Ep. 000: Welcome to the Sell it, Sister! Podcast

Hey Sister!

This podcast has been a long time coming and I’m thrilled to be sharing it with you.

If you don’t already know me, I’m Erika Tebbens and I’m a Sales Strategist and Coach for female and gender expansive entrepreneurs.

I teach womxn that selling doesn’t have to suck and you can have the business success you want without needing an MBA in marketing, or being a sleazy salesperson. Honestly, selling can be really fun when you do it in the relational way that I teach.

I’ve been running successful businesses and teaching others how to sell smarter for over 15 years. I’m excited to be able to share what I know with you, because I firmly believe that womxn deserve wealth, and running a successful business can not only bring in money, but it’s incredibly fulfilling too.

There’s never been a better time for smart, fierce womxn to be able to impact the world with their gifts and get paid well for it. We can change the world as entrepreneurs, but we have to know how to run strong businesses first.

So stay tuned for all sorts of wisdom on how to do just that!

LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED TODAY:

• Join my free Facebook community for additional tips & support: The Sell it, Sisterhood!

• Get my free No-Sleaze Sales Method delivered right to your inbox: Get Instant Access Here

• Click here to learn more about me and how I can help you.

• Want to read a transcript of this episode? Click here!

  Erika Tebbens: Welcome to the very first episode of the Sell It! Sister podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I just want to record a real quick episode to give you a little bit of an overview about what you can expect from this space, what you can expect from me and what you can look forward to.

  So, as I've said in the intro, I am Erika Tebbens. I do sales strategy and business consulting for highly motivated, female and gender expansive entrepreneurs. I love to teach people that selling doesn't have to suck because it often feels like it does. It feels like one of the worst parts about running a business sometimes, but don't worry.

  I am going to teach you my ways and you are actually going to learn to love it. And I know you're probably skeptical, but just stick with me on this. Okay. So a little bit about me and who I serve. So I love to work with people who are incredibly passionate about what they do. So the people that I work with are not people who just want to make money for the sake of making money.

  They are people who want a purpose, and that goes along with her. Their paycheck, essentially. They want passion with their profits. They want to either make a difference with their business or with the money that they earn from their business. So, yes, if you, if you were one of those people, if you are nodding, then that is awesome, stick with me.

  I also really love to work with people who are experts in their field. And I know expert can be kind of a really tricky word because especially as women, we tend to minimize our knowledge and our experience experience and our skills. And so we tend to not often say, Oh, I'm an expert in this, but what I mean by that is that you, you definitely don't necessarily know everything that there is to know about what it is that you do, either the product that you sell or the service that you sell.

  But what I mean is, is that you are very knowledgeable. You are very skilled and the part that you are struggling with is the business side of it, the monetizing, it, the feeling like you are either burning out or want to avoid burnout and want to be bringing in more money without a whole heck of a lot of drudgery and sacrifice.

  And lastly, the people who I serve are people who I like to say are all in. And what I mean by that is that even if your business right now is a side hustle, you are motivated and you are in the process of trying to turn it into a full hustle or maybe your business is your full-time gig. So if you are just doing it super part-time and you don't really have any intention of scaling it or growing it or anything like that, that is fine.

  There is nothing wrong with that whatsoever, but the people who get the most out of what I teach are people who are really looking to grow their businesses. So some of the ways I serve people, I have a lot of ways that you can get my knowledge for free, like this podcast, the blog on my website. In my free Facebook group, the Sell It! Sisterhood, if you follow me over on Instagram, which by the way, if you follow me over there, it's @erikatebbensconsulting and I love to hang out there, especially in the stories.

  So if you're ever listening, screenshot the podcast, post it and tag me because I am all about getting to know the people who I serve and who are getting value from what I do. So don't be a stranger. I also have two courses: one is exclusively about better sales language, and that's called conversations that convert.

  And the other is a full sales and marketing and just a business simplification course called Sell It! Sister. That was actually my first course. It's my flagship course and I absolutely love it. Obviously, I love it so much that I named the podcast after it and my Facebook group. So those are the ways I serve people.

  Um, Partly and then other ways are I have a group coaching program called the Success Squad Mastermind, and then I also love to work with people one-on-one so why do I do what I do? Because at the end of the day, If you want to run a successful business, if you want to truly be running a business and not a ex, not an expensive hobby, you need to be making money.

