Why Doing Less Created Better Results Than 'Doing All The Right Things'

INTRO: After generating over a million dollars in sales and selling one of her businesses with a single email, your host Catherine 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, K.Thompson.

K.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 a really cool story, uh, about a client of mine who has clicked into alignment as I like to call it. And if you've been in my world for a while, you already know my story about how I was doing all of the right things.

I was posting on social media consistently. I had built out funnels. I was hosting live events. I had the perfect follow up email sequence, I'm a copywriter, so we all know that my messaging and my copy and all the things were on point, quote unquote, and yet I only signed one client through that funnel in a 12 month period.

And the reason for that is because a lot of the work that I was doing was misaligned to how I'm here to show up and in the way that I'm here to show up and the energy in which I'm here to show up. And it all felt hard. And so if you're in this season of hard right now, where you're doing quote unquote, all the right things, and maybe you are creating results and success, but it [00:02:00] just feels like a lot of efforting for you to create those levels of success, or maybe you're Not seeing the success and it's coming in, in dribs and drabs, so to speak.

You're, you're seeing a client here and there, but it's really not creating the consistency that you want based on the effort that you're putting in. And you are telling yourself in a lot of ways, you're doing all the right things. So why isn't this working? And I wanna share with you a story of a client of mine because I've shared my story.

Uh, many times on the podcast and, and continue to share it and how, when I just started to do things my own way and stopped doing things the way others told me I had to do them, everything changed in my business, literally. And I say quote unquote overnight because it happened in such a short period of time.

However, it wasn't overnight. As many of you know, I spent years and years going against the grain, the grind, so to speak. [00:03:00] And I want to share another perspective and another story for you, because every time I see a client click into alignment and they see these epic results so quickly after maybe months or years of struggling, I'm often reminded that.

It's not just me that this has happened to that. It continually happens to people in my world and people not even in my world. There's many people that share their stories of just getting into alignment and finding sort of their flow within it. And so I want to share this really cool story with you because similarly, I'm seeing this particular client create results almost overnight.

When she spent months, even a year, really struggling to create results and was in a place of doing all of the right things and hearing crickets, you know, not having people really sign up or feeling like it was hard to get people to sign up for even free events. And she came to me and she said, [00:04:00] No other industry in the world asks us to work so hard for free.

For us to quote unquote, sell something to quote unquote, see a return on investment. And so she was really contemplating that more than anything. She's like, I'm doing all of the right things. I'm posting on social media. I'm hosting live events. I'm launching. I've got the funnel built. I've got the program.

I know the program is epic. And yet. I'll email my list and I'll get no response. I'll have a really great open rate, but I'm not getting people click through and take me up on my offer, whether it's free or paid. And so we were working together on her messaging and I was coming in to refine the messaging that she had already quote unquote created.

And about three months into us working together, we just weren't seeing the results. And I knew That the messaging was good, the copy was good, because I was helping her with it. So I knew that the messaging was [00:05:00] high converting, I knew the copy was high converting, and she was working really hard to do everything, right?

To hold the live events, to send the emails, to invite people, to post in other people's communities, to run ads, you name it. And we just weren't seeing The results in terms of sales. I will say that she had high converting opt in pages She had high converting You know people signing up based on her data and all of that, but we just weren't seeing it translate into sales So I did something that a lot of business coaches Would never do.

Um, and I have my thoughts and reasons for that, but I asked her if she had the capacity to just pause for a minute, rather than do this thing called full steam ahead, which I see a lot of business owners do where they want something to work so badly. That they're not [00:06:00] willing to sort of pause and take a breather and literally not do anything.

I mean, literally stop doing anything, stop posting, stop sending emails, you name it, because they want it to work so much that they think if I just keep doing this and refining and making it better, then Eventually, something will click and this is what often happens is that we do that for really extended periods of time and we end up burning out.

We get really frustrated. We give up on the idea, you name it, but in hindsight, it doesn't actually make that much of a difference. And I see this so often and not just with business owners just starting out, but I'm talking multiple six, seven figure business owners that just don't have the capacity to like step off the track for a moment.

