First published 1 February 2021 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
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Nigel left us on a cliffhanger at the end of episode 114, and this one picks it up. A big pharmaceutical company had booked him for a motivational lift before Christmas. Sales were down and redundancies were coming the next quarter. His opening line to that room was "What a wonderful opportunity it is to speak to so many multimillionaires."
Then he got everyone to write down 12 parts of their body. He made me do it live. (I got as far as hand, foot, nose and ear before asking if that was enough.) His point is that people insure a foot or an eye for silly money. Some insure their tongue if they taste coffee for a living. And we're all walking round with the full set.
From there it turns into pricing. Nigel used to run a January sale for 10 clients, because once Harrods had a sale he reckoned he could too. Somebody asked if he worried what it did to how people saw his value. He said his value's up to him. He won't have a plastic cup on stage either. He wants a glass for his Diet Coke.
I came at it from the other end. There was a time I bought the car and the suit I thought would impress people, and I didn't much like how I felt. Then the money side, from a talk I gave at Mark Stern's event on high-ticket sales. Almost everyone has already done high-ticket sales. You sold a year of your life for a salary. And if you bring in £1 million against a £1 million target, you don't get the million, but without you nor do they.
Nigel said he'd hate to think what he'd insure his mouth for. Some people would say about 3p. I said there are people who'd pay a lot for him to close it. Later I told him about a message from a man who'd just won an award and put part of it down to a 20-minute session on video I'd run two years before. A quarter of a million pounds of trackable extra revenue. Then Nigel's internet dropped and he went silent, which after the mouth joke felt about right.
What I'd pass on
- If you put a money figure on what you're worth, use the biggest one. What a client was charged for your day counts for more than your payslip.
- A year of your life for a salary is high-ticket sales. Most of us have done it already.
- Choose the things around you that make you feel good, even if it's just a glass on stage.
- The return on what you do can show up years later. Look at it over 10 or 20 years.
My self-worth is not based on someone else's opinion. I know what I'm worth.
Nigel Risner
And I think very often people fall to the wrong measure. They go to the lower number when they should go to the bigger one.
Neil Martin
