On this week’s episode of Conversational Selling, we sit down with Christine Schlonski, the Queen of the Sales Success Mindset and founder of christineschlonski.com. Christine has over 12 years of successful high ticket event sales in the corporate world, and has built and trained international sales teams, leading them to make millions in revenue. She is also the creator of the online Summit Series, Sales Mentality Makeover Masterclass, and the host of the Heart Sells! Podcast.
Christine says, “I shifted from just thinking about the sale, making it logical and showing up in a way that I thought I had to show up to represent the success that I wanted people to see. When I really shifted into that heart space and I started to talk to a human on the other end of the phone, things just shifted dramatically.”
We chat about how our hearts help us sell, as well as:
- The Sales Success Mindset
- Teaching entrepreneurs to sell naturally
- Her Sales Mentality Makeover
- The Heart Sells! Podcast
- And more
Listen now…
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Nancy Calabrese: Hi everybody and welcome to Conversational Selling. It’s the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today. And it all starts with the human conversation. I’m your host, Nancy Calabrese, and I’m so excited to have Christine Schlonski with me today. She’s the founder of christineschlonski.com and is known as the Queen of the Sales Success Mindset.
She has over 12 years of successful high ticket event sales in the corporate world, has built and trained international sales teams, lead them to success making millions of revenue. She’s the creator of the online Summit Series, Sales Mentality Makeover Masterclass, and host of the podcast, Heart Sells! You know, it’s so funny. I always open my shows saying it starts with the human conversation. But our heart has to be in the right place first, for sure. Welcome to the show, Christine. So happy you can join us.
Christine Schlonski: Yeah, thank you so much, Nancy. I am so excited to be here.
Nancy: Yeah, yeah. Well, for my viewers, Christine and I have gotten to know each other in the past couple of months. And she’s just a wonderful, wonderful person to know, and you are going to enjoy this conversation. So why don’t we start with how do our hearts help us sell?
Christine: Well, I think at the end of the day, right, when you look back on what you have created or what kind of life you have to live, that is a place where you are looking. And that is the place where, you know, we are all aligned and we all come together through our hearts. And I think it’s so important when you create relationships to include your heart and not just make it about a business transaction.
Nancy: Yeah, you know, I mean, why is it so important to our sales success? Or for that matter, any success in general?
The Heart Brings Meaning
Christine: Yeah, I think without heart, it’s meaningless. You will not find the fulfillment, you will not find the happiness because that is created from within. And, you know, that comes from that place of love. I think everybody is looking for, you know, being loved, being recognized, being heard. And that all comes from that desire.
That’s a human desire. So if we go out into the world and we just use our brain and be like, super logical, we don’t find that fulfillment. We might climb a ladder or a mountain and at the top, we figure out that, oh, it doesn’t feel the way I thought it’s going to feel because we forgot to put the heart into place.
Nancy: You know, interesting. I think when most people think of sales, they don’t think of heart, right? When they sales as a profession or part of a role, I think they think stress, panic. What am I going to do? So you bring a good twist to it. I mean, how did you discover selling with the heart?
Christine: Well, when I was working in corporate Germany, and I was cold calling people day in, day out, I just noticed the moment where I discovered self-development, where I started to read certain books where I gave myself permission to be me.
And I shifted from just thinking about the sale, making it logical and showing up in a way that I thought I had to show up to represent the success that I wanted people to see, when I really shifted into that heart space and I started to talk to a human on the other end of the phone, things just shifted dramatically. And I was very successful already before but that helped me to double and triple my revenue that was able to close for the company because I started to really engage with people and to build relationships.
Nancy: So you took the pressure off of yourself not to be someone that you weren’t, but to just have a conversation with a like-minded person. Is that safe to say?
Christine: Yeah. I’ve been taking the pressure off. That had really something to do with it. But I think just feeling good about who I was and who I wanted to be and not, you know, not trying to show up, like how I thought the super successful person had to be calling the other person that already had success because we were only calling like, general managers, owners of companies, CEOs.
So like, taking all that off and just thinking, I’m going to talk to an amazing human being and I have something that they need that helps them to make their life better. So I’m calling a person. And this person is an awesome person, and therefore I can, you know, put my respect, my love, my gratitude, for just talking to that person into the conversation.
Nancy: You’re known as the Queen of the Sales Success Mindset. Tell us more about that.
Christine: Yeah, so everything starts with a sales mindset. And as you mentioned in the intro, a lot of people don’t think that sales if something beautiful, right? We all have these emotions around sales, and they’re pretty bad. So we all have a sales mindset, but for most people, it is something more negative.
