20: How to Sell Without Selling – The 3 False Beliefs That Must Be Broken To Get New Students In Your Classes And The One Technique To Break Them

What Is This Episode About…

In this episode, John will talk about the art of selling without selling, and dive into the psychology of selling anything, specifically, selling yoga. He will describe the psychology and how the brain processes a potential purchase. 

He will also go through the 3 False Beliefs: Vehicle (does it work), Internal (can I do it), and External (do I have the resources), and tell us the best way to break those false beliefs through storytelling. He will then describe a very simple framework to tell your stories so that you can always motivate potential students to sign up to your classes. It’s gonna be a resourceful 23 minutes, so take out your pen and paper.

Key Points Discussed:

• The psychology of selling yoga: Potential students’ belief patterns around yoga (01:02)
• How it all gets lost in translation and the “Can I Do It” internal belief (04:16)
• How to replace their stories to change their beliefs (08:34)
• The great power of testimonials and the basic story (12:24)
• The transformation is better than talking about the struggle and results or searching for the solution (20:15)

Learn More About The Content Discussed…

Join The Facebook Group –> http://bit.ly/yogaentrepreneur

When Was It Released…

This episode was released November 06, 2019

Episode Transcript…

Disclaimer: The Transcript Is Auto-Generated And May Contain Spelling And Grammar Errors

00:00          We want to shift people’s belief patterns so they’re not stuck in the vehicle, the internal, the external. We wanna tell people stories that take their belief, and the old story that’s holding that up, and we’ve replaced their old story with the new story. It could be ours, it could be somebody else’s, it could be a testimonial story, but at the moment we shift that story, their belief changes. And that, my friends, is the key to not only storytelling, but it is the key to the art of selling without selling.

00:32          What’s up everyone? You are listening to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets. I am Chris Yax, and I’m John Yax. We are part of a small group of yoga entrepreneurs who are committed to making a living, doing what we love, without feeling guilty about making money, or ashamed of being successful, because we know the real value of yoga and how the world needs it now more than ever. This podcast is here to teach the strategies and tactics so we can thrive financially as yoga entrepreneurs. We are the Yax brothers and welcome to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets.

01:02          Hello. Hello, hello. Welcome, welcome. And so, Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets, people. All you entrepreneurs out there, we are going live, and we’re talking today about the psychology of selling yoga. This is really the psychology of selling anything, but specifically the psychology of selling yoga. And so, what we want to start with is, for any of you who have ever had somebody come up to you and say, “I want to do yoga.” Like, even something as simple as that. Like, “I want to do yoga. What’s yoga about? Or talk to me a little bit about it.” They are essentially… even if you’re not actually offering them a class. Even if you’re… maybe you’re not even in your studio or you’re… they’re asking to actually buy a package from you, or anything like that. They’re just like, one of your friends is curious about yoga, we still approach it the same exact way. So this works for everything guys.

01:53          Even if, like so… cause even then we’re kind of kind of selling it in a way that we want that person, whether it’s a friend or family member, to actually practice, we have to be persuasive enough or get their interest piqued enough, so that they’re willing to step into a studio, step onto their mat, and change their lives. Right? So that’s really the key. And so, regardless of whether it’s… you’re literally trying to sell them a package or sell them into your studio or into your training or whatever, the thing that you’re offering is… or you’re simply just having a conversation with a friend, it’s the same psychology. Like, any time, no matter what it is, anytime we go to make a purchase… so this is yoga, this is buying a car, this is buying an outfit, this is buying whatever it is that you’re buying, we always approach it… if we’re not familiar with it, we haven’t bought it before, we’re not… we’re not…

02:41          It’s new, we approach it the exact same way. Everybody approaches it… approaches it the exact same way. And how they approach it is, they have specific belief patterns around that thing. And it’s three specific belief patterns. The first… this so… how the brain processes potential purchases, is exactly what I was saying. The first A, this is a vehicle. Right? And what vehicle means is when they look at, well, say yoga, when they come in and say, “Hey, I’m not sure about this yoga thing. All my friends are doing it, and I’m kinda interested in it. What’s it about?” The… what their belief pattern is, “Will yoga… does yoga actually work?” Right? Does yoga actually work? So it’s a vehicle belief, meaning, does the thing work? If I’m going to… I’m going to buy an outfit, I’m like, “Does that outfit work?”

