How to get over your sales phobia
If you want to sell more of your products, you must master two things: The thing you are good at and sales.
Hi,
Even though it’s critical to a business’s success, most people hate the idea of selling their products. They fear people will hate them, find them annoying, and turn away from them. More importantly, they believe selling is “gross”.
Today, I’ll hopefully show you how to overcome those mental blocks and see sales as not only an integral part of your success but also a fun way to build an engaged audience that loves your brand.
Please note, you absolutely do not have to learn this stuff. However, if you don’t occasionally remind people they can buy things from you, then there is almost no chance you will be able to build a critical mass of customers to make a go of it.
But maybe you don’t really want to make a go of it, and that’s cool. Maybe you finish this article and go “Yup, I hate every word of that and I’m never gonna do it.”
Then, at least you can stop beating yourself up about it. The first step to overcoming a problem is recognizing it exists, and fear of sales is a prominent problem for nearly everybody I’ve ever met.
Recognizing the problem and deciding not to do anything about it lifts a huge weight off your shoulders. It is a solution in and of itself.
That said, I would contend that the biggest thing holding people back from achieving the level of success they covet isn’t their ability to make something cool, it’s the ability to find people to buy that cool thing.
Usually, they can make something cool just fine, but they’re petrified about talking about it. They are petrified of people hating them, laughing at them, and shunning them. They’ve put their heart and soul into making something, and the idea that somebody won’t like it paralyzes them.
Does that sound like you?
If so, then you’re in good company, because I’ve never met somebody who didn’t have a little bit of that going on deep down in the bowels of their soul.
Even the best salespeople have it. Heck, I have it right now as I’m writing this piece. I worry that you aren’t going to like this article, that it won’t be filled with enough value for you, and that you’ll hate me for it.
The thought of it makes me bristle, but I soldier on anyway. See, I was right where you are not long ago.
What makes it so much harder is that I know it will turn some people off. At least a dozen of you reading this right now will unsubscribe and write me off forever. I hope that it magnetizes more people than it turns off, and it helps build a deeper bond with those who are already in my orbit.
It took a ton of inner work to get there, y’all and it’s still hard every time I hit publish, but it was so much harder before I started the type of work I’ll talk about in this article.
I used to be horrible at sales. By 30, I failed three companies, all because of my own hubris and inability to realize that sales were an integral part of the game.
After my third company went under, I didn’t have the money to try again, so I had to get a job.
At the time, the only job I was qualified to get was in sales, because there are pretty much no qualifications in sales except to sell things. They’ll take anybody for a commission-only position, which was where I started.
At first, I was as bad at sales as I was at running a company. I bounced around to a lot of sales jobs in those first years until I eventually landed at one that showed me how to sell and why selling was important.
It changed everything for me. I went from a terrible salesperson to the best salesperson in the company almost overnight and rose from salesperson to sales manager to running my own office in just a few months.
Then, I started my fourth company, Wannabe Press1, and this time it didn’t fail. In just a couple years we went from making a few thousand dollars to six figures a year and it all started because I overcame my fear of sales and marketing. We’re almost ten years on from it now and I still make a good living from it to this day.
A very smart person once told me that to be successful as a business, you must be good at two things: the thing you do and selling it.
Business success is a function of both.
The two questions…
I have two questions for you. These questions can change your opinion of sales right now. I’ve seen more light bulbs go off after asking these questions than any single thing I’ve ever said in my life.
Are you ready? Here they are.
Do you think you are a good person? I’m not talking about Mother Theresa, Gandhi level good, either. I mean do you generally feel you do the right thing given the option? Do you help your friends and family? Do you watch for pedestrians when you drive? Do you generally do good in the world when given the choice?
Do you think the things you make can change lives? Again, I’m not talking about earth-shattering changes here. I don’t expect your products to light the world on fire and create a global revolution that will bring about an era of global peace. However, do you believe that you can bring even a moment of joy into a person’s life with the things you make? Do you think it can help somebody in a moment of darkness or add to a moment of great joy?
