More leads are NOT the only answers to your marketing problem

by Karen Skidmore | 11,19 | Marketing Articles, Pillar Articles

To get the leads you feel you need can be exhausting at the best of times; growing and managing free Facebook Groups, posting endless social content and running Facebook ad campaigns (that have the habit of eating up your cash flow!) are all popular ways of generating leads today. Focusing your attention on getting sign-ups to your email list or to get to people into your marketing funnel by offering low-cost digital products can be an important part of your marketing plan.

But did you know there are hidden gems and opportunities in your sales and marketing process that you may simply not be aware of?

What I want to shine the light on here today is you make you consciously aware of the exact steps your clients take with you. Because if you do, it will be far easier for you to spot where the potential opportunities are and do something about them.

And, in the process, you may actually discover that getting more leads, which can be one of the toughest and most expensive problems to solve, may not be the right thing to focus your time and energy on right now.

Let me give you a couple of examples first.

A client I worked with recently was growing her fitness business. She had been teaching Pilates for many years and as her children were growing older, she had the energy and time to step up her business. She had decided she was wanted to create some digital offerings and develop herself as a health coach, which would enable her to move away from having to teach four days a week.

She did exceptionally well in the first six months of her new business, as I helped her create huge numbers of leads through various Facebook challenges and webinars. Once she then decided she was in a position to outsource Facebook ads and hire someone else to run her campaigns, she really flew and was able to take her list from 500 to 4,000 in just three months.

But here was the problem; her sales figures were yet to go much above a few hundred pounds each month and she was struggling to sell enough of her courses to make the shift from teaching classes to online business. Her natural instinct was to go get more leads. But once I helped her shift her attention from lead generation to stages further down her sales and marketing process and work out why people weren’t buying, her business changed for the better.

She adjusted her offers, increased her prices and opened up her diary to allow her to speak to more people, rather than rely on them clicking on a sales page. The shift from only teaching in-person group classes to the online business she desired finally became a reality.

Another client I worked with earlier this year had an amazing Facebook Group, with more than 3,000 members active in it. Running free Facebook Groups is a popular marketing strategy today and, from the outside looking in, it can look like you have a thriving business. But the reality was, for this particular client, that her free Facebook members were sucking her dry of energy and enthusiasm for her business.

She was falling out of love with what she was doing and had essentially trapped herself in the lead generation stage of her marketing, drowning under all the messages, posts and day to day management of the group.

To get back on track with growing her business, I showed how to declutter her offers, streamline her prices and developed a marketing strategy that would essentially take her off Facebook so that she didn’t feel trapped, serving her free audience every day in order to grow her business.

And this is what I want to help you with today. Instead of only thinking that it’s more leads or better quality leads that you need and keep your focus on the lead generation stage, there may actually be easier and simpler solutions further down the line.

Let’s break down the stages and you’ll be able to see where you may need to shift your attention if your lead generation focus is getting you nowhere fast.

The sales and marketing process for businesses like yours can be broken down into five stages.

1. Leads
2. Prospects
3. Conversion
4. Value
5. Frequency

1) Leads – these are the initial shows of interest.

Leads are not Likes on your Facebook page nor are they retweets of your blog articles (although both can give a good indication on whether you have a potential audience out there).

Leads are people who make them known to you and you have basic information about them. For example, emails subscribed to your list, registrants for your webinar or people in your free online groups. Leads are people who have shown themselves to you as being genuinely interested in what you share but all you know about them at this stage is perhaps their name or simple contact details.

Just think of leads as the initial handshake when you meet someone for the first time.

2) Prospects – these are people who have taken a step further into the enquiry process with you.

Prospects have either requested a call with you, clicked several links in your emails to your various offers, filled in an enquiry form, requested a brochure from your website or even spent money with you, but at a low price point. It’s really important that you decide on your own definition of who a prospect is for your business because every business will be slightly different here, but it doesn’t need to be complicated.

Just imagine yourself with a room full of people, who maybe have heard you speak or explain your business and they’ve put their hands (maybe only tentatively to start with), wanting to know more about what it is to you. From their actions, they are showing you that they are interested in engaging with you about what it is that you can offer them.