And push the old pause button, it's that full steam ahead, even though that full steam ahead is actually not bringing them any closer to where they want to be. So I did something that [00:07:00] no business coach I know would ever do. And the reason for that, I think in a lot of ways is because of our ego as a business coach, a marketing coach, copywriter, you name it.

A lot of business owners are driven by the ego and driven by if my clients aren't creating results, then somehow shape or form that makes me not a good business coach, a good marketer. It makes me not good at what I do and therefore I'm not providing the value, quote unquote, when in reality there's so many variables that go into creating successful offers, businesses, you name it.

And as a business coach coming in, unless you're actually running the business for them. And doing all of the work for them, you're only one small portion of the pie or one variable within it. And there's only so much you can do as a business coach. And so I always love to take the stance of after 90 days, if we're really not seeing the results, then to me, it's a regrouping.

And I asked this particular client, I said, [00:08:00] let's go back to the offer and let's go back to what you're. You're selling, is this something that you really want to sell? Like, are you in love with this offer? And what came through was no, she had come to me after investing in multiple other programs and experiences and having not seen the results she wanted from selling the invisible.

So what she ended up doing was creating an offer that had more tangibility to it, but it wasn't something that she was a hundred percent. In love with it's it's something she could offer and she had the skill set and the gifts to be able to to fulfill on the promise but it wasn't something that she was like really in love with she she had tried to create an offer to fit the quote unquote mold of what.

The business world says that you need to do the marketing world says you need to do that. You need this big tangible results like how [00:09:00] to make 10k in 10 months or In this particular case how to reduce anxiety by half or something like that, right? When when you're selling the invisible when you try to make it tangible It becomes less believable because you can't really measure anxiety based on metrics you can't say I'm going to help you reduce your anxiety by 10, 10 X or, you know, three times over or whatever, because it's not a tangible thing you can measure.

Right? And so it becomes less believable. It's kind of like saying, I'm going to help you. You know, reduce your negative emotions by 100 percent by the end of this program, you're now trying to attach an intangible thing that's variable for, for most people, right? My emotions might look different than your emotions than somebody else's emotions.

And so to say that you can help me reduce my emotions by 100 percent when my emotions [00:10:00] aren't quote unquote, not tangible, they're not a tangible thing that you can grasp, touch, feel, then it becomes less believable. And. This is the mistake I see a lot of people that are selling The Invisible do, is that they're trying to make tangible claims in an intangible or unseen realm.

And so they're trying to sell their invisible by trying to conform it to a model that isn't and wasn't designed for them in the first place. And that Is energetically felt, but it's also in language felt someone's going, well, wait a minute. How can you put a measurement to that? How can you put a measurement to my level of anxiety?

Now, granted, if you're a university researcher, and you're researching subjects for years, and you've got hundreds of thousands of subjects, and you come up with a research study, and you add some metrics to it, cool. But for [00:11:00] most business owners, they're not that good. They don't have that integrated in their business.

So again, you're selling an offer that is not designed to be tangible in the first place. So what ended up happening was is that she had invested over time. This offer had had morphed into something that she wasn't feeling super jazzed about. But again, you come into a new program. You want to create the results.

You're excited to create the results. And so you just keep moving on that track. It's that moving full steam ahead when sometimes we need to pivot course, correct. You name it. And as a coach, it really isn't my responsibility or any other. It's your person's responsibility to decide whether this is an offer you love selling or not, right?

That's something you have to decide in and of itself as a person. So the long story short is, it wasn't an offer that she was super jazzed about. It had definitely [00:12:00] morphed to fit the script or fit the mold of selling a tangible outcome or result. And as a result, she wasn't aligned with it, right? And that Alignment, or misalignment, is a very subtle, invisible thing that Unless you express it, isn't necessarily seen, but it's definitely felt by the people in your orbit, in your sphere.