If you answered yes to both of these questions then you are under a moral imperative to tell as many people as possible about your products.
This is not a choice.
If you are a good person, and you believe your products can change lives, then you must tell as many people about them as possible so you can change as many lives as possible.
I know that might sound silly, or hyperbolic, but it’s absolutely the truth. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.
I’m not famous, but I have a loyal fanbase, built from traveling the world with my books and spreading the message of my work.
I can’t tell you how many times people have come up to my table and thanked me because something I wrote helped them in an hour of need. I saw the joy in their face when they talked to me, and the sincere gratitude in their eyes as they spoke.
What would have happened if that person hadn’t seen my work? What would have happened if I wasn’t there for them when they needed me?
I don’t know for sure, but they wouldn’t have had a positive experience with my work, that’s for sure. Their life wouldn’t have been changed for the better because of me.
That would have been horrible for both of us.
The truth of the matter is that what you do can change lives. The better you are at marketing and sales, the more lives you can change.
And you are obligated to change those lives if you can.
That’s the trick about sales.
Sales isn’t about selling, it’s about finding people who need your work in the depths of their soul and showing it to them.
You will get rejected…a lot.
That last bit should have gotten you motivated to talk to all the people, every single one of them in the entire universe.
For about three seconds.
Then, the butterflies in your stomach fluttered and you dropped back down to Earth, right?
It hit you like a ton of bricks.
Because…if you have to talk to everybody, doesn’t that mean you’re going to get rejected by just about everybody? Doesn’t it mean people are going to hate you?
Well, I have bad news and good news.
The bad news is that yes, you will have to talk to people, a lot of people. The good news is that almost none of them will hate you.
Most of them will nothing you.
They won’t care about you at all.
Cheery, right? The creeping dread that most people don’t care if you live or die isn’t a comfortable one, is it?
The good news is that there is even more good news.
The good news is that this happens to everybody. Almost nobody cares about even the most famous person you can imagine.
Think about Stephen King. There isn’t a more famous author than Stephen King. He set the bar for success not only with his books, but also with his movie adaptations, for the past several decades.
He sells about 2 million books worldwide every time he releases something, like clockwork. That’s a massive number, right?
However, there are around 2 billion literate people in the world, which means 1.98 billion people don’t buy his books.
Some might hate him, but most…just nothing him. Stephen King doesn’t factor into their lives at all.
Or think about The Walking Dead…
…the smash hit television show racked up about 12 million viewers an episode at the height of its popularity…
However, there are over 200 million adults in this country. This means 188 million people just…didn’t care enough to watch.
I know that seems depressing, but the depressing part only exists if you look at who doesn’t care about you. The trick is to focus on those that do.
Any network would kill to have a show with 12 million viewers.
Every author would love 2 million book sales every time they launched a book.
Those are phenomenal numbers, but they come with a ton of rejection.
If we focus on the rejection, we’ll always be disappointed. However, if we focus on those who love our work and spend all our time finding more of them, then the rejection doesn’t matter.
In fact, the more fans you get, the more rejection you face, and that’s a good thing.
Because it’s not about those people who don’t care.
It’s about the people who do, and every time you find somebody that doesn’t care about your work, you are closer to finding one that does.
Rejection is a certainty in life, no matter what you do. The real trick is understanding that rejection just gets you closer to acceptance with the right people, and that’s what it’s about in the end; connection.
If we start thinking about that rejection as simply failing to meet the conditions necessary to convince somebody to buy, it stops being about the money.
Now, it’s about the connection. Now, it’s about the journey. Now, it’s about discovery.
If somebody loves my work, they will likely buy if they can, but buying isn’t the goal. Seeing the value is the goal. Even if they see the value, not everyone can or will buy. Some will, though.
That’s a game I enjoy playing. I love that kind of puzzle.
The constant promotion puzzle is exhausting, but the thought exercise of building the conditions as such so that people see the value is a fun game for me.
