4 Simples Phases to Create Marketing and Sales Alignment

INTRO: After generating over a million dollars in sales and selling one of her businesses with a single email, your host, Kathryn Thompson, takes an unconventional approach to marketing and sales. So if you're ready to tap into a more powerful way to be seen, heard, and a sought after entrepreneur in your industry without having to spend endless hours marketing your business and chasing clients, you're in the right place. 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 spend less time marketing your business and more time doing your soul work and enjoying the richness of your life. Welcome to Be The Sought After Entrepreneur Podcast. And here's your host, Kathryn Thompson.

Kathryn Thompson: Hey, hey, super stoked that you're tuning in this week's episode. I cannot wait to dive in [00:01:00] today's topic because I want to share with you four really simple phases that I would focus on and where I'd focus my energy depending on where I was at and what stage of business I was at. Because I've been hearing from so many people how overwhelmed they are with what to focus on.

Where do I put my attention? There's so many conflicting messages out on the internet. So saying you need to do this, you've got to do this, you've got to have this, you've got to, you know, get all these things done in order to build a successful business. And I want to simplify this for you so that you have some focus.

You can say, okay, I'm at this stage of business and this is where I need to focus my energy. And then I can move on to the next phase. And at least you also have something to sort of look forward to. But also be hyper focused on the place that you are now so that when things pop up into your orbit or messages come across your plate and you're like, but this person is telling me to do it this way.

And I've got someone else [00:02:00] telling me to do it this way, and I don't even know which way to look anymore. And I've tried them all, or I've tried bits of them, and I'm still not seeing. The success, the results, whatever it might be that you're after, you're not seeing that yet in business or experience, which to me often leads to burnout, right?

I think burnout happens at a variety of different levels, to be honest with you. But I think in the early stages of business, for sure, you know, we're, we're focusing our attention on a lot of the things that in my opinion, Don't necessarily move the needle forward and we end up putting in all of this effort and time doing something and we don't see the results in it.

So over time we become discouraged. We come, we become burnt out. And so I wanna help you either avoid that or move out of that. Okay. So I would do this if I was starting a product based business. If I was starting a service based business, I would approach this the exact same way. This is [00:03:00] exactly how I focused on building my brick and mortar, where we sold a product and also where I focus my energy when I started my service based business, which is what I do now.

And to me, there's four phases of this. Um, and I will share where I'm at in the phase of my business at the moment and where I'm focusing a lot of my energy on at the moment. So if you're just starting out, And that means you don't have any clients yet. You might have an idea of what you want to do.

You're kind of in that ideation stage. You're like, I want to do this, and this is how I want to serve people. Or this is the product I want to bring forward into the world and launch. Where do I focus my energy? And if it was me, I would be focusing on how to articulate the value of what I do and what I offer.

Why offer it? Who do I offer it to? How does what I offer be different than anything else that's on the market? And how am I going to position myself differently [00:04:00] compared to everybody else? And then what do I need to do in order to start making sales? Quickly in my business, because at the end of the day, sales are the thing that are going to keep you going in the early stages of business.

If you don't have sales coming through, then eventually at some point you're going to get either burnt out, overwhelmed, or you're just not going to be able to sustain it because you need to be making money in your business in order for it to be a business. So, I'm What did this look like when I was starting my brick and mortar?

Well, this is me coming up with an idea and I didn't come up with it solo. I had partners in this. We came up with the idea that we wanted to produce wine at a low cost. And there were other stores in the city that were already doing that. So this wasn't a new concept. There were other people out there.

And in some people's opinion. They could have said it was a saturated market because of the size of location we were living in, uh, compared to the other stores. But we [00:05:00] knew that we were coming in with a different product than what everybody else was selling. And we also knew we were coming in with sort of a very different customer experience that we wanted to offer.

And we had a bunch of different things we were going to be positioning ourselves differently with that we, we knew that we'd be able to sort of stand out. And so that was our goal. Right? Was how do I make sales on day one, two, three, four, five, six. And for us, we focus solely on word of mouth. So we did do some like free advertising.