And so I did the thing that most business coaches would never do. And I said, let's just take a beat. I want you to pause. I want you to take a breather. You've been working really hard and we're not seeing the results in sales that you desire. And so you're not losing anything at this point. If you just pause for the next 30 days and regroup.

And I said, I invite you to step away, to go play, to not think about your business, to just go be and see what comes through when you're sitting in liminal space, when you're out in [00:13:00] nature, when you're walking your dog, when you're cooking supper, when you're at the spa, whatever it might be. I want you to see what comes through, number one, and I want you to tune in to see how excited you are about it.

Even if what drops in is completely out of left field, it is polar opposite than what you're currently doing. And sure enough, within a couple of weeks, I get a voice note that says something dropped in while I was walking my dog by the river. It's completely polar opposite of what I've been doing, but I'm really excited about it.

And I said, great, now let's take the next step of excitement. What feels really exciting for you to get this thing out into the world? And she said, I just want to share about it. I don't want to necessarily build a complicated funnel. I want to have fun with it. And I said, great. So what does fun look like?

And I'm not even kidding you. When I say this, she [00:14:00] launched a workshop that was so fun and so cheeky. And she had, I want to say like 50 people sign up effortlessly. Like there wasn't like there, she really wasn't marketing it. And I say that because when we are in alignment, the results of people coming into our world and the people wanting what we have to offer, they'll come when there's the excitement, they'll come when we're excited about it.

And it doesn't have to be a complicated process for them. to step into our world. And so literally there was no complicated funnel. She was running ads, but not spending a ton on ads and directing them to a workshop. And then the number of sales calls that she was having went through the roof compared to what she was having before.

And after what I call a sales drought, having no sales come in, she had someone sign up for her program. [00:15:00] And again, without very much efforting, everything she was doing, she was taking a step in, in towards her excitement. From naming the workshop, to Taking the sales calls, and it's funny because at one point in this process when she had had a few sales calls and they hadn't yet translated into sales, our natural tendency, and I do this and everybody does this, is to start to try to fix the process.

What do you think is wrong with my sales calls? Do you think I need to do X, Y, and Z? Do you think I need to clear more energy around this? What part of me is blocking sales? That's our natural tendency in our brain to want to fix things, but also to find a problem with what we're doing when in reality, it just might be a timing thing.

Literally, right? It just might be that you're now taking these aligned steps in your business, in your life, and that the results are going to [00:16:00] eventually catch up with you. And sure enough, they did catch up with her. It just took a little bit of time, which. It will, but it wasn't that she was doing all of this efforting and seeing literally no real results from it, feeling like she was talking to crickets or speaking into the void.

She was actually getting response. People were signing up for the workshop. People were then booking a sales call from the workshop. She was having conversations with people. She was learning about the type of client she wanted to work with and didn't want to work with. And she was getting a lot of feedback when before, when we were working together.

She wasn't getting that feedback. Sure, her numbers on paper, the metrics looked good on paper, but the feedback wasn't there. For example, she might get people to sign up for a masterclass, but she'd get nobody to show up for it, right? So, you can have 10 people sign up, 50 people sign up, 100 people sign up, but if Two people show up and one of them is a friend.

You're not really getting the feedback. And so on [00:17:00] paper her numbers looked good, but she wasn't getting the feedback needed to see the results in sales. What's different now is that she's getting the feedback. She's getting people signing up. So out of 50 people that signed up for this, half of them showed up live.

Which is unheard of in a live setting by the way, like it is unheard of. To have half of the people that signed up show up live. Most people catch replays. That's not uncommon, but these people signed up live and then she had really great numbers of people booking calls with her. She was taking all these sales calls that she never had before.

And then she had someone sign up for her one to one experience, which again is just showing that. What she was doing before wasn't in alignment. It didn't mean that she wasn't seeing some results. On paper, things looked good. Um, and you've probably heard that saying before. On paper, my life is good. [00:18:00] I have the success, I have the house, I have the partner, I have the career, but something inside just doesn't feel right.