If you can make that mindset shift, then people who don’t buy aren’t rejecting you. They simply haven’t met the conditions necessary to buy.
Even people who buy your other work have conditions to buy your future work. It’s incumbent upon us to develop a strategy to meet those conditions.
But the money isn’t the point. The connection is the point.
If we don’t make that connection between the buyer and the product, it is a failure of our marketing, not of our work.
Who is gonna buy your work?
Now that I’ve hopefully gotten you over your fears of rejection, it’s time to ask the next logical question. Namely, who is even going to buy your stuff?
If you’ve been doing this for a while with very little success, then there’s a good probability that you think that nobody is interested in the stuff that you sell.
If you haven’t even started yet, then you’re probably thinking that nobody will ever want to buy what you are going to make.
Does any of that sound familiar?
Well, I can tell you definitively that there is a market for what you are trying to sell.
How do I know?
Because there is a market for everything.
For proof, just look at Temu or Alibaba. Most of the stuff on there doesn’t make any logical sense and yet it must sell because they are advertising it. On top of that, I know a ton of people who make niche stuff and kill it.
I know people who make nerdy oven mitts and make good money.
I know people who sculpt weird, made up animals and make good money.
I know people who draw sad, cartoon superheroes and make good money.
Except for maybe that last one these are all obscure niches. There’s no reason somebody should be able to make money on any of them.
And yet they do, because there is a market for everything.
You just have to find it.
I’m going to hit you with a hard truth now.
You are not a special snowflake.
You are one of seven billion people on this planet.
Seven billion.
That’s a ton of people and it ensures that you are not alone in your weirdness. If you like something, there is a good bet that at least 10,000 other people like it, too.
If 10,000 like something, you can make a business selling things to those people.
Kevin Kelly popularized the idea of 1,000 true fans back in 2008 in this blog post on The Technium.
In it, he posits that to make a good living, all you need is 1,000 people who are willing to spend $100/year on your work.
One thousand people is not very many in a world of seven billion. That’s just .00000142 of the entire population.
If you can do that you’ll end up with $100,000 a year, every year for the rest of your life.
Those are not pie-in-the-sky dreams, either.
It is very reasonable to expect to find 1,000 people in the entirety of the world who will pay you $100 a year, or even 10,000 people willing to pay you $10 a year.
This isn’t a ridiculously high number, nor is it complicated. It’s insanely hard work to find those people, but it’s not complicated.
It means you must show your work to millions upon millions of people.
Let’s talk about that number for a minute, though, because in order to find 2,000 people willing to pay you $50/yr, you need to “kiss a lot of frogs”, as they say.
I talked to a creator recently who related a story from a company he worked with that they gathered 4,000,000 in order to find 100,000 engaged fans, and for 1,000 of them to become buyers.
They were obviously selling a wildly expensive enterprise product of some type, but even as an extreme example, it’s instructive.
The fallacy inherent inside the 1,000 True Fans parable is that you are going to need to talk to a lot more than 1,000 people to find enough people who resonate with your message to financially back you.
Basically, you have to show it to everybody you can, whenever you can. If you do that, you’ll whittle down your audience to a few people who are rabid enough to buy everything that you do.
And that’s the game.
Finding those 1,000 people as quickly as possible, and serving them enough awesome stuff that they will pay you to make cool stuff now and far into the distant future.
It’s absolutely and fundamentally doable. In fact, when you look at it that way, it’s almost inevitable, given that you put in the work.
What do you think? Can you put in that work? I think you can.
Now, we just have to figure out how to find them, which is what we’ll talk about next.
Why are you giving it away?
I’ve given away tens of thousands of books in my career to all sorts of people. I generally believe in giving my best stuff away and letting the universe figure out the rest. Somehow, it always works out in the end, but it only work because I know a secret.
The more knowledge I give away, the more trust I build with my audience, and trust is the key to sales. If I give away my best information, people are more likely to buy from me, not less.