So locally, uh, new businesses, the newspaper here would feature us. We got clients from that, but we relied predominantly on word of mouth. So our network of people, there were four of us that went into the business together. So we had a network of people and that is how we grew our business. We've been doing this predominantly in the first year.

That is how we had 40 sales happen on day one when we open those doors to the public. And to me, it was [00:06:00] very simple, right? There wasn't a lot of marketing or complicated stuff or anything like that. We had a solid product and that was phase one of the business. And I'm like, How do I position myself differently?

How do I showcase how we're going to be doing things differently? And how do I attract people in without any marketing budget at that point in the journey? And that was word of mouth, right? Going out and getting a network of people to support us. Now you might be thinking, but Kathryn, I own a service based business that's online and I don't really have a network.

of potential clientele. And if that's the case, then there are ways you can do this organically, obviously, but phase one to me would be articulating the value of what you do, getting really clear on what it is you do, why you do it, who you serve, why you serve them, how you're different, what they're going to get as a result of your product or your service.

Like why do, why should they pay attention and how do [00:07:00] you plan to share that offer, that product or service? with your people. And this is where I feel like a lot of online service based businesses go sideways, right? Because oftentimes we focus on needing to grow an audience. So we spend a ton of time creating content to grow this audience so that we can then have an offer to sell them when we're ready.

And the problem and the risk with that is, and I've shared this many times is that if you build an audience of people and you evolve, you change, Things happen, you grow this audience of people who are interested in this message that you're putting out there that might not have any connection to the offer, or at least not be congruent with the offer, then you run the risk of building an audience of people who will never buy from you.

And so to me, if I was starting my business or any business or working with people that were just starting a business, this is where I would get very, very clear. And I would invest [00:08:00] what I needed to invest in order to really master this for myself. So if you are not familiar with, you know, how to articulate the value of what you do, you're not familiar with, um, communicating to an audience, you're not familiar with how to differentiate yourself or how to position yourself or how to package yourself, then I would invest in learning that, right?

And that could be paid investment from somebody, or that could be trying different resources, free resources on the internet on how to do that, right? There's, you can get resourceful with that. Now, if you invest your time on getting resourceful, that's going to take more time, to learn it. If you invest in support, That's going to fast track your time.

The choice is always yours. You get to choose what direction you want to go. But I just wanted to preface that because I think sometimes when we're first starting out in business, it's like, well, what do I invest in? I don't actually have the money. So. I need to then do this for free and [00:09:00] sort of piecemeal this together, which is absolutely okay.

Nothing wrong with that. It's just probably going to take you a little bit longer than if you were to pay somebody to support you in doing this. So that's phase number one. And if you're sitting here right now and you're like, But Kathryn, I need an audience. I need a website. I need, you know, an email list, all of those sorts of things.

Then I want to invite you to shift your perspective right now in this moment. Because like I mentioned, if you have an email list and you've got an audience on social media, and they're not even in alignment to the offer that you're eventually going to put out into the world, then You, no one's going to buy from you.

And then, so you've spent all that time and energy growing this audience of people that are not even congruent with the type of people that you want to work with, or that are going to buy your product or service. So the message I often say is, is that in order to be successful in business, it's about putting the right offer in front of the right people at the right [00:10:00] time.

Right? So if you're trying to create an audience and you don't have an offer, then you're not really starting with the offer. You have an audience, and now you're trying to put an offer in front of them. And that to me is very counterintuitive. Which brings me to the second phase, right? So you've got this offer.

Are you in alignment with it? Do you embody it? Live the message that you're putting out there. Is it something you can teach? Is it something that you're a master at? Is it something that you're capable of helping people with? Is it a product that you've created? Um, that is the first place you want to start.

The second place then that you want to start is really defining how you're going to reach your people. So again, this is where I think people sort of falter, right? Which is why oftentimes we throw spaghetti against the wall because we've now. We've all stretched ourselves on all these platforms. We've put ourselves on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, you name it.

We've got [00:11:00] freebies out. We've got people coming into our email list, but yet we don't have the offer? Plus we're stretched way too thin because we're trying to do all of the things. Maybe we even have a bunch of different offers and we're trying to put those out there into the world, right? And I'm gonna come back to that 'cause I think it's really important.

