Paloma Lev’s entrepreneurial career began when she was just 19, and she’s now the founder of a bustling online community, Sell Anything with Badass Confidence: High Ticket Sales Secrets, host to more than 1,500 entrepreneurs from across the globe.
Specializing in empowering entrepreneurs, for nearly a decade Lev has served as a sales strategist and coach to hundreds of clients. As head of The Paloma Academy, Paloma uses her characteristic humour to provide insight to her clients about how to pitch, negotiate, and close major deals. She’s also the author of 30 eBooks, including Cold to Captivated: The Rapport Report.
Paloma spoke with The Edge about how she empowers her clients, how millennial entrepreneurs differ from other generations, and more.
Can you describe what you do for clients?
I’ve seen that the most incredible experts are profoundly limited by their lack of confidence. They chronically undersell themselves to the detriment of themselves, and their clients. I bridge the confidence gap. I help talented experts and influencers increase their confidence, package their high ticket offers, and master the sales conversation so they can live a life of freedom, unapologetically, on their own terms, while giving their highest gifts to the world.
What do you do to help them with this?
I help them audit their beliefs. I help them desensitize themselves to rejection. I teach them negotiation skills 101: the art of influence, through language. Without fearing “no,” and empowered with the skills of negotiation, they fearlessly make high-ticket deals.
What, for you, differentiates a millennial entrepreneur from other generations?
We know that everything is possible. We’re not under the illusion that we must please some “gatekeeper.” There are no more gatekeepers. We’re not satisfied to obediently cap toothpaste in factories. We don’t want “a good, stable career.” We are not frightened by our potential for greatness.
We are only afraid that we’ll merely scrape the edges of our potential. We are the most social, most connected, most collaborative, most resourceful bunch of humans. We are powered by the internet, a field of infinite, magnificent, terrifying potential. We understand the value of “edu-tainment.” We know that attention is the ultimate currency. We are possessed by a dream of profound self-actualization.
And we’re just crazy enough to make our dreams a reality. Then we come back to the naysayers and teach the cynics how to do it.
What tends to be the biggest hurdle for clients?
- Lack of exposure to possibility.
- Crippling fear of rejection and public “failure.”
- Playing “small,” due to fear of what others will think.
- Underpricing themselves and aversion to selling.
- Lack of resilience to persist.
- Doing busywork over vulnerable work (ie: procrastinating, doing meaningless “work” that doesn’t move the dial).
- Flip flopping instead of specializing.
How do you use collaboration as a marketing tool?
There’s this story about two chefs fighting over an orange.
Scenario 1: They struggle against each other, fight, and finally, out of exhaustion, settle on chopping it in half.
Scenario 2: They talk, examine their respective interests and realize that one wants to use the rind, and the other, wants the pulp. Once you can clarify your priorities, and unearth another person’s priorities, you can influence others, and make awesome deals.
I learned early on that collaboration beats competition. Competition assumes scarcity of opportunity. Collaboration is a multiplication of opportunity: attention, publicity, audiences, value, content, wealth.
Entrepreneurship is a three-legged race. If you want to get to the end and win, you can’t win alone; you better bring people along with you.
So we learn to combine offers, promote each other, refer [business] to each other, pitch to each other’s audiences, launch our products together, support each other behind the scenes in our goals, connect each other to useful resources and people, do panel chats to feature all of our expertise.
What did your mom, Tsufit – a widely-respected business coach – teach you?
Chutzpah. Boldness. Intensity. How to be interesting. How to command attention. Humour.
Dave Gordon | Contributing Writer
