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Money Tolerance And The Games We Play

Money Tolerance is a topic I'm surprised to find I haven't written much about here, given that it is such a central concept not only to the sales training I deliver but also to life. Your life.

If we look at the 80/20 Rule aka Pareto's Law, and apply it to your life, we find this: a small number of beliefs and their resulting decisions turn into the majority of what you experience in life.

The purpose of thinking is to stop thinking. The vast majority of our decisions are made on autopilot, drawing on what we've done before, consistency, identity. The maintenance of identity is key, whether you're conscious of this or not.

money tolerance, dollar, eye, bill

Photo by Vladislav Reshetnyak from Pexels

The Consistency of Money Tolerance

Money Tolerance is a two-parter. It's a limiting belief to imagine as two goalposts: one lower, and one upper. The upper limit is easy to spot, at least when we're being truthful with ourselves (and we often are not). This is the number at which you start saying, "That's a lot of money".

This is a game we play. We play it first with ourselves, then with others.

You see, that number is a BS story. It's nonsense. One number isn't any bigger than another: compare your number to infinity. It's all a game. Why this number and not another? You probably heard your parents say it. "This washing machine is a lot of money." OK, $500 or $1000 gets locked into your mind as "a lot of money".

But it's not the same number for other people, and this is where many folks get stuck in the game they're playing.

"This car is a lot of money," Dad said about the Mercedes station wagon priced at $87,500 because he wanted the nice trim package. So for you, $1000 is peanuts; "a lot of money" starts at $80,000.

How This Key Limiting Belief Affects Your Sales Conversations

Different people are walking around with different money tolerance levels... but they don't know it.

So as a prospective customer, you can bump into somebody who has an extremely different belief in what the cost and value of what you offer as a business owner or salesperson represents.

If you grew up being imprinted upon that "$80,000 is a lot of money", but this prospect in front of you right now believes that "$500 is a lot of money"... can you predict what's going to happen?

That prospect is going to collapse. They're going to fall into themselves, because their belief doesn't support your price tag, and they're going to leave. They literally cannot stand being around the mere idea.

Take this in.

You can also use Money Tolerance as a qualifying tool: I certainly do.

I've explained for years how you choose your customers.

One of the levers you've got available to work with here is Money Tolerance. What if you were to use it to set a bar? So that only those people who already believed—were playing the game that the money number level of where you believe value begins is what they already agree with—were allowed past the velvet rope?

What if you only let people with a pricing-value belief matching your own see the offer?

A big part of positioning works this way. Consider Mercedes again. They're happy to give away whatever info is on their website to whoever wants to look: they know the vast majority of visitors are dreamers who will never qualify to buy. Only those who come into the dealership, and pass the test of answering some qualifying questions correctly, will get the chance to receive an offer to buy. Remember, those are the prospects who can stand there and participate with the idea of this investment as not being "too much money".

How can you take this concept to your own business and apply it?

>> Jason Kanigan is a business strategist and coach. If you're ready to book a session with Jason, click here <<

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Head Trash and Why It Is So Important

Head Trash is the limiting beliefs you have. I have them, too. They're different from yours, but the effects are similar and bad, so we should talk about them.

A limiting belief is, foremost, an unconscious belief. You are not aware of it. If you were, it would not stick around very long: like fog in the sunshine, it'd "burn off" and you would be free of it.

And the worst thing about head trash is this: you don't suspect you could be a victim of it.

You're walking around with your point of view of the world...and you think it's 'normal,' the only way anyone could possibly see things.

"It ain't."

Head Trash and Your Point of View

The point of view you have at the moment is weird...individual..."site specific" if you will.

head trash man throwing liquor bottle away bad idea

We all have limiting beliefs. When you find one, and clear it, another takes its place higher up the perception spiral. I'm not sure we'll ever be free of them.

But we can definitely identify and clear out the limiting beliefs most weighing us down right now!

Imagine Pareto's Law, aka the 80/20 Rule, applied to your life:

A small number of decisions have the majority of the effect upon your life.

A small number of perceptive filters have a big effect upon your business.

The decisions are driven by the filters.

You act on what you believe to be true.

What you believe to be true is what you think is possible.

If you view yourself as "the janitor," you're not going to walk up to the CEO and propose a deal, are you.

Your perception of that role would be a limiting belief.

It's possible for someone to take on the job of janitor, but not identify with the role of janitor as their personality, you understand. But for nearly everyone, they'd get sucked into that view of themselves because of the role they took on.

And that would block them from doing this or that action because "janitors don't do that."

Are you starting to see what I'm demonstrating here?

Head Trash is a collection of limiting beliefs that stop you from doing what you'd really like to do.

How do you identify you've got head trash?