3) Conversion – simple really; people get to this stage when they’ve spent money with you.

If you only have a handful of leads and maybe only speaking to one prospect every few weeks, then it is unlikely that many people are going to get this stage as you’re simply not going to be able to convert everyone. So your marketing problem may still in stage one or two. Go back to getting clarity on who you are marketing to and what problems you can solve for them because if you aren’t getting that initial interest, you probably haven’t got your audience or message clear enough.

But if you have leads coming in and you are building up an email list, but not making the sales, then you actually have a different opportunity. There’s every chance you need to review your offers, your sales copy, your positioning and how easy it is for people to actually buy from you.

With many clients I’ve worked with, low pricing and poor positioning is often the marketing problem that needs solving. Perhaps you don’t enough social proof; case studies, testimonials or client stories. Maybe it’s your bootstrapping approach isn’t giving the necessary trust factor or credibility needed to win your prospects over.

In many cases, it’s the fear of picking up the phone and having a conversation that stops many people from making the right sales; if you are relying on your website and social media presence to do the work but, in reality, your prospect needs to speak with you before they are willing to invest their time and money in what you offer, then you need to step up and bring conversation selling into your marketing.

Putting in the systems to make it easy for you to arrange phone calls or meetings with your prospects can be one of the quickest ways to increase your sales next month.

4) Value – this is the total amount of money each client can spend with you.

As a rule of thumb, the lower the price you sell at, the bigger list you need. If your average client spend is under £50, your marketing strategy has to focus on volume. You need to spread yourself wide and far and your list building activities have to attract hundreds, if not thousands of new subscribers each month. If your average spend is upwards of £2,000, your focus will want to shift to qualifying your leads and prospects; it’s not just anyone who will buy what you offer so you can get laser-focused on a smaller marketplace.

What this means is that if you’re focused on the lower end of the price band and struggling to generate enough sales from your Facebook groups, social content posting or ad campaigns, perhaps your problem is your offer. As with the conversion stage, low pricing is often the problem so never assume lowering your price or offering discounts is the answer to making more sales. This tactic often does the complete opposite and lowers your total sales; you end up competing in an Amazon marketplace where your customers’ decisions are based only on price. Not a fun place for your business to be.

5) Frequency – how often your clients spends with you.

Again, if your marketing strategy is low price, high volume but if there are only one or two things to sell to them, you have some hidden gems and opportunities. A lot of people would stay in stage one and simply exhaust themselves on the treadmill of getting new leads so that more people can buy their one or two products or courses.

But what if you created a higher-priced programme or a continuity/membership offer? Developing a full product suite can take time, often a few years to get right for your audience and market place. So you need to question yourself whether you are creating the space in your day-to-day running of your business to research and develop new product offerings, ongoing servicing packages or even affiliate offers.

OK. Where do you go from here?

What I recommend you do now is to take these five stages and spend 30 minutes thinking them through in your business. Don’t go into what I call “How Do I?” mode which means you head off to google and start searching for answers to questions you don’t need to answer right now. This will only knee-jerk you into more tactics, rather than thinking strategically about the shifts you may need to take.

Take yourself away from your desk and your screens and spend half an hour or so doodling out or mind-mapping some ideas. Step away from the need from finding a quick solution right now and look at your marketing with a fresh perspective. Perhaps you need to speak some of your current clients and customers; ask them about how they are solving their problems right now. Maybe you already know, in your gut, that what you are doing just doesn’t feel right. So ask yourself what would feel right?

It’s important to give yourself this space to re-look at your current marketing plan and spot the opportunities you may be missing.

Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.

Is making a decision a skill or a way of being?

by Karen Skidmore | 02,19 | Marketing Articles, Pillar Articles

The number of choices you have to make to each and every day can add up into the thousands; from what clothes you put on in the morning and what you eat for lunch to what podcast you listen to next or radio station you play in the car. In fact, some sources claim that we make up to 35,000 decisions every day.

So it’s no surprise that, when it comes to making decisions about your business and marketing, that decision fatigue can become a real problem. If you’re already facing a thousand or more decisions about day-to-day stuff, when you apply the same decision making process to bigger business and marketing stuff, your brain can be running tired and wired.