I feel like something's missing or that I'm meant for more. Or that I'm just not in alignment to this true path I'm supposed to be on, but I've got it on paper. That's sort of what she had experienced. And when we paused for a minute, we got really clear on what it is that she wanted to do. And then we didn't make a plan.

There was no plan. The only strategy for her was to follow the excitement. What do you feel like is really exciting from naming the workshop to hosting the workshop? How do you want to host the workshop? Where do you want to host it? All of that. How many emails do you want to send about it? We just got really, what do you, how do you want to talk about it?

We got really clear on that from her level of excitement. And I'm telling you right now, the level of work that she's putting in right now is substantially [00:19:00] less than what she was doing before. And the reason it's substantially less is because she's in alignment. She's in flow. And so the first place that you can look to, to see if I'm not creating the results, but I'm putting in all the effort.

I feel like I'm doing all of the right things is to ask yourself, number one, is this an offer that I'm so fricking jazzed about selling? And if so, Then where along the path am I doing things that don't excite me? Because I'm telling you this right now, she wasn't posting on social media promoting this thing daily.

She wasn't on her stories talking about it all the time, right? So I want you to get out of your head that it's like, well, but I've got to be on social media, or I've got to run Facebook ads, or I've got, no, you don't. When you're in alignment, you don't have to do the things that aren't exciting you. And at some point.

When you get to a point of scaling your business, you can then [00:20:00] outsource some of those things up for scaling, but right now in your business, if you're struggling to create results, or you are creating results, but it's a ton of efforting, I can almost guarantee there's something out of alignment to how you're operating your business.

There's things that you're doing that are not congruent with who you are, what you stand for, your values, how you were designed to show up into this world. We are designed to be the natural expression of who we are. And it's why a lot of really successful business owners at six, multiple six, seven, eight, you name it, that have built the success that go, I still feel unfulfilled.

And there's a reason why they feel unfulfilled, because at some point along the way, they sacrificed their values and what they stood for. to create the success. And so it's no longer sustainable. And here is what I am all for is creating sustainability and not just sustainability and consistency in sales, but sustainability in the fact that [00:21:00] your business is a natural expression of who you are, that what you're doing within your business is a natural expression from the way you market it to the way you show up.

Online to the way that you deliver your offers. For example, you might be more designed to just do one to one consulting. Um, you might be designed to do consulting and not have deliverables. You might be designed to just do consulting and not have a whole course and curriculum available. I think we have to rethink everything that we've been taught and also we cannot create.

the success we truly desire that's sustainable for us from the existing model that hasn't worked for us. So if we're not aligned with posting on social media, 24 seven, then we can't create from that model. We can't say, well, I have to do this in order to be successful. Or I'm going to try to like [00:22:00] Rig the model, right?

I'm only going to post once a month. And I've done that right where I've I've done the once a month to four times a month thing.

There are so many ways to build businesses. We've just been sold a certain way or a certain method or a certain model. And we're trying to now fit our uniqueness. Into a model that doesn't work for us and that for me. I'm and I'm not kidding you when I say this that for me Literally is the reason why Lots of messaging and copy doesn't work because I have written copy for some of the most successful brands out there And it'll fall flat.

And I'll often say, Okay, let's go back to the drawing board. Why is this falling flat? And it's not because I can't write copy and messaging, y'all. It's because they're oftentimes internally pivoting without me knowing about it. [00:23:00] Or they're struggling, there's internal turmoil going on about what they want to say and how they want to say it.

But that's not coming out because they're not sharing that quote unquote, right? And so part of the work that I do with my clients is actually get below the surface and really start to drill down. Like, are you sure this is what you truly want to do? Like, tell me how you really feel. And these are the conversations that I've been having lately with people is like, tell me how you want to build your business.

And oftentimes people will look at me, clients will look at me and they'll tell me something that is like. Completely polar opposite to how the world is run. It's really challenging status quo. And then I'll, I'll say awesome. And they're like, but my mind is telling me this is impossible. And I said, of course your mind will tell you that because your mind wants to keep you safe for sure.

