Hello and welcome to Unshakeable with Human Design, everybody. I’m Nicole Laino. We are here together today. This is going to be an entrepreneur focused episode. Entrepreneurs and human design combined. What I do best here, what I do most here. But this is going to be much more about the business side of human design.

And really what I want to break down for you are three ways that human design can help increase your sales. And these are three things that I’m seeing across the board with entrepreneurs who come to me in various ways through various programs. Inside my Business by Design Mentorship, people who have signed up for the unshakeable Human Program, even, they’re entrepreneurs starting out, not ready to take a leap into my mentorship just yet, they’re looking to embody their design, but their ultimate goal is to start using human design in their business. And also just in my networking groups, other entrepreneurs that I work with that are friends of mine, what I’m seeing and what we’re hearing. Now, I want to break down these three things that I notice come up with entrepreneurs all the time when it comes up with sales.

And there’s a shift with sales that we’re seeing, we’re definitely seeing things change, and that can be really scary for people if you aren’t what I call unshakeable. It’s not scary for me. It almost feels like an of course, and I’m welcoming it. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit more too, but the three things that I hear entrepreneurs saying all the time, and if you fall into this category, you’re definitely going to want to stay till the end of this episode.

Cause I’m going to break each one of these down. Sometimes we need strategy and sometimes we need energetic practices. And that’s why I teach both. I don’t just say all you need is human design. I know that there are people out there who say that all you need is human design or some other energetic practice. All you need to do is get into the energy of something and then the rest takes care of itself.

Now I agree that the energy makes the strategy so much easier. A lot of the bumps in the road, a lot of the so called blocks that we end up bumping up against when we try to make something happen, when we try to take action and we get stuck can be solved through understanding that the problem probably lies within you and starting to look at that and becoming a master at leading yourself through life in general but certainly being able to navigate those times when things aren’t flowing smoothly.

Do you know how to get back into your flow? And that’s becoming more and more important because we’re seeing the strategies of yesterday not work all the time. So I think that’s why people are turning to these energetic practices. But we still do need strategy. But I’m going to talk about the shifts that we’re seeing with strategy.

And even in my own business, I’ll talk about how we had an 80 percent close rate on our last launch with the sales for the Business by Design mentorship. So it’s a high ticket mentorship. I’m not selling a $37 product or even a $500 product. It is in the multiple thousands of dollars because it’s a year long mentorship with private coaching and stuff from me. So it’s very involved, but we saw an 80 percent close rate. And I’m going to talk to you about the shifts that we made, and the shifts that I made within my business and what I didn’t do. Actually, in order to make that happen.

So, first of all, the things that we hear entrepreneurs saying a lot around sales, I hear that sales are icky, I hear that I wish I didn’t have to sell and I could just coach, heal, create, whatever it is that you do, insert your job right at the end there.

And then I hear people say that people aren’t buying as much as they used to. And like I said, there’s a shift in buyer behavior, yes. But I’m going to tell you how this can actually work in your favor, how this shift in buyer behavior is actually a good thing for you. So that’s what I’m going to break down in today’s episode.

I’m going to take you through all of that and I’m going to tell you how human design fits into this, and I’m going to help you understand where strategy is necessary and where energetics are necessary .Because there is an energy to sales. And if you read even old sales books, they might be talking about strategy, but they used to refer to it as confidence.

But now I think that we’re seeing the veil be lifted on phony confidence. And people want something deeper. We’re going to break all of that down in today’s episode. So if you want to know how to increase your sales using both strategy and energy and incorporating human design into that process, then you’re going to want to stay until the end of the episode.

I also want to let you know that if this is a topic that interests you, if you’re an entrepreneur who’s interested in incorporating human design into your business,

you should come to my party that I throw every couple of months. My Authority Accelerator Masterclass. This is a five day masterclass.

This is my flagship free teaching that I do outside of the podcast. And what I’m told is that this free masterclass where I break down my entire framework, my sole strategy framework of how you bring in sales regularly, how you can have a semi evergreen process for your business and how you can use human design to elevate your business more so than anything else will ever allow you to do.

