Not just the business or offer’s selling point, but the purpose behind each piece of content I share.

My mission is to bring more intentionality to how I show up online, which includes intentionality in why someone would want to follow my content and stick around.

My younger self didn’t understand this. If someone had asked, “why do you post on social media?”, I would’ve said, “to grow my business” or “ to get clients”. The problem with those answers is that there are 1001 ways to grow a business and get clients. They still leave the unanswered question of “…but why social media? why this content?”.

Thats why I chose The Selling Point as the name of this newsletter.

Because at the center of everything we do in business, there needs to be a main selling point.

In retrospect, I didn’t have a reason to be sharing on social media. Sometimes I shared educational posts, sometimes I posted sales pitches, sometimes I shared portfolio work. It was sporadic and unclear at best.

Now, 6+ years later and with a lot more business experience, the selling point has been the main focus, not an attempt to stitch together a million things together after the fact.

I am documenting on social media because I am building my personal brand.

And branding is basically what the selling point is all about. Mine is to share the rarely-documented behind-the-scenes of starting a business from scratch. So often, we see entrepreneurs and influencers start sharing after they’ve already succeeded. They may talk about the early days, but it’s always in retrospect — which leaves too much room for memory to romanticize things or forget the small but important details.

My selling point to you is to come along on the journey, not read about it afterward. I encourage my audience to bring their own experience on the journey as well. If you’re starting something right now, tell me about it! Comment your take on certain topics and with what you’re working on. I want social media to feel social again, not like an editorial magazine of highlight reels and ads.

And if you are on this journey and aren’t quite sure what your selling point is, consider these questions:

1. Why should a stranger care?

If someone new found your work today, why should they be interested in it? What draws them in?

2. What unique edge or perspective do you (or your business) bring?

In business school, we’d call this your Value Proposition. This is a great way to think about what is uniquely interesting about your work.

3. Could someone describe what you do in one sentence?

If there answer is no, or you need a full paragraph to explain what you’re doing, then you’re not quite there yet. Especially now when audiences make a decision abotu whether or not to watch/follow/buy in split seconds, your selling point needs to be as clear as possible.

The selling point isn’t a tagline you slap on at the end. It’s the thing that makes everything else make sense. Figure that out first, and the content, the offers, the audience — they all have somewhere to point.

I had a client a while back who ran an events-based business that was struggling to get off the ground. She wasn’t making enough sales — very obvious to identify, especially when your business model has a specific number of seats to fill and you’re consistently landing around 20% capacity. Like most proactive, intelligent, driven founders, she didn’t just bring the problem to our session. She brought her list of potential solutions too. She was thinking about spending more on paid ads, investing in higher-traffic venues, and partnering with a local influencer. None of those are bad ideas — I have a marketing background, and I genuinely love seeing founders who are open to investing in it. But what we had to dig into first was that she was trying to solve a sales problem with marketing tactics.

Sales problems need sales solutions.

So much of the advice, content, and courses out there are skewed heavily toward marketing, and I rarely see anyone digging into the sales side with any real depth. But sales isn’t just a number of tickets sold or revenue generated. It isn’t just 1:1 pitch calls. Sales is your value proposition, your pricing, your objection-handling. It’s understanding the psychology of your clients — what they actually want, and what they’re genuinely willing to pay to get it.

The first question I asked this client is the same one I ask most often in sessions: “I understand you have a lot of empty seats. But first, who’s filling the ones that are sold? Where are your current customers actually coming from?”

Understanding what’s working today is often the key to understanding what’s not working today. She shared that most of their customers came from word of mouth and referrals — her and her co-founder had various friend groups who’d share events with their other friend groups, and so on. I loved hearing that. Word of mouth is underrated for small businesses, especially early-stage ones.

Once I had a handle on what was working, we turned to what wasn’t — specifically. Sure, they weren’t filling enough seats. But the more specific you can get about a problem, the better positioned you are to solve it. Digging in, it turned out that the spots they were selling were almost all booking at the last minute, which is incredibly stressful in a live-event business. And on top of that, they were offering referral discounts, so nearly everyone who booked wasn’t paying full price.

This is where it gets interesting. This client didn’t have a marketing problem. She had a sales journey problem.

Your sales journey is simply the path someone takes on their way to buying from you. It makes sense that a business owner’s first instinct, when sales are low, is to put more leads into the top of that journey. More people in, more people out. But it’s often easier — and more effective — to make the journey itself flow better, so you convert more of the people you already have into paying customers.