It’s like having too many tabs open on your browser or too many apps running in the background of your phone … because your brain is full of mundane thinking, it just doesn’t have the capacity to move up a gear to deal with the seemingly bigger or more important decisions about your business.

I believe decision making to be one of the “secrets” to business success. It’s action, rather than ideas, that grow your business and action can only happen once you’ve made a decision.

So if you find it difficult to make decisions, it can really hold you back in your business growth journey.

Many years ago I came up with The P Cycle; the constant and exhausting swirl of perpetual learning, which leads to perfectionism, which leads to procrastination which leads straight back to perpetual learning.

Because when you don’t know something (which is ALWAYS the case with most of your business and marketing decision, yes?!), it feels easier to go out and learn more about whatever it is you are making a decision about first, before actually making a decision to take action on it.

This means you are forever seeking ideas and learning more about how to do something … but you never quite get out of The P Cycle to take actual action and move forward with your business idea or marketing initiative.

So is decision making a skill you can learn?

Yes, sure it is. You can use tools such as the classic SWOT or cost-benefit analysis to help you weigh up the pros and cons.

But for most of your decisions you have to make to move forward with your business or marketing, I’ve found many of these decisions making tools have the danger of keeping you in the P Cycle.

Because you go off and learn how to make a decision, you try and get the decision making process right (AKA perfect!) which delays the decision making process even further and thus stops you from taking action.

Is there another way of making a decision?

Yes. I’m glad you asked 🙂 

Because there is an important space within us that very few of us know how to access on a day-to-day basis.

You probably feel it from time to time and perhaps, like me, you know it’s there because so many people around you refer to it. Some people call it a gut feeling. Others may call it intuition. It doesn’t really matter whether you may feel it or hear it in your gut, soul, heart or solar plexus, it’s the thoughts and feelings that come to you when you may meet someone for the first time or walk into a room or in the middle of a conversation with someone. 

Having spent the first 25+ years of my adult life as a strong, independent Super Woman (yup, I really was on track to burn out by the time I got to 43 – I just didn’t see it coming!), I really didn’t know how to access this intuitive way to help me make decisions. I was so busy making decisions based on logical thinking, that it was burning me out. Just like that browser with too many tabs open; at some point, you are painstakingly watching yet another spinning circle of doom that you realise the only thing you can do is re-boot the whole of your machine.

So a few years ago, I decided I need to re-boot, slow down and explore different ways of growing and building businesses.

Let me hand you over to my good buddy, Kate Wolf, who is an expert on this matter.

“Everyone is designed differently which means we all ‘hear’ our intuition in different ways. Some people hear words or phrases, for others, it’s a ‘feeling’ or sixth-sense. And for others, it’s an actual physical feeling or sensation in the body.

The key is to take the time to discover how your intuition speaks to you. The more you ‘listen’, the more you’ll ‘hear’. It’s also a journey of trust and courage. As you start honouring your intuition and daring to act on it, it will show up more for you and your relationship will strengthen.

Often people think they’re not intuitive but when I ask them to tell me a time they ‘just knew’ something was the wrong decision for them – whether it’s in the realm of business, finance, relationships, health or pretty much anything – everyone can come up with something.”

So if you’d like to find a way of accessing your intuition more to help you make decisions more easily – and thus take action on the stuff that’s going to grow your business – here’s what I love to invite you to do.

Learn to be a tracker of how your intuition shows up.

I’ve been on a huge journey over the last few years, re-connecting with myself and discovering how our energies work. I have had to learn how to slow down so that I may hear what my body and soul is trying to tell me.

A couple of the regular practices I use to allow myself to track how my own intuition comes up are are journalling – the simple practice of writing a few pages of my thoughts before I start my working day – and using Angel Cards – picking a card before or during my journaling to help me bring awareness to what I should be paying attention to.  Both these practices allow me to get out of my head and feel into different parts of my body and awareness. And from here, I can pay attention to source rather than the exhausting logic.

There’s so much more I want to share about this topic but I want to finish off today with these final thoughts from Kate.