But to me, the offer and the overarching message around that offer, who you are, why you do what you do, what you stand for, the offer, messaging, who you serve, why you serve them, you name it, is the thing, then that will dictate all of your other decisions and actions so that you're not throwing spaghetti against a wall.

And by that I mean. If you're a career coach, for example, a holistic career coach who's helping people, um, you know, find work that actually lights them up and is in alignment with their most inner desires while also being able to get paid for it, being on Instagram and pumping out content there or being on TikTok and pumping out content there might not be the first [00:12:00] place that I start.

I would probably start on LinkedIn. That's where I would focus my energy and you might be thinking right now, but Kathryn, I want to be on all of them, right? Like, I would just want to cast this wide net. This is where burnout comes out because in order to really create epic results. We've got to be putting out quality content and what I've seen far too many times is many business owners who are not content creators stretching themselves in on all these platforms hoping to build this audience and to reach more people with their offer and result in burnout because They're not a master at TikTok LinkedIn or whatever.

And so they're having to, they're putting out all this content with no real sort of results. And so if it was me, again, I would go back to one strategy, one offer. You might be thinking, but I'm multifaceted. I've got all these ideas. I want to do all of these things. And I want to invite you [00:13:00] to go, that's cool.

Like I have a ton of ideas too. I have a ton of ideas, right? But, and I'm a marketer by trade. So I'm an expert in what I do. I could put up a funnel tomorrow and spend, you know, have a sales page written in a day. Like I'm a master at what I do. And yet I still very much prioritize what I do. growing one offer to a point that then I can scale other offers and I'm going to share where I'm at and the phase that I'm at and when I decided to start to add additional offers to my product suite.

Because here's the thing, if you're not a master, if you're not a marketer, trying to build out a product suite And then trying to build out how to communicate to everyone and how to reach people and how to grow an audience. I mean, that in and of itself is already exhausting to me, right? Because I would rather have one offer selling really, really well and then start to add more.

And that takes discipline, right? That [00:14:00] takes discipline to go, okay, this idea is great. I'm going to just table it for right now and I'm going to pick one offer that I double down on and I promote it, I market it, all these sorts of things. Now I'm not saying that you can only sell one offer and never sell anything else.

That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is, is that you create the offer, you launch the offer and you create some success with it. You validate it. Before you start to build out all of these other things to promote because again, it's going to be overwhelming to try and create all of the success.

One of the things that I often hear is, I don't want to spend all my time marketing. I don't want to rely on social media 24 seven. I don't want to use hype marketing. I don't want to be on all the time. And then I look at their business and I do an assessment of it. I'm like, But that's exactly what you created.

You've created the business that requires you to do that because you have a hundred offers that you're trying to sell, or you're creating a new offer every other month. And so [00:15:00] every time you create a new offer, guess what has to happen around it? You've got to promote it. You've got to create content around it if you actually want it to sell.

But the other problem, With this is, is that, I hear this so often is like, I just wanna be able to post it and people buy it. And if that is your belief that you can just put up a sales page with some checkout button on there and people are just gonna buy over and over and over and over again and you're gonna make millions doing that.

Great, if that's what you want to believe, but it doesn't work that way. And I'm somebody who's all about, you know, breaking the mold and breaking rules and proving people wrong when they say things aren't going to work. But you have to promote and talk about what you do for people to buy it. Right? And so this is really important.

So if I go back to my brick and mortar and I share with you what that looked like, we nailed our offer, right? We nailed the positioning. We knew exactly who we wanted to serve. We knew how we wanted to serve them. Obviously had a brick and mortar store. We were ready to rock and roll. And then [00:16:00] we picked one strategy to start with.

We're going to leverage our community and our network of people that we know and have them share word of mouth. So that was the one strategy we chose. Of course, we had a presence on Facebook and Instagram, but again, if you're a busy business owner and you're making sales in your business, the last thing you have time for is to think about what do I need to create for social media?

And I know a lot of my brick and mortar people are often like, don't tell me I need to be on social all the time because I have a brick and mortar to run, you know? So if you're making sales in your business and you're in client delivery, I can almost guarantee you that you don't have the time to churn out content 24 7.