When you find yourself saying, "I can't do that"—usually to yourself—stop and ask yourself, "Why not?" Write the answers down. Review them: there's your head trash.

The Granddaddy of Head Trash: Money Tolerance

Money Tolerance is a critical limiting belief. It's a highly effective thermometer to tell you exactly how you're feeling about yourself at this very moment.

How much is "a lot of money" for you? Who told you that number? Where'd it come from? Because it's a BS story: thousands of people out there, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, believe whatever number you said is a tiny amount. (The typical range for the garden variety human is $500 - $2500, by the way.) If you believe the BS story that $2500 is "a lot of money," how on Earth will you ever invest in a $5000 program to help yourself or your business? And how will you ever sell a $5000 offer? You can't! You'll find ways to screw the sale up.

Fortunately, Money Tolerance is a head trash limiting belief, and the goal posts can be moved. Yes, there is a lower limit to Money Tolerance as well as the more visible high figure...I won't bother to sell $50 items, for example, because it's a "waste of my time and energy." (How many good money-making opportunities am I cutting myself off from because of that 'truth'? I well know making money is only about Traffic and Conversion, and if we can get those numbers high enough we can make plenty of money on a $50 offer. But somehow it's still a "waste of my time." Exploring this belief would open up possibilities to me that exist now, but I have cut off from my perception. See?)

When you find yourself blocked, self-painted into a corner, unable to proceed...ask yourself, "Why? What do I believe about this situation?"

Why can't you move to another city?

Why can't you start that business?

Why can't you approach this prospect?

I'll give you another example of head trash before we finish.

A Personal Example of Head Trash In Action

In the past year or so I've been working on getting into the Space field. To do that, I've been meeting, engaging with, and doing interviews with Space experts.

There's a guy who runs what I consider to be the best explainer channel on YouTube for Space, and the rapidly rising subscriber count echos that statement. But for a year, though I connected with him on Facebook, I didn't "feel right" about approaching him to be an interview guest.

Some limiting beliefs held me back.

I was only able to ask him a couple months back, and then had to wait around 45 days for the actual interview date to come around after we booked. I had to get another Space expert on my show before I could ask this person to be a guest.

Would he have been a guest much sooner if I had just asked outright? If I had simply been comfortable with asking him a year ago? Probably (we'll never truly know, but I strongly suspect so)!

But I felt I needed "credibility" first in this situation.

See how that held me back for at least six months from proceeding in the direction I wanted to move in?

That I needed "Space" credibility was my limiting belief. There's something about self-worth in this field, a gap that I believed I needed to make up before moving forward.

These things are not rational.

You may have a low money tolerance because as a small child you heard your parents arguing about a $600 washing machine purchase in one of those "listening at the top of the stairs" moments. That number got installed for you, as most head trash is. And for decades you've been walking around with this unconscious belief fueling the voice in your head that says, "That's a lot of money!" whenever you encounter a price at or above it. "Yeah," you reply to yourself unconsciously. "It sure is." And this drives your emotions and actions.

Identify that moment, clear it, replace it with something else (note that it'll be a NEW limiting belief: a higher figure of "That's a lot of money," but still a fake story you're telling yourself!), and your range of possibilities will expand.

Few things are more exciting than getting rid of head trash, and observing what you or someone you like can now imagine as possible.

>> Jason Kanigan is a business strategist. Book a call to discuss your situation with Jason using this link. <<

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SREDIM and Selling

SREDIM and Selling: What's the Connection?

SREDIM and sellingLike most people in the field of selling, I am trained in another specialization. From 1994 to 1996 I took 10 and 11 courses a term, double the maximum recommended university courseload, in the BCIT Operations Management program. 50 people began this course, and 30 graduated: it had a 40% failure rate. This program taught me how to think and how to work.

Operations Management is the "glue" that holds business together. It's "How are we gonna do this?" It's "Is there a better way to do this?" And it's even "Should we be doing this?" Industrial Engineering skills are the core of Operations Management. You can get away without the computer, accounting, human resources, production and inventory management and other skills taught in the program, but that IE toolkit is one huge problem-solving powerhouse.

When I told my grandfather I was going to be an Industrial Engineer, I remember him responding, "What's that, a garbageman?" Good for a laugh. No, an Industrial Engineer studies process. Every step of how we accomplish the things we do in business. How does an invoice get processed? How does a product get put together? What steps are involved in choosing a new supplier?

In startups, these processes are typically undocumented and totally personal. Depending on the individual performing the task, the steps can vary wildly. But as an operation grows, it's going to need consistency. Repetition. People doing things in pretty much the same way. Why? "To manage we must measure." This is an Operations Management maxim. If everyone is doing the same task in a hundred different ways, how can we measure and manage it? How can we improve it?

The great danger, of course, is fossilization. When a business bloats to the state and age of, "We've always done it that way," its days are numbered.

