The Biggest Thing Sabotaging Your Marketing and Sales

[00:00:00] Kathryn Thompson: After generating over a million dollars in sales and selling one of her businesses with a single email, your host Katherine Thompson, takes an unconventional approach to marketing and sales. So if you are ready to tap into a more powerful way to be seen her and a sought after entrepreneur in your industry without having to spend endless hours marketing your business and chasing clients, you are in the right place.

[00:00:26] Be The Sought After Entrepreneur podcast is here to help you ditch the cookie cutter, one size fits all approach to marketing, and use your unique energy to effortlessly attract the most aligned clients. When you do this, you can. Time marketing your business and more time doing your soul work and enjoying the richness of your life.

[00:00:46] Welcome to Be the Sought After Entrepreneur podcast, and here's your host, Katherine Thompson. Hey, hey, welcome back. Super stoked that you're tuning into this week's episode. I cannot wait to dive [00:01:00] into today's topic because what I'm about to share with you, I'm really hoping will give you some peace of mind when it comes to running your marketing and sales strategies for your business.

[00:01:10] Whether you're a product based or a service based, whether you're an online business or brick and mortar, it doesn't really matter. But more importantly, that it helps you avoid the frustration that can go into running, marketing and sales strateg. Especially if we think they're not working or we're not seeing a return on investment, I really wanna help you avoid that frustration.

[00:01:30] And I think one of the biggest things I don't think I know after working with a hundred companies, businesses from all sizes, from startups to medium size to large corporations running massive marketing campaigns for. Multimillion dollar companies and doing this for over 20 years is, there's one theme that I see.

[00:01:51] Regardless of what phase of business you're in, regardless of how long you've been in business, regardless how big or small your marketing budget is, there's always [00:02:00] one thing I need to manage above everything else, and that is people's expectations and their perspective of what they believe. Should be happening when it comes to the marketing and sales strategies we're employing and how quickly they should see a return on investment.

[00:02:15] And I know within the first 30 days of any campaign is one of the most dangerous times where people can literally sabotage everything that we've built and worked on. Within those 30 days, and it's usually within the first seven to 10, if I'm being honest, that we don't think that things are happening quick enough.

[00:02:37] So we go in and start meddling with stuff, whether it's meddling with Facebook ads, whether it's, um, changing our offer, again, whether it's rejigging, our messaging, whether it's, you know, posting different things on social media because we don't think what we're doing works and I see this happen so prevalently.

[00:02:57] Like I said, across the board, [00:03:00] and it's usually within the first 30 days that I'm having to talk people off the ledge and manage this expectation. And I know now to really manage it up front whenever I'm working with clients. And even when I do that, it can definitely still appear within those 30 days.

[00:03:18] And what's so interesting is, is that I'll often get a call that's like, Catherine, the stuff isn't working. Like we need to change something. We need to do something differently. And I'm like, just hold the faith. Things are gonna start to like create momentum around what you're doing and boom, in a day or two calls start getting booked in people's calendars or you know, they get more inquiries at their brick and mortar business or.

[00:03:41] the ads start converting way better or whatnot. Right. And why I'm sharing this with you is because, like I said, I've worked with over a hundred businesses. I've talked well over a thousand businesses at this point in my career, and it is one of the. Biggest pieces that I have to manage in any [00:04:00] of my consulting gigs is this expectation that things are gonna happen quicker than we expected.

[00:04:05] And, and reality is, is that time really is an illusion and we have no clue. Some people's stuff converts in seven days. Some people's stuff converts in 30. It really, we don't know, and it really depends on your audience. It depends on. You know the channels in which you're communicating. Are you on social media?

[00:04:24] Are you using paid ads? Like it's, there's so many variables that go into the success of a marketing and sales campaign that I can't tell you, well, if you just do this and hold the faith for 30 days, it's gonna work. Like I can't say that to you, which is why typically, I always say to people like, we wanna give things 90 days.

[00:04:44] We wanna give it 90 days. And I'm not talking 90 days of like throwing spaghetti against a wall, hoping something sticks. I'm talking about a well thought out marketing and sales strategy that. Is well planned out and well thought out and rolled [00:05:00] out in a way that has a lot of intention behind it. I'm not saying that everything has to be like there's gotta be this formula that you follow, but there's gotta be intention behind what you're doing.