I break that down for you in five days. It is a totally free masterclass for now. I haven’t decided if I will charge for it in the future, but right now it is still free. All you have to do is DM me on Instagram. I’m @NicoleLainoOfficial DM me masterclass and we will register you right there. And if you want to go to the website, go to nicolelaino.com/masterclass and we’ll register you on the website there. We’ll also link all of this up in the show notes for you. So if you can’t write it down, don’t worry. All right, let’s dive into the episode. First of all, let’s tackle the first one. Sales are icky. Now you’ve probably heard this, but I’m going to say it again.

And when I say it, I want you to pay attention to where this lands in your body. What do you feel when I say this? Selling is a service. What do you feel when I say that? Does it feel like, of course, yes, absolutely. Selling is service and you feel that to your bones, that when I sell something, anything that I do, it is a service to the people I am selling to.

And do you believe that? Do you have that in your bones? Or does it feel like total bullshit? Like that sounds like something that sales people say to get you to buy something and then screw you over. Is that where selling as a service lands for you? Or do you roll your eyes? Yeah, right, selling as a service.

Yeah, service for you because you’re collecting the money. Or is it, is it somewhere in between where it’s like I intellectually know that selling is a service, but I don’t feel it. Or I don’t feel it about my products. So this is one of those energy things. Selling is a service when you are living your purpose.

When you’re living your purpose and you’re truly embodying your purpose, then it changes the way that you feel about what you do. Because you feel like you’re doing what you are meant to do. And if you weren’t doing what you were meant to do, then the world would be worse off for it. So when I show up and I teach human design and I teach business and I teach everything that I teach, I truly, truly believe in my bones this is of service, but it’s only of service to the people who are right for it. And we’re going to get into how we determine that in topic number three that I’m going to talk about in the show. But I know that I’m living my purpose. I know that every day I will deepen that connection.

I will get better at it. It will get clearer to me how it will change and morph. But right now, I am embodying my purpose every day. I am working on it every day. I’m conscious of it. And everything that I do is of high integrity. I care. I told my team at the beginning of this year, we are obsessed with client results.

That is number one, even before our results. We are obsessed with client results. And we’re constantly changing and shifting things within my programs and within my other containers to make sure that we are showing up for our clients. I can’t make you do the work. But I can help you get over whatever it is that you need to get over if you come to me for the right things.

And that’s my job. So when I sell, my whole purpose is to help you get clarity, to help you figure out if I’m the right person for you. That’s my whole job. I don’t hard sell. I don’t push. I don’t manipulate. I just show up, I’m honest, and I allow you to experience my energy. I do workshops like the Authority Accelerator, so that you can experience my teaching style, and you can decide whether I am for you or not.

So, selling is a service when you are embodied in who you are meant to be. When you’re doing what you’re meant to do. It starts to take care of itself. So that’s number one. Number two, I wish I didn’t have to sell. I wish I could just coach. I wish I didn’t have to market myself. I wish I didn’t. I get that.

I used to say it too. I don’t say it anymore. Because underneath that statement, here’s what you’re really saying, selling is hard. I suck at it. It’s no good. You wouldn’t be saying that if you were making sales every time you sold or if you felt good and you felt like you were serving every time you showed up and you allowed somebody to experience you, experience your genius, experience your energy and let them decide.

That confidence of the right people will find me would take care of that. But ultimately, underneath it, you’re like, selling is hard. Here’s what makes selling not hard. This is a strategy and energy combination and human design fits into this in the second half. The first half is the message.

And it can sound manipulative when we talk about messaging, you have to be able to speak to the problems that your ideal client is having. You have to speak to the desires that your soulmate client really wants to connect with. And that can sound manipulative, like we’re going to exploit their pain.

That is not at all what I’m talking about. But products have to solve problems, or deliver on a desire. They have to do that, or they aren’t worth the person’s money. So in order to have integrity with what you sell, you need to know what the problems are. Otherwise you have people get out of your program, and they look at you like, this was good, but I didn’t get what I wanted out of it.

And the reason for that is, you never knew what they wanted in the first place. You didn’t know what they wanted. You sold them on four calls a week and some sort of features. You’re going to get Voxer with me. You’re going to get access to this program, but you didn’t really tell them what they would get at the end.