That’s what we focused on. We leaned into the channel that was already working and amplified it. We replaced the blanket referral discount with an ambassador program: ambassadors could attend events for free as long as they brought a certain number of paying ticket-holders with them. We cleaned up the sales page to speak more directly to groups attending together, rather than individuals. And we introduced multi-event packages to encourage advance purchasing and take some of the last-minute pressure off the team.

Their next event sold out at 90%, without touching ads, influencers, or any additional marketing spend.

There are very few entrepreneurs who haven’t struggled with sales at some point. But what helps most people get through that struggle faster — and get to the other side where revenue is consistent and more predictable — is being willing to dig into the actual problem. Not just the symptom. Because when you identify a sales problem clearly enough, the solution usually points itself out pretty quickly.

Here’s where I see a lot of service-based entrepreneurs get tripped up, and it comes from a genuinely good place. They care about their clients, they want to make something more accessible, they want to be part of changing how their industry operates. So when they try to articulate their client’s pain point, it sounds something like this: my clients want professional brand photos but don’t want the big price tag that comes with a full shoot.

And that framing feels right to them because it’s true — their clients do want the photos, and the photos are expensive. But price is not a pain point. It never is.

People pay for what they want. That’s just how it works. If someone isn’t paying for something right now that they say they want, there’s a real reason underneath that, and it isn’t the number on the invoice.

I watched this play out constantly in tech sales, especially with newer reps who hadn’t done a lot of discovery work yet. It’s genuinely easier to lead with price — to say “you’re using our competitor? We can do it cheaper” — than to slow down and have a real conversation about what’s actually holding someone back from making a change. The cheaper pitch feels efficient. But it doesn’t close the real gap, which means it usually doesn’t close the deal either, and when it does, you’ve attracted a client who will leave the moment someone else comes in cheaper.

When I was traveling in Thailand for my Honeymoon, I remember walking through a street full of shops of knock-off luxury goods. One shop in particular caught my eye because of the wall of fake Louis Vuitton bags that looked so real, even I (someone who had worked in luxury fashion, specifically in handbags) would never be able to tell the difference. And at this point in my life, I didn’t own a real Louis Vuitton bag, nor could I really have afforded one. So I stopped and browsed for a few minutes, and debated buying three as gifts for my mom and sister for Christmas. But even with the prospect of owning this bag for a fraction of the cost of the real thing (these bags were probably only $100 each), I ended up walking away empty handed. Why? Because it turned out that price wasn’t actually what was holding me back from owning a real LV bag in the first place. What I realized was, I just didn’t like the idea of carrying the same basic tote bag that everyone else in NYC had, regardless of whether it was $100 or $1000.

Going back to the photographer example: if someone tells you that a brand shoot is too expensive for them right now,

The price is a symptom, not the cause.

Maybe their target client hasn’t fully settled on their brand identity yet and doesn’t want to invest in photos that might not reflect who they’re becoming. Maybe they’ve had a bad experience with a photographer before — felt uncomfortable, stiff, like the photos didn’t look like them — and that experience made the whole idea of a brand shoot too intimidating and risky. Those are the real pain points. They’re specific, they’re emotional, and they’re things a photographer can actually speak to and solve.

When you build your brand and your messaging around price, you end up attracting clients who are primarily motivated by price, and you end up in conversations that are fundamentally about justifying your rate rather than about what you can actually do for someone.

When you go deeper — when you take the time to understand what’s really in the way — your messaging resonates differently. It reaches people where they actually are.

The work of figuring this out isn’t always comfortable. It requires being honest about who your client really is and what they’re really dealing with. But it’s the work that makes everything else easier.

Until next time, Rebecca

— The Selling Point is a newsletter for service providers ready to sell better, earn more, and build a life they love. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

The rep earning 30% is focused on everything happening outside of themselves. They complain that people just don’t want to buy right now. They worry they don’t have enough leads. They spiral the moment their goals get off track. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because it works the same way for entrepreneurs. If you’re not hitting the revenue results you want, there’s a good chance you’re fixating on a similar set of external problems.

The reps consistently earning 100% and above — and the entrepreneurs seeing steady growth — aren’t looking outward. They’re focused on what’s happening internally. They ask themselves things like, “how can I improve this process?” and “what helps me stay motivated on a bad day?”. They’re not staring at their monthly goal and trying to figure out how they’ll get there. They’re looking at what they need to do today, and trusting that the work will add up.