[00:05:09] And if you are wanting to launch an offer, you know, you come up with an idea today and you wanna launch that in five days from now, you're setting yourself up in a lot of ways to fail because you're not giving yourself. your audience, and if you have a team, you're not giving your team any time to sort of rally behind this.

[00:05:31] Right. I get it as entrepreneurs that we, we have ideas that are flowing through all of the time . It's like we're not short of ideas, but the discipline to table the idea that is popping in today or yesterday or the day before that and stay the course. On what it is that you've planned out to realize.

[00:05:55] The vision that you wanna realize takes a lot of discipline. That is what [00:06:00] people mean when they talk about discipline, right? They're not talking about, oh, you've gotta show up consistently and you've gotta post consistently at three o'clock in the afternoon every day on social media. Like that's not the commitment and discipline that we're talking about.

[00:06:14] The discipline. Highly successful entrepreneurs are talking about is the discipline to, to not leap at every opportunity that comes their way. It's uh, it's about not executing on every idea that pops into their head. It's about seeing. that it takes time to be able to really create momentum with their marketing and sales strategies.

[00:06:39] And they know that, and that they know that if they're a solopreneur, they know that it's still gonna take them time. And yes, they might be able to execute it quicker because they don't have other people maybe that that, that are supporting them and different timelines at play there. But if you have a.

[00:06:57] That's the least you can do for your team [00:07:00] is give them the space and time to also create and execute really well for you. And that's one of the biggest pieces that I see top founders and leaders do really well above other people that are aren't as successful because there's this lack of discipline and this lack of perspective.

[00:07:22] Yes. You might wanna move quickly and you might move quickly. I used to say this all the time, and it would kill my team every single time. It would kill my team. Right? And I'd lose team members, really good team members because I'd be like, why move quickly? And you just, you just can't keep up, which is a really entitled and selfish way to look at things, right?

[00:07:40] It's a lesson I've learned in managing teams is that in order to get the best out of your team, . You also have to give them the space and time to be creative in that process in order to create really great content for you, or come up with a really cool idea for your marketing and sales strategies, which is why giving yourself 90 [00:08:00] days to really execute on something and to really see it through for what it is so that you can look at it.

[00:08:07] If you're walking around right now going, I don't know what works within my marketing and sales, my guess is when you're winging. and you are throwing spaghetti against a wall and there really isn't a well thought out marketing and sales strategy that you're following consistently for at least 90 days.

[00:08:25] And when I say consistently, I don't mean that you have to post five times a day and send to emails a week. When I say you have a well thought out, intentional marketing and sales strategy, you've created that. That's in alignment with who you are, your business and your offer. And for example, my wine business, I sent one email a month.

[00:08:43] right? I posted on social, but it was more behind the scenes at my wine business. It was never really a ton of sales or marketing stuff. It might have been accessories that I had in the store. We had a new wine shipment come in. It was very organic and off the cuff. [00:09:00] Um, and that was intentional because. . I wanted people to see what was going on in the store.

[00:09:06] I wanted people to see us making wine because that ultimately sold the wine in a lot of ways. Right? And if we showed accessories, people would come into the store. My marketing and sales strategy for our wine store looks very different than my online business, right? And, and it's gonna look different to your business when I say you have a consistent strategy that you're following out for 90 days.

[00:09:28] I'm talking. Creating and devising a plan for yourself and your business and seeing that through, and not throwing in the towel at day 20 because you're not seeing the results yet and not throwing your towel in at day 35, cuz you're not seeing results and not coming up with a new offer idea at day 30 because the offer that you're trying to sell within this 90 days isn't selling yet.

[00:09:52] That's what I'm talking about. That's the discipline, that's the managing the expectation that. [00:10:00] shifting your perspective from the idea that you can create an offer, put it out in the world, and you're gonna make, you know, 20 K when your audience doesn't even know who you are or what you do or hasn't heard from you in three months, or it's a brand new offer that we don't know yet if your audience is going to resonate with.

[00:10:21] That's the thing, right? Is when people launch a new product or service, we don't actually know. how it's gonna go until we try it and put it out there. If you're a product-based business, my guesstimate is, is you've done some market research before because there's a lot more capital and investment that goes into it and inventory and all of that before you start selling things.

[00:10:42] When we opened our wine business like. There was a ton of wine stores in the vicinity that were successful, and we knew we were coming in with a totally different offer, and we knew people loved wine, like we already knew that people loved making wine. They liked getting it at a fraction of the cost of retail.