So, nail the offer. Get really, really clear on what that is. And then, from that, go, where do I need to put that offer in order to reach the people I want to reach? For us, it was word of mouth. So what did we do? We asked friends and family to come and support us. And then their friends [00:17:00] and family, and then their friends and family, and it spread sort of like wildfire.

That's what we decided to do, right? Again, you could choose what you want to do. If you want to be on Instagram and focus on organic content, then double down on Instagram and focus on Instagram. You know, I'm a little bit on Facebook. I'm mostly on Instagram and I've been in business now since 2018. I have a, I have a profile on TikTok.

I went over there, took a look at that, but I wanted to spend my energy on the platform to me that was the platform that was, that was going to give me the results that I wanted. I obviously have this podcast, right? I didn't start that. I started this coming on to four years now. So again, it's like you layer these sorts of things in, but then you commit, I'm going to commit to my podcast on a weekly basis, right?

So it's the reach. Who do, who do I want to reach and where do I need to go and put my offer to reach them? [00:18:00] And that, then you're building an audience of people who are buyers, Not people who are lookie loos, right? Or the, or the, I'm, I like your stuff. I think it's amazing, but I'm actually never going to buy your offer.

And I hear this often. This is what contributes to speaking to the void and being friend zoned, right? Oftentimes when people say I'm speaking to the void and I'm being friend zoned, if I ask them, how they built their business and how they built the audience. I can almost guarantee nine times out of 10, they'll say to me, I built my audience on Insta and then I created the offer.

Or I built my email list on this freebie on a meditation or hypnosis that has nothing to do with my offer. Or I was trying to sell to this audience. They weren't buying from me. So I've pivoted. I've changed my IG bio a hundred times. And I'm changing who I'm working with and my message is constantly changing who I'm focusing on and I'm pivoting with that, right?

[00:19:00] Again, if you want to pivot in your business, absolutely. But I want you to know that the audience that you've built might not be the audience that's going to buy from your, from your future offers. Right? If you, if you're making a big pivot. So reach is key. How do I want to reach my people? And that to me is the lead generation strategy.

What is a lead generation strategy? That is, how do I get people to come into my world? So word of mouth was our strategy that would get people into our door. That does not guarantee a sale. And again, I think this is an often mistake and overlooked that people think, Oh, well, if I just reach a bunch of people, they should buy from me.

That's, this is the awareness phase, right? Lead generation is the awareness phase where we get people to come into our physical doorway. but that doesn't guarantee they're going to buy from you. And the same is with your online business, right? Just because someone opts into your newsletter or freebie masterclass, downloads your hypnosis, whatever it might be, [00:20:00] follows you on Instagram, messages you on Instagram does not mean they're going to buy from you.

It takes These other phases that are in my opinion required in order to get to a scaling place in your business. And so the third phase to me is that audience growth is and the reach piece of it. So growing your audience, right? So you're reaching people. You also need to consistently grow your audience because let's just say you have an audience of a hundred people, right?

If you're blasting them with buy my thing, buy my thing, buy my thing, buy my thing, and that audience never grows, you're selling to the exact same audience over and over and over again. So you simultaneously have to grow your audience, right? So if you think about it, our network, 40 people bought on the first day in our brick and mortar, and then it just grew and grew and grew and grew.

And at some point before we sold, we sold. There was a contemplation that of like, huh, [00:21:00] I may have to think about what a growth strategy would look like if we plateau in sales. Because word of mouth would take me only so far in a lot of ways, right? Eventually, we would have kind of capped out on what that word of mouth is.

When we sold, we hadn't plateaued in sales yet, but if we had started to plateau in sales, then I would have considered some other types of strategies to grow our business. So the one strategy for reach worked really well for us. For my online business, again, it's predominantly Instagram. I am using Facebook ads now, but I didn't start with Facebook ads, right?

I started with Instagram and organic content. And I started with growing my list of people who would be ideal clients of mine for the services I was putting out there. I have also pivoted my message slightly. Um, and that's okay, as I mentioned, but we have to understand that sometimes when we pivot our message, it takes a while for our audience to kind of catch up, but we [00:22:00] also need to continually grow that audience of people who are now more aligned with the pivoted message.