“It can be very easy to mistake projection for intuition. One of the key ways to recognise your intuition is that it comes without a story. If you find yourself explaining WHY something is so, and telling yourself lots of stories about it, it’s almost definitely some form of projection. Intuition simply is. It doesn’t need to explain itself, rationalise or justify.

So if your ‘sense’ or ‘feeling’ is coming with a lot of story and explanations, it may well NOT be intuition. When this happens, take some time to meditate, to journal, to get beneath the story to the truth. This is also a good time to turn to a skilled Coach or Healer who will guide you out of the story-mess of your head and into the wisdom of your body.”

I find I can use stories A LOT in my thinking when I’m running my decisions purely on logic, which is helpful when working with my clients because I can see them do exactly the same thing LOL. So this is great advice from Kate, particularly if these kind of practices are new to you. 

If you have anything to add to this, please leave a comment below. I’d love to know how this article shows up for you and what you do to help you access your intuition.

Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.

Revenue streams – how many ways can you make 6 figures?

by Karen Skidmore | 01,19 | Marketing Articles, Pillar Articles

No, it’s not a trick question nor am I about to launch into some scammy way of turning on a money tap whilst lounging back on a Caribbean sundeck. It’s a serious question that all experts and service-based professionals need to answer at some point in their business.

Of course, the sum doesn’t have to be 6 figures. If you read my book, True Profit Business, you’ll discover that I am not a fan of pushing out the 6 figure business dream; it’s an ego-driven target because the reality is that most “6 figures” mean some an entirely different money-in-your-bank-account-sum when you take into account exactly what profit you made and what you sacrificed to get it.

Too many people are simply burning out to achieve the wrong goals.

If it is a genuine 6-figure sum you’re after, great, but the money sum could be that you simply want an extra £10,000 over the next few months. For the sake of simplicity, the money sum I’m going to use in this article is £100,000 because it’s as an easy number to work through.

First of all, why is this question important?

Knowing how you want to make your money from your business is important because it’s going to significantly impact your marketing strategy, positioning required, resources needed (advertising budget, hiring of team, cost of digital platform set up), skills to learn and how much time and effort you are required to get it all working.

Your business model – how you shape your revenue streams and how you engage with your clients and deliver your products – is directly related to how well you can grow your business. You may not have realised this before now, but you have a choice in the way your design, set up and run your business. Most people like yourself end up with a business model based on what everyone else in your profession is running or a business model based on what you’ve been taught to be the most profitable or easiest to run.

In the first instance, you may have the same business model as everyone else in your profession not because of choice, but because you don’t know any better. What you don’t know, you don’t know and, as with most clients I work, I doubt you’ve gone to business school or have training in business processes and systems.

If this is the case, you may have spent a lot of time learning about marketing and how to get clients but the topic of how to design, set up and run your business is something you’ve probably never given much thought to. Doing what everyone else in your profession does has its upsides because you know what works already. However, there is a big problem with this.

Just because most of your colleagues or competitors are running their business in a particular way, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are all doing it the right way for them. If we take the Pareto Principle that statistically proves 80% of your outcome comes from 20% of your input, 80% of the success that happens in your profession comes from just 20% of the businesses. Thus 80% of businesses in your profession is creating just 20% of the output.

Hmmmmmm. No wonder so many of your colleagues and competitors seem to be struggling when you get to see what’s really going on behind their marketing, promotional campaigns and brand presence.

You know if you are in the 80 percentile if you experience any of the following:

1. You’re overwhelmed; you’re procrastinating over marketing initiatives and new product ideas because you simply don’t know what you “should” be doing to make your business work more effectively.
2. You’re overworked; you are stuck in the day-to-day grind and feeling miserable that you can’t spend the time doing more of what you love
3. You’re underpaid; you compete on price, charge by the hour or the time you spend with a client and often over-deliver so that you do far more than you originally promised thus dropping your value even further.

I know this paints a pretty depressing picture but there are plenty of you in this situation (you are part of the 80%!) and if you get a copy of my book, True Profit Business, you’ll discover the path out of this 80%.

