If you’re like some female entrepreneurs who cringe at the word “sales,” this episode is for you. As someone who used to dread making sales calls because I was afraid of coming on too strong, I understand the discomfort. But what if I told you that sales could be an act of service rather than manipulation?
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Show Notes | Transcript“When you approach sales from that heart-centered way of being able to offer service, then it’s easy to make a sale. It really is.” – Gloria Grace Rand
In this episode of Live Love Engage, I’m sharing my journey from sales-averse to sales-embracing, and how you can do the same. We’ll explore why women over 50 have unique advantages when it comes to heart-centered selling. We’ll also address potential hurdles like ageism and self-doubt, offering strategies to turn these challenges into opportunities.
Discover how to:
- Approach sales conversations with genuine curiosity
- Use active listening to uncover client needs
- Offer solutions that truly serve your audience
- Handle “no” with grace (it often just means “not yet”)
Key insights include:
- How my first “sale” as an entrepreneur came from a place of genuine desire to help
- Why women over 50 are twice as likely to create successful businesses
- The importance of listening deeply in sales conversations
- Reframing sales as a sacred offering to serve others
- Practical tips for overcoming sales-related limiting beliefs
A Gift for Your Energy Field
As a special bonus, I’m offering a brief light language transmission to help clear any unconscious blocks holding you back from sales success. This energetic gift is designed to resonate with your DNA and open new pathways of abundance.
Ready to reclaim sales as a heartfelt way to serve others? Tune in for practical wisdom, spiritual insights, and a dash of humor as we navigate the beautiful world of conscious selling.
Resources:
Schedule a free introductory light language session: https://tidycal.com/gloria3/lightlanguageintro
Join the Soulful Women’s Network: https://www.facebook.com/groups/soulfulwomensnetwork
Receive daily inspirational email messages: bit.ly/LoveLightNotes
Achieve emotional balance with a personalized 30-minute light language session: https://gloriarand.com/light-language-healing/
Need support? Go to engagewithgloria.com to schedule a call.
Connect with Live Love Engage:
Send Gloria Grace a message
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LinkedIn: Gloria Grace Rand
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TRANSCRIPT
Heart-Centered Selling: Top Strategies for Female Entrepreneurs 50+
Host: Gloria Grace, Confidence Catalyst and Self-Love Advocate
Introduction: Reframing Sales
Gloria Grace: Namaste. If you’re like I was a few years ago and you hear the word sales and you go “ah,” well, you’re in the right place because today we are reclaiming sales as an act of service, not manipulation, which I think is one of the connotations that sales has.
But first, as always, I want to welcome you to Live Love Engage. I am Gloria Grace, confidence catalyst and self-love advocate. And I empower women over 50 through my signature LOVE method and energy healing to boldly live life on their terms.
As I mentioned, sales—sort of like systems a couple of weeks ago—not exactly my favorite subject. And I’ve been procrastinating on doing this episode because even though I know and I understand now that sales really is a service, there’s still part of me at times that just feels icky about it. I’m just going to be honest, and that’s a problem frankly, because it makes it challenging when you’re in business if you’ve got this limiting belief about sales.
My Sales Background
That’s what I did. I mean, when I first started my business way back in 2009 as an SEO copywriter, helping write content for business websites, that was what I decided to do. Before that I was an employee—I worked in television. I worked for a long time at the public television station down in Miami, Florida on the staff of the Nightly Business Report. Then I left that for a while and worked part-time at another television business news organization, and then finally became a stay-at-home mom for a while.
So my previous experience of selling before that was: right after high school I sold shampoo door-to-door as a fundraiser for our band. I was a Girl Scout, so I sold Girl Scout cookies and did well with that. Although truth be told, it was really my mom who did well because she would sell them at work. I sold the most cookies in our troop one year because of that—where she worked, they were hungry for Girl Scout cookies and so I was happy to oblige.
I even sold Tupperware for a little while when I was in my twenties, mostly because I had a good friend who was trying to get a Tupperware business going. Since I’d used Tupperware for years—my mom was a Tupperware customer—I thought, “Oh, okay, how hard can it be to sell Tupperware?” Direct sales and me are not a good fit, especially selling physical products. I didn’t enjoy that.