  And it doesn't matter how beautiful and polished your website is, or how many hours a week you spend on social media. If you cannot convert, if you cannot close sales, you will not have a business for very long. Another reason why I do this is because I've already been working with women for years and years and years, I realized that women really, really, really struggle feeling comfortable and confident with sales and business.

  And so I really wanted to take that to the masses rather than just in the small industry that I was in, because I believe firmly that women deserve wealth, whatever wealth looks and feels like to you. I also know that money is impactful. We can do a lot of good in this world when we have money. So I want amazing, passionate, highly motivate bad ass women to be able to make money so that they can have it for all of those things that they want to see happen in their families, in their communities and in the world at large.

  So why the heck should you even listen to me? Why am I qualified to even talk about this? Well, I'm glad you asked, even though you didn't, but I'm going to tell you anyways, so many, many years ago, I went to school to actually be a teacher.

  Teaching is what I love. I, uh, I taught high school for a little bit and teaching is my passion and I still teach, I just don't do it in a classroom and I don't do it to teenagers. So now I just teach all over two fabulous entrepreneurs, such as yourself. And when I was in my twenties, I ran a multimillion dollar retail store.

  I worked for Calvin Klein. We were the fifth highest volume store in the country. So if you can imagine, we were very, very busy. The store was large, my staff was large. I had over 40 people on my team. And we were really, really successful. I loved that work, but my husband was in the Navy. We got transferred to upstate New York from Seattle.

  And then I ended up actually working for a very large and successful organic vegetable farm in the area. And I know that we often have this idea of the poor struggling farmer, but I will say that when I started to work for them and I ended up doing some marketing and some managing that I took the skills that I had learned from corporate retail and I merged them with what we were doing at the farm and we saw yearly revenue increases.

  And then I like to say that I had an accidental career, successful career in direct sales. And I say accidental because truly I, when I signed up for the company, I was Swift. I figured I'd do it for four to six months. I didn't have a huge network where we live now. At the time we had. Only recently moved here.

  Um, I figured I'd get some free product and that would be, it I'd be done. I'd be out. But again, because I was using the same principles that I had had success with in the past, the same stuff that I teach to my clients, my business really took off. I ended up being in the top 3% of the company. I was in leadership.

  I had a team and again, I was back to teaching people how to run. Really successful businesses. So at the end of 2016, I will say with a lot of honesty that I was feeling very burned out and I thought maybe it was just the presidential election or something like that. But what I realized was because I, I had hit these huge milestones.

  I had hit four of them in about six weeks. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I, what is going on? I'm just not happy. I don't feel fulfilled. And I realized after a lot of ref reflection that it was that. I felt very boxed in, I was teaching and training and leading all the time, but it was in this one industry and in this one company and I wanted to help way more women.

  I wanted to help women who had started their own businesses from the ground up. So I took a huge leap of faith closed out that business while it was successful. And then not too long after I started this one. So that's, you know, that's how I got here. That's how I got here to this point. And that is where all of my, my past experience comes from, but also a little bit about me, because I think that it is really fun to get to know people for who they are and not just what they do.

  So I'm fully obsessed with parks and rec specifically, Leslie Nope . I have a Leslie and Ron Funko pop that stare at me on my desk while I work. And I am a big believer in Leslie's life mantra of friends, waffles work or waffles, friends work, but work is always third. I'm a big geek for all things, Lord of the rings and Hobbit.

  So if you ever see any funny memes online, be sure to tag me in them because I love that. And I am a major murder Reno, which if you don't know, that means I'm super into true crime. So while I'm working, you can often catch me listening to true crime podcasts. I love true crime documentaries, and I have been known to fall asleep to the soothing tones of the narrator from forensic files.

  So if you aren't. Super creeped out by that. And you like what I have going on in this space. I hope that you will hang with me. If not, no worries. Maybe you have some friends in business who love this podcast. That's great, tell them, but I, you know, if this does feel like your jam stick around, I hope you love it.

  If you ever have questions or you want me to cover anything that I haven't go ahead and just reach out because I want to make sure that you get as much value from this podcast as possible. All right. Have an amazing day and happy selling.