hosted by: We often find ourselves in a situation where we need to pitch something, to get our audience’s ear and say, “Hey, I think this is worth your time, money, and attention.” Many people find that hard because it seems to go against all the other advice they hear about building trust, about being interested in serving your audience first. It feels contradictory to turn around and say, “Also, please pay me.” Time and again (and if you’re an AskPat subscriber you know this), that says a lot more about you and your belief in what you’re selling than it does about your audience and what they may think. If you don’t believe in how your course or book or whatever will transform someone’s life, how do you expect someone else to believe in it?
On today’s episode of AskPat, we’re joined by Tennessee therapist Gordon Brewer, who you can find at practiceoftherapy.com and on the Practice of Therapy Podcast. He’s developing a course on Teachable to help his audience learn how to manage their finances for their private practices. [Full Disclaimer: I am a compensated advisor and affiliate for Teachable.] On a recent webinar, he took the opportunity to pitch the class, but it didn’t go as well as he hoped.
I’m tempted to make a lot of therapy puns, but let’s just say that Gordon made some major breakthroughs on this episode. We cover some specific tactics that really help improve any pitch. The biggest is to think through your audience’s objections and address them preemptively. That could be opening the course up in Teachable to show just how easy it is, or it could be a story that shows your audience a person just like them who got the results they want. Instead of a “pitch,” I push Gordon to think of what he’s offering as a transformation, to focus on what it gets his audience instead of some situation where he has to sell something.
Be sure to subscribe so you can check out our next episodes, where we’ll finally get a chance to check in with people we’ve had on AskPat earlier this year. We’ll see what’s worked, where they might still be stuck, and, hopefully, see some amazing progress. Don’t miss it.