58: Confessions of a Digital Nomad, Superstar Accidental Salesperson with Samantha Alvarez

58: Confessions of a Digital Nomad, Superstar Accidental Salesperson with Samantha Alvarez This week’s Misfit Entrepreneur is Samantha Alvarez. Samantha is just your every day, run of the mill, digital nomad, sales system strategist, nurse practitioner, and university faculty member who travels the world funding her adventures by helping businesses find the secrets to growing faster and more profitably hidden in their business.

Sam has traveled to almost 30 countries, lived on 5 continents and in 2016, while growing her entrepreneurial ventures lived in 7 countries in 7 months alone!

One of the most interesting things about Sam is that she has held 63 jobs in her life. That’s right 63. It just goes to show that if you never give up on the pursuit of your dreams, you will find what you are looking for…

www.SamAlvarez.com

Sam started out as a registered nurse and then a nurse practitioner for the first 10 years of her career after school. Before that, she had almost 30 jobs finding her to school and nursing. She began to get burned out. She was making 6 figures per year, but was losing her passion. She decided to save her money and then go to Japan to learn and study Japanese. She is a lover of languages and speaks 8 of them. After 6 months, she ran out of money and came back to the states.

This time, she wanted to find a way to work and travel at the same time, so she started taking online jobs and found her way to sales. She now is a consultant that helps companies throughout the world build their sales organizations. As she says, she now spends her days talking “about communication, hopes, dreams, fears, and relationships.” She gets to travel and work how she wants and help people reach their potential and grow their business.

What have you learned about sales and selling? What works? What doesn’t?

• Get rid of the hang ups and be yourself
• Find things to sell that you feel strongly about and believe in
• If you are talking to someone about your service or solutions and they are taking the time to listen and have interest, you are halfway there – your job is to get them to get over inertia and take action
• You must offer lots of value, but doing it through honesty
• People don’t buy products, they buy people
• The first buying decision is whether they want to do business with you.
• The most important thing you can do is to create rapport and connect with those you are selling to first, and then everything else can fall in line.

At the 13 min mark, Samantha expands on how to make sure that the transition you or the salesperson makes with the client to the next level in providing the solution is so important and how to do it well.

At the 16 min mark, Dave and Sam go deep on selling value vs. price.

The number one thing Sam sees people struggle with in sales and setting up sales systems is mindset. They have mental roadblocks that get in their way and must be cleared.

Most important thing Sam has learned about herself going through what she has?

• To allow herself into the flow of things and not to fight against herself.
• You have to be fully present in what you are doing and your interactions and not be thinking about selling while you are building your relationship.

How do you find your engagements and find clients?

• Most of Sam’s clients come through relationships, referrals, and sometimes meeting clients face to face before engaging
• It comes from the networking she has done online
• She uses LinkedIn connections, Masterminds, Networking events and her reputation she has built in the digital nomad community by her presence online.
• She focuses on connections vs. getting clients as the relationships turn into clients over time either directly or by referral.
• If you are new, find your why, and do not stop. Be willing to go through everything it takes to get your foot in the door. You must know what you want before you go after things then.
• It takes a lot of self-directed motivation to get what you want and work digitally.
• There are hundreds of websites, blogs, podcasts, etc. that will teach you to be a digital nomad – know what you want, take action, and go learn from all of the resources available to you.
• You have to fail a lot in order to get where you know you deserve to be!

At the 34 minute mark, Samantha talks about how she changed her mindset and ways of thinking to help her get on a better path to success.

 

Best Quote: “People don't buy products or services, they buy people. They buy you first before anything else.”

 

Samantha's Misfit 3:

1. Find someone who is not as far along your path as you are and give them something from your knowledge to help them for free. Gift your knowledge.
2. Practice some sort of minimalism. Purge 3 items from your life that you have not used or thought of in 6 months. Pay attention to how you feel when you do.
3. Connect reflectively with your own intuition. Do something that allows your inner voice to speak to you daily. Be a human “being” – not a human “doing”