[00:10:57] Like we, it was already a proven concept, [00:11:00] and so we knew that. , was it still a huge risk to invest? Absolutely, because we don't know a hundred percent for certain what's gonna happen until you actually get into the game and, and start to try and market and sell it. Lucky for us, lots of people loved it as we thought.

[00:11:20] You know, if you're an online business owner or coach or consultant, and you're creating an offer, like a course or a program and you're creating it in isolation in your home, and you haven't really tested the concept with somebody, You don't know whether or not it's gonna lend until you put it out there.

[00:11:35] And so you've gotta give yourself space and time to build up again. That momentum, that that demand, that trust with your audience. If it's a completely cold audience that has never hurt, you've never tried to sell to then. It's gonna take time for them to sort of warm up to the idea of it, right? Unless it's like an offer that is so specific and so, [00:12:00] um, you know, dialed in and you are putting that offer in front of the right people exactly at the right time.

[00:12:06] But again, most. Online business owners that I work with, that's a very sophisticated way to market and sell. And most people don't have that sophistication yet cuz they haven't learned how to market and sell. And so it, it's, again, there's this conception out there that I can just put an offer out. And if it's really solid offer and really specific that people are just gonna eat that up.

[00:12:29] And yes, people will maybe buy it, but there's this perception that it's gonna be like a million dollar business overnight. And again, if you've. Any of the episodes before this, you know, I get really passionate about this because. It's such an illusion that's been created in the online space, that there's this quick cash that can be made when we just put that offer out there.

[00:12:48] And in reality, that's not the case. And what ends up happening is more businesses than not flop, whether you're a product based or a service base, because we don't give ourselves the space in time to [00:13:00] actually implement these marketing strategies. 90 days, minimum, 90 days. And like I said, it's a minimum of 90 days of.

[00:13:06] You're not going in and changing the offer, you're not changing the delivery of it. You're not changing the product. You're not adding more products, right? I see this happen all the time as well, and it was one of the biggest things that we had to literally, I had to sit on my hands because when you open a wine business, you can have a lot of fun with it.

[00:13:24] Right. You can sell wine obviously, is what, what we did, but there's accessories, there's tons of things you can do. We could have done cider, there was beer, there was all of these things and I was like, yeah, this would be so fun. I can't wait to do this. And I had to sit on my hands because I'm an entrepreneur at heart and I've got a ton of ideas and I've got this big vision that I see, you know, five years down the road that I want ha to happen.

[00:13:47] Now. It's like, well, how can we make that happen? Right, and it's like, I don't want to collapse that timeframe necessarily. Right? We always want to collapse it or see if we can do it quicker than, well, maybe what [00:14:00] we thought, but it's like we also have to. Get successful selling the one thing, which is what we did with the wine business and which is what I'm such a big proponent about.

[00:14:10] Now in the online world, if you're not well-versed in marketing and sales, I'm always like, sell. Try to sell the one thing and do that really well and build out the sophisticated marketing and sales strategies for that offer. And then, Build off of that if you want to. But what ends up happening is, is again, we've got all these ideas and we wanna execute them all, and we want the variety and all of the things.

[00:14:35] And I get it. I get it. I'm multi-passionate. But what happens is, is we don't end up doing things very well. And if we're not well-versed in marketing and sales, we probably don't do them that well. And things don't really work. And we end up feeling like we're putting in a ton of effort and not seeing a big return on investment.

[00:14:53] And that's the reason why. That's the reason why is because. It's spaghetti throwing. [00:15:00] We don't actually know what's working because we're trying to do all of the things and we're not doing all of the things that well, and then we burn out at some point, whether it's year one, year two, whether it's six months in, whatever it might be.

[00:15:13] At some point we hit this sort of like burnout point of like, okay, this isn't working. And for most people I work with, their business has done really well on word of mouth, so it's been sustainable on word of mouth, which is fine, which is fine. You're seeing that income coming in, but at some point, most entrepreneurs wanna scale it and grow, right?

[00:15:34] You hit this sort of plateau or cap in your business and you're like, okay, I've grown it to this. On word of mouth. Word of mouth isn't that predictable. It's not a hundred percent scalable, so to speak. Right? There's, there's a lot of things there that, you know, aren't predictable and we don't really know when that word of mouth referral's gonna come through the door.

