Ethical Selling for Holistic Practitioners
Mar 23, 2023
Selling isn’t something that comes naturally to most holistic practitioners. Many feel it’s sleazy and shy away from any form of selling - it’s true, there are some people who are pushy and inconsiderate.
Selling doesn’t have to be like this for your holistic business, but you do have to make sales to survive. Selling is necessary if you want to earn enough money to pay your bills. If not, you’ll be forced to find other sources of income to subsidise yourself or stop practicing altogether.
Ultimately, selling is just about helping people solve their problems by making them appropriate offers on how you can help them. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.
There are ways to sell that feel good and ethical and that’s about making sure you’re making the right offers to the right people in a way that’s fair and filled with integrity.
Understand Your Clients
You need to know who your clients are, what their problems are related to what you offer, and how you can help them achieve the results they want. Having a defined niche and a clear marketing message will support you to make relevant offers to people who need your help. Here are two articles to help you with this:
Helpful Marketing
The need for selling is reduced by creating helpful marketing. This is a perfect strategy for holistic practitioners as it fits brilliantly with the ethos of wanting to help people. Helpful marketing is about creating lots of value and building relationships. It limits the need for sales as clients are prompted to approach you instead.
Helpful marketing will help you build sustainability for your business. By building these relationships, your potential clients will already have a connection with you. They will trust that when you do make them an offer, it’s based on what is best for them.
This worked brilliantly when I worked as a practitioner and teamed up with a colleague Claire to create a series of podcasts. We shared tips and helpful information available for people researching what we offered. When they were ready to find a practitioner, they already knew us and our styles and we were then their first choice.
Make Offers
Whilst consistently helping people with free sessions, creating content, and answering endless email enquiries is honourable, you must make offers. You must tell people about how you can help them by working with you. If not, you’ll build a community of people who are consuming all your free information without even realising you have a solution for sale.
Making offers is often the missing piece in the puzzle to building a thriving practice, and it’s a critical one.
There will be times when you make offers and people say “no” – that’s okay. It may not be the right time or the solution they’re looking for. These are the times you need to put down to experience, brush yourself down and move on. With every no, you’re one step closer to a yes. The more you practice making offers, the easier it’ll be and the more success you will achieve.
Keep it simple, you’re simply saying, if you want to resolve your issue, I have this solution available.
If you struggle to articulate your offers, check out this article: How to create an offer outline.
Follow-up on Enquiries
Practitioners often focus their marketing efforts on attracting new clients. They forget about those who’ve already enquired and shown interest in their services.
If you’re getting interest in what you do but it is not converting into paying clients, your problem isn’t your marketing. Spending more time and money on marketing won’t work if you’re not following up on the interest you’ve already generated.
People are busy and whilst they may have every intention of working with you, life can take over. A simple message can be the reminder someone needs to prompt them to book.
Here’s an article on how to follow up on enquiries
Tell Clients Their Next Step
Make sure clients understand the process of how to work with you and the steps they need to take. The clearer you can make the system, and the easier it is for them to navigate, the more clients you’ll get.
Something as simple as an online diary for taking bookings removes barriers. I resisted this for far too long believing my diary was far too complicated, and I needed to manage it. How wrong was I! Having an online scheduling system has saved me time on endless emails trying to book appointments, and I get more discovery calls booked than ever before.
It’s worth asking a friend to review the process of booking to work with you. It’ll give you an external opinion to ensure your process is simple and easy to navigate.
This article will show you how to understand your client experience.
Ultimately you must make sales to have a business. You can sell in a way that feels ethical and provides your clients with solutions to their problems. Doing it in a way that’s filled with integrity and has your clients’ interests at its core.
If you want help in creating a sales and marketing approach for your business that feels ethical, book a discovery call with me today.