And I discovered that sales basically is love. So saying, like sales as love is always a good conversation because people are pretty skeptical when I make this claim. But at the end of the day, if you really have an amazing product or service that helps another person, that makes their life better, then you are just actually sharing your love by helping them to, you know, get on board with whatever you do for them. So yeah, so I changed that to the sales success mindset because you need that success part. You need to know that there is a different way to think about sales.
And by really letting go of your beliefs that are not serving you, and tuning into what serving you, you create that success. So people started to say, Well, this is really the success mindset. This is really what you need in sales. So the sales success mindset was born. And yeah, for some people, they were like, well, you’re so amazing. Like, you are the queen of the sales success mindset. And so yeah, kind of like that.
Nancy: Okay, let’s bow to the queen. I mean, I love your concept. And there you go, you have me talking about love now too. You know, many entrepreneurs find themselves in a sales role that is somewhat new to them, you know? Maybe they’re launching their own business for the first time. And this new role, they sometimes lack the skills and confidence to sell. What are your thoughts on that? And I know you do a lot of work with business owners. How do you get them past that so that selling becomes a natural part of their everyday conversation?
Do You Want a Business or a Hobby?
Christine: Yeah, that’s such a great question, Nancy. So I think if you can’t sell, you don’t have a business. So you have to make the choice. Do you want to have a business or a hobby? And when you say, Well, I do want to have a business, obviously, you are not in the game to have a business that, you know, is just barely supporting you and your dreams.
You are in the business to have a big impact, to make your own dreams come true while you help all these other people. So really getting clear on what is the goal. What do you want to achieve with your business in your life is the first steps I usually take as entrepreneurs. So they have a really clear map and clarity around their own desires.
Because oftentimes, entrepreneurs think, well, I’m really good at this or I have this skill set and I just can go into business for myself and people will show up because I know how to do it and they don’t. But they forgot that they do need that selling part, that sales piece to get people into the door and to support them and to serve them. If they don’t say yes to you, if you don’t make the sale, well, again, you’re back to having a hobby. So we get clear. And with that clarity, I always touch on all of their skills and gifts and talents because what happens so often, and that’s the two of us toon Nancy.
We could talk about sales all day long, right? We would have the best conversation ever. But for other people, that’s a topic like, Oh my goodness, right? They can’t even get to it. So we would talk about sales And we would, you know, be talking about without getting paid. And that’s the same for all these other entrepreneurs. They have something that they love so much, that they would do it without getting paid. And if they haven’t learned that sales piece, well guess what, they don’t get paid because they don’t ask for money.
So really getting clear on your gifts and what they do to support others, what they do in other people’s lives, gives them the understanding of how amazing they are and that they should be charging. And they should be also charging in a way that feels aligned and that they stop underselling and over-delivering, that they create, like a harmony, a balance in their businesses. So they get rewarded for their amazing work while the other person gets what they wanted.
Nancy: Yeah, well, you know, in listening to your description, I always think of sales is just having a conversation. That’s it. It’s a discovery, right? It’s an exchange of information to determine whether or not, you know, the person that I am speaking with, do they have a need? And is the need right now?
Can we solve that problem for them? And I think, you know, adding onto your beliefs about the heart and being so genuine, it’s hard, frankly, I can, I’m sure this is for you, to understand where all of the fear comes in. But having a coach like you to remind them and, you know, the practice and the conversation over time, it becomes so natural, doesn’t it?
Christine: Yeah. And I want to teach people that sales is fun, right? So I love that my clients come and they, you know, I just had like, one of my clients and she started selling her new course. And, you know, we talked about the course and the pricing we picked and I, you know, I challenged her. So she went with her new pricing.
And all of a sudden, like people started to book because the way she expressed it, the way she presented it, and the confidence that came with it just showed her Wow, this was fun. I just offered my next new thing. I knew the person needed it, I knew I was a perfect fit and I knew they’re going to get so much more than what I asked even though I felt uncomfortable with that new pricing. But in the same process, she learned that was a fun conversation.
She got paid in a way she’s never gotten paid before. She feels totally rewarded. Well, guess what, the course is gonna rock because she’s so excited now. And she doesn’t feel like, you know, she’s giving too much and she’s like, missing something in return. That is such a beautiful energy. And with that energy, she goes out, talks to the next person and they said yes and then next person said yes. And all of a sudden, she’s like in total excitement about sales conversations that she was dreading before.
Nancy: Wow, that’s really awesome. Talk a little bit about your Sales Mentality Makeover.
Sales Mentality Makeover
Christine: Mm-hmm. So that’s an online series that I created. And now I run it once a year. And we are just in the process of, you know, setting up the experience to have the replays. But what I do is I invite experts who can teach on mindset sales, money and wealth creation, because that’s like the whole chain, right?