[00:15:55] And so it would be really nice to have a little bit more predictability, which is what happens with these [00:16:00] marketing and sales strategies that you put into your business. But we have to see them through. You have to see. And even after 90 days again, right? We see this so often. I did this in the first year of my online business was.

[00:16:13] When I launched, you know, I didn't see success off the back end of that launch, and it was like I entered the online space. I put together a launch within 60 days. Again, I'm a quick mover, right? So anybody that wants to say, well, I move really quick, and people just can't keep up with me, like, come hang out with me for a little bit, because I execute really quickly.

[00:16:34] Um, and I get shit done really quickly and I create results really quickly, which is the difference, right? Lots of people say, they move quickly. I've, I move really quickly and I've got all these idea. But yet the results aren't there to sort of back it. So I'm like, okay, well, but you're not really seeing the results that you want.

[00:16:48] And so, yes, you can move quickly all you want. You can be a Tasmanian devil and buzz around and build a lot of things and create a lot of content and come up with all these ideas and feel really productive cuz you're busy. , [00:17:00] but you're not really creating the results off the backend of it. And the thing is about what I do is that I do create results.

[00:17:08] I do create results really quickly. But what happened to me in that first year was, is that I launched and I had zero sales off the backend of my webinar, but then I had four people come through. and, which was beautiful and super grateful, but it wasn't considered enough for me. Right? So then it was like, oh, the offer might not be good enough.

[00:17:29] The, you know, the mechanism that I'm using to sell the webinar, I might have to try challenges, right? So instead of going chalking that up as like, wow, I, I did the thing, I had four. interested buyers who bought at INA Beta and came into this program that I created. That's beautiful. It was passion to profit and that was the name of it.

[00:17:48] And I was helping basically startup businesses go from passion to profit, like how to go from idea to launch, beautiful concept, beautiful program, beautiful [00:18:00] entrepreneurs within that. And I launched it. I had them. You know, were with me for eight weeks. They created beautiful results, clarity. Lots of them got off the ground, and I ended up completely scrapping that offer after that.

[00:18:15] Eight weeks with them because I wasn't, I didn't chalk it up as successful when in reality, off the back end of that, I could have refined it. Right? I had four beautiful people in front of me. I learned a lot from them, and I scrapped it and then launched an entirely new offer with an entirely new front end piece of that, which was through challenges, which is again, a lot more work.

[00:18:38] Everything was from scratch. Everything was. and I was constantly doing that cycle. Every time I went to launch, I had a brand new launch. I had a brand new challenge, challenge idea, challenge content, right? I had new offers off the back end of it, like I've been there and every time I launched I had people buy from me.

[00:18:57] So I was seeing success. I was seeing [00:19:00] success in what I was doing, but I wasn't. Creating the same success as I was in the offline world in my brick and mortar, and so I was comparing the two, which is a really bad place to be. I was comparing the success I was seeing on my brick and mortar and how easy it felt to sell wine compared to what it felt like to sell online coaching programs to online business owners.

[00:19:23] It felt. The sales felt a little bit harder. It just felt like a whole different, there was a lot of front end energy and time and effort that went into selling that. I was like, there's gotta be an easier way, which there totally is, but I was constantly starting from scratch every single time and. . If you're in my world, my guess is this is gonna resonate with you.

[00:19:44] You likely have, if you're an online coach or consultant, you have a portal, whether it be cajabi or think ethic, or Teachables or whatever that has retired programs in it, that you never really spent time refining it [00:20:00] because either it wasn't as successful as you thought it was gonna be the very first time you did it, and therefore you chalked it up as a failure.

[00:20:09] or you got bored with it after the first time you ran it and you lost the energy for it and therefore you scrapped it and started something new. Now, I'm not saying that that's a bad thing of wanting to pursue the excitement and something new, but if you're feeling like your marketing efforts are a lot of work, And the ROI on the backend doesn't really seem to match the effort, then I would love for you to take a look at that perspective, because sometimes we want something, we want simplicity, we want ease, we want, we want this effortless sales and marketing and all of that.

[00:20:49] And yet we continue to do the same thing, which is start new ideas from scratch, start an entirely new challenge or webinar, or. [00:21:00] You know, a completely different campaign or whatever it might be. Start and stop ads. What, whatever. Learn Google Ads, because Facebook ads don't really seem to be producing anything for you.