So, Offer, getting that offer down and knowing what you're going to sell and then asking yourself, how am I going to reach those people? How do I put that offer in front of the right people? And only you will know that in every business is different, which is why I often get frustrated when I hear this is the only way to do it, or this is the right pathway for X, Y, and Z, because that's just not true.

If someone's telling you that this is the way you do it, and this is the only way you do it, without them ever knowing your business, knowing who you serve, even knowing what your product is, then how can they tell you what's the right next best step, right? Because there's so many different ways you can reach your people.

Again, organically on social media, absolutely great way. Leveraging other people's audiences, so you could do publications, you could be on other people's podcasts, you could teach in other people's groups, right? You could do [00:23:00] what we did and use free publications and media, uh, that was given to us or granted to us because we were a new business locally that had reach there, right?

So again, there's different ways that you can reach people and there's no right or wrong, SEO, search engine optimization. You know, really optimizing your website for people to be able to find you. But in order to optimize your website, you have to know what you're selling, right? There's no point in optimizing a website with the hope of selling people something at some point, you're just gonna have to redo it, which is why knowing what your offer is, is so important.

So that you can reach the right people and put that offer in front of the right people. And then what I like to say is the next phase of this, which again, I think is one of the biggest ones that's overlooked is that whole nurture. How do I nurture somebody to a sale? And this is going to look different depending on what you're selling.

If you're a product based business, this might look way different. The nurture to me is where we build the trust, right? And the level of trust, and I've said this before, the level of [00:24:00] trust that you need to cultivate in order for someone to buy from you, depends on the level of trust that is needed for them to make the purchase.

For example, buying wine from me for 197 dollars, 30 bottles of wine. takes a lot less trust than if I was hiring a therapist to help with helping me heal my trauma. Very different, right? If I'm a therapist helping people heal from their trauma, I'm asking them to share with me and to be open and honest and vulnerable with me.

That's very different than going, Hey, do you want to buy 30 bottles of wine? Cool. I'm going to start that for you. And you can come back in six weeks and bottle it. And we have no other, there's nothing else they have to share with me. Right? It's not, it's not very, it's not very personal. So that's the nurture phase.

And so you have to cultivate in your business, what that looks like. For me, it's, It's personal outreach to people that come into my world. If they follow me on Instagram, reaching out saying, Hey, thanks for coming into my world. Or if someone opts into a training of mine or opts [00:25:00] into an email and they provide me with their Instagrams, reaching out to them and saying, Hey, like I see that you've opted into this.

Thank you so much. I'm curious to know how it is for you, right? It's forming those connections. And it's also understanding that given the price point of my, some of my offers. Somebody might not be in day one coming into my world be going, oh, I'm going to, you know, invest 10 K to work with you. Like, again, that requires trust.

And so you've got to think about how am I nurturing my people? Um, far too often, we have people that come into our email list, let's just say, and then we never emailed them. Right? And the only time we ever emailed them is to sell them on something. We're not Adding any sort of value. We're not showcasing how we're, our perspective is different.

We're not showcasing, you know, that we have a level of mastery. The podcast like this, right, is a great example of what we're doing. my level of mastery in marketing, my level of mastery in [00:26:00] business, my level of mastery in being able to launch products and services and support other business owners in doing the same, right?

Because you can't fake this. I can't fake showing up on my podcast and talking for 30, 40 minutes or an hour, sharing like real life examples about how I've done things. I can't fake that. So video and voice like this, and the depth that I bring people on. Shows that I am a master at what I do. So you've got to think for yourself.

How do I show others that I'm a master at what I do, but also that I care that I want to be of service, right? And that I'm willing to invest time, like recording a podcast for 30 or 40 minutes and provide a ton of value. With no payment on the end of it, right? Most of the people that listen to my podcast, y'all listening to it, I've had people tell me that it's like a mini course.

You know, if I just listen to the podcast, I could piecemeal stuff together. And that's the whole idea of it. It's why I created the [00:27:00] quiz, right? My quiz is one of the most in depth quiz you'll ever get on the internet. And it's not just like a couple paragraphs of like, here's your archetype and now you're in my world and I'm going to sell to you, right?