But it's also holding on to what it knows to be true. And what it knows to be true is the existing model that [00:24:00] we're all operating within that we have to rely on social media to be successful in this modern world that we have to build complicated funnels or have complicated systems in our business in order to move people down a customer buying journey that we have to have a low ticket to then upsell to a mid ticket to then upsell to a high ticket.

All of that is just what others are trying to sell you in a lot of ways, but also what has worked for them. And if you're in my world, I already know that you're trying to break free from the status quo and do things your own way. So, this episode has been a reminder that alignment, above all things, and I know the word alignment is overused, but It's when there is a lot of resistance in your business when your soul is like, man, this feels hard and others are going, no, this is normal.

This is the way it is. This is how it's done. [00:25:00] Then that's fine because that's how they've done it. And that's what their reality is. They know that. Right. And so they're just sharing what they're seeing as their reality. Don't dismiss that. Don't dismiss what, what you're deeply feeling. If you want to, if you want to create simplicity in your business, you want there to be elegance.

You want quality over quantity are not here to like create mass appeal and build an empire. All of the things you want to create solid quality relationships, you're tired of playing into the machine, quote, unquote, where someone's telling you, you have to send multiple emails a week and a bunch of reminder emails to, for people to buy your stuff or whatever it is.

And you're like, but I don't, I don't want to do that. Like, and it's not from a self sabotaging or procrastinating. It's like deep in your soul. Like, wait a minute. I feel like there's a better way. There's a, there's a better way for me. [00:26:00] Then don't dismiss that. That is my invitation to you. And my other invitation is to sit and contemplate and to pause more than you're trying to bulldoze ahead and make things happen.

Take the time to pause. What is 30 days on this journey of life and business when you can bulldoze along for 30, 90, I don't know, two years and not see the results that you want and then go, but I'm doing all of the work. There is something so beautiful about the pause and about just Coming into stillness and just being present for a moment and going and listening to what it is that you truly, truly feel called to step into or step towards or how you want to show up, don't dismiss that.

It's what's in the stillness and what comes through in your stillness, the thoughts, the ideas, the feelings, that is what's really truly meant for you. And I know [00:27:00] this particular client, I know many of my clients will say that. Right. This idea popped in when I was cooking or baking or taking a shower or whatever, but it's like completely out of left field.

I had another client recently who again, Was trying to do all of the right things and I could, I could share many stories about this, but she got a sacral hit to do something that was polar opposite than what we were working on. And she has created so much success, y'all, and it's all around in-person events, so it's not even online coaching and whatnot, it's all in person events.

And she just followed this sacral hit and went after it after months and months and months. I'm talking months of stagnancy in her business because she was doing again, all of the right things, the things that should work in hindsight, she was moving out of alignment. And so when she followed the sacral hit.

And focus on in person events, they skyrocketed and now she's looking to expand that brand to other major centers and cities across the world, [00:28:00] which is wild, right? And had she not followed the sacral hit, because it was like outside of the realm of what we were working on, it wouldn't have come to fruition.

So don't dismiss the sacral hits, don't dismiss the insights that's coming through in your moments of stillness, because those are the genius ideas that are dropping in. To guide you and then how can you continue to follow your excitement and what excites you and let's follow that energy of excitement.

So alignment and, and being in flow with our natural essence and presence to me is the thing that creates really epic results in a tangible way. But it also creates really sustainable results as well. So with that, I hope this episode has, uh, given you some insight into the amazing clients I get to work with, but also their story and their journey, because they're all beautiful in their own right.

And they're all [00:29:00] challenging the status quo and they're all breaking out of the. Um, mold of how things should be done and they're creating simplicity in it. There's a, there's a simplicity element that's coming through in a lot of these businesses and with a lot of these business owners that I'm working with and it's so beautiful to witness them really just trusting in their path and their journey.

So with that, I hope this episode has been helpful. 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 at creativelyowned. com until next time, keep showing up as your authentic self.