So they’re not clear and you’re not clear. And then their expectation is that they will have something that you don’t even know what it is. So how could you deliver on that? How could you create a program, an offer? Something that delivers when you don’t know what they want you to deliver on. It’s your job to know. That’s how you create a better product.

Do you think Apple isn’t taking in user data and feedback about what people love and don’t love about their products, what they wish they could do? Why do you think they keep upgrading the camera? Because it’s the thing that most people will buy a new phone for because they want to take better pictures.

Okay, that’s how they decide what goes into these products and what doesn’t. What do they put research and development dollars into and what don’t they? Because of what people want. Because they understand that they’re in the business of selling solutions. Products are solutions. So it’s not manipulative.

If you don’t understand your message, then you don’t understand the product and the offer that you need to create. And this is what makes selling hard because you feel like you’re begging people to like you. And that sucks. Nobody wants to do that. And honestly, that’s not what delivers results for people or for yourself.

But when you start solving problems, then it takes the pressure off of you to sell because you’re selling the solution. It becomes less personal. But let’s talk about the personal side, because there is another aspect to being able to sell without selling. I call pitchless selling.

The second half of that is your personal brand. What I call your genius brand. And I call it a genius brand because it should be rooted in your unique genius, as laid out through your human design. Why? Not because it says it on a piece of paper so that’s what you have to do, but because the gifts in your human design are shadows until you start paying attention to them. Or have the potential to dip into shadow.

And that means you live more in the shadow. The more you pay attention to your gifts and the more you lift into them, the more that’s what people feel from you. That’s when it becomes like a no brainer about what offer you should create because it’s rooted in your genius. It’s what you do. It’s what you can’t help but talk about.

It’s how you naturally show up. And then the more you focus on the gift, and the more you lift up into that, and the more you embody the gifts, the more it just becomes who you are. And then that becomes your brand. You don’t have to think it through, you don’t have to sit there and be like, what are my people loving on Instagram right now? I’m gonna make that my brand, because they really love this style.

And so many people come to me looking for human design to tell them who they are. They want to do a reading and I tell you who you are. Now I can tell you what I see, but only you can understand how that plays off of your life experience, how you feel as a unique human being.

And then that’s the work that we do together. That’s what my mentorship is all about. We help build a strategy, but that whole time, I’m helping you embody your design and figure out what does this all mean to you? How has this been triggering you your whole life? And how can we get over that trigger so you could start living in the gift of this?

That’s the magic. And that’s when you start showing up and people feel something different from you. There’s a massive shift between when I was learning about my design and talking about it and just giving keynotes versus when I shifted over into really just being it. And the way people reacted and interacted with me is completely different. People now feel from me, I don’t know why, but I just need to work with you. I think I need to work with you. I hear that all the time. And that happens when you are embodying your gifts. People are reacting to that.

The other aspect of this is that, I look at my clients inside my program right now, and so many of them have aspects of my design that I have embodied. They are attracted to the fact that I’m leading them to a path to maybe embodying that themselves. That’s it. And some people will try to engineer that. Okay, well, Gate 64 means imagination and illumination, so if I talk about that, then I’m gonna get those people who want that. That doesn’t really work.

It might start there, you start to turn the rock over that way. But, when you start to actually become someone who embodies illumination, where you actually have that to offer. Where that’s how you look at the world. That was the shift that had to happen for me. So, when you’re leveraging your gifts and you’re embodying them, you start to become your genius brand and that’s where I say that you get to achieve pitchless selling.

Where your energy is doing a lot of the work for you. You don’t have to think about all of this all the time. And you pair that with some strategic messaging and you get a really, really powerful brand and business.

Now the third thing is what we were talking about in the beginning. This buyer behavior shift. People aren’t buying as much as they used to. They are just buying differently than they used to. People have been burned. People have not gotten an ROI on previous investments. So they are more discerning about what they buy and who they invest with. This is a great thing for anyone with integrity because you will stand out.

But if you are shaky in your energy and you pair that with a buyer who is more discerning and who is like, I’m not just jumping in. Even if you’ve got testimonials and stuff, I really want to make sure I validate those. I want to interact with you. I want to feel your energy a bit.

