“It Will Affect Your Soul”: Grant Murrell's Formula for Trust, Influence and Selling Only What You Believe

Most sales training teaches you to handle objections. Grant Murrell would rather you never had to, because if you are selling something you truly believe in, the pitch stops being persuasion and becomes a duty. "Please, please, please don't sell something you don't believe in," he says. "It will affect your sales. It will affect your soul."

On this episode of The BEYOND Podcast, Aleksandra King asks Grant Murrell, founder of the coaching business Success Is A Formula, to strip his work back to the parts people can use quickly. Watch the full conversation here. The formula he describes has less to do with scripts and more to do with alignment: who you are, what you stand for, and whether the people across the table can feel the two match. For founders, salespeople and anyone who has to win trust for a living, it is a useful audit.

Identity Before Strategy

Grant's first question for capable people who are underperforming is who they want to become, because he believes the strategy that gets someone to a six-figure income is completely different from the one that gets them to seven, eight or nine figures. "You have to become a different version of yourself to get there," he says, though it has to stay congruent: "it's still you."

Growth, in his model, always brings a new challenge that did not exist at the previous level. Anyone who has taken a promotion knows the pattern: the new role is a struggle, six months later you wonder what the fuss was about, and then the next step makes it hard again. His second question for people who are competent but "ever so slightly underperforming" cuts through the noise: "If you knew you could not fail... what would you go for?" As he tells Aleksandra, "this life is not a dress rehearsal."

Paper, Wood and Coal

Where many coaches sell passion, Grant sells purpose, and he explains the difference with a fire. Paper ignites quickly and burns out fast, while wood takes longer and smoulders. Coal takes the longest to light, but once it catches it is hard to put out. "Your passion is a fire starter to get you started. The passion can burn out. Purpose burns."

That distinction is also his answer to what separates two equally talented performers. The better one, he argues, is often not thinking about performing at all. They are thinking about the client, the audience or the family they serve. Aleksandra calls it servant leadership. Grant calls it "a selfless pursuit", and he is careful to separate hunger from ruthlessness. When Aleksandra pushes back on his "whatever-it-takes energy" with the story of an ex who would give his kidneys to get into an elite MBA, Grant agrees the key word is values: "It's about your value system."

Congruence Is the Fastest Route to Trust

Asked what builds trust fastest and destroys it fastest, Grant answers with one word: "Congruency." People may not consciously notice when your words and your body disagree, he says, but "they may feel that something's off". The same instinct explains why customers buy things they do not strictly need from people who clearly stand behind them.

His rule for business owners is blunt: "if you have a business, you'd better be the embodiment of what you're selling." It extends to how he sells. If he has something that could change a person's health, relationships or career, "it would be pretty selfish of me not to share that with you". He shares it, suggests they do their own due diligence, and leaves the decision with them. And because "most of us out there are in the world of sales, one way or another", whether we are selling vegetables to children or a policy to voters, the principle applies well beyond a sales team.

Help First, Coach Second

Grant's networking playbook runs on the same logic. Before a big event he sits with a large cup of tea ("Sorry, I'm English") and asks: who is going to be there, and how can I be of value to them? "The greatest way to get someone to help you is to help them," he says. The return may not come from that person, but it comes, "three weeks later, six months later, 16 years later".

He draws a similar line between mentoring and coaching. Mentoring is direct, "a little bit in your face", and "can only be given to someone who's actually been there before and done it". Coaching works differently: "Coaching brings it out of you." Tell most people the answer and they reject it, he says, out of ego or fear, but let them find it and "make them the hero of their own journey" and they will embrace it for good. The same thinking sits behind his advice on big goals: chop them into micro goals and celebrate each one, because "there's nothing that breeds success like success."

Actionable Takeaways for Founders and Sales Leaders

• Audit your product against your beliefs. If you would not buy it yourself, your customers will feel it. Sell something you would share for free.
• Prepare for every meeting by asking how you can help. Go in with a list of what you can give, not what you need.
• Let people discover the answer. In coaching, management and sales, the idea someone reaches themselves is the one they act on.

For the story of how he learned to read people, read how Grant Murrell learned to read people. Listen to the full conversation with Grant Murrell on the Aleksandra King YouTube Channel, and browse more episodes of The BEYOND Podcast in the episodes archive. Grant's warning that a bad sale "will affect your soul" is the flip side of the world of fraud that financial crime expert Jessica Cath unpacks in her episode.