None of this is new. Growth mindset has been talked about for a long time. But I think there’s a specific reason entrepreneurs struggle to actually internalize it and use it in their day-to-day — and there’s a pretty simple fix.

Entrepreneurs are big dreamers. That’s what makes us successful, right? At their core, they’re the people who see a possible future and are optimistic enough to chase after it. That’s a gift.

But big dreams and vision boards aren’t great tools for daily motivation. In my experience, most people actually find it pretty demotivating to look at a vision board every day full of things they haven’t achieved yet. It’s a constant reminder of the gap.

The fix is to build a separate kind of goal planning — one built around your sales process and the specific inputs that drive your results.

One of my mentors, who is genuinely one of the best salespeople I know, always says her business really took off when she committed to showing up on video every day in her Facebook group. And the secret there isn’t the content, or the platform, or even the consistency itself. It’s that she had taken the time to figure out that most of her clients were coming from her live videos. So as long as she showed up and did that one thing, the clients would follow.

She stopped worrying about the outcome and just focused on the input she knew was working.

That shift — knowing what inputs produce your outputs, and focusing your energy there — is the core of what a healthy sales mindset actually looks like in practice.

I had a client a while back who wanted to get to $20k months.

That was double where she was, and she was already burnt out. She couldn’t imagine doing more than she was already doing. She’d been focused on that $20k goal for a long time and was feeling stuck and frustrated that she still wasn’t there.

My first question was simple: “Where do your clients actually come from right now?”

When we dug into it, we realized that about 20% of what she was doing was bringing in almost all of her results. But because she’d been so locked onto the big goal, she didn’t realize how her daily time was being spent on marketing channels and efforts that weren’t actually paying off. So we cut the other 80% and focused her energy on what was actually working. The next month was her first $20k month — and it wasn’t the last.

The more you can bring your focus back to the daily inputs you can control, the less overwhelming the big goals start to feel. You don’t have to figure out how to get there all at once. You just have to figure out what to do today, and trust that it’s going to add up.

Until next time,

Rebecca

— The Selling Point is a newsletter for service providers ready to sell better, earn more, and build a life they love. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

Someone starts out closing. Getting yes’s, making it look natural. Then they decide they need to get more “strategic” about their calls. They start researching talk tracks, workshopping their discovery questions, overhauling their whole approach.

And almost immediately, something breaks.

The conversations go stiff. What used to feel like a genuine exchange starts to feel like a performance, and they can feel it. Which means the person on the other end of the call can feel it too. They start dreading their sales calls and the results follow.

What went wrong wasn’t their strategy. It was that they stopped trusting themselves and started trying to say the perfect thing instead.

If getting on the phone with a potential client is something you have to psych yourself up for, it’s worth asking whether you’ve fallen into a version of the same trap — the belief that there’s a magic question or a perfect script that’s going to get someone to say yes.

There isn’t.

Clients don’t buy your words. They buy your confidence and your energy. They buy the feeling they get from talking to someone who genuinely believes in what they’re offering. No combination of words replaces that. The magic is in the how, not the what.

So what does that actually look like in practice? A few things I’ve noticed the most consistently successful salespeople do differently:

Instead of rehearsing what to say, they rehearse the outcome.

Before a call, rather than running through questions in their head, they spend a few minutes imagining the conversation going well — the client opening up, sharing what’s actually going on, and saying yes to working together. It sounds counterintuitive, but what it really does is set your brain up to expect a good outcome, which changes how you show up to the conversation.

They don’t linger on the conversations that didn’t go anywhere.

The best salespeople I’ve seen aren’t the ones who never feel the sting of a no — they’re the ones who feel it and move on faster than anyone else. If you find yourself replaying a dead conversation for days while a warm lead sits waiting on a follow-up, that’s a pretty telling sign of where your energy is actually going.

They pay attention to their physical environment.

Confidence isn’t just a mental state — it’s physical too. A lot of people find they show up better on calls when they’re standing rather than hunched over a desk. For me personally, it was about my space — being somewhere clean and quiet, where I felt settled and present, made a real difference in how I came across. Executive presence is a lot easier when you’re not fighting your surroundings to get there.

None of this is about performing confidence you don’t feel. It’s about building the conditions where the real thing can actually show up. Your energy on those calls is either working for you or against you — and the good news is that’s something you have a lot more control over than you might think.

Until next time, Rebecca

— The Selling Point is a newsletter for service providers ready to sell better, earn more, and build a life they love. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

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Which was really just a sales call. A pricing call.