It’s because I’m not trying to sell people. I’m providing value to your life with no expectation of return. I know you have a pain point, and I’m filling it. That builds a lot of trust.
This realization turned everything around for me. The only sales I ever saw came from used car salesmen and stock brokers who would murder their mothers for a sale, and I hated that idea.
However, I do like to talk and that became my biggest strength. I talked to my customers forever, but instead of hard selling them, I would provide value and explain products. I would tell them why they should use our products and when they should go with a competitor.
Through that process, I made them comfortable with me because I helped them instead of forcing a product on them.
And, eventually, they would buy.
Well, at least some of them did. Enough for me to make a very good living. I could never tell who would buy, but I figured out that if I talked to enough people, the math worked out in the end.
Most of them never bought, though. Most of you will never buy anything I sell either, and that’s okay. Remember, it takes millions of people to lead to thousands of loyal fans.
The truth is that while I would love for you to buy what I make, that doesn’t factor into how hard I work on what I give away. I’m trying just as hard to help you succeed whether you buy from me or not.
Will the people who buy my products and services get more value? Of course, they will, but only because those products are much longer than this article, and more focused on driving immediate results.
This is the mindset shift that you need to make in your own business if you think selling is gross. The truth is that selling can be gross, but helping people is never gross.
Unfortunately, most businesses are sales first. The first thing and last thing they care about are the numbers at the end of the day, no matter the cost.
99.9% of businesses work like this to their detriment.
True rock stars understand that to be great at sales, you must be value first. You must give information freely and openly.
You must do it consistently, honestly, and with the same effort whether somebody buys from you or not.
If you can do that, you’ll no longer feel gross about sales and you’ll start seeing your network rapidly expand. You’ll start seeing people want to buy from you, instead of you needing to sell them.
I call this the virtuous sales cycle.
Every time I enter a new market, the path for success is pretty much the same. When I start a new venture, there is a little bit higher of a base for me to begin with, but not as much as you would think. This is the general breakdown of my path to success, which I call my virtuous sales cycle.
Step 1:
People are wary at first. They have been burned many times, and they aren’t sure they can trust me. This is when I flood the market with free things because I want to show that my work is incredible. The more people who try my work, the more will get hooked on it.
Step 2:
People hesitantly try one of my products for free, and most of them never read them. However, I keep giving them out to more and more people because a small percentage of those people will like what I have made.
Step 3:
It takes a long time before somebody dips their toe into my water to see what kind of things I create, usually about three to six months. Most people simply don’t try it. This is a very slow time because you can only push so hard. Mostly, you just have to wait, and it’s horrible.
Step 4:
The people who tried and enjoyed my first product buy, or try for free, a second product of mine. They are still wary they will not enjoy my work. After all, anybody can luck out once.
Step 5:
Those people try the second product more quickly than the first. This usually takes two to four weeks, or even less, as many people try the second product immediately. Some of those people don’t like the second product, and their fears are confirmed. Others try it and like the second product and realize I’m not a one trick pony.
Step 6:
At this point, I have developed fans for life. Once I can get somebody to try and love two different products, I have hooked them. They will go and try all my other products and fall in love over and over again. Those fans tell other people and rope them into buying from me.
Step 7:
Those new people who have been referred to me go through steps 2-6, and word starts to spread. My goal is to get as many people as possible through step 6 because that is when the referrals start to trickle in, and people start joining my ecosystem and moving through quickly. A referral from a friend is one of the most powerful marketing tools available.
Step 8:
There is an explosion of revenue every time I launch, as more and more people eagerly await what I have to sell, knowing I’m not going to disappoint them. This is the critical mass I am trying to build with every new venture, and I release products rapidly at the beginning so I can build this head of steam. Once I have built this steam, I can ease off the gas a little bit, knowing my fans will be waiting for me.
I have sold all kinds of things to people in all sorts of consumer service industries: phones, courses, comic books, novels, marketing services, and more. In every case, these steps have been the cycle for my success. It takes forever, which is where advertising helps bring in new people, but the results have been the same across every industry.