My First Real Sale: A Heart-Centered Approach
Now when it came to promoting my business as a copywriter, I realized, “Oh, crap, I have to sell, don’t I?” And what I discovered—and this is sort of the crux of what we’re going to get into today—is that my very first sale came about as a result of hearing a presentation by a couple of life coaches.
I belonged to a women’s group at the time called Mothers and More. They gave this presentation to our group called “No is a Complete Sentence.” I think I’ve talked about boundaries on the show before and how important they are for men and women, but especially women, because we tend to be caretakers. But we also have to learn to take care of ourselves, and that’s where boundaries come in. We need to learn to say no. Even in business, sometimes we need to say no as well.
So anyway, I’m listening to this presentation, and what was going on in my life at the time was that I was taking a course on SEO copywriting. I was studying with Heather Lloyd Martin—she was an SEO copywriter and had a course that I was taking. I was learning about this stuff, and I thought, “Well, you know, just for giggles, I’m going to Google this company and see if I can find them.”
They were life coaches in Orlando, and I knew enough about keywords to look for that. So I went to Google and searched for “life coaches Orlando,” and I couldn’t find their company. I looked and looked—went past page one, page two, nothing. Then I finally typed in the name of their company, which was Creating Your Masterpiece. Then they came up on Google.
I said, “Let me look at their website. Let me see what the deal is here.” What I found was that they did not have “Orlando life coaching” as a keyword phrase in the back end of their website. Even though I wasn’t done with the course yet, I knew that I could help them. I suspected that if I was able to do this optimization, I had a good feeling that I could help them get onto page one of Google. This was way back in 2009, and it was much easier to get on page one of Google at that time. Now there are billions of websites, so it’s a little more challenging.
Overcoming Fear to Make the Sale
So I called them up on the phone—no, wait. Did I call them? No, no, no, no. That would be too bold for this introverted girl. No, I sent them an email thanking them for their presentation. I said, “I noticed I was trying to find your website and I couldn’t find it online. This is the reason why I think it’s not showing up.”
Then I paused. I didn’t send the email because fear came up for me. I’m like, “Oh, you know, what are they going to say? Are they going to respond positively? Who am I? I’m not even an official copywriter yet. I’m still just taking the course.”
All these thoughts started coming into my head, and I was like, “No, I really know what I saw on their website. I know what I saw on the code. I’m sure I could help them.” And so I hit send.
I got a call maybe the next day, or maybe later that day. They were like, “Oh my gosh, thank you so much! We just had this website designed and we don’t understand why nobody is calling us. When can we hire you? How can we hire you?”
They did hire me to do the work. Sure enough, they showed up on the first page of Google and their phone started ringing. As a result of that, one of the women belonged to a networking group, and she invited me to join it as well, which I did. She would constantly sing my praises, and I was able to get more business that way.
The Key Lesson: Sales as Service
The lesson I want you to take away from this story is that when you approach sales—and I wasn’t even really thinking of making a sale, I wasn’t really thinking of them being my first customer—I was just coming at it from “Oh my gosh, I need to be able to help these people. They’re not showing up on Google. I know what can be done. I know I can fix it.”
When you approach sales from that heart-centered way of being able to offer service, then it’s easy to make a sale. It really is.
Advantages for Women Over 50
Now, for those of you who maybe have been listening to my podcast for a little while, you might have noticed that I changed my intro a little bit. I’ve been going through a program where I’ve been upleveling my brand and really honing in on who I want to serve. I really want to serve women over 50.
Women over 50 have advantages when it comes to selling because by now you’ve got decades of business experience or even just industry experience that helps you with relationship management. Whether you’ve always been an entrepreneur or you’ve been in the corporate arena, or maybe you haven’t even done that—maybe you’ve held jobs or maybe you’ve been a stay-at-home mom and now that your kids are out of the house, you’re ready to get back in and do something, maybe start a new business.
