A large part of being an entrepreneur revolves around sales. However, not only sales as a source of revenue generation for your company, but also the ability to sell more than just a product or service.

In Season 6, Episode 49 of The Making Bank podcast, Cole Gordon talks about his discovery of the seven beliefs your prospect needs to have before they buy what you’re selling. Cole is one of the top closers in the high ticket industry, having sold over 10 million in consultancy, coaching, and agency deals. He also successfully scaled his consulting company to over eight figures in less than 18 months. Currently, Cole builds, trains, and consults the sales teams of hundreds of seven and eight-figure companies online through his company Closers.io. He has even been able to work together with groups such as Tony Robbins, Frank Kern, and others.

On the podcast, Cole dives into the key beliefs your customer needs in order to close a sale with them. He breaks it up into seven fundamental beliefs that allow your prospects to believe in what you’re selling. Cole explains it as reverse engineering an objection list close. The idea is that rather than trying to be a hardcore salesperson and hard close deals, you position yourself in such a way that your prospect sees you as a leader or an advocate for whatever you are selling. You’re enabling them to see you as an authority by doing that. If done right, at the end of the call, your prospect is basically enrolling themselves into whatever you’re selling because you have been able to convince them through the seven fundamental beliefs.

We’ve put together an in-depth explanation of what the 7 key beliefs are and why they’re vital to being able to sell and close more:

1. Pain
The first belief is pain; you can’t have the other beliefs without pain. Pain is the belief that they have a problem. Having a problem is arguably the most essential aspect of the seven beliefs system since, without a problem, there is no point of having a solution.

2. Doubt
After pain, you have doubt. Doubt is the belief of whether or not they think that the problem can be fixed. That’s why it’s not enough to just sell your solution without first convincing your customer that their problem actually has a resolution in the first place. You may have the best product or service that is highly beneficial to your prospect, but the underlying factor is that they will not accept your solution if they are still in doubt. So no matter your solution, a part of them may still be in doubt.

3. Cost
Cost is what the prospect has to endure if they choose to leave the problem unfixed. It’s the consequence of choosing not to find a solution for your problem. Cost can be considered an incentive for why a person should be fixing their problems. As a belief, it’s only effective when the cost or consequence of leaving a problem unfixed outweighs the cost in terms of time, money, energy, and resources invested in fixing the problem.

4. Desire
Desire is related to how compelling the payoff for fixing the problem is. Essentially it is based on how worth it is to fix the problem. While resolving all problems is beneficial, some issues aren’t worth going through the trouble of fixing them. That’s why desire as a belief is essential; it judges whether it’s worth investing in finding a solution for a problem.

5. Money
Money has become an essential factor in many processes. We give sales so much importance because sales are the most significant source of revenue generation for any company. Regarding the seven beliefs, money is related to the amount of funds required to fix the problem. A problem can only be fixed if it’s feasible to fix it in the first place.

6. Support
Support refers to the people that your prospect has around them. This includes their spouse, partner, family, board, etc. This belief is related to the support your prospect can get from the people around them to fix the problem. Support is essential because all problems aren’t of the same magnitude. Some require more support than others because the cost and desire to fix that problem might be relatively more prominent than other problems.

7. Trust
Finally, trust is how much your prospect trusts you to fix their problem. Trust isn’t only related to the trust your customer has in you but also the trust they have in your specific solution and methodology to fix their problem. They may have tried other solutions in the past that have ended in failure. That’s why trust is vital to closing a deal — your prospect has to be able to trust that your solution is different from the others that had failed them in the past.