The key is making something great that delights people, and then showing it to more and more people to get them excited about what I do. Once the referrals start rolling in, everything starts to snowball, and then it’s time to put gas on the fire and find even more people.
This is my virtuous sales cycle of success.
Just because you give away information freely doesn’t mean you don’t do it strategically, though.
How does providing value work?
Now that we’ve made the shift from a sales-first to a value-first mentality. Providing value builds trust between you and your audience, and trust leads people to buy from you.
While this value is critical to success, it’s important not to provide it haphazardly.
It is essential to provide information for free, but we need to be strategic about the information we provide, to make sure we are pointing people to where they can build a deeper connection with us, for a price.
This is called the value ladder.
The value ladder is a way to structure your business so that people can build a deeper relationship with you and obtain ever more impactful help with their problem for increasingly higher and higher price points.
The first step on the value ladder is free content, delivered consistently and without the expectation of somebody buying from you. This content should help your audience but also relate to products that you offer in your business.
The idea of free content is that people say “Wow! If this is what they’re giving away for free, what must their paid content be like?”
This will lead to somebody opting into your email list with a freebie.Usually, you will need to offer something like a free book or another piece of exclusive content to get people onto your mailing list, but if you have a banger publication, often they will opt-in because they don’t want to miss anything you post.
Once they are on your list, the next step on your value ladder is called the “tripwire offer”. This is an offer that doesn’t cost very much, but turns somebody from a consumer of your work into a buyer of your work.
The tripwire offer is possibly the most important of all your offers. Once somebody is a buyer of your products, it’s 10x easier to sell them your next product. Getting somebody to buy the first time is the hardest part, which is why we offer heavy discounts and trials to get people in the door.
The next rung on your value ladder should be more expensive and give even more value, and should continue the same way with every subsequent rung.
That is the secret to the value ladder and free content in general.
It’s not about just making the content free. It’s about delivering value to somebody who has a need, helping them, and offering a way to get even more help by developing a deeper relationship with you.
This isn’t about telling people to buy your products, though. It’s about helping them and giving them the epiphany they need your work in their life. People buy when they have an epiphany.
The epiphany…
You can’t force a customer to buy your products. You can inform them, enlighten them, and instruct them about what they need, but at some point, the choice is up to the customer.
They must be the ones to take their money and exchange it for your products. They only do that once they have the epiphany that they need your offer.
What is an epiphany?
You know when you’re watching a cartoon and somebody is trying to find a solution to a problem? They think hard for a few moments, then a light bulb goes off over his head and they suddenly know exactly what to do.
That is them having an epiphany.
Our goal is to create an environment where the right customers have an epiphany that they need our products as soon as possible.
One way we do this is by using psychological buying triggers. These buying triggers are subtle ways to get customers to have the epiphany that you are right for them.
There are dozens of buying triggers, but I’ve boiled them down to the six most important that you need to know to get started.
Reciprocity – When you give something to somebody, they are more likely to want to give something back to you. This is one of the main drivers behind providing free, valuable content to people.
Authority – When somebody is an expert in their space, you are more likely to buy from them. It’s very hard to become an expert, and if you can show expertise in a subject people will trust you more, and will spend money with you.
Consistency – The more often you show up, and the longer you show up, the more people will trust you. The simple act of being around somebody improves your opinion of that person.
Commitment – Whenever somebody engages with your brand, be it through opening emails, liking photos, or even finding you at live events, they are recommitting their interest in your brand, and thus reaffirming their trust in you.
Social Proof – When somebody’s friends buy something, they are more likely to buy it, too. This is where having quality reviews and testimonials on your site helps drive sales. People trust what other people are buying.
Scarcity – When a deal goes away, people are more likely to buy it before it vanishes. This is why you see so many limited-time offers and flash sales because the scarcity convinces people to get off the fence and buy immediately. It doesn’t help build trust as much as make people act on the trust that’s already been built up over time.