And that's what you have to think about. How am I nurturing my people? What value am I adding to their life? Right? So for me and my brick and mortar, the nurturing piece of that, when somebody came into the store was me actually spending time with them, answering their questions. sharing about the product, um, recommending different types of products, taking them around the store, showing them how we do things, right?

We had an open floor plan. No other store had an open floor plan. You could literally see from the door to the back of the store. You could see all of the carboys full of wine. You could see the barrels. You could see everything, right? So that actually built trust and did nurturing almost instantaneously.

The reason why is because people could see our process. There was nothing to be hidden. They could see exactly how we worked. They could see how we made the wine. They could see [00:28:00] how clean the store was. They could see it all, right? And then our front counter was like right at the front of the store. Like you couldn't walk into the store without Somebody kind of being right there, right?

Whereas sometimes when you walk into a store, the counters like in the back on the side and like you walk in and nobody really even acknowledges you or say hi, we created our store very intentionally from a design perspective to nurture people the minute they walked into that door, right? That, that counter was like not even six feet off the front door and it was a long counter and there was either somebody always standing there to greet you or because we had this massive open floor plan.

Even if I was working in the cardboard area, I would see someone come in right away. And if I knew their name, I would address them by name. If they were a new customer, I'd say, Hey, welcome to the store. I would go and I would support them and answer any questions that they had. Right. And that was one of the things we often were praised for was our level of customer service and our ability [00:29:00] to.

Greet people, be friendly, answer questions, knowledgeable about the product, knowledgeable about the wine, right? Again, that's all part of the nurturing. And in person, you can't lie about it either, right? And so, you have to think about, Okay, so I've got this beautiful offer, product or service, whatever it might be, Now, how do I reach people?

Like, what is my strategy there for reaching people and driving new customers and new business people into my business, right? That audience growth, which is what we call lead generation. How am I driving new people into my business consecutively and consistently? And it doesn't have to be, I have to be on all the things and send all of the emails, right?

Again, with our brick and mortar, I think I sent one email a month, maybe. Sometimes that didn't happen. My service based business is kind of similar in a lot of ways. I send one or two emails a month, but they're very high value. Um, and oftentimes not sales emails. So that's the reach piece of it. And then the nurture piece, right?

[00:30:00] How am I nurturing people? How am I building that like, and that trust predominantly? And that again, will look very different compared, compared to the business, right? So it depends on the business that you have and what that nurturing requires for depending on the level of trust that you need to cultivate.

And then there's the sales piece, right? And so you're in this phase of sales in your business, right? Getting the sales down packed for your business. And to me, that has to happen with the offer piece of this too. But what is the sales process? right? So I've got somebody that comes in my world, they land on my website.

What is the sales process? Are they selling, are you selling based on a sales page? Is it a Shopify? Is it, you know, are you selling in the DMs? Is it just a checkout link? Is it a sales call? Again, it totally depends on your business and there's no right or wrong. And once you've got these levels sort of down packed and you're in alignment at all of those phases, then [00:31:00] then you can start to decide what you want to do, right?

To me, if I didn't have those four sort of phases ironed out, I would not even consider scaling because scaling to me is I'm going to scale my business now to bring in more, uh, clients, impact, revenue, whatever it might be. And how am I going to do that? I might do that with, uh, different types of products.

I might do that with different types of services. I might do that with raised prices, right? So it's, you have to think about, I might do that with bringing on team members to help support me so that I can scale. I mean, there's a lot of things that you need to consider, but this is again where I think people go sideways because they think, Oh, I'm going to scale.

I need to scale. Well, you can't scale a business that isn't making profit or sales, right? There's no point in scaling your business if there's no profit or sales coming through. Right? To me, if I wasn't making a profit in my business, then I'd be looking at how do I make a profit, right? What expenses do I need to [00:32:00] cut?

Uh, where, where am I going sideways with this? If I'm making a ton of sales in my business, And I'm not making a profit, then what do I need to do? Right? So for our brick and mortar, it was how do I increase my profit margin? Right? So as a product based business, again, the profit margins tend to be lower.

