of you when you’re selling on social media

This fear of being salesy or selling too much on social media can show up in the form of creating excessive content that isn’t strategic and doesn’t convert followers into clients. 

Or maybe you keep editing your website or captions over and over again. 

Whenever you find yourself procrastinating with activities that are not selling, that’s usually a form of resistance towards actually putting yourself out there and selling because you’re afraid of what people think.

People don’t have to follow you if they don’t want to. 

They have a choice to unfollow or not watch your stories. You don’t need validation from your audience or anyone else to make an offer. 

Also, people will say no to the wrong offer. 

If they don’t want your offer, they’ll move right along. It’s not your job to worry about who wants and does not want your offer. 

Your job is to keep showing up so that one day, the right people will reach out to you. Similarly, even if now may not be the right time, later on, your ideal client will more likely reach out to you and say yes simply because you kept showing up and reminded them of what you can help them with. 

Otherwise, your prospect would go to someone else who showed up for them when the time was right. So, yes, keep showing up and giving value. 

It’s none of your business what people are thinking about you and your offer. 

If anything, people do need to hear you talk about your offer for the 10th time before they realize, “Oh wait, I didn’t even realize he or she was selling this offer and oh my goodness it’s actually something that can help me. Let me look into this.”.

What selling really is about and it’s not as complicated as you think!

All selling is you extending an offer or invitation to people. Then they get to choose whether to take you up on your offer or not. 

This means that it’s up to the other person to decide how to feel about you. And it’s not up to you to feel embarrassed about selling. I mean, you can choose to think, “Oh, people are right. I am salesy.”. 


What if you looked more critically at these thoughts and questioned these thoughts? Why did you immediately adopt the thought that you’re being too salesy? What evidence do you have that supports this thought? 

Then, you can perhaps decide whether you want to subscribe to this thought or not. After all, you can choose what you want to feel when it comes to selling your offer. 

One more thing to consider is: Do your ideal clients think you are too salesy? 

Your offer is meant to serve this group of people, so try looking at this from the perspective of your ideal client.

When they see your offer, which they know they need and that it will help them, are they going to think you are too salesy? Or are they going to be more focused on vetting your offer and decide whether to take the next step with you? 

One shift you can start to make is to focus on your ideal clients and how your selling is going to serve them.

When it comes to selling your offer on social media, selling is just energy. 

People buy when they can sense the energy you have behind your offer. This means being genuinely excited about and confident in your offer. 

In order to be truly confident and excited, you need to realize the value of your work. 

You’re only going to be selling something incredible, I assume. 

Because if you’re planning to sell something that isn’t going to be of great value or isn’t going to truly help people, then I’m going to be questioning why you’re even reading this post in the first place. 

The next time you feel resistance to showing up and sharing about your offer, ask yourself: Why don’t I want to sell? 

Then, ask yourself what are the reasons you DO want to sell. 

Here are some of the possible reasons that you should be selling. The obvious one is to be able to actually make sales in your business, because if you don’t have sales coming in, it’s hard to argue that you have a business in the first place. 

Moving forward, there’s a few more reasons I want to elaborate on.

Selling helps you make an impact on your clients’ lives

By selling, you can start working with clients and create change and transformation for them. 

You’re in this space because you genuinely care about helping people get results using your skills and experiences. You’re not just here for money.

Your offer is meant to help people, so don’t keep your offer to yourself because you think people will judge you for talking about your offer. 

You’re not here to be a people pleaser. Rather, you are here to help people and tell people what they actually need to hear.

Your offer is going to help people, and it’s your job to make sure that the right people get to hear about your offer.

It’s up to them to decide for themselves whether they want to reach out to you about your offer. Sales is not coercion. 

I must say that we’ve all probably been exposed to sales tactics that rubbed us the wrong way and left a bad taste in our mouths.

However, if you’re reading this post, I’m confident that you won’t be implementing any of those aggressive or pushy sales strategies. 

Instead, I’m sure you’ll focus on selling from a place of genuine energy, meaning you’ll keep showing up and sharing why you truly believe in your offer and how it can help people. This energy matters.