03:31          Meaning, “Will I look good in it?” This isn’t going to work if I’m going to buy a car, does this car actually drive? Right? Does this car actually work? Is it gonna? Is it gonna achieve what it says it’s gonna do? And so if somebody is coming into a yoga studio, they’re like, does this yoga thing work? Right? What is this like? Tell me about this yoga thing. Right? And so what we tend to do as people that have practice forever, so your friend comes up to say, Hey, talk, kind of interested in the yoga thing. I know you’re, you’re a yoga teacher and you do yoga all the time. Talk to me about it. What they’re really kind of diving into in the beginning is their belief pattern around the vehicle. Does yoga work now what we do on the other side as teachers, as people that are in it, like we know it works, we’ve done it our whole lives.

04:16          We love it. We start talking about details, about benefits, about we throw technobabble like so if for instance somebody comes into my studio and they say, Hey, mentioned yoga, right? What I did in the past was, Oh, you’re going to love it. The heat is this, and then we do poses that create this and these poses work this and then we do these posters over here and the works this and a bunch of technobabble and I used to even throw out some Sanskrit credit and some other terminology that they’re like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Right? We tend to miss when we were in the beginning of the emotion that we felt, how amazing we felt, the epiphany we had that, Whoa, this is incredible. And then we get into the logic where we start to study it so much. We dive so deep into it that we understand all the technobabble up dog and down dog in myofunctional methodology and all of the things that are in a class, right?

05:12          All of the things that we love about it, the way it makes us sweat, what it does to the last of the muscle, how the build strength and coordination and balance and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of us. That stuff. When someone’s brand new, that’s like, Oh no, I knew what you’re talking about. All right, I’m going to go over here and keep pushing weights or keep running or doing my other thing. Right. They get, it gets lost in translation and I’ll get to the solution just a minute, but the next thing, so if we get past that vehicle or they get past the vehicle thing where they come in and they’re like, well, all my friends are doing it. I see it on TV. I see it all over the place so I know it works. I know it like yoga is legit.

05:48          Will it works for me? Right? The internal belief is can I drive this vehicle? All right, I know that car that I want to buy actually works drives, right? It’s sporty, it’s fast, it’s, or it’s a truck. It’s tough, but can I drive it right? Looking at Lamborghini, it’s really sports car, but do I know how to drive it? It’s probably a sensitive state, right? The internal belief comes down to there. The belief, uh, that they’re able to do it. Not that it works. I, they’d gotten past the vehicle already. Now it’s an internal belief. Can I do it right? So the next piece of it is if I step into a yoga class, am I actually going to be able to do these poses? Am I actually going to be able to do this practice? Right? Do I have the body type for it?

06:33          Am I strong enough? Right? All of these internal ideas, right? Do I have to be like a dancer and be super flexible and be able to straighten my leg and do all of this, touch the floor and do all of this stuff? I don’t know if I can do that right? That’s the next level. Like am I able to do it right? Do I believe I can do it right? And again, the way we’re going to jump that right, and I’ll get to it a minute is the same as the vehicle. If they get over the, the internal belief, right? The next piece. So that’s who they got the vehicle. They were like, okay, yoga is the legit yoga actually works and I believe I can do it right. I’ve maybe a friend of mine is just like me, is the same body shape and the same thing and he does yoga all the time.

07:15          And, and so I had this, I had the belief, I know I can do it. The next is an external belief. Do I have the time, the resources, the support from a spouse? Am I able to pull the external resources that make this a reality? Right? So the next thing, if I’m coming to the yoga studio, I know that yoga works. I believe that I can do it. Do I have the time to do it? Do I have the money to do it? Is am I going to get the support from my spouse or my friends? Am I as a man? Am I going to get joked by my friends for going into a yoga class maybe 10 years ago these days? No, you won’t. So do I have the resources to do it right? You know, and so for them it’s like, okay, timing.

07:53          What’s my day like? Do I have, do you offer enough class times that I can actually fit this into my schedule? Is how expensive is it? Can I budget it into my budget? All of those pieces like the, is it, do I have the resources? Is it at, can I actually make this thing work no matter what? So again, I’m going to reiterate a point I made earlier. It doesn’t matter if you’re coming to do yoga, it doesn’t matter if you’re buying a car. Doesn’t matter if you’re going to buy an outfit, doesn’t matter what you’re buying. We all go through this process of, through this brain process of a potential purchase. Does it work? Can I drive it? Can I actually do it and do I have the time, the resources, the support from friends and family to be able to make it work.