So how do I do that? One way to increase profit margin is increase your price, right? And then hopefully decrease your expenses and decrease what, you know, the cost of things. So, Service based business, again, you've got a higher profit margin to start because there isn't an inventory that you're carrying in all of those sorts of things.

You're not paying for a product and then having to market up, right? If you're providing a service, there is no cost to providing, like, to providing that compared to having to buy a product. So I'm sharing this with you because I think, again, most people start to look at, like, how do I scale and how do I grow?

And There's a lot of messages out there predominantly [00:33:00] in the online space that are like, how to make 10k months, or how to make 50k months, or how to make 100k months, and if you're after the 100k months and you haven't even made 2k, Like, you're going to be applying for a strategy that is not going to benefit you at this stage of your business.

And that's the thing that breaks my heart because I see lots of people investing in ma masterminds that are like, I'm going to show you how to make a 50k a month. And it's like, but I don't even have an offer. I would never be investing in a 50k mastermind, like how to make 50k a month if I didn't even have an offer down pact.

If I hadn't even had a validated offer, there's absolutely no way. Because I'm not at that stage of business if I don't even have an offer, right? So to me, what I would be investing in if I was starting out again would be really honed in on the offer piece and then, okay, what is the lead generation? What do I need to do to reach people?

And who do I, who do I need to hire to get that support on who, on [00:34:00] how I'm going to do this? And that depends on the, the strategy, right? If you're going to use search engine optimization, I would be hiring an SEO expert. I wouldn't be hiring a business coach that is a generalist. I would be literally going, I want the SEO expert.

Or if you're like, how am I going to reach more people? And I'm going to use organic social media content. Well, okay. Well, then. I'm going to hire a content strategist to help me iron out what the content needs to be in order to reach people. Or, you know, I want to build out a marketing system and machine that's driven through a masterclass or a quiz or a lead magnet or a freebie of something.

Well, I'm going to hire someone who's an expert in that and can help me put into words what I do and why I do it and how I do it to move someone down that customer buying journey. If all those things are tickety but I'm not making the sales, then I would really look at What do I need to do to nurture and sell?

And what does that actually look like? So [00:35:00] for me, if you want to know the phase that I'm in at the moment with my service based business is I'm looking to scale. So when I launched in 2018, I had one offer. I've just now started to build up my product suite. That doesn't mean that I was all about, well, you have to, you can only have one signature offer, yada, yada, yada, none of that.

That's never been my motto. I mean, I could offer a bazillion different courses, right? I've done photography. I've traveled and done photography. I've done my master's in a foreign, like there's so many things that I could create a course or a program on, but there's only so much you can create in a certain period of time.

And also it takes. energy and effort and time to grow an audience, to build out the systems needed in order to be able to scale, right? So I've got my team. I feel really well supported. I've got the systems. I've got, you know, the offer. I've got the audience, all those sorts of things. Now I'm ready to scale.

So what other offerings can I bring into the mix to [00:36:00] support the people that are in my world? Right, which is why I launched the Offer Architect and the Alchemy of Attraction this fall, but I was, you know, predominantly the only way you could have worked with me prior to that was through Spellbound or hiring me to write copy for you, right?

But there was such a need of people coming into my world, predominantly selling The Invisible, telling me, I need something to like, as a stepping stone, can you help me in any way? Which is why I created those offers, right? Which is the offer architect and did that very strategically. The offer architect is the first phase.

Like if you don't have anything to sell or you don't know how to sell it, or you don't know how to articulate the value of it, you need to start with the offer. Because if you don't know how to articulate the value of what you do, you're going to have a hard time selling anything. And then if you have nobody to sell it to, right, which is the alchemy of attraction, which is the lead generation and continually growing your audience, then you're going to continually have a hard time to sell because it's about putting the [00:37:00] right offer in front of the right people at the right time.

And that's where the nurture and sales piece comes in, which is often overlooked, right? If you. are just throwing an offer up to somebody who just came into your world, who's not even built a trust factor with you at all, and you require a lot of trust to invest because it's a high ticket or the level of work or depth of work that it requires, they're going to be turned off, right?

And we've all had that happen to us where someone's pitched us on something where we're like, we don't actually really want that. We're actually looking for this, or I'm interested in what you have to say, but like, tell me more how that can help me and let me then decide whether this is my next best right step forward.