You’ve had to sell. You’ve been selling people your whole life. You started selling as a child because you had to sell your parents on something that you wanted. So we do know innately how to sell. I think it’s just that sales has gotten a bad rap.
You think about—and I’m guilty of this as well—my idea of sales is the hard-pressure used car salesman. That’s usually the stereotype: someone who sees a person coming onto the lot and they’re ready to sell you a car when maybe you’re just looking, or they’re going to sell you the more expensive one when you wanted just a simple sedan.
Additional Advantages of Women Over 50 in Business
You’ve got:
- Well-established networks of people and personal reputation that you can leverage for referrals and warm sales leads
- Financial stability – more financial stability at this age
- Resilience – if you’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time, you’ve built up that resilience muscle
Part of being a business owner and dealing with people is that not everybody is going to want to buy from you. You’re going to get a lot of rejections. I know I got a lot of rejections and still do. You have to be able to just let that roll off your back because that’s just the way it is.
People have lots of different reasons why they don’t want to buy:
- The timing isn’t right
- They don’t have the money right now
- Maybe they just don’t click with you
You’ve got to be okay with that. I know we don’t like to be rejected—at least I don’t like to be rejected—but it comes with the territory. You’ve got to learn to build that resilience muscle and know that there’s going to be ups and downs in this business.
A lot of women over 50 really are successful entrepreneurs. In fact, there have been studies that show that you’re actually twice as likely to create a successful business compared to women who are much younger, like in their twenties.
Challenges to Be Aware Of
There are also some challenges because, let’s face it, as you get older, sometimes there can be ageism or gender bias, and sometimes that can make it challenging to connect with clients or reach other people. Especially if in whatever industry you’re in, perhaps there are younger men out there who you’re trying to compete with, it might be a little bit more challenging.
You might have a bout of self-doubt creep in, especially if you’re trying something new or you’re deciding to launch a new product. Hopefully you’ve done some research first to make sure that it is something that people are going to want, not just what you think they need. You have to take into consideration what people want, because what you want and what you need aren’t always the same thing.
You want to be able to meet people where they are and provide something that they want, and then give them what they need.
Don’t Let Fear Keep You from Making Offers
Don’t let fear keep you from making offers. I know sometimes we might be nervous about making people a new offer for a product or service, especially if you’re pivoting into a new direction. But if you know that there is a market for it, number one, you have an obligation to make an offer. Because if you know that you’ve got something that’s going to help somebody and you don’t offer it, then you are depriving them of your gift.
When to Say No to Clients
I want to mention this because I talked about my clients early on, but those coaches who talked about “no is a complete sentence”—if you have someone who comes to you and wants to hire you, it’s okay for you to say no to them.
I know sometimes, if we’re in a financial position where we hate the idea of turning someone down because we have bills to pay, I get that. So maybe sometimes you do have to take a client. But I encourage you to really trust your gut when you are dealing with people, because sometimes there are big red flags out there that we might ignore, but eventually they become really loud and really big in our face.
Unless you need to, you might have to either say that you’re not going to work with them, or you might have to let them go as a client and not sell them any more of your services.
Example: The Meeting-Loving Client
I had a couple of instances in the past when I was doing more copywriting. I had a lovely gentleman who loved to schedule meetings with me, and we would go over these lovely plans of what he wanted to do in his business and how to promote it. I’d spend like an hour with him, and then he wouldn’t implement anything. I finally just—this was early on in my business, so I may not have been as tactful about not wanting to work with him anymore. I think I might have just stopped answering his calls, frankly. But it was really frustrating.
Example: The Resistant Client
Then I had another woman who had hired me to help her with her LinkedIn profile. I kept making all of these suggestions, and I was on a phone call with her. Every suggestion I made to her, she’s like, “Oh, I tried that. I did that already. That doesn’t work. Oh, no, no, that doesn’t work for me.” Every single thing.
As I’m talking to her, I’m getting a stomachache and my body is just tensing up. It was so frustrating because she wouldn’t even give it a try. Some of the things she’d say, “Oh, I heard that doesn’t work now”—so it wasn’t even direct experience. Instead of listening with an open mind.
