Welcome back to Sales & Business Growth for BUSY Entrepreneurs. I’m your host and resident sales and business nerd Lindsay, and this podcast is the place for small business owners to learn sales skills, business growth strategies, and how to squeeze more out of your day.  HAPPY OCTOBER!!!  I'm hope Texas gets the memo that it is fall y'all!  I’ve launched a FREE tool on my website that you can download that we have used to figure out which sales and marketing activities actually create revenue. My SALES GROWTH TRACKER is now available for download on my website - go to LindsayFletcher.co/free-resources. Click on Sales Growth Tracker and drop your email and I will send it over to you immediately, along with steps on how to use it. It has been THE TOOL that we’ve used in our service-based local business and I’m using it to track my sales activities in my consulting business. So go to my website LindsayFletcher.co and click on the free resources tab and you’ll see Sales Growth Tracker at the top of the page! Download it and use it, and be on your way to Sales Success!!!   Ok let’s dive in to today’s topic: learning how to sell as a small business owner and why it’s important.   Here’s the short answer: sales generates revenue, and revenue pays your bills.    Thanks for listening to the show. Haha! Just kidding. Seriously though, sales generates revenue and revenue means your business is bringing in dollars, and that’s how you are going to pay your bills.   You know from listening to this podcast that I love sales, it’s really fun for me to teach, and that I believe everyone should learn how to sell. But I do understand that many of you, maybe even the majority of small business owners and entrepreneurs, start businesses with passion and a really great product or service but they don’t know how to sell it. For many, many entrepreneurs, sales conversations are uncomfortable and avoided, and then they struggle to get to the place where their business pays their bills.  Friends, if this is you, you are not alone, and I’m here to help you!    Here are a 5 reasons that you should learn sales skills, and then continue building your sales muscles, as an entrepreneur:   You’ll learn how to be confident in presenting your offer. You’ll learn how to prepare for sales conversations and ultimately how to present your offer in a way that makes sense for your customer. Part of buyer psychology includes how confident you are in selling your offer, and you’ll learn how to craft your pitch with confidence. Sales skills will improve your customer relationships. When you learn how to ask effective, great questions, you will learn more and more about your customer. If you ask the right questions, you will learn how to get and keep customers, attract more, and how to continue serving them with new products and services. You’ll learn how to position your product or service with messaging that converts inquiries into sales. You will learn to anticipate and identify objections and how to handle them in real time. Often times, the reasons people give for not purchasing are smokescreens. They don’t want to lie to you, but more importantly they don’t want to hurt your feelings. Learning how to properly identify, anticipate, and  handle objections will allow you to overcome objections, create better relationships through building trust, and close more sales. You’ll learn to identify opportunities for your offer and your business. By learning how to prepare for  Sales skills will increase your productivity. Once you learn how to sell, you will learn how to close more sales in a shorter amount of time. You know how I feel about time management as a busy business owner…it’s of upmost importance. Otherwise you’d be working 24/7…and none of us want that. Sales training provides tools and techniques so you stop spinning your wheels wondering why no one is buying and start selling!  These are 5 reas