Today we’re going to get to the core of why your last launch flopped or why no one wants to hire your services.
You’re aren’t the only one (believe me), we all completely miss the mark when it comes to selling the products/services of a new venture. Even if you know your product is exceptional, it’ll never reach it’s full potential until your sales process is firing on all cylinders.
Flops happen. Business is slow and drags on without major sales. The real challenge is working out exactly why cash isn’t raining down on you and your startup.
Today we’re going to jump right in and discuss the 3 keys to squeezing every last bit of revenue out of your fledging enterprise on the sales side. These are the foundational concepts of any business selling anything and I use them as a framework to tune up my own processes and sales funnels.
This is the pillar everyone has some version of no matter how lousy. What exactly are you selling people? An ebook, an hour of coaching, a desk chair. These are all ‘offers’.
Here’s where most people miss out on the big bucks.
Your offer sucks (no one wants it)
Your offer is mispriced
You don’t sweeten the deal
If NO ONE is buying, then it’s high time you consider the possibility that what you’re selling isn’t that great. There are ways around this, mostly by playing with the following two points to see if you peak more interest (i.e. sweeten the pot with more goodies and lower the price).
Pricing products and services (especially digital ones) is black magic when you first start out. Eventually it turns into a ice cold data driven machine, but for young ventures the data doesn’t exist yet.
I’m not going to get into a huge guide on how to price your stuff, just know that pricing is one of the levers you can pull when tweaking your offer to maximize revenue.
You Don’t Over
Everyone likes feeling like they’re getting value before they fork over those hard earned dollars. Make sure you have a kicker in your offering, it can be free stuff, access to a previous digital product (old courses), recordings of you talking about the product, an invite to an exclusive Facebook group, and anything else we perceive to have value.
You DON’T need to spend extra money on sweetening the deal usually. Get creative with the content/community you (hopefully) have already built.
This also applies to having multiple pricing/status levels to your product or service. Don’t just sell a regular widget, make sure there is a premium and a budget version for sale too.
Your audience is the amount of people who you can reach out to directly to sell something. This includes everyone on your email list, social media, forum groups, friends and family.
In the vast majority of cases when new businesses struggle it’s simply because they aren’t getting in front of enough potential customers. People don’t buy things they can’t find.
There are two factors to your audience that you should always be evaluating.
Simple. How many people can you directly contact with your offer?
Also simple. How many of those people like and trust you and find value in what you’re selling? How many of them have the problem that your product solves?
Your ‘copy’ is any text, audio or graphic that you put out there to entice people to buy your offer. It can be in the form of landing pages, Instagram Livestreams, Webinars, anything where you’re out there ‘pitching your stuff’.
I also include things like educational content on social media, blog posts, and email lists under the copywriting umbrella. Technically they aren’t ‘sales’ but they’re building your product’s value and trust with your audience. Both of which are essential parts of a killer sales game.
The average startup founder is a terrible copywriter who thinks they’re great. Time for a quick reality check.
If you have never studied copywriting directly, or written words to sell thousands of dollars of a product then you are not a good copywriter. Yet.
If your business bank account has been looking like a sick puppy in recent months then the culprit is almost certainly one of the above three concepts.
You either aren’t selling something people want (fix the offer), aren’t finding enough of the right people to buy it (grow your audience), or you just can’t get people juiced up enough to fork over their credit card.
I spend a lot of time assessing all three parts in my business. As feedback comes in from customers (or prospects) we constantly tweak the offer or the copy while trying to build an audience that responds to it.
By now you should have an inkling in the pit of your stomach when you think about your offer, audience, or copy. Stay tuned, next week we’ll start with some easy to implement strategies to fix problems in all three categories.