I’d get so nervous going into them, and this wasn’t irrational fear. I had a portfolio. I had client work to point to. But I’d still doubt myself, still worry they wouldn’t buy because I was young and didn’t have a corporate background, and basically every other imposter syndrome thing a 20-year-old entrepreneur carries around with them.

And because that’s where my head was on those calls, I was charging $15–$20 an hour. I was consistently selling myself short because that’s exactly what it felt like — I was selling myself. My work. My worth. It was an incredibly vulnerable place to be standing.

Fast forward to my late 20s. I’m in tech sales, having those kinds of conversations every single day — at least ten pricing calls a week, often with a CEO or CFO on the line, on deals ranging from $3,000 to $120,000.

But my mindset was completely different.

I wasn’t stressed about the price or whether they’d like the product. I was focused on them and their business. My goal on every call was to find out where the pain was and whether we could actually solve it. If we could, I’d walk them through the price tag. And if they asked for a discount, I didn’t question my worth or even the value of what I was selling — I questioned them. What’s the priority here? What’s holding you back from making this investment?

The sale was still personal. Just personal about the client, not about me.

As entrepreneurs, we make the sale mean something about ourselves.

Whether I would have admitted it at the time or not, I took rejection personally. I let those conversations dictate my mood, my prices, my bank account. Every no landed like a verdict on my self worth.

That’s the thing nobody talks about — it’s not that entrepreneurial selling is harder because the deals are bigger or the clients are tougher. It’s harder because you’re too close to it. When you built the thing, when you are the thing, it’s almost impossible not to feel like every sales conversation is actually about you.

In tech, that distance exists naturally. The product isn’t you. But as a service-based entrepreneur or freelancer, that line gets blurry fast.

The good news is, sales is a skill that can be learned.

And entrepreneurs can learn how to embrace sales in a way that doesn’t compete with their ego.

The reason I’m so passionate about this newsletter is because I want more entrepreneurs to sell the way I learned to sell in tech. To genuinely embrace the idea that the sale is about your customer — their problem, their cost of staying stuck, their decision — and not about your worth as a human being or a business owner.

Because unlocking that mindset is what makes it possible to raise your prices without panic, to get excited about sales calls instead of dreading them, and to start operating less like a freelancer hoping someone picks them and more like a CEO who knows exactly what she’s offering.

More on how to actually get there — in next week’s issue.

— Rebecca

The Selling Point is a newsletter for service providers ready to sell better, earn more, and build a life they love. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

Subscribe now

Every single person I got on a consult call with became a paying client. A 100% conversion rate. I told people about it like it was proof of something — proof that I was good at this, that I had the gift, that sales came naturally to me.

Now I find it a little embarrassing.

Because a 100% conversion rate doesn’t mean you’re great at selling. It means you’re not selling enough. And I’d bet money that if this is you, you’re also not making the income you want — at least not as consistently as you want.

Here’s where my perspective changed.

A few years into working in startup and tech sales, I was given a project: sell seats to an in-person founder event. Tickets were $3,000–$5,000 per person. My goal was 10 seats in two weeks.

To hit 10 closed deals, I knew I needed to reach out to 100 people and get on roughly 20 discovery calls. Not because I was bad at sales. Because that’s how sales math works. Most people say no. You plan for that and build your pipeline accordingly.

I hit my goal with two days to spare.

When I was an entrepreneur, I approached it completely backwards. I’d think: I want 3 new clients this month, so I just need to find 3 perfect people. I’d cherry-pick my outreach. Keep the list small. Only approach people I was almost certain would say yes.

And then I’d wonder why I had more slow months than I wanted.

The difference wasn’t my sales skills. It was my relationship with no.

In a sales role, rejection is just part of the game. You anticipate it, you plan for it, and you move on without drama. It’s not personal. It’s math.

As a business owner, I was so personally tied to my work that I avoided rejection at all costs. Every no felt like a verdict on my worth, my talent, my whole business. I didn’t set myself up for success because I was too busy trying to avoid failure. So I kept my conversations small and safe. And I called my 100% close rate a win.

It wasn’t a win. It was avoidance dressed up as success.

Here’s the mindset shift I want you to take into this week:

Stop trying to find the perfect three people. Start having more conversations. Cast a wider net, go into it expecting that most people will say no, and stop treating rejection as a sign that something went wrong. It didn’t. It’s supposed to happen.

If you have a 100% conversion rate, you’re not a sales unicorn. You’re someone who’s been too afraid to hear no — and it’s costing you more than you realize.