08:34          Here’s the next piece guys. In order to, for somebody to get through these three beliefs, these blocks, these roadblocks from achieving what they want to achieve to buying the car, to doing the yoga, coming in and practicing. There’s a simple way for us to help people get over those hurdles. There’s three major hurdles. They have a belief. What we’re here is with the vehicle, the internal and external. Those are belief patterns. They have a belief that yoga doesn’t work or they have a belief that I’m not capable of doing it or they have a belief of I don’t have the money or the time to do it right? These are belief patterns. Every single belief that you, that I have that you have is held up. Here’s the belief. It’s held up by a story. Every single belief we have is held up by a story, so the solution here on our size comes.

09:23          Someone comes to you and says, I’m interested in doing yoga. Instead of saying, well, here’s the benefit of yoga. Yoga is so good, right? Do you, it still is the mind. It allows you to, to be, have deeper awareness is, uh, is it allows you to be more skillful in your relationships, allows this and it makes your body feel incredible. Instead of telling the person all the benefits, we just need to replace their story so that the belief changes, right? Every belief is held up by a story. If we changed their story, right? Meaning tell a story, we can change that belief regardless if it’s a belief around there, the vehicle, the internal or the external. Okay? So how to sell without selling. If you’re a Bruce Lee enthusiasts, like Chris and I are in enter the dragon. There’s a scene where Bruce Lee is on a boat and he’s going to the main Island of the bad guy and that’s where he goes crazy and fights everybody.

10:14          He’s on that boat and one guy tries to pick a fight and he was like, have you ever heard of the art of fighting without fighting the whole thing? And he gets the guy to, to sit in a boat. This is the art of selling without selling, right? And this is what’s so powerful about this is if you’re a yoga entrepreneur, you’re in the yoga world. And what we bump up against as yogis is, I don’t want to sell it. I don’t want to be a salesperson. Selling is so it’s hard. It’s like we don’t have to sell. We simply need to be good at telling stories, right? So good at telling stories, storytelling, basic storytelling script. We’re gonna go over this in just a minute, but if somebody comes in and they’re asking, does yoga work? I don’t need to say yes, it does because of X, Y, and Z because of all this feature and this benefit and this feature and this benefit.

11:00          I simply just need to tell the story. Yeah. Well, when I started yoga, I was into martial arts and my brother and I were pounding away. We’re fighting all the time. We were, we were hurt all the time. We were, we’re beat up a lot. And we started searching out something that was going to allow us to heal faster and our sister was huge in the yoga and she was like, you guys gotta do a yoga class, and she taught us our first class and then after that class we were like, Whoa, that was powerful. Let’s start practicing more regularly, and we started getting into it more and we realized that the more we practiced, the faster we healed, the faster we healed, the more we could train, and then we practiced so much we were realizing, Whoa, this feels incredible. This is making such a difference in my life, not just my martial arts, but in my actual, my relationships and how I look at food and how I feel about myself and my ability to stay focused.

11:49          There’s a story, right? Yes. Yoga works. That’s a vehicle story and same thing, internal belief. I would tell a story around that. If somebody comes in, it’s like, yeah, all my friends are doing yoga. I know it works, but I’m not quite sure if I can do it. Then you tell a story about an internal belief. It could be your story. It could be somebody else’s story. A lot of you have worked with so many people in the years. You have a multitude of stories, so many stories that you could pull and say, Oh, well, this is my friend Peter who came in. He’s a little bit heavier set guy, and he came in and he heard me talking about yoga all the time. He knows it works, but he was like, I don’t know if I can do it. I was like, Peter, come on.

12:24          I’ll come into, I’ll go and take a class with you. We’ll do it together. And Peter tried it and he got out of class and he was like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I’ve never felt so good in my life, and it changed everything for him. He came a couple more times and he was hooked. He realized you don’t need to have a crazy dancer’s body. You don’t need to do all these crazy gymnastics in class that it’s, there’s a deeper aspect to it that’s so much more powerful. Testimonials. Guys are so powerful. When you talk about other people’s stories, people that you all have worked with, that you’ve changed their lives. People are like, Whoa, he’s not just telling me his story, obviously. Yeah, he, he’s a yoga teacher. He probably grew up being able to do press-ups and handstands and stuff.