By adding these buying triggers into your existing practices, you can enforce people’s commitment to your brand, their trust in you, and their desire to enter deeper into your ecosystem by purchasing products from you.
Each of these buying triggers is incredibly powerful by itself, but when you stack them together, you can see exponential results.
For example, a person who gets a daily email from you after opting into your mailing list to receive a free eBook will receive consistency from your emails, build commitment by reading your emails, see you as an authority as you deliver value, and want to reciprocate the generosity of your free eBook, thus engaging four powerful buying triggers at once.
The more of these buying triggers you can engage, and the longer you can engage them, the more rabid your fan base will become.
Getting people to trust you…
Now that we’ve learned all about getting the right people to trust you, let’s talk about building a repeatable system to turn somebody who doesn’t know you into a raving fan. Rest assured, there is a system.
It’s called a sales funnel.
The sales funnel works like an upside-down triangle, wherein a lot of people go into the top and eventually most of them funnel out, leaving only the fraction left willing to buy your work.
Just like buying triggers, there are dozens of ways to design a sales funnel, and they can mean many things to many people.
I have distilled the sales funnel down to its most basic five steps which you need to know right now to be successful.
KNOW – This is the process of finding people and bringing them into your ecosystem. Before this, customers don’t have any idea who you are. Afterward, they are part of your community.
LIKE – After people know who you are, you must show them you are a likable human by talking about yourself, helping them with their problems, and generally creating empathy between you and them.
TRUST – After somebody likes you, the next step is convincing them you make amazing products. This involves showing them what you make, pointing them to amazing reviews, letting them try out your products, etc. The goal is to make them trust that not only are you a good person, but that you make a great product.
BUY – Once people trust you, they should be ready to buy from you when the need arises for your product in their lives. Hopefully, you’ve brought people into your ecosystem who already need your product immediately, but often people will sit for months without buying until a pressing need arises. This is where the scarcity buying trigger comes into play.
BUY AGAIN – Once somebody buys from you, it’s important to deliver an amazing product, even overdelivering, so people are willing to buy from you again and again. It’s 10 times easier to keep an existing customer than to find a new customer, and these customers will be the base of your business in the future.
I like to think of the funnel like this:
We all have that uncle we know but don’t like…
…that cousin we like but don’t trust…
…and that friend who we trust but won’t give money to because they have different tastes.
However, we also have that best friend to whom we’ll gladly give money all the time because they always come back with the coolest stuff, whether it’s food or concert tickets, you love everything they suggest.
Your job is to be best friends with as many people as possible, so they will gladly give you their money.
What is a Flywheel?
Now that we’ve talked about how to funnel people into your business, we need to create a Flywheel so our efforts grow exponentially while our efforts either stay the same or decrease.
The goal of a flywheel is to attract new customers, engage them, and then delight them with your work in a cyclical manner that centers the customer experience. By creating this flywheel for your business, you are able to build your network and audience with the least amount of effort and minimal downside.
The reason people like this model over the funnel is because it centers the customer experience, and retention, above revenue. If you remember us talking about the sales funnel, Retention and Advocacy were huge parts of any successful business, and the flywheel is a wonderful mechanic to foster that part of your ecosystem.
Additionally, it can be very helpful for the MOFU activities we talked about above, as potential customers enter your flywheel before they buy and use what they learn inside of it to make purchasing decisions. Additionally, a properly functioning flywheel can also help your TOFU activities by helping you attract more potential customers.
In a well-functioning business, the sales funnel and flywheel reinforce each other. I like to call a flywheel a virtuous sales cycle in action.
What if they’re still not buying…
There is a chance that you’ll get your funnel set up and people still won’t be buying from you. Then you’ll come back to these emails and just…be so angry with me for wasting your time.
Luckily, there are only a couple of main reasons this could be happening, and simple corrections can easily rectify the flaws in your design.