And that is where Operations Management and Industrial Engineering skills come in. Where the overlap with selling exists.

SREDIM and Selling: Where the Overlap Is

Selling can be about agitation. Waking a prospect up to the fact that things could be different. That they don't have to live with the pain they may have just realized they are in.

Selling can be about meeting a need. Matching a solution you have with the problem your prospect knows they have and came to you to fix.

Here's where I see salespeople failing their customers: just because they have a solution, they are trying to push that solution onto every prospect. Simply because they offer SEO services, they assume every business needs SEO.

What if this is not the case?

What if the customer would be better served by another solution?

If you don't care, I say you're an unethical seller. To be ethical in sales, you must always have your customer's best interests in mind. If you don't, you are just another product-pusher. And the world is full of those. They are the people who have made it tough for the rest of us. They have been perpetuating that negative stereotype into the public mind.

Of course you and I want sales. But we want Stark Raving Ecstatic Sales--sales where the customer was so impressively helped and even transformed by our efforts that they take it on as their duty to broadcast our awesomeness to the world.

Not people who were sort of, kind of, maybe a little bit helped by our solution. Who aren't sure if we made a difference. Who wonder whether we were just pushing a product or service on them with the hype of the moment.

So how do we make sure our solution is what's best for the customer?

SREDIM and Selling: Transforming Your Sales Relationships and Results

As Mahan Khasla would say, and has said in his great book on selling, Let's Get Real Or Let's Not Play:

"Move Off The Solution."

Forget about your needs right now, as you begin the buying conversation.

Find out what's really going on in your prospect's world.

SREDIM, amusedly pronounced "Shred-em" (what we do to problems with it), is a problem-solving methodology. Each letter stands for an action in the process.

We begin with Select.

Select is about determining needs and prioritizing them. If a prospect won't let you into their world, you don't talk to them. It's a waste of time. But if they will share with you what's really going on, now you can start seeing symptoms of problems. Note carefully that the symptoms are NOT the problems themselves. Many symptoms can be caused by a single root problem.

Gather information. Don't accept hearsay; it's often inaccurate. Employees will lie to protect themselves. See what's truly going on, not just what your prospect or their staff tell you.

Be dispassionate. We don't know anything yet: whether this prospect is a fit with us or not. What does the data show you?

When you believe you have identified the root cause of the most pressing problem, now you are in a position to ethically proceed in the sales process. Not before.

Why not before? Let's say you're a web designer. If you assume the solution to every problem is a redesigned website, you are going to be the guy who has a hammer and thinks everything is a nail. That's silly, of course; but then why are you behaving that way? The prospect's business model may be flawed. Their copy may be terrible. They may be in front of the wrong market. And in these cases, redesigning their website won't result in any improvement. I would call that a scam. Wouldn't you?

This is why it is good to have more than one solution at your beck and call. You never know what combination you may need to bring out of your toolbox.

The next step is Record.

Having determined where we can get the biggest bang for our customer's buck, we zoom in on that area of the business. We gather data specifically about that process. We use tools like flowcharting and Ishikawa diagrams. We nail down that Present Method: how they are doing things now.

Once we're comfortable that we understand the customer's Present Method, we Examine it and the data for direction of a potential solution.

We can see if Pareto's Law (the 80/20 Rule) applies. We can check if any outliers appear in the data that perhaps should be removed, or looked into more deeply.

After we have an idea of the key problem and how we might, in general, fix it, we want to Develop alternative solutions.

Being creative at this stage is invaluable, and there are books on how to stimulate this kind of creativity. For instance, how would a washing machine apply to solving the problem? And how a venetian blind works? Again, be dispassionate. Don't get married to any one solution.

You want five, six or more alternative solutions. Each will have plusses and minuses. We're going to put these into a weighted decision matrix or criteria of evaluation to find out which is best.

And now we can Install that best solution.

Note that only now are we able to say a website, or SEO, or sales training or whatever should be applied. We're far, far into the process here. This is when you train staff on the new process, implement new programs, change the culture if necessary.

Finally, we must Maintain this new process.

Staff may backslide. They may revert to the old way of doing things. They may even discover an improvement to your new system! Document everything and revisit it regularly. Ensure everything is remaining on track...and, most importantly, getting the results promised! If not, it's back to Select.

SREDIM in selling is an invaluable tool and I've been using it for 20 years. It has helped me with developing my own optimized sales process, which is an approach nobody else has used to my knowledge.

And yes, you get paid for doing this analysis, conducting SREDIM and selling. Use the Monkey's Paw if you have to.

>> Want Jason's help to optimize your processes? Click here to apply. Do you have questions about SREDIM and how to use it in your business? Ask below to let us know! And please Like or Share to get this info in front of others who need to see it. <<