By not showing up, you’re denying the change or results that people want and need.

Likewise, feeling bad about selling doesn’t help anyone. Not showing up to sell doesn’t help anyone. 

I want you to take some time to think about the reason you are selling your offer in the first place. 

If you find that in your reflection, you listed a desire to help people as one of the reasons why you’re even putting out this offer or why you even started this business in the first place, then that’s more than enough of a reason to go out there and tell people what you do and how you can help them.

Selling helps you become a better service provider, coach, or consultant 

If you want to be a better coach, you need to work with people. 

To do this, you need to sell your offer. 

For example, one of the reasons why I KNOW I want to work with more clients is so I can hone my skills as a business coach and help my clients get even better results. 

Working with a few clients isn’t enough for me to master my skills as a coach or to really solidify my methodologies and strategies.

This is because I’m committed to selling the step-by-step, walk through of my own processes so that my clients can sustainably do it for themselves for the long term.

My offer is not meant to be just a short term solution. Instead, I’m providing the tools and resources that will sustain my clients through time.

If you know you can help someone, why wouldn’t you? 

After all, people buy something when they feel that the offer can bring value to them. 

We often forget that our clients are benefiting from this transaction too, it’s not just us gaining something from the sale.

Don’t think that you’re taking advantage of people because you are giving value to your clients. It’s a value exchange. 

As you work together, not only is your current client going to benefit from the results and transformation you’ll help them with, but your future clients will also benefit because you’re constantly improving your abilities and skills as a service provider simply by selling and working with clients.

Selling helps you create better content

It’s easy to want to spend a lot of time creating tons of amazing content or planning your content strategy in great detail. That’s great as long as you are creating content that’s related to your offers.

This is just creating more work for yourself when you could have been spending time interacting with people or creating ways for people to ask about, apply to or directly invest in your offers. 

Avoid the temptation to create content simply because you feel like you aren’t ready to sell.

If anything, you’ll have new content ideas when you actually work with clients and gain experience and perspective.

Really think about what are the activities you’re doing in your business as a way of procrastinating from having to do the front-facing work that can often feel uncomfortable but are instrumental for making sales in your business. 

Because if you don’t get uncomfortable enough, you won’t make changes in your business or grow as an entrepreneur. 

More importantly, it’s going to be much harder to make the income and impact you know you’re meant to make.

What to do if you feel resistance towards selling and you’re afraid of being salesy

There’s no right or wrong way to sell or make offers, but there will definitely be approaches that work better for you and feel more aligned with you. 

There’s really no need to get caught up in the, “How do I sell?” or “What videos on selling do I need to watch?”, because then you’ll tend to consume way too much information and try to plan for every step and every potential pitfall all in your head. 

Doing things and planning things in your head is not the same as actually going out there and sharing about your work. 

Your audience needs to hear about your offer directly from you, and they need you to repeatedly tell them about it and tell them what are the next steps for them to take if they’re interested in moving forward. 

This means getting out of your head and selling in a way that works for you and feels good to you. 

How do you know how to sell in a way that works for you and feels good to you? 

Trying to find the “best” how-to strategy on selling is a waste of your time because it may not feel good to you when you actually implement it. 

You won’t know what’s right for you until you do it. 

Some of you may disagree with this and believe that you need to know how first before you can take action, but I would like to offer an alternative thought for you to think about: Why are you searching for the “best” or right way to sell? Is it coming from a place of “OMG I don’t know how to do this” or “OMG I want to do this right the first time”? 

Or is it coming from a place of supplementing what you already know and tweaking what you’ve already tried? 

Maybe you’ve already shared your offer consistently for a while and now you’re thinking, “Okay I definitely can try something different when I talk about my offer to my audience. Let me see what others are trying and if it’s an approach I want to adopt for myself.”. 

You see, the energy between these two scenarios are completely different. 

Your energy and intention matters a lot when it comes to selling, because if you’re building a business, your energy not only affects how you feel about your business, but people can also sense when you’re being desperate for clients. 

