It’s a spooky Sunday! 👻

It’s also a great day to talk about sales.

“Sales? On a Sunday? But whyyyy?!”

Because the beauty of living a Roadpreneurial lifestyle is that sales opportunities happen every day, whether you realize it or not. And, because last Sunday, I witnessed someone blow a sales opportunity because of something as simple as a wrong perspective — emotional attachment to the thing they were offering.

Earlier that Sunday, my phone buzzed. While my husband was out doing errands, he pulled a hard stop on the side of Old Spanish Trail to take pictures of a car. This car seemed to check the boxes of what we were looking for in an SUV.

• Third-row seating so I can pile in stinky kiddos after jiujitsu practice
• Seat warmers because I don’t do well in the cold (hence why I love the space heater in our RV)
• Dual climate control because my husband does do well in the cold
• Decent cargo space to load in all of our stuff while still leaving ample room for our dog

There were more boxes to check, but those were important to me. After seeing the car, I called the owner and asked her if I could come to look it over.

When I rolled up, she expertly backed it into her garage (that backup camera? Another checkbox checked!) and proceeded to walk me through her favorite features.

• An Audi symbol that lights up when the door opens at night
• The speed limit and your speed displayed in front of you when you’re driving
• A car that feels like butter. Butter, butter, butter (she said this about EVERYTHING from how the gears shifted as you put it in park to how the interior felt, and even how the radio moved from one station to the next. 🧈).

Then, she kept telling me everything the car did.

• The seats folded down with the click of a button (pretty nice, I’ll admit, but not something I felt I HAD to have)
• The cup holders that popped out between the passengers in the backseat — but nevermind how tiny they were and couldn’t fit my sons’ water bottles
• The remote control key fobs that adjusted for each driver. She chose blue for her ambient lighting, while her hubby chose red

The list went on. And on. And on. She told me about their drives up in the snow (drives we wouldn’t take because we’d use our truck for those). She told me about long road trips (road trips we wouldn’t take in it because we’d be towing with our truck). She even told me about the mortgage on her upcoming new house and her experience with her lender (an experience we don’t need to know about since it had nothing to do with the car).

What didn’t happen? Questioning.

Not once did she ask me about how I’d use the vehicle. Never in our hour-long conversation did she find out about where I planned to drive the car, who would ride in the car with me, or which features mattered most to us.

I walked away from that conversation feeling like I’d just consumed a firehose of information but none of it was relevant. And I realized something important — her emotional attachment to the car inhibited her ability to sell the car.

While trying to picture whether this car would fit into my lifestyle, she took me down memory lane of the 50,000 miles she had driven in it.

I drove away an hour later, knowing it was too much for my needs. She watched me drive away, thinking I was SOLD and would pay every cent because, to her, it was worth the top KBB dollar she was asking for it.

The next day, I gave her the price I felt was fair according to KBB and what I had seen. She rejected it with a healthy dose of snark and criticism for my ignorance of being unable to see just how amazing her car was. I wished her well and popped back open the website on my phone, where I had been scrolling for other SUVs.

The lesson here? Selling from a place of emotional attachment will cause you to miss the cues from your audience. It’ll cause you to look past what they need because you’re focused on fulfilling your needs instead.

So often, I hear coaches touting the advice to sell to a past version of yourself. *That’s* true empathy, right? Not quite. While there might be a case for selling to a past version of yourself in some cases, it might be true for all cases. What’s far more powerful is listening to your audience, asking questions, getting feedback, and then selling with empathy. Learn how they’ll use your product. Lean into what they’re telling you and show them how you’ll fit into their life…like butter (see what I did there?).

Do you sell from a place of attachment to your product? Or attachment to your audience? The difference is critical to your success.

This letter came from my weekly newsletter, Campfire Chats. Each Sunday, I share a campfire chat type story, plus tools and stories for the Roadpreneurial lifestyle, a mini Q+A, and a tip for making your RV feel better while you work. To get your copy delivered each Sunday morning to your inbox, head to Roadpreneur.com/letters to sign up.