[00:21:09] Like whatever it might be. We're, we're creating all this effort in the front end instead of refining, instead of taking what it is that we've built and looking at it going, how can we optimize it? Which is exactly what I help my clients do in spellbound, in my one-to-one containers, which is a lot of, you know, expectation management more than anything because it's about asking them to hold the nerve of allowing the 90 days to do its thing.

[00:21:40] And then if at the end of those 90 days you feel like, you were a failure or didn't, wasn't as successful as you wanted it to be, therefore it must not be working. I'm there to be like, actually it's working and we just need to refine at this point. And the more you sort of refine what you're doing, the more effortless it's gonna feel [00:22:00] over the long run.

[00:22:00] But it's like you've gotta give your ti yourself the space to do. And that all boils down to that perspective and that expectation that either you think you're a failure , uh, even though you're creating really great results, which again, is that critical thinking mind of like not ever feeling good enough or not ever feeling like you're measuring up.

[00:22:23] and having that lens on everything that you do well, you're gonna sabotage everything you fricking do because nothing will ever be good enough, right? So you're already going in with this biased mind of things aren't good enough, and so you're gonna meddle and tweak and muck around on things and just not.

[00:22:40] Really see things through, or your mind's gonna convince you that, oh, this new idea that came up is way better because the idea that you're pursuing right now is not successful. Or the idea that you're pursuing right now is not good enough, right? This new idea is way better, which is that lovely ego of ours that's trying to keep you safe.

[00:22:57] And it's really seductive because new [00:23:00] ideas are really exciting. And obviously we all have different brain makeup, right? And some of us. Love that sort of dopamine hit of newness, right? We love to have the new ideas. We love to have chase the new cuz it's like fun and exciting or we love to be able to just sit and build.

[00:23:19] So it's like building things from scratch. That was one of my biggest distractions, right within my business, was like, I'd like to just build things from scratch. And so whenever I got to a point in my business that. . I wasn't building, like I wasn't actually building new ideas and new from scratch. It was like my brain was like, oh, I, you need to create something new.

[00:23:40] This is like old news, which again goes back to that sort of discipline of like, what is it that you want? And if you wanna just continue to hop and create new things, I'm not telling you you can't, but this really is. Episode is really specifically for the entrepreneur that wants a little bit of peace of [00:24:00] mind, that you can create a marketing and sales strategy that's simple and that is effortless, and that works on like clockwork in a lot of ways.

[00:24:07] That works sort of as a machine for you so that you can free flow in and out of it as the creative that you are, as the visionary that you are. You can do that, but in order to create that system within your business, you've got to see things through. And that will take. A minimum of 90 days if you're starting something new.

[00:24:30] But it's gonna be that long-term commitment. It's going to be like, I'm building the thing and I'm testing it for 90 days, but it's not just 90 days of making my decision if I wanna do this or not. It's after 90 days. I'm looking at it from the lens of how can I improve this? Not how can I scrap this and start, start fresh, right?

[00:24:48] So if you make it past the 30 days without meddling with your things and pulling the plug on things, and I'm laughing kind of. You know, this isn't to shame, you'll make you feel bad. Like I've done the same [00:25:00] thing. I told the story, I can't remember what episode anymore, and I tell it often is like my very, very, very first launch that I, I basically entered the online world, hired my first coach, and within 60 days I had launched, I had come up with the masterclass, the name, my website was built.

[00:25:16] Like I tell you, I'm a quick action take. But I had this expectation because of what they told me in this program that in order to see success and I had set a target, I can't even remember what it was, but let's just say I wanted to make my first 10 K, um, and I had, in order to hit that target, I needed to have.

[00:25:37] You know, I don't know, 300 or 500 people coming through my challen or my masterclass signed up for my masterclass, and I think I had like 15 or something like that. I wasn't running ads at the time, but again, perspective, right? It was like in order to really hit that target with no audience at all, I would've needed to run ads and I wasn't gonna run ads.

[00:25:56] Because I didn't have a proven offer or a message [00:26:00] or anything, and then to me, that's just a waste of money. So I was like, oh, wow. I only have like 15 people signed up. Like I'm never gonna hit my goal. So I pulled the plug on the entire launch because before I ever even held the masterclass, because I just was like, oh, it's never gonna turn out.

[00:26:17] Instead of. Just using that as even an au audience builder, which I think sometimes we forget, right? We're so fixate. We're like, we, we just we're so fixed on having that result. Like, I have this offer and I need that. My, I have this income goal, and that's all I care about. We're so attached to the, to the, um, outcome that we forget that whenever you do a launch, whenever you put a freebie out into the world, whenever you.

