My calendar was full of sales calls I dreaded.
I’d been trained well. Really well, actually. I’d invested in some of the best sales courses, learned from people who knew what they were doing. They’d taught me techniques that worked. Proven frameworks. Scripts that converted.
But everything they’d taught me was built on one fundamental approach: press the bruise. Make people feel terrible enough that they’d make a decision to work with you.
And I hated it.
I really, really hated it.
Nobody talks about this, but you’re being taught to start every relationship by making someone feel worse about themselves.
Listen to their pain. Write down their exact words. Recite them back. Push them deeper into that pain. Show them how bad it could get if they don’t act. Stack bonuses. Add guarantees. Create urgency. Make them decide NOW.
It works. I’m not going to lie and tell you it doesn’t work. People buy.
But it’s a crappy, crappy way to start a relationship with someone.
And when you’re building a business based on deep transformational work, based on operating at the highest levels of expertise, starting from that place felt fundamentally wrong.
So I started studying how luxury brands actually sell.
Not how mainstream marketers think they sell. How they actually operate.
And I discovered something fundamental that has changed everything for me: luxury brands don’t sell to pain. They sell to expanded vision.
Nobody needs a Rolex. But they desire the craftsmanship, the status, the statement it makes.
Nobody needs a Ferrari. But they desire the experience, the performance, the feeling of driving something extraordinary.
Nobody needs to stay at Aman. But they desire the exclusivity, the beauty, the transformation of being in a space designed for their highest experience.
Luxury buyers aren’t purchasing solutions to problems. They’re purchasing rarity. Experience. Possibility. A vision of who they could become.
And that realization validated everything I’d been building around luxury pricing and positioning.
If you can expand the vision of possibility for someone, if you can show them something they can’t see for themselves, and if you’re the only person who can deliver that vision, your pricing becomes unlimited.
The whole thing works in extreme harmony. Luxury positioning. Luxury pricing. Luxury selling. It all backs itself up.
But it requires a completely different conversation.
TWO DIFFERENT CONVERSATIONS
The mainstream approach looks like this:
You listen, but you’re listening for pain points. You’re taking notes on their exact language so you can recite it back to them. You’re pushing them into their pain as much as you possibly can.
Then you tell them the only way to solve this is to work with you. You add bonuses. Stack everything. Create false urgency to make them decide quickly.
It’s transactional. It’s manipulative. And even when it works, you’ve started the relationship from a place of desperation.
The iconic approach is entirely different.
You listen, but you listen deeply. You allow them to expand on their dreams, what they want to achieve. Yes, there might be pain they need to transform. That’s fine. Let them go there.
But then you move them beyond it.
“Once we’ve resolved that, what’s next? What’s the bigger picture of possibility for you?”
You really, really listen. Not so you can recite it back. But so you can truly understand.
And then comes the magic moment.
“Can I share with you what I see for you beyond what you’ve just painted for me?”
This needs to be done with integrity. With honesty. With truthfulness. But when you’ve developed the skill, when you’ve done the deep work to understand what’s possible, you can take them somewhere they can’t see for themselves.
You paint a vision that expands beyond what they described. You show them possibilities they didn’t know existed. You anchor yourself in that dream.
And suddenly, you don’t need scarcity or urgency or bonuses or guarantees.
If you’re selling million-dollar offers, you can literally only take a handful of those a year. Two, three, five, six maximum. The scarcity is real. The exclusivity is real.
The sales conversation becomes a meeting of the minds. You doing your best, deepest work. And if you’ve anchored them in a dream that’s bigger than what they could see for themselves, and they have the financial capacity to invest, the pricing becomes very, very easy.
This is where million-dollar offers come from.
WHAT LUXURY BUYERS ACTUALLY WANT
Don’t misunderstand how luxury buyers make decisions.
Yes, they want things to be efficient and effective. Yes, they want to deal with the pain point or get whatever needs to be resolved. Yes, they want their dreams sorted.
But what makes it really exciting for them is the EXPERIENCE. The bigger vision of possibility. What you can see for them that they can’t see for themselves.
They want the novel. The innovative. First-to-market. They want to work with someone who is the only person in the world who can deliver this specific transformation.
When you can offer that, they’re willing to invest at the very highest level.
Not because you pressed the bruise. Because you expanded the vision.
THE HARDEST PART
The people who struggle most with this shift are the ones who’ve been really, really well-trained in mainstream selling.
They’re good at it. They know the techniques. They’ve been doing it successfully for years.
The unlearning is hard.
Chipping away at the mainstream approach to reveal the expanded vision of possibility requires you to trust something completely different. To believe that you don’t need to manipulate urgency. To have faith that anchoring someone in a dream is more powerful than pressing the pain point.
And there’s another piece that makes this challenging: with million-dollar offers, you can’t really have someone else sell for you. At least not at first.
You need to get close to that person. You need to expand their vision of possibility. You need to see what they can’t see for themselves and anchor yourself in that.
That’s what makes you the Icon.
Yes, as you scale, you can build a sales team. Leverage can come. But in the beginning, this is you doing your deepest, most important work.
WHEN SALES STOPS FEELING LIKE SELLING
Sales doesn’t have to feel like selling.
When you’re building on people’s dreams instead of pressing their pain, when you’re expanding vision instead of manufacturing urgency, sales becomes giving.
People say “sales is giving” all the time. And it actually is, when it’s done this way.
But it’s certainly not when it’s done the mainstream way, which is what 99% of the market is teaching you to do.
When I made this shift, everything changed.
My calendar went from being full of conversations I dreaded to conversations I looked forward to. I went from feeling exhausted and burnt out to energized by the work. I went from starting relationships from desperation to starting them from possibility.
And my clients started investing at levels I’d been told were impossible in my industry.
Not because I got better at pressing the bruise. Because I got better at painting the vision.
You’ve been trained to sell a certain way. We all have.
Find the pain. Press the bruise. Create urgency. Stack bonuses. Close the deal.
And maybe it’s working for you. Maybe you’re good at it. Maybe you’ve built a successful business this way.
But I’m guessing there’s a part of you that hates it. That dreads those sales calls. That wishes there was a different way to start relationships with extraordinary people.
There is.
Luxury brands have known it for centuries. They don’t sell to pain. They sell to desire. To expanded vision. To possibility.
And when you learn to sell this way, everything changes.
Your pricing. Your positioning. Your relationships. Your entire experience of building your business.
Sales becomes a meeting of the minds. Your deepest work. The place where you show people possibilities they can’t see for themselves and anchor yourself in their dreams.
That’s not manipulation. That’s mastery.
That’s iconic.
If you’re reading this and recognizing that mainstream selling has been exhausting you, if you know there’s a different way but you haven’t quite figured out how to make the shift, I want to show you something.
When you learn to sell this way, your pricing changes completely.
Not because you’re charging more for the same thing. Because you’re creating an entirely different level of transformation. You’re showing clients possibilities they can’t see for themselves. You’re anchoring yourself in dreams that only you can deliver.
And that changes what’s possible with pricing.
I’ve created a free resource that shows you exactly what iconic pricing looks like across different industries, service models, and expertise levels. Real examples. Real deals. Real clients who’ve made this shift.
See what’s possible: https://iconicpricing.com
Because when you understand how to sell to expanded vision instead of pain, pricing becomes unlimited.
Welcome home, Icon.