People I like to work with have open minds. Those are my ideal clients—people with open minds. She was not one. So I finally said, “You know what? I’m going to suggest another person that you might be a better fit for, because we obviously are not a good fit.” I blessed her and gave her a couple of referrals of some other people who did this kind of work.
I just remember the stress that she caused in my body. That’s not good. We want to work with clients that are going to light us up, that are going to make us feel good, that are going to make us look forward to working with them every day. Especially if you are in the service industry—if you’re a coach or a consultant—you want to be happy with the people you’re working with.
Reframing Sales as Sacred Service
Let’s talk about sales a little bit more concretely. If at the start of this, your default position when it comes to sales is negative—because I know I’ve been in groups before where they say, “How many people love making sales? Raise your hand if you love making sales.” There will be a few people that raise their hands, but there are going to be others that don’t, because we have this idea of making sales that we think of cold calling or something like that.
But if we can reframe that and approach sales as something more sacred, something that is a service that you’re offering—a solution to somebody to make their life easier—that’s ideally what it is. If you’re in business and you’ve got a service or product, somehow it is your intention to have it help someone in some part of their life. It could be their health, their finances, their relationships, whatever it is.
Addressing Money and Worth Limiting Beliefs
If you’re not as successful in making sales as you would like to be, it could be that you might have some limiting beliefs around money and your worth. I talk about this in my book Live, Love, Engage, because when I started my business, I realized that I did have limiting beliefs about money—things that I had inherited from my mother in particular.
The only entrepreneur in our family was my uncle, my mom’s brother, and she thought he was a crook. My parents were both union employees, so they were more focused on employees as opposed to business owners. When I started my own business, I think I had some unconscious beliefs that kept me from really being as successful as I wanted to be.
It led to me:
- Undercharging for some of my services for a very long time
- Really not valuing my worth as a writer
- Not promoting myself as much, even though I knew it was important to do, especially because I was dealing with marketing
If you’ve got something like that going on—and you may not be aware of it—but if you see the results in that your bottom line is not growing as fast as you’d like, then you might want to do some journaling about that and some meditation. Ask yourself and look back and think about your relationships with money. What were the lessons you learned about money growing up? What did you hear?
You might have just picked up on these things and you’re acting it out without even really thinking about it.
The Good News: Neuroplasticity
But there’s good news here. Our brains have this wonderful capability called neuroplasticity that will allow you to rewire these stories. You can rewrite the script. You can practice affirmations and say, “I am worthy of being paid well for my gifts.”
You can start doing some of this work on your own, and you might want to also work with a coach. Actually, just recently I had a wonderful money coach on the show, Mikelann Valterra. You might want to go back and listen to that episode because it was really great.
Noble Poverty in Holistic Providers
One of the things she talked about, especially for holistic providers, is that we have something called Noble Poverty, where heart-centered service providers don’t want to charge a lot because we want to be able to serve everybody, forgetting that you still have bills to pay just like everybody else.
If you undervalue and underprice your services, you’re also giving a perception to other people—to your prospects—that maybe you’re not that great because you don’t charge a lot. Let’s face it, especially in the Western world where a lot of my listeners and viewers are, there is this perception that the more something costs, the better it’s got to be.
You think of Walmart items versus items at Nordstrom or, back in the day, Neiman Marcus. My mother loved to go to Neiman Marcus after Christmas and get Christmas ornaments on sale—these really expensive ones, now 50% off. Good deal.
The Art of Listening in Sales
Once you’ve sort of cleared out some of this stuff, when it gets time to really get into a sales conversation, this is where it really pays to use our ears. What’s the saying? God gave us two ears and one mouth, so we’re to listen more than we speak. There’s a reason.
When you are in, let’s say, a discovery call with someone, you really want to listen, listen, listen well to what they’re saying and also even what they’re not saying. This is where your life experience, if you’ve been really working on honing in on your intuition, this is where you can really put that into play and really hold space while you’re listening to someone and give them your undivided attention.