The goal isn’t to close everyone. The goal is to talk to enough people that closing some of them is inevitable.

Go find some no’s.

Until next time, Rebecca

— The Selling Point is a newsletter for service providers ready to sell better, earn more, and build a life they love. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

I figured this out sitting across from another entrepreneur at a coffee shop, the kind of meeting I’d been stacking my calendar with because I was hungry to grow and I knew it...

She was running a full marketing agency — exactly what I wanted to build. So when she asked about my plan, I laid it out confidently: start with a low-end offer to get clients in the door, build trust, then upsell them into bigger packages over time.

She nodded. Then she told me her own version of that story.

When she launched her agency, she’d done the same thing. Priced herself low to seem accessible. Got in front of a dream client. Nailed the pitch. And when it came time to talk numbers — they said no.

Not because she was too expensive.

Because she wasn’t expensive enough.

The client told her they were looking for someone who “could do more.” Her price had told them a story before she ever got the chance to. And that story was: I’m not the one you’re looking for.

I sat with that for a long time after we said goodbye.

Then I went home and blew up my entire offer structure.

No tiers. No upsells. No more “starter package” designed to feel safe for people who weren’t sure yet. One branding package. One price. A number I was proud of.

The following week I went to a networking event and said it out loud for the first time.

I was so nervous I was convinced my foundation was sweating off my face. My stomach was doing somersaults and I had to fight my feet from instinctively running for the door. But I said the number. Clearly. Without flinching — or at least without showing it.

A few days later, that person referred me to a colleague and that referral became my first big client.

She paid in full. Didn’t negotiate. Didn’t blink.

And I learned the lesson that has shaped everything since:

You get what you sell.

Sell cheap and you attract clients who want cheap — who will question every invoice, push every boundary, and exhaust you for a fraction of what you’re worth. Sell quality and you attract people who value quality, who trust your expertise, and who are actually a joy to work with.

I want to be clear about something though. Charging what you’re worth isn’t about inflating your prices to the ceiling or squeezing every dollar out of someone. It’s about not discounting and discrediting your own work. It’s about standing behind the value you deliver without quietly apologizing for it through your pricing.

High ticket doesn’t mean out of integrity. It means in alignment.

Your price isn’t just a number. It’s a signal. It tells the market who you are, what you believe about your work, and what kind of client relationship you’re inviting.

Most service providers I talk to are sitting on a version of my old plan — starting low, hoping to earn their way up. I get it. It feels safer. It feels humble. It feels like you’re being realistic.

But here’s what it actually is: it’s playing small before anyone even asked you to.

You don’t have to earn the right to charge what you’re worth. You just have to decide you’re worth it — and then say the number out loud.

It will feel like you might throw up. Do it anyway.

Until next time, Rebecca

— The Selling Point is a newsletter for service providers ready to sell better, earn more, and build a life they love. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.

I know this because I’ve seen the scenario play out with dozens of entrepreneurs I know, including myself.

When I started my first business, I was doing $200 logo projects for clients who loved my work, paid on time, and referred me to everyone they knew — and I still felt exhausted and underpaid at the end of every month. For a long time I thought that was just the cost of doing business when you’re starting out, that I needed to earn my way up to the rates I actually wanted, that charging more was something that happened later, once I’d proven myself enough.

What I eventually figured out — the hard way, and then again the right way when I spent years inside high-performing sales teams — is that the problem was never my work. It was how I thought about selling it. And those are two completely different problems with two completely different solutions.

Here’s the thing about talented people: we tie our pricing to our self-worth without even realizing we’re doing it, which means every time we raise our rates or pitch a bigger package, it doesn’t feel like a business decision — it feels like a personal one. Like we’re asking someone to validate us, not buy from us. And that one mindset gap costs more than most people ever stop to calculate.

That’s what The Selling Point is about. Not scripts. Not manipulation. Not hustle-culture tactics that feel gross the moment you try to use them. Just the real, honest work of learning to sell the way the best salespeople do — with confidence, with clarity, and without making every client conversation mean something about who you are.

Every issue I’ll share something I’ve learned — from building businesses from scratch, from selling everything from branding packages to six-figure B2B deals, and from coaching service providers who are talented as hell and just need someone to show them how to stop leaving money on the table.

If that’s you — welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

Until next time,

Rebecca

The Selling Point is a newsletter for service providers ready to sell better, earn more, and build a life they love. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.