13:07          Oh, the someone else’s stories. Somebody that’s like me, they’re coming in and actually getting benefit from it. They didn’t think they could do it and they’re coming in and practicing law. That’s so powerful. Testimonials are huge. Huge, huge, big, big, big. And then obviously external belief. Right? Externally it’s going to be time and resources and you know, it’s a, it’s one of those where you’re like, yeah, my so-and-so didn’t have time either or they didn’t have money and they realize that to not do it, I’ve made there. They had to spend that money later on because their health was deteriorating or something was going on in their bodies and [inaudible] but instead they dedicated themselves to a practice and realize, yeah, over the long run I’m paying for yoga, but it’s making a difference where I don’t have to actually fork that money out to a doctor later on or something like that.

13:49          You know, you also have the stories of the external belief. How have people made it affordable for them and what’s the benefit of them doing it versus not doing it right or, or the time I feel like, well I don’t, I’m so busy, I’m so busy, but like my friend Sarah has three kids and she’s running, running her studio with her mom, a gym with her mom and then, and she’s doing all this other stuff and she’s able to practice on top of it regularly. And that’s where I would start the story. But she also teaches too. So like when, if I were able to tell that story when I would tell that story, feel like, Oh wow, I don’t have any kids. And I just had my job and my dog. Yeah, I can make the time. If Sarah can do it, I can do it.

14:31          You know, let’s say it’s so telling stories and not saying, no, you have the time. You just have to do this and this to say, no, I got a friend of mine that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they’re like, ah. It breaks their false beliefs. So you see what I just do. You move those simple stories and I was just shooting from the hip with it. But even those simple stories, somebody comes in with a belief, a belief that is held up by a story. I’m so busy, I don’t have the time. We don’t have the money, I don’t have the resources. And you just change that story with somebody else’s story or your own personal story and all of a sudden it starts to break their false belief. What they thought was a true belief was actually a false belief. And we’re just breaking it through storytelling, through testimonial.

15:09          Now a simple way. Here’s this and this. We’ll finish with this. I am going along. I like to talk. A simple way of structuring a story is this. So this is basic storytelling script. Chris and I will do another training sometime when we’re going to go, we’ll go deep into storytelling and really break all of these apart because there’s multiple levels to it. But we want to keep this simple for today. So you guys get some good information that you can take right away and say, okay, let me plug this in. Let me start working, storytelling and start making a different. So basic storytelling script number one is the struggle. All right, so when I’m telling a story either about myself or somebody else, I’m going to start with the struggle. The a a master at this as Quintin Tarantino, if you ever see any Quentin Tarantino’s movies, he starts, a lot of times he’ll start it kind of in the middle or at the end of the story where it is crazy high drama, crazy struggle, create like you’re like, Oh my God, how did that person get there and why are they holding the stick of dynamite?

16:01          Oh my gosh, this is so crazy. You know he does a whole high drama and then he backtracks and goes chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, and you start to see the story unfold all the way. That point of high drama, right? He’s a master at it. But you’ll notice in a lot of movies they’ll open up the movie with really high drama or really like the struggle. What’s this? The main character going through. They’re running on a train and they’re like, the cars behind him are exploding. And I’m like, Oh my God, how did she get there? And then they back up and start to tell the story. So you want to go into the struggle immediately, right? Because that catches people like, wow, why are they struggling with that? And then can talk about the search for the solution. The search for the solution is, how do they get to that struggle?

16:40          They got to that struggle, right? It’s the story of like, okay, I’m, I’m in this place and now I gotta figure this out. Like what is the solution to this? You know, I’m bumping up against this wall and there is a way for me to get around this wall, right? My friend had start off the story like, yeah, I have a good friend of mine. He had to compress distance low back. And so he had to get surgery. And when they did the surgery he thought, okay, this is gonna make me feel better. And after the surgery and after he got over and started healing, he realized I’m not, I don’t feel better. I got to find a way to like get out of this pain. Like I am too young to be immobile. I’m too young to be in this much pain. So I gotta start to F I got to find something.

17:21          And so he went on the search, he came to me and he asked, Hey, think about this yoga thing and you know, I just had a low back surgery. Like you think this thing worked for me? And so I’m actually going into it. So that’s the search for the solutions. We find the solution I friend is search for, okay, I’ll try this yoga thing. And they find the result dedicated myself to yoga, had low back surgery. I could not move. Even after I healed, I healed up from the surgery. It was supposed to, I was supposed to not have pain and I still had pain. And I thought, Oh, okay, now I just had this surgery and I went, talked to friends of mine and realize that yoga could really make a difference. And I started practicing and after I got consistent with it and after just a few weeks, I started feeling such relief.

