It’s been a little while since I’ve communicated the intent of this podcast, so I want to do that because it’s relevant to what I’m talking about in today’s episode.
I teach female business owners how to increase their sales so they can have stable cash flow and increased profits without stressing about ads, webinars, and complex funnels.
Now, if you’re a business owner who runs ads, does webinars, and likes to nerd out on complex funnels and it works for you…that’s awesome.
If you love your launch model and it works for your business and your personality style, I’m absolutely thrilled for you.
I have clients who run ads, host webinars, and use a launch model.
This is NOT a podcast episode to pass judgment on these tools.
However, this IS a podcast episode to speak to women who don’t want to run their businesses that way or aren’t ready to use those tools.
If you’re a woman like this, who doesn’t want to use those tools or aren’t ready to use those tools, I first and foremost want to assure you that you’re NOT alone.
I know it can really seem that way when you open your favorite social media app. It seems like EVERYONE and all their biz besties are running their businesses this way.
But that’s actually not true. Your social media preferences and the matrix you’re in are just making it seem that way.
What’s inspired today’s episode is a conversation I recently had with a dear family friend who I‘ve known for 30 years.
She messaged me on Facebook asking if I’d ever heard of a particular business program and then proceeded to vomit a lot of online jargon into the message.
It’s not often that my business and personal life collide in this way, and with as little panic as possible, I asked if she’d like to chat for a bit.
I almost never get the opportunity to speak to someone before they go through the online business education gauntlet.
I almost always work with people after they’ve run their credit cards up and are flat out exhausted trying to sell 400 million thousand and 1 low dollar products and want to burn everything down.
Since my conversation with this woman is so fresh in my mind, I want to share some of my thoughts with you as I shared them with her.
1. While she is starting a new venture, she is NOT new to the business world. And most likely neither are you. Please picture me standing on a desk with a megaphone shouting this at you.
You have, over your lifetime, gathered knowledge, skills, and abilities that serve your business. Whether you have a formal business degree or not. Whether you have worked in a corporate environment or not. I watch women who have run a brick and mortar business come into the online space and toss out everything they know about business because they think doing business in a digital, online, virtual – whatever word you want to use to describe leveraging the internet to run a business – is different.
NOT TRUE.
Business is business. Online, offline it doesn’t matter much – the principles are the same; the fundamentals are the same.
What you’ve achieved in a previous career MATTERS.
It is relevant.
It is valuable and useful.
The reason why I’m speaking about this and doing so passionately is that when I decided to take my business online, I fell into the trap of believing I didn’t know anything and that I had to start at the beginning. That’s damaging and dangerous. It sets you back, it robs you of time, it erodes your confidence and it makes you easy prey to internet marketers selling quick fixes to something that takes time.
For me, it meant stepping into coaching relationships from a place of disempowerment and turning down opportunities that I thought were too advanced for me even though I had 20 years of experience doing what I do. That one thing cost me the most time, money, and energy.
2. Women struggle to see their worthiness and feel like they aren’t good enough. Getting female business owners to see the value in the services they provide is one of my primary concerns. Owning their credibility so they can demonstrate their authority, or having them write clear results on a sales page, or asking for a testimonial take WORK.
So when women see the opportunity to sell a low-priced product via a sales page or an email with a link, there’s a lot of sex appeal to that. It gives them a strategic out to an emotional and mindset challenge.
However, it takes just as much work if not more to sell 50 units of a $97 offer vs a $5,000 offer.
But women are hard workers…our society thrives on the unpaid hard work of women, so when women decide to sell those 50 units and struggle, they think they just need to do more.
When in reality, women need to work differently.
They need to ask the questions:
Who benefits from my struggle with worthiness?
Who benefits from my inability to see my own value?
Because it certainly isn’t us women who benefit.
3. The misconception that people have when they get to the online space is that sales magically happen through a link, a sales page, or a funnel. That once the messaging is perfect and you know your ideal client’s eye color and all your tech is perfect, that sales will just happen.
Again, that’s really attractive to women who want to do what they love to do but have never learned how to sell, and the thought of selling scares them.
So they take courses on their money mindset, what to post on social media, how to create an email funnel, how to deliver the perfect webinar, but very rarely are they working on their sales skills. Which I very much understand.
As a matter of fact, the primary reason why our first business (my husband’s and mine) went bankrupt is that we put zero emphasis on selling. We genuinely didn’t know how and didn’t even realize that was the problem.
And we weren’t even operating in the online space.
So, let me recap…
1. You are an expert. You have valuable knowledge, skills, and abilities that will support you in running your business. You are most likely NOT a newbie. It’s more likely that you’re learning new things but you are learning them from the perspective of someone who already has valid experiences.
2. Selling premium services and products will challenge you to own your credibility, but will also help you earn the maximum amount of money in the simplest, most straightforward way.
3. You need sales skills. Once you have sales skills, it makes using the tools the internet provides such as social media, email, podcasts, webinars so much easier and effective.
Thanks for taking the time to listen today. I hope this has been helpful.
Please know I believe that small business owners have the power to change the world.