What are the top 20% of your profession are doing to have a greater output?

There will be of course all sorts of reasons for their success but there is every chance that they are using technology to create huge growth advantage opportunities to allow them to stand out as a leading expert in your profession. You’ve probably already seen colleagues and competitors create new ways of sharing their expertise. From expanding their offerings to serving groups of clients, large and small, through to creating digital content and using cutting edge use of artificial intelligence; the opportunities to do something “different”  and grow the number of clients you work with are open to you if that’s what you want.

This leads me to the second instance where many of you may be. The explosion in selling digital content since 2015 has led to thousands of marketing experts teaching digital ways of making money and growing a business from your laptop on the beach, particularly within the coaching, therapy and training professions. Because technology has been the reason for a lot of businesses’ success, it’s easy to get sucked into believing that digital is the only way to grow a business like yours. But that’s not simply the case.

Many marketplaces are now so flooded with digital offerings that it’s hard to break in and claim your space, especially when so much of the content can be of poor quality and your client base may have begun to distrust this form of learning or support. Plus there are plenty of those 20% businesses in your profession who are running more traditional business models, but because you don’t get to see their marketing campaigns or brand presence on your Facebook or Instagram feed, you may not realise they exist.

And let’s get real about how it is to run a top 20% business. You may have a business that, on paper, is well within your profession’s top 20%, especially if you are measuring its success on traditional key performance indicators such as turnover. But the reality of running your business in the top 20% is that it may be burning you out.

You know if you are getting burnt out in the 20% if you experience any of the following:

1. You’re overwhelmed; you’ve stepped up and created your expert status but you don’t like the visibility and constant pressure to perform.
2. You’re overworked; you can’t seem to keep up what you’ve promised your clients and can’t come up for air long enough to hire the right people to help you grow.
3. You’re underpaid; your turnover maybe 6 or 7 figures but there’s not much left for you once you’ve paid your team, advertising invoices and running costs.

Again, another pretty depressing picture. But as before, you aren’t the only one to have created a business that is burning you out because this practice of growing a business based on following someone else’s formulas and business model is rife. This is why I want to open up your eyes and see the possibilities available to you on your path to creating a True Profit Business. My mission here is to help you to avoid following someone else’s proven business model and systems, just because they are telling you it works for them.

You have a choice.

You have a choice on what business infrastructure, processes and team to have in place to give you the right business to help you achieve your creativity, purpose and money aspirations. You can choose the design, set up and how you run your business based on who you are and how you want to show up, just the way you can decide on the right vehicle you want to drive day-to-day.

The reason why there are so many different types of vehicles on the road is that each and every one of us has a different reason for choosing our mode of transport, and at different stages of our lives. Starting out, you’ll drive any car you can afford; a small hatchback or perhaps stick to your bike, especially if you live in a city. Families may drive a big SUV. Some may like fast cars. Others choose their mode of transport based on environmental impact and may even decide they don’t want to own a vehicle but use uber or rental cars for longer journeys.

There’s no one vehicle that’s right for everyone or for a specific profession.

And so it is with your business model.

There are four critical decisions to make to help you decide which business model you want; your role in the business, the number of clients you want to serve and then consequently at what price point, how you deliver your service or products and which selling system you decide works best for you. In my book, True Profit Business, I am taking you through in detail all four of these decisions. So for now, let me take you through a couple of examples.

The passive income dream.

Someone I spoke to recently had recently spent a significant amount of her investment cash setting up a new membership website. She had read a lot about membership sites, had joined an online business mentoring programme to teach her the basics of setting up digital products and thought this would prove to be a perfect revenue stream to have around being a mum at home with two young children. She wouldn’t have to travel anywhere and she could do everything her business needed her to do from her kitchen table.

There was no questioning her passion for helping the audience she wanted to reach out; she knew they were desperate for clear signposting and easy to access advice. But 14 months in and her beautifully designed website was verging on a marketing disaster. Although visits to the site were climbing and she was good traction in the forums, database building was almost non-existent and her offer just wasn’t compelling enough.