Once you have the mindset in place, you will be able to sell. Once you sell, oh my goodness, you might have some money. What do you do now? And then comes all the money mindset into place and maybe strategies how to not just put all your eggs in one basket, right? But then what do you do then? And then how does it lead to wealth? And what’s wealth? It’s not just money for me. Wealth is like your way of living, the level of fulfillment, your health, your happiness, the, you know, the happiness you can give to others by interacting with them.
So yeah, I have guest teachers that I interview portraying their story to help others to be inspired and to see like wow, some people come from a really, really, really low and unfortunate level and they made it all the way to the top of their mountain by shifting their mindset and by putting strategies in place that really helped them and their business and tons of other people on the way. And so there’s like this teaching moment. And yeah, so I put that out once a year and it’s full of amazing people who have created wonderful businesses in a heart-centered way.
Nancy: Wow. When will the next one come out?
Christine: Well, the next one will come out May 2021.
Nancy: Got it. Alright, well,
Christine: Now we are setting up the experience. So basically, the experience is that you can go and watch like it was live. You get like, your daily content over a certain period of time. And you can just take in all that wisdom and knowledge of these amazing entrepreneurs.
Nancy: Wonderful. They’ll be here before we know it, right? Yeah. Hey, and, you know, I definitely would be remiss not to bring up your very successful podcast, Heart Sells. Tell my audience more about that.
Heart Sells! Podcast
Christine: Thank you so much, Nancy. So Heart Sells Podcast is there to inspire and to motivate entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs in the making, by really showcasing other extraordinary businesspeople who have created amazing companies, by not really starting out with loving sales. And we showcase their success story, what they have accomplished, we talk about the mindset, we talk about the first thing they ever sold, how they overcame, maybe their own fear of selling or rejection or what it took.
So it’s always inspirational interviews. And on Fridays, is where I just teach myself, where I share resources. And yeah, it’s a wonderful podcast that can be listened to in the whole wide world. And I have really, really amazing guests. And I’m so excited because we also had an interview together. And yeah, I just loved it. You gave so much wisdom to the audience. And yeah, it was just wonderful.
Nancy: It was. And I encourage, you know, at the end of our discussion we’ll be able to let people know how to find that and all the other good things that you do. So what is something that is true that almost nobody agrees with you on?
Christine: Well, coming back to sales is love.
Nancy: It sounds like a song, doesn’t it? It reminds me of a Beatles song.
Christine: It does. What’s the Beatles song though?
Nancy: Love is Real? I think love, John Lennon wrote it. Maybe it wasn’t the Beatles. Maybe it was post Beatles but every time I hear you say that I’m thinking of that song.
Christine: Yeah, awesome. Yeah, that’s usually something that people don’t buy it right away because it feels so so not true for so many people because when they hear sales, something within them kind of clicks. And, you know, their tummy tightens, or, I don’t know, the mouth gets dry or the heartbeat goes up. Usually, sales is not a wonderful emotion for people. So, love is, right? When we hear love, like we think of romance of couples, of love hearts, of I don’t know, wonderful vacations, candlelight dinners, like all the good stuff. And bringing that together feels little bit contrary.
Nancy: I mean, how can you not be in a good mood in listening to everything you have to say, Christine? Brings a smile to my face and I’m sure everyone else who’s listening. You know, finally, what is the one takeaway you’d like to leave the audience with?
Allow Yourself to Give Your Gift
Christine: Yeah, really, please get clear about your gifts because everybody on this planet, no matter where you live, what you do, you have a wonderful, beautiful gift. And if you allow yourself to give that gift and if you’re an entrepreneur, to sell that gift, to monetize your gift by supporting so many more people, your life will be like, more than you can imagine right now because you do grow and your dreams grow with you.
So I always say like, create a life beyond your wildest dreams because what’s now your wildest dream might not be next year, right? They might get like, bigger and you grow. So just give yourself the gift of being you and stop buying into who you have to be due to whatever, society, family, I don’t know, just be you. And don’t miss out to live the life you want to live because you only have one.
Nancy: Well said. So how can my audience find you?
Christine: Well, you can just google Heart Sells or you can go to christineschlonski.com. And that’s my page. And, you know, you’ll find the podcast there, you’ll find all the ways to connect on social media. So yeah, that’s the easiest way.
Nancy: Wow. Well, I thank you. I, you know, again, I don’t know how anybody can leave this podcast not being in a good mood and not thinking about love and perfect timing for us, it’s going to be the weekend before we know it. So we go into the weekend feeling great. I thank you, Christine and I can’t wait to have you on again.
Christine: Thank you so, so much, Nancy. It was a pleasure. And, you know, a great podcast always has a great host with awesome questions. And thank you so much for, you know, asking in a way that I never answered those questions before.
Nancy: Oh, really? Well, I’m glad you enjoyed this. You’ll never forget it, right? Alright, have a good one. Bye, everyone. See you next time.