Number one, they’re going to love you for that, because as human beings we want to be heard. We want to be seen. We want to be heard. So if you can give that to someone and just ask them questions and say, “Where are you? What’s going on in your life right now?”—and again, this is more for like coaching or consulting as opposed to someone selling a product. That’s a whole different thing, and I’m not going to get into that because that’s not my expertise.
If you’re looking for someone who can help you sell products, I’m sure there are other podcasts out there that are all about selling on Etsy and things like that. That’s not me. Full disclosure right here. I’ve been a service provider now for 15-16 years. Oh my gosh, time flies.
Key Questions to Ask
So, listening. Give them your full attention and ask questions and then let them speak. Ask:
- “Where are you? What’s going on for them?”
- “What would life be like if they had this problem solved?”
- “What happens if they don’t get this problem solved?”
Just really listen and then pause. Yes, pausing. And take notes while you’re talking to someone as well, because then you can use their words back to them and say, “I heard you say…” and then you can go deeper into that and explore that.
Say things like “What I’m hearing is…” and then you can say, “Well, here’s how I can support you.” And then ask permission: “Does this feel aligned for you?”
Handling “No” with Grace
Handle that “no” with grace, because “no” oftentimes is just “not yet.”
In fact, I was on a call with a woman a few years ago. We were going to do a VIP day together where I was going to help her with redoing her LinkedIn profile. I was big on doing LinkedIn profiles a few years back. She was like, “Yeah, I’d love to do it, but I just can’t do it right now. It’s just not in my budget” or she didn’t have the time or whatever reason.
What I did do, though—and I’m getting back in the habit of this, I got off track with email for a while, but I’m getting back into the habit of sending regular emails out to my list—so at the time, I was being very good about that. We stayed in contact. She was getting my emails every week or every two weeks, whatever it was.
She came back to me a year later and said, “I’m ready now.”
And this is where I learned to value my services: I said, “Well, you know, there’s been a price increase since we talked last year, so it’s going to be this much now.” And she’s like, “Okay.” And there you go.
Don’t Be Afraid to Raise Your Prices
Don’t be afraid to raise your prices. Hey, like everything else, inflation is out there. And even if there wasn’t inflation, if you have been doing something for a long time, you do want to still raise your rates every so often because you have bills to pay.
And again, for this psychology of humans, the more expensive you are, sometimes the more desirable you are. And there’s another benefit: when you get to the point where you are charging a lot—you see these coaches… I think Tony Robbins, I don’t know how much people pay him for sessions, but I’m sure it’s tens of thousands of dollars probably to get private coaching with him.
When you’re doing that, you don’t have to coach as many people. So for instance, if you’re a coach or a consultant, the more money you charge, you can kind of cut back on the number of clients. There’s some advantage to that.
But if you like the lower-cost thing, some people love offering low-cost membership programs where it’s maybe $20 a month or $40 a month, and then they have a whole bunch of courses and things that people can do on their own. They usually offer group coaching and things like that. There are all sorts of different ways to do that.
If you wind up having 100 people or 200 people paying you $20 a month every month or $40 a month every month, you can make a good living doing that as well.
Sales Training and Goal Setting
There’s a whole other thing you can go into—I’ve attended sales trainings and I highly recommend those—where you go in and look at how much money you want to earn and then figure out how many sales you need to make to earn that.
You can figure out, of your offerings—if you have something that’s a $100 offer, something that’s a $1,000 offer, something that’s a $5,000 offer—you can see how many people or how many sales you’re going to need to, let’s say you have a $100,000 goal to earn a year. You can divide that up by 12 and do the math.
That’s not what this podcast is about. There are wonderful people out there who teach this stuff. I am not one of those people, but I just want to put it out there so you have it.
Main Takeaway: Sacred Service
I’m looking at some notes here of all the different things that I could talk about, and I just don’t want to because I want this to be more of a high-level look at sales.
My main point that I want to stress is that you treat sales as a service and treat it as a sacred offering that you’re making to someone. I’m sure if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re someone with a big heart. The podcast is called Live Love Engage, so I’m sure you are someone who wants to live fully, love deeply, and engage authentically, which is what I always say at the end of the show.