Her plan was to start with the freemium model and then start charging £27 a month. She had dreams to have a 6-figure business but to make £100,000 that would mean 309 members, assuming that all 309 would stay a minimum of 12 months. That’s a whole lot of leads to get that many customers, and a whole lot of customer retention strategy to keep them being members.

Of course, long term this kind of membership model can work but you need a big bucket of resources (advertising, customer support, time, energy and hours and hours of screen time) because your marketing strategy is focused on high volume, low pricing model. It’s highly unlikely that any decent profit will be made for at least a year or two (probably many more!) if you are relying solely on this kind of revenue model. And this person was burnt out already after 14 months of struggling to build up her tribe on a bootstrap budget and a lack of skills around digital marketing and advertising.

Let’s go the other end of the scale.

A client I worked with recently came from many years in the publishing industry. Now I am sure you are aware of the massive changes that have turned much of the publishing sector on its head. The problem she was still stuck in the traditional, old school business model where very little revenue was created until a book was published and selling. For her business to make £100,000, it was all about book contracts; working hard upfront and only seeing rewards when (and sometimes only if) the book was successful. Plus it was a cost-heavy business so profits were tight.

When we starting diving into the process she went through with her author clients, it was apparent to me, almost immediately, the value of what she did even before the content was written. Of course, being surrounded with the traditional – and very much outdated – publishing business model, it was a classic case of “what you don’t know, you don’t know.” But having talked through all her options and what role, client capacity and delivery process would work for her, it was as if a searchlight was beaming through the fog and a new path became clear.

Offering her services as a book coach and mentor at the start of the process was an obvious place to begin; charging for the 6 months run-up to get the book ready for editing was not only profitable for my client but incredibly powerful and instrumental for the success of her author clients. Again, not a holy grail solution to making 6-figures – there was still a lot of thinking and doing to be done around her positioning and marketing her new offerings – but she could see clearly that this additional revenue stream could be a far simpler way of growing her business revenue than sticking to what everyone else in her industry did.

And without distracting her from her core revenue base or burning herself in the process.

The price you decide to charge has a lot to do with your success.

Before I send you off to have a think about your potential revenue streams, let’s deal with the elephant in the room; the price you charge. When creating new revenue streams in your business, it’s often perceived easier to start at the lower end of charge of the price scale. I’m sure you have seen, and perhaps even bought from, the classic product funnel that gets you started with a £10 introductory product, which leads into a £295 course and then takes you into a premium programme of £1,000 and more.

So what many do, and are taught to do, is start creating your £10 introductory offer because you believe you need to build your list. And a £10 product is so much easier and safer to create, is it not?

Coming back to the question on hand – how do you go about creating £100,000 … that’s a lot of £10 sales you need to make to build enough momentum to move people up to your next mid-level product. You’d probably be needing 500+ sales to get you the conversions to that £100,000. That’s exhausting (and I speak from experience!)

Again, like the membership offer example above, this kind of product funnel works. There’s no doubt about it. But starting with the perceived easier end of the funnel is not always your easiest path to growing your business. A far quicker, simpler and easier way can be to flip your funnel on its head and start at the top end of the scale. Even if you decided to start small and create a programme or service at around the £2,000 mark, it becomes obvious that you have to sell to far fewer people to get yourself to your £100,000 goal. Plus you’ll gain valuable experience, build your credibility and see better results from your clients working at this level.

Now, of course, I’m starting to sound like the rainbow fairy.

“Just wave your wand, burn your candles and the unicorn will come and poop out those clients for you.”

You know clients aren’t going to magically appear with intention alone (don’t you?!). There is focus needed for your overall strategy and positioning, a clear offer created and an understanding of what your market place really wants. But I hope that you get the point that I am making here and that you realise you have a choice about how you design, create and run your revenue streams in your business.

Think carefully about your pricing and offers as you grow your business.

Don’t just follow someone else’s system that they are selling you or stick to what your industry does best, because it’s not always the case. Start with where you want to go in your journey and what income and impact goals you want.

Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.

Marketing live events in this digital age?

by Karen Skidmore | 09,17 | Marketing Articles, Pillar Articles

Want to find out more about my next live event coming up this November?

Click here to find out more about Playing Your Bigger Game