And we can condense this into a short timeframe as well. It doesn't have to be this long drawn out process that we take people on, right? For me, word of mouth with a brick and mortar was like, Just getting people in that door. And then I could sell people when they came into that door, right? And not from a place I'm going to sell [00:38:00] everybody.

There was people I turned away who wanted certain things that we didn't have. You know, lots of people came in and asked for beer or cider. And I could have easily gone, Oh, I had somebody come in and ask for cider. I'm going to start selling cider now. Or someone came in and Ask for beer. So I'm going to start making beer or people are coming in and asking for wine accessories.

I need to order a bunch of wine accessories. And my whole strategy was no, get really good at selling what you're selling and why people are coming to you, which is the wine, right? Don't start to go like an octopus just because people are asking you for things. Again, that comes down to boundaries and discipline, right?

It's easy to say yes to all of the things. Trust me, I could build out. Many things, as I've mentioned, but that doesn't mean that this is the time to do it. And had I decided to do beer, I would have had to learn the whole process of making beer. If I had decided to do cider, I would have had to learn how to do that.

And likely would have sacrificed my ability to deliver the wine, which is again, something I often see, right? That [00:39:00] oftentimes we're looking outward of how to make more sales, more sales, more sales. And we actually slack on the service side of things inside our business. When that, to me, is easier to recruit more people back into your business of people who already know you, right?

And so it's like, be of service to them first and foremost, and the rest will sort of come. So, again, this is like a really, to me, this is where I would invest my energy and time. If I had an offer that sold, I'd be looking at how can I bring more people into my world consistently over time. And then obviously the nurture and the sales piece, it all sort of goes simultaneously.

But what I often see people do is I often see people start with the audience gross piece and they want to grow the audience and to, and to, then we'll have something to sell to them when they're ready. Um, and I've seen that go sideways so many different times. So [00:40:00] these to me are the four phases of the customer buying journey in a lot of ways, but the four phases that I would be focusing on in my business in order to create that consistent client attraction, but also client sales.

And depending on where you're at, will depend on what needs sort of optimizing, improvement, that sort of thing. So with that, I really hope that this has been helpful to help reduce some of the overwhelm, because I do think it's noisy out there. And I absolutely get it. I get how easy it is to get pulled off our center and off our core and pulled out of direction because somebody said to do this versus this or this strategy is the best and this one isn't.

And at the end of the day, all of the strategies don't work. In my opinion work, it really boils down to making sure that you're putting the right offer in front of the right people at the right time. And how you communicate and the way in which you communicate around the offer and communicate to [00:41:00] your people is the thing that's gonna move them down that strategy.

And so. I focus less on the strategy piece. When people come to me and they're like, what strategy do you use? I said, strategy is irrelevant at this point. Strategy is absolutely irrelevant. If you're focused solely on the strategy that you're going to use, before you've even Spent time on articulating the value of what you do, and even thought about how you want to move someone from cold to sold faster, and you're already thinking about what strategy to pick, you've put the cart before the horse, right?

Because you could pick a strategy like SEO, and then realize it's not maybe the fastest way or the best way to put your offer in front of the right people. It all boils down to what are you selling, and who are you selling it to, and how are you building that know, like, and trust. And that will dictate the strategy, and that will help you avoid throwing spaghetti against a wall.

Using a strategy that is is that isn't even really a strategy like posting and preying on social media, [00:42:00] or being on all the platforms. Because that way you'll reach more people. It's like more likely that you're going to reach more people. But if you don't know how to communicate what you do, it won't matter.

You're going to be speaking into the void and being friend zoned because your offer is not going to land with people. And if you're not putting that in front of the right people at the right time, it's not going to land with them either. So with that, Um, I hope that's been super helpful at reducing some of the overwhelm, giving you some idea of where to sort of focus your energy.

And if you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to pop over to Instagram and drop me a DM at creativelyowned. I'm happy to answer those for you. Cheers. Thanks for listening. We'll see you right back here next time. You can also find us on social media at creativelyowned and online at creativelyowned.

com. Until next time, keep showing up as your authentic [00:43:00] self.