You’re not someone who just wants to go in and make as much money as possible and doesn’t care who you hurt. No, you are someone who wants to help people and you want to grow your business and you want to pay your bills, and you probably want some time freedom and some financial freedom to go on vacation and to have fun and to spoil your family with gifts or trips or something.
Just always remember to be of service to someone when you’re talking to them on the phone and think of how you can help them.
Like I talked about at the beginning, my very first foray into trying to promote my services as a copywriter wasn’t so much about making the sale as I just felt sorry for these people because they had this beautiful website and nobody was finding them. I’m like, “That’s not right. They need…” And I heard them and they were great. I was very impressed with their presentation. I’m like, “More people need to hire these people. More people need to hire these women. So I want them to be known.”
That’s how I came at it, with that open heart to help them. And they were like, “Great! Help us.”
Light Language Energy Healing
I think that’s going to do it for now on this topic, but I want to do one other thing as we’re winding down today’s episode. One of the things that I love to do—and as I mentioned at the beginning, I offer energy healing—so I want to share with you a light language message to help you to release perhaps some unconscious limiting beliefs that might be keeping you from being as successful in your business as you’d like to be, to help you to be able to have more confidence to go out and be of service, to sell your services.
What I’m going to share right now is a message that is intended for your heart to understand. It’s not something necessarily you’re going to be able to translate because it’ll sound like a foreign language, but it’s got energy in it, and it will resonate with your DNA and resonate with your energy field to help you to clear away any blocks that you might not even be aware of.
What I encourage you to do is, if you’re driving while you’re listening to this, pause the podcast and come back to it later when you can be somewhere where you can put your feet on the floor, close your eyes, and set the intention that the message that you’re going to receive will be for your soul’s highest good and the highest good of others. That’s what I am setting that intention as well.
[Light language message delivered]
Just a little taste of light language. If you would like to know more about that, schedule a free session with me. We can do a short little one. I’ll give you a little bit more detail about what light language is, and I’ll have the information for that in the show notes. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll see it right there.
Let’s schedule a time to chat. I’ll do a little bit more because it’s great when I can share one-on-one with someone because then I can address your particular needs. And of course, if you want to just go ahead and book a session with me, you can do that as well. I offer half-hour sessions and I’ll give you a lot longer message than what I just shared with you right now. I’ll also have that in the show notes, too.
Closing
Make sure that you are subscribed to Live Love Engage on your favorite podcast platform or on YouTube, because then you’ll be notified when next week’s episode drops. That one features Meghan Caughey, who is going to share with us how creativity can literally rewire your brain and become your secret weapon for mental wellness.
It was funny when I was saying “literally”—if any of you are familiar with Rob Lowe, he loves to say “literally.” He has his own podcast as well, which I’ve listened to. I’ve been a fan of his for years and years, especially from The West Wing and then Parks and Recreation days. But anyway, I think I said it normally—I would just say “literally,” but he loves to say “literally.”
Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. Until next time, go out and live fully, love deeply, and engage authentically.
Key Takeaways
- Sales is service – Approach selling from a heart-centered place of helping others solve problems
- Women over 50 have advantages – Decades of experience, established networks, financial stability, and resilience
- Listen more than you speak – Use discovery calls to truly understand client needs
- Address money blocks – Examine limiting beliefs about worth and money inherited from family
- It’s okay to say no – Trust your gut about difficult clients
- Value your services – Don’t be afraid to raise prices; higher prices can indicate higher value
- “No” often means “not yet” – Stay in touch with prospects who aren’t ready now
Resources Mentioned
- Book: Live. Love. Engage. by Gloria Grace
- Previous Episode: Money coach Mikelann Valterra discussion
- Next Episode: Meghan Caughey on creativity and mental wellness
- SEO Training: Heather Lloyd Martin’s SEO copywriting course
For more information about Gloria Grace’s services, energy healing sessions, and the L.O.V.E. method, visit the show notes or schedule a free consultation.