Because I just did a post on this recently. The fake it till you make it era is over. Thank God. Of people just saying things that sound good to other people, but not having anything to back them up with. That bullshit confidence, that veil that I was talking about in the beginning being lifted now. People sense whether you are for real or not now.

And their guard is up. So even if you are for real, they’re still going to probably spend a bit more time and energy sussing that out. But this is an amazing thing for you, for the embodied coach, for the embodied entrepreneur, for the person actually leading themselves with integrity. Cause that’s what people are trying to figure out.

If you can lead yourself, if you are what I call unshakeable, That’s what people are looking for, because especially the people who are trying to figure this out, they’re going through a transition, they want to create something new. That’s very rarely a very smooth, flat, paved road.

It’s gonna have bumps, and hills, and pitfalls, and they need to know that the person that they invest in can hold them. And that starts with you demonstrating the fact that you can hold yourself. More important than it is for anybody, than for the coaches and for the healers, and for the people who provide a service to others.

I’m talking to you copywriters, if you’re a copywriter and you are frantic and you are reactive and you’re producing the copy for like their launch or something. You’re going to stress them out and they’re going to regret ever hiring you. We don’t want that.

You want to be a steady force. If you’re a real estate agent, when I sold my house in LA, I had two brokers that I could go with and I chose the agent I chose because they checked all the same boxes. It was like, okay, you guys all have great experience.

You have great track records, all of that. But one of them had such a calm, grounded, yet powerful presence, not meek and meager at all. She was powerful, but super chill. And I was like, she’s gonna make me feel really good through this process, and the other one I think will stress me out. And I chose the chill, calm one.

We had an amazing experience. I couldn’t recommend her more to anyone. But we had an 80 percent close rate for our last launch. I mentioned this at the beginning of the episode. We had an 80 percent close rate on our last launch into the business by design mentorship.

And the reason that we did that, one thing that I did not do, I did not use a sales script, that old school sales script where you walk somebody through, tell me what your desires are. What do you hope to do? What is it that you really want to accomplish? What are the implications?

Okay, fast forward six months from now, or a year from now. Where are you if you don’t make this happen? Where you can just feel the script being read. I recently did a sales call with somebody I was gonna maybe invest with. And I got walked through that script. And he was fine.

I liked his service and everything, but there was just something so icky about that sales process where I was like, Oh God, could you just talk to me? It’s making me not trust you. Because I feel like you are just following this script to get me to say these things so you know what your next answer is.

You’re manipulating me. I don’t do that. I threw all of that away and I just sat there, and I answered their questions, and I helped them identify what their issues were. And then I told them honestly, whether I felt that I could help them or not, if I thought they were ready for this.

And some people weren’t. And I suggested, book a reading with me, do something smaller, but I don’t think that this will serve you right now. I think it will be more of a burden for you, so I don’t recommend it. That’s integrity, and that’s what people respond to. That’s being unshakeable, because I didn’t sit there and think that if one person didn’t sign, that another person wasn’t right behind them.

I know that if you’re not right for me, somebody else is. And you’re right for somebody else. That’s power. So I hope you liked this episode. I hope that this broke down and demystified some of the energy versus strategy of sales and how human design can start to tune you into what I call pitchless selling and get you to that place where you’re selling all the time with ever having to actually hard sell anybody.

This is how sales feel good. This is how revenue starts coming in and generating itself and you start to feel very supported by your business, very supported by money. Without having to feel like you are manipulating or messing with people. And it helps you deliver the best product as well. So I hope that this became clear for you.

Please, register for the Authority Accelerator Masterclass. DM me the word Masterclass on Instagram, I’m @NicoleLainoOfficial. Or go to nicolelaino.com/masterclass and we’ll register you there right on the website. You can go to the show notes and we have all of those linked up for you there if you need to.

Thank you so much for being here, I appreciate you. I hope to see you in the Masterclass. And remember, in order to have an unshakeable business, you must first become an unshakeable human. So thanks for letting us help you become unshakeable with human design, everybody. We’ll see you next time.