[00:26:43] Have a way for people to connect with you more. You're creating that connection with them and they might not buy from you anyways in that moment, but they, they will likely over time. Create more like no, like and trust for you, and then maybe buy from you. You know, I have people that have been in my audience for two [00:27:00] years that eventually invested with me.

[00:27:02] After two years. I have people that have been in my audience for four years and continually message me saying, one day I will invest with you. It's just today's not the day. And after four years, you're still saying that. I feel that, listen to this podcast, that say that to me. They'll message me after an episode comes out.

[00:27:17] I love the episode. It's so awesome. I'm learning so much. Someday I will invest it with you, but today's not the day. Great. That's what I'm talking about is that discipline to continue to create value and reciprocity for your people and show them that you're here and. You're not expecting them on one launch to sign up with you, and if they don't, you're gonna hit the, you know, hit the road and do something completely different.

[00:27:43] Right. They wanna know that you're gonna stick around. They wanna know that, you know, if they follow you for two years, that they'll still be able to invest in something that you're doing. And obviously people pivot, people change. I'm not saying that you have to, you know, commit to running your business for the rest of time, but I'm just saying that so [00:28:00] often we launch something and.

[00:28:03] We ditch it because it didn't produce what we wanted it to produce. And there's a lot more to that. And I, and I wanna speak on that as well, because I don't want you to get the idea that like, oh, I have to be so disciplined that I stick with things because I do also think that. What contributes to that, and I'll share this on the next episode, is like we create things that are not energetically aligned for us.

[00:28:25] We create offers within a business model that are not energetically aligned for who we are, and therefore we build it. We see it. And then we get in and and we're like, Ooh, this isn't quite what I expected. I want to do something differently. And so I would love to talk more about that on the next episode, but I really just wanted to focus on this one.

[00:28:45] Becau, this particular perspective that I see is this expectation around what people think marketing and sales should do for them, and then how quick of a timeframe, like when should I see an roi? And that [00:29:00] answer. You know, it's gonna take time for every business. And, uh, no marketer can tell you, oh, you'll get an ROI in 30 days.

[00:29:09] I mean, that's a bogus guarantee because nobody really knows. It depends on your offer, depends on the audience. It depends on how well you've cultivated your audience. It depends on if you even have an audience. You know, some people will come to me and they're like, I don't have an email list and I don't even really have a social following.

[00:29:24] Well, it's likely gonna. a little bit more time than for you to grow and build your audience. That's the goal. I have other clients who are like, I haven't talked to my clients in four months because I've been doing a lot of inner deep work to be able to launch something completely new and I want, I need to take a break.

[00:29:41] Okay. Well we need to reengage your audience before you can start blasting them with an offer. Cuz who knows? . If the people that are still on your list and still following you are really the right people for you, as we grow and evolve, so too will the people that we ultimately wanna work with. Um, so too [00:30:00] will the energy of your community.

[00:30:02] Right. And so again, it's all of these things we wanna look at, and this is really specifically for online coaches and consultants more than anything. But, um, even if you are a product-based business, right? As you grow, as you evolve, as you maybe change offerings, as you evolve offerings, like things are gonna look differently for your people and.

[00:30:21] If you weren't, haven't talked to them in months or something like that, or haven't reached out to them, the last thing you can do, the last thing I would recommend doing is throwing an offer in their face. And the reason being is this kind of like this friend, your best friend that you've had for years.

[00:30:36] Who out of nowhere kind of dropped out of your life, and that's totally kosher, like coming in and out of people's lives, but then all of a sudden out of nowhere, they reach out to you and they're like, Hey, I have this huge favor for you and I need you to do da, da, da da, da. It's kind of like, Hey, I haven't talked to you in five years, but like, what do you mean you have a favor?

[00:30:50] You know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't do that. You would reach out, Hey, how's it going? And you would reestablish connection before you started asking them to fulfill. Things for you? [00:31:00] Well, you wanna do the same with your audience. You want to treat them like you would your closest friends in a lot of ways.

[00:31:05] Like, would you like try to sell things to your closest friends if one, they didn't even know you had an offer to begin with that you were gonna sell to them? No. So, I want this episode to be a peace of mind. One that things take time and that it's okay if you are laying the foundations. I'd way rather you lay the foundations in your marketing and sales strategies and build those out.