18:06          After a few months I wasn’t in pain anymore and it just radically changed my life. Right? There is the result I, that’s what happened. I practiced a bunch and now I don’t have pain. Here’s a transformation. Along with being out of pain, I realized that what I was learning was to understand myself on a deeper level to move into what yogis call pure awareness. This, this place where you start to be able to see colors are brighter and you start to, to pay attention to your kids and your wife. And, and what I realized after practicing for a few months and doing this, not only was I had a pain, but it radically changed my life. My relationship with my wife is better. My relationship with my kids is better, my work is better. I can focus, I don’t have to drink as much caffeine. I’m I, my body feels on fire.

18:54          I feel better than I did before I even had back pain. So this, it shifted everything. So that’s the transformation of like, okay, that result happen. You did yoga and got out of the pain and your back. But what’s the deeper level? Right? It’s that it’s the shift that happens. It’s a shift that happens that we don’t expect, right? So there’s always a result. We get to the key, but then there’s a deeper level. It’s like Disney movies are really good at this. Or like kids cartoons are really good at this. It’s like where like if you ever seen cars, right? Son loves the movie cars in our cars. Lightening McQueen. At the very end, he wanted to win the piston cup. And so he, he went and got sidetracked. And that was the struggle. And he was like, I got to get to race and the piston cup.

19:37          And he was stuck in a town and eventually he, he made friends in. Eventually, he got a mentor and he taught him how to race differently. And so he went to the piston cup and, and he was going and going and winning and, and then the King, one of the old drivers like wrecked and flipped and flipped. And he was on the, on the side. And then the other, a guy that was racing was right behind him and he, and Quinn was about to win the race. He’s right up on the finish line when he stopped two inches before the finish line and he turns around and he goes pick up and picks up the King, right. And starts to push him across the finish line. The other guy went across the finish line, wins the piston cup, and he pushes the King across. Right.

20:15          So this is like, he almost got the result. He didn’t get the piston cup, but what gives everyone goosebumps at the end was a transformation that happened from it, right? He transformed his entire being because, and this is so, this is what happens with our stories. We want to talk about the struggle, the search for the solution. We want to talk about the result that we, that that happen. But then the deeper part of that is transformation. And it’s important to keep these, you know, obviously, you can’t talk to someone for 20 or 30 minutes unless they’re sitting down and having lunch, lunch or dinner with them and you’re like, no, I’ve got plenty of time. I’ll tell a giant story for, and they’ll get engaged and we’ll have a good conversation. But if somebody is coming into your studio, you don’t have 30 or 40 minutes or an hour to talk to that person.

20:54          So you want to keep your story, your story condensed. Now they’re the key. And what’s cool about this framework, guys, is that you can do this framework in two minutes. I can tell the two-minute story or I can tell that story like I just did a tell, told a story. I think that’s probably a five-minute story. I can lengthen it by simply just popping in details. I can take a two-minute story, make it a 20-minute story or 30 an hour story, a two-hour story. But if I was speaking from stage and I had to tell a story like that, I could lengthen it to 60 or 90 minutes presentation if I needed to. Right? So our stories can lengthen or shrink depending on who we’re talking to them when we’re talking to, but the concept stays the same. We want to shift people’s belief patterns so they’re not stuck in the vehicle.

21:35          The internal, the external. We want to tell people stories that take their belief in their old story that’s holding that up and we’ve replaced their old story with the new story. It could be ours, it could be somebody else’s, it could be a testimonial story. But at the moment we shift that story, their belief changes and that my friends is the key to not only storytelling but it is the key to the art of selling without selling. So I hope that helped plug it in right away. If you’re offering your services to somebody, you’re, you’re trying to make a living doing this stuff and whatever it is, yoga, maybe you have other things on the side. Maybe you want to talk to your employer about getting a raise. Same exact thing. Use storytelling to do that work. So anyway, thanks for hanging with me and we’ll see on the next one.

22:22          Yes, Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode and be sure to tune in for the next one. Thanks. Peace. Thanks. Yes, thanks so much for listening to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets. Do you have a question that you’d like us to answer raw and uncut on the podcast? If you want your questions answered, all you need to do is head over to Apple Podcasts, and do three simple things. One; rate and review telling us what you think of the podcast. Two; in that review, ask anything you want related to yoga, and three; if you want to shout out, leave your Instagram handle or name and that’s it. Then listen in to hear your question answered Live, raw and uncut. Join us next time on Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets Podcast. Thanks.