Very few small business owners start out as confident sales people.

In fact, selling is quite often a new business owner’s #1 fear.

Many avoid selling. Some stumble through it. And still others look to leaders and sales trainers to learn their methods and duplicate their models.

In that process, they learn what works… but they often also learn that “what works” doesn’t necessarily work for them.

All this month, we’ve been examining sales and selling–asking “what works?” when it comes to asking someone to buy what we’re selling.

First, I talked with Autumn Witt Boyd who shared how she realized that she’d taken the trend toward sales automation a little too far–and has since developed a hybrid process that’s high touch without overwhelming her.

Then, I talked with Katie Hunt who shared how she had a fabulous new offer launch without spending tons of money on advertising or recruiting an army of affiliates.

Last week, I shared my conversation with Kate Strathmann where we both shared our reflections on building less harmful sales systems–systems that are less manipulative, less urgent, and more in line with our values.

This week, I’ve got 4 more stories to share with you from small business owners who have intentionally done things their own way when it comes to sales and selling. They’ve found what truly works for them–even if it bucks the prevailing wisdom or would make a bro marketing expert role his or her eyes.

Before we get there, though…

I wanted to share some questions you can use to examine your own sales process.

First, I want to say that I don’t think learning someone else’s sales system is a bad thing. And I don’t think every effective sales system being taught is inherently manipulative or harmful. Even if you plan to find your own version of what works, learning about effective sales systems can help you get creative with the way you do want to go about selling your offers.

When it goes wrong is when we don’t take the time to carefully examine and analyze what’s going on in a sales system that we’re learning and, instead, just naively follow the instructions.

So these questions–which I formulated from the conversations we’ve had this month–can help you take a closer look at a sales system that you’ve learned or one you’ve created and make sure that it’s creating the experience you want your customers to have.

The first question is:

Does this sales process mimic the experience I want customers to have after they buy?

Both Kate and Autumn talked about how they want to align what was special about the type of experience they offered with the way sales conversations actually went down.

For Autumn, that meant incorporating more personalized, human conversations into what had become a really automated experience. For Kate, it meant making sure that the collaborative, co-creative experience she was building also carried over into the content and conversations she was having around her program.

Before you decide on what your sales process should look like,