[00:31:32] In a beautiful time. Then try to rush them out the door and launch them in seven days or 10 days or whatever and, and not really give yourself the space and time to do it. But I also want you to know that trying a marketing and sales strategy for 90 days and then ditching it. is highly not, I would not recommend that because you can always optimize it, right?

[00:31:56] I am, I've, I don't think I've worked with a company or a business yet [00:32:00] that I haven't been able to optimize what they're already doing. So that's my other encouragement to use that you, you can optimize it, right? Is that after 90 days, if you didn't get the results that you wanted from that marketing and sales strategy, then.

[00:32:16] How can you optimize that to see the return that you do want? Right? And that's where you start to understand what's working and what isn't working. It's that discipline and commitment to actually the process of understanding it. Oftentimes we say we want the thing, I want that, I want effortless sales. I want to know what's working.

[00:32:32] So I'm not throwing spaghetti as well, but I'm not actually willing to do the thing that's needed to actually get the result that I want, right? I say, I want this thing. But then when somebody tells me, this is how you can get that, it's like, I don't wanna do it that way. Nope, I'm not doing it that way.

[00:32:46] I've got all these ideas that I'm just gonna execute, you know, all the time. And I'm, I'm not gonna create results, but I'm gonna be frustrated that I'm not creating the results that I want. And yet, I have this pathway [00:33:00] forward, but I'm not willing to do it. You know, there is the saying that in order to have a different outcome and different results, you have to be willing to do something differently, and that goes for your marketing and sales strategy and the way that you've been been approaching it.

[00:33:12] And for a lot of multi passionates, for a lot of entrepreneurs, it's really hard to stick to just one thing. It's hard to commit to one thing. It's hard not to wanna execute on all the ideas. I get it. I'm, I've been there, you know what I mean? But the biggest lesson that I learned through my online business was that I needed to really, Commit and have the discipline to sit with what I was doing and to, and to devote energy and time to refining it.

[00:33:37] Because the funny thing was, is that that's what I did in my brick and mortar. You know? That's what we, that's what I did. I sat on my hands and didn't start launching beer and sparkling wine and ciders when people were asking me for it. You know, people would come in, when are you gonna do beer? When are you gonna do ciders?

[00:33:53] When are you gonna do sparkling wine? You know? And I wanted to. Tomorrow or the next day, because I was [00:34:00] excited to get into that arena. We were ran the store for four years. I never, I, I ordered beer kits at one point. Um, and I never really sold all that well. And I never got into the cider game and I never got into the sparkling wine game.

[00:34:14] And we still did really well sales-wise. Right. Um, it, it wasn't the thing that was gonna make or break our business at that point, right. It's like it was just an added product or added service that we could add on for sure. Um, and, and after four years, we still hadn't really added that much to our product list or our service list.

[00:34:35] If anything, we started to bring in wine access. So I want you to like just conceptualize that for a minute because for whatever reason, and I say this on so many episodes, it's like, it's like I walked into the online world and I walked into this vortex and this message hitting my face that I can hustle less and live more, and that I could make all of this money really quickly, you know, in months, three months, six months, make [00:35:00] this money.

[00:35:00] But the reality is it, it takes time to build an audience, to grow an audience, to cultivate that community. It takes time to. Create momentum and. Yes. I was selling in all of those years, right? It's not that I wasn't, but it's similar to the wine business. You know, the day we opened our doors, it's not like we had a million dollars in sales, right?

[00:35:20] It took four years to grow year after year, after year, doubling sales, year after year, after year, right? The same is with your any business, right? It's like. It takes time to double triple sales and this vortex of the online world, that just tells us that things happen really quickly. Screws with a lot of people's brains when it comes to marketing and sales because we have this expectation that.

[00:35:48] We can just throw something out there and it's gonna sell, or that we don't really even need to put an intention behind our marketing and sales that we can just show up on social and make a [00:36:00] ton of money, and when that doesn't happen. Is when I often will hear from people who are frustrated from riding this hamster wheel of throwing spaghetti against a wall or they're, they're ready to scale beyond just word of mouth.

[00:36:14] And they've tried things, they've invested in coaches, they've vested in programs, and yet they're still not seeing the results. And I don't blame the coaches of the programs when somebody tells me they've invested in a lot of coaches and programs and I, and they haven't really seen the results that they.