The most pressing reason you still aren’t making sales is that you aren’t asking for them. Most business owners aren’t giving their customers a reason to buy from them nearly enough.
Customers are not mind readers. While they are interested in your products, there are a thousand things that draw their attention every day.
If you simply tell them that there is a new product or some sort of deal, chances are good that they will buy that product…given that you have made something that interests them.
The second possible reason that you aren’t making sales is that you are collecting potential customers, but you aren’t reaching out to them often enough to make a connection.
Customers need to hear from you every week to keep your brand in the forefront of their minds. If you reach out monthly or even less frequently, people will forget about you.
I’m specifically talking about reaching out with value-based content here. You don’t need something to sell every week, and it’s probably better if you don’t, but to stay top of mind with people, you should be reaching their inboxes regularly.
If you are sitting on emails you’ve collected without reaching out, it means you aren’t nurturing your audience. Even if those people were interested at one point, they quickly moved on to another product when you ignored them.
The next thing you might be doing is bombarding people with pleas to buy your products too often. This is the inverse of the problem above. If you are constantly telling people to buy, then your pleas become white noise. Remember, the people in your audience are more than just $20 bills.
You wouldn’t harass your best friend to constantly buy something from you, and you shouldn’t beg your audience to buy from you all the time, either. It’s annoying.
You must walk a delicate balance between launching too much and giving people enough chances to buy from you.
Because people do want to buy. We are consumers living in a consumerist culture. However, they don’t want to be pestered. If you’re reaching out with an offer, every email should come from a different angle and add to their knowledge of what you’re selling.
For instance, if you’re selling a book, then your first email should talk about the book, then the main characters, then the world, then the villain, and keep building out the lore throughout the launch sequence so customers fall deeper in lover with your work until they have an epiphany.
Everything you do as a business is about nurturing a customer until they have an epiphany and decide to buy.
Another possible option is that you aren’t feeding enough people into the top of your funnel to create enough buyers to sustain yourself.
Only a small fraction of people who make it into the top of your funnel will turn into buyers at the bottom, so if you aren’t filling the top with a lot of people, it’s very hard to churn out enough buyers at the bottom to sustain yourself financially. If you’re converting 1-2% of your leads into customers, you’re doing decently. Anything under 1% is a problem. Anything above 5% means you probably aren’t expanding your audience wide enough.
There is one more option, and that is you are reaching out enough and have enough people in your funnel, but you’ve built a list of people who aren’t interested in what you sell.
This happens if you run unspecific lead gen offers targeted at everybody instead of honing them specifically for your ideal customer. The things you offer for free should be congruent with the things you are selling. If they are not, your email list will not convert into buyers and you’ll have to built it from scratch, as I did with my Twitter account and my first Instagram account.
It is important to fill your funnel with a lot of people, but it’s equally important to make sure you have the right kind of people in your ecosystem who are interested in buying what you sell.
These are the most common reasons you still aren’t making money on your funnel. If you can fix and tweak them, you’ll be well on your way to success.
Filling up the goodwill bank…
The key to sales is trust and the key to trust is goodwill.
Goodwill is a friendly, helpful, cooperative attitude between two people or two groups of people, as defined by Miriam Webster.
If you can develop goodwill with your audience they will grow to like and trust you, and eventually buy from you.
Goodwill operates just like a bank. Every time you do something nice for your audience, whether it’s give them something, offer advice, share articles, or anything else, you make a deposit in the goodwill bank.
When you ask something from your audience, whether it’s to buy your product, like you on social media, or anything else, you are withdrawing from your bank.
If you go to a real bank, for instance, and try to withdraw $50,000 with a balance of just $3, you will be turned away in shame. You must have the money to withdraw it.
The same is true with goodwill. If you don’t have enough goodwill built up, then people will become annoyed by your launch and turn away from you.
However, if you build up enough goodwill that you can comfortably make withdraws, people will accept your launch with open arms and excitedly buy your product.
You need to be building up your goodwill constantly.