I want you to be aware of whether you’re becoming dependent on information instead of relying on your internal resources and having confidence in yourself and to take action even if you feel like you don’t have it all figured out.

My own approach to selling for my business

You may be wondering, “What are some ways people sell?”.

I can only speak for myself and what works best for me. 

While other people may focus heavily on conversion copywriting, some may leverage live video a lot, others implement webinar funnels and email sequences. 

For me, I mostly sell in my content, meaning I add call-to-actions (CTAs) and invite people to make the next move, like applying to my program or direct messaging (DM) me. 

It may seem simple, but it’s effective. 

What also works for me is to communicate to my audience how my offer is going to change their lives within my content like Instagram stories. 

First, I share the value of the transformation that I’ll help them achieve, which is being able to build an online coaching or service-based business and to sign on clients consistently, which ultimately creates a lot more career opportunities, financial security, and confidence for my clients. 

Because the skills you’ll acquire through starting a business are repeatable, impactful, profitable, and scalable. You can continue to grow your business and open more doors for your business, career, and life based on the skills you’ll learn from my program. 

Then, I support this with client testimonials, client wins, and other social proof. For instance, many of my one-on-one clients have been able to sign on their first paying clients and hit their first four figure months purely through their business during our work together. 

I also have an abundance of screenshots that showcase the inner transformations that my clients have gone through in addition to the concrete business wins like signing on clients, hitting their income goals, new speaking opportunities, and so on. 

For my business, this method of selling has worked because I truly believe in the value of my offer and I’m fully confident in the results I can help clients get. 

This energy, genuine enthusiasm, and confidence is what sells for me. 

I also make sure to communicate the value of my offer consistently because it’s not my audience’s job to convince themselves why they need to work with me. It’s my job to communicate that to them. 

What happens when you start selling

One thing you can zone in on is to create content that invites people to say “Hey, I’m interested!”. Every single day. 

Remember that the majority of your audience at the moment are like window shoppers. They’ll browse around, maybe like some of your posts. 

Many won’t want to have conversations with the sales associate and just want to continue browsing alone.

But, when the right offer presents itself or when one day, the person will have a strong urgency to buy your offer because there’s an urgent pain point they need to solve. 

It’s your job to open your storefront and have the means for people to buy from you. 

You need to continuously show up and create opportunities or people to buy from you.

If you’re scared to make offers, you’re delaying the progress of your business, the impact you make with clients, and the income you bring in for your business. 

You need to let your desire to grow your business and help people exceed your fear of being judged if you sell. 

Don’t let ego get in the way of doing uncomfortable things like putting yourself out there. People need you to be confident in yourself before they can be confident in you.

The entrepreneur who makes money is the one who shows up, gives value, takes action, and makes offers to their audience. As opposed to getting caught up in figuring out what’s the best selling strategy.

When you’re showing up to talk about your offer, focus on the possibilities, the return on investment, and the transformation that will happen when people join your program.

Remind them that you got them and you fully believe that you can help. Ultimately, empower them to decide for themselves.

By truly being so excited and by having full belief in your work, this helps people see you as an authority. Help your audience see you as a serious business and show up as much as you can to tell people what you do and how you can help.

After all, you’re a business that helps people.

One important thing I learnt when navigating my own fear of selling

One thing I’ve personally learned when navigating my own fear of selling is that it’s not necessarily that my audience needed time warming up to me as a business owner. But it’s me who needed to warm up to my own identity as an entrepreneur.

There was a time earlier on in my business where I didn’t fully believe in myself as an entrepreneur and felt a lot of resistance to selling.

Now, not only do I remember that I am a business and businesses sell products that they believe can impact people, but I also remember that showing up and selling is good for my audience because of the results and transformations I can help people achieve.

At the end of the day, I want you to be committed to your growth more than the sales and numbers and shiny outcomes that you can share with other people. 

Selling your offers and growing a business. These things are all part of the growth journey in entrepreneurship because it requires you to do uncomfortable things. 

Are you ready to be committed to your own growth? 

Are you more committed to your business and goals than you are to your current fears and limiting beliefs about selling? 

Sounds good? Awesome. Let’s get to work.

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