[00:36:34] I often ask about five follow up questions to that and I can 99.9% of the time pinpoint it to the fact that there is a perspective piece here around expectation and that isn't having the discipline to stick with the marketing and sales strategies. And the fault of the coach, not to blame people is that lots of coaching programs either self-study [00:37:00] there, there's not.

[00:37:02] Coaching there to help people hold their nerve. The other problem is the coaching containers are massive, so there's 200 people in it, and it's like you get five seconds with a coach, how are you gonna have that person help you hold the nerve? And thirdly is that there's coaches out there that won't call you on your bullshit.

[00:37:20] they're gonna regurgitate some question back to you of like, well, what do you wanna do? What resonates with you? How would you approach that? When in reality, sometimes it's like, hold your fricking nerve, stop meddling with your Facebook ads. Don't do that. , which is basically what I do to people, um, which I'm not a non-traditional coach in a lot of ways.

[00:37:39] I'm not a traditional coach, which I've always said I'm more of a consultant because I will tell you like, this is exactly why your shit isn't working. So you, we can either keep doing it that way. or you can listen for three seconds and we can really change the game here for you. . You have to be willing to do it right.

[00:37:59] [00:38:00] And yes, that can rub a lot of people the wrong way. That can absolutely rub people the wrong way. But good coaches and good consultants are not here to always be rubbing their clients the right way. That sounds really weird, but it's the truth, right? It's like I'm not here to tell you what you wanna hear.

[00:38:16] I'm not here to agree with everything that you're doing. That's not why you're paying me, right? You're paying me to. Guide you in the right direction for you and your business that's going to help you avoid this frustration that is going to help manage the expectation when you wanna pull the plug, when you want to, you know, meddle with your ads when you want to throw your offer out the window.

[00:38:38] Just had this conversation the other day with a private one-to-one. I said, we're not throwing the offer out. We haven't even tried to optimize what we've been doing. . So we're not redoing the offer. We're not redoing the ads. We're not redoing the masterclass. We're not doing any of that yet. Cause we don't even have enough people that have gone through the masterclass to even know whether or not it's gonna [00:39:00] convert again.

[00:39:00] Right. It's like. . That's where we get the, the frustration happens and then the overworking and the busyness happens, and the, I don't know what's working Well, you don't know what's working because you put something out there and then you meddle with all these things, hoping something works. And I'm all, I often say it's like a science experiment, right?

[00:39:19] Like if we, if we change too many variables, we actually never really know, which is why patience becomes one of the greatest things you. Have as an entrepreneur is like the patience, right? Because sometimes you might need to launch five times to really get a good sense of what's working. Not a lot of people have that patience or that discipline, and you might be listening to this right now going, that's me.

[00:39:45] And I want you to know that. I'm not saying that to make you feel crappy. It's literally you're not alone. It's, it's literally what most of the people. I've worked with over the last 20 years. That's one of the underlying [00:40:00] themes is not being able to sort of hold the nerve or the discipline on the thing that's being executed in order to really assess what's working and what's not.

[00:40:10] And what's so peaceful once you do know, is that you can literally just, you know, you have, there's the peace of mind of knowing what's working in your business. One that's gonna help you save a ton of time. , a ton of effort and a ton of money down the long run because you're not throwing a ton of money, let's just say it, ads not really knowing if they're converting.

[00:40:31] You're not throwing a ton of money at coaches to help you implement a strategy, like you already know the strategy that works for you. It's just a matter now of like, do you wanna do more of it? Do you wanna do less of it? Do you wanna drive more traffic to it? Like, how do you wanna drive more traffic to it?

[00:40:45] Right? Like it's there, it's, it gets to be. Fun at that level in marketing because you get to play a lot more and there's a lot more peace of mind and less frustration. So with that, I really hope that that's helped ground in the expectation [00:41:00] around your marketing and sales, that it's, it's, it's beyond the 90 days, in my opinion, and that we've gotta give it some space and time.

[00:41:06] But with that, I want to share next week the whole idea of your business model and is your business model that you've created for yourself. Really gonna help you amplify what you do and not burn you out down the line. And if you've ever gotten into business and then got in there and been like, oh, this was a mistake, this isn't the right place for me, or this isn't the right business model.

[00:41:33] You're gonna wanna tune into that episode because that's happened to me a few times. Cheers. Thanks for listening. We'll see you right back here next time. You can also find us on social media at creatively owned and online@creativelyowned.com. Until next time, keep showing up as your authentic self.[00:42:00]