Therefore, you need to create an ecosystem where your audience can be given value constantly.
It’s not enough to feed them a weekly newsletter, you need to create multiple spokes in your ecosystem, like spokes in a bike, for people to build a deeper relationship with you all the time, thus giving them more value.
Those spokes might include your mailing list, which should act as your home base, or your social media presence where they can get articles you share, pictures, and other value.
Spokes could also include the free content you create, whether it be in blog, audio, or video form. It can be anything you build out to buoy your ecosystem.
The more spokes you have on your wheel, the more goodwill you will build up.
Additionally, those spokes allow new customers to find and connect with you as well. This allows new people to start building goodwill before they even join your community while existing members get ever-increasing value from your work.
In both instances, they build up goodwill with you and develop a deeper relationship with you, which leads to more people at the bottom of the funnel for your next launch, and thus a bigger base to buy your next product.
A plea and an example
This will be really hard to hear but…did you know that people want to buy things from you but they need you to explicitly tell them you have things for sale?
Not all people. Not even most people. Some percentage of people want to buy things from you. Many are confused how to do so and need guidance.
This does not mean hitting them over the head every hour of the day, but gently nudging them, especially around a sales event, with concise and clear language will do more to boost your revenue than anything else.
Yes, some people will take the initiative, but most people won’t.
Most people need you to point to something and say buy this for this reason.
You have to make the case for why it’s cool, but the best thing you can do is stop hiding behind cute phrases and weird esoteric messaging.
Just tell people you have a thing for sale, and they might like it if they think you are cool.
Honestly and truly, it infuriates me when people don’t send sales emails when I’m on their list. I’m there to buy things.
Yes, reading your thoughts on soup if fine, but I want to buy a thing from you. I want to support you making the next thing for me to buy.
So, here’s what I’d love for you to do, next time you have something for sale.
Send an email that says something like the following:
Hi,
As you know, I’ve been thinking about [THING] a lot recently, which led me to talking to a lot of you about how much you care about it, too.
It turns out I fell down a deep rabbit hole, and ended up making [YOUR PROJECT] I think you’d like. So, I made it, and now you can buy it.
[LINK TO BUY]
Obviously, you don’t have to buy it, but if you like [REASON], [REASON], and [REASON], which I know lots of you do from talking to you, and the weird way my brain works, you could now buy this thing that meshes them together.
I have a lot more to say about this, and I’ll be sending a couple more emails to talk about why I love it, but I wanted to give you a chance to get it first before it goes up in price.
No worries either way. Look forward to talking more about this thing we both love.
-[YOUR NAME]
Look at all the gentle language, and also, most importantly, you parroting the language you have heard them use back to them.
If you are of service to your community, then you are making things based on their (and your) interests.
You don’t have to hard sell them. You just have to explain to them why you love it, why they will love it, and offer the ability to buy.
Once you finish that email, take those reasons above about why they will love it, and write an email about each one of them, teasing it out, and sharing why it’s important. Every email should give your customer base a better understanding of what you’ve made and give them a clearer picture about why they will enjoy it. People buy when they have clarity.
You might think this makes you sound like a used car salesman, but I would kill for some of you to sound a little more like a used car salesman so that I know what to do and how to support you.
People want to support you, but they aren’t going to suffer to do it.
A smarter man than me once said that to succeed in business you must be great at two things: The thing you do, and sales.
Without both, you cannot hope to be successful.
With both, you will be unstoppable.
What do you think?
How did you do on the quiz?
Does any of this resonate with you?
Was past me onto something?
Does this help you break through any mental blocks or limiting beliefs?
Let us know in the comments.
I’m so tired but started reading I stopped here because it was such GOLD - “A very smart person once told me that to be successful as a business, you must be good at two things: the thing you do and selling it.”
You are SO good at this stuff Russell! Going to read the rest with my morning cuppa!! ✨ ☕️
Brilliant article - it completely changed my mindset. Thank you for sharing! I’m upgrading to paid 🙏🏻