How to Make More Sales by Summer

Kelly Sinclair: 00:00:00

You have a gift that needs to be shared with the world, but you're staying hidden. And when you're the best kept secret, you can't help people. Are you okay with that? By not putting yourself out there, you're saying you're okay with your clients suffering.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:00:23

This is the Entrepreneur School podcast where we believe you can run a thriving business and still make your family a priority. This show is all about supporting you the emerging or early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur. To CEO while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is Kelly Sinclair and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who started a business with two kids under 3am, a corporate PR girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life is too short to waste doing things that burn you out. On this show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business owners on their journey, and learn strategies to help you grow a profitable business while making it all fit into the life that you want. Welcome to Entrepreneur School.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:01:11

You know how sometimes everything feels like a priority, and then you get just overwhelmed trying to make a decision, because you're constantly juggling all of the things whether you should update your website or tackle your admin or maybe spend time on professional development post on social media, or actually do client work, right? How do you decide how you spend your precious time. And With summer coming around the corner, it might seem like it's time to pull back on certain things. But I'm actually going to encourage you not to take your foot off the gas right now. Now, let me ask you a question. What is the most important part of your business? The answer is making sales. Because no sales, no business, and what are what are we doing here? Right. So then it seemed very obvious, but truly, I have to remind myself, let's do. So that means that your priority needs to be on activities that help you make sales. So I want to underscore this with three big ideas around focusing on money generating activities.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:02:21

So the first one is I want to just talk about why the advice that you're seeing on social media does not work for your business model. You are not a content creator, you're a business owner. So most of the people who are on social media who are sharing about, you know how to use trending audios and how many times a week you should be posting or how many times a day you should be posting and all the different tools and strategies and stickers and polls and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blahs. They are influencers, they are content creators, they get paid to post. So they get brand deals, they share. And they are literally just they're already paid before they have been going on social media to post. So that's cool. When you're a business owner, you're going on social media to post and hopefully get paid, right. So we're actually just like, hoping that somebody's going to find us somebody is going to connect with us, whatever we ask them to do, they're going to take that action, we're going to get a lead, we're going to be able to eventually turn that into a sale. That is the hope of a business owner on social media.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:03:31

And so it's I just wanted to shine light on this because it's truly important to understand that a lot of the advice there is irrelevant to you. Because they are doing the things that they're doing to create the successful businesses they have. But they have a way different model. So if your business model isn't get paid to post on social media and get clicks on a link and make affiliate Commission's on stuff, etc, then we don't need to be following the advice of people whose businesses are like that. And you know that I talk a lot about not needing to rely on social media for visibility. And I think this is one of the important pieces to understand about why I believe that that is true. And I mean, it is it is true. But it helps to showcase that because we just are living in this world, where the narrative is you have to post on social media to be successful. And if you're not doing it on this particular schedule, and rhythm and cadence, you're not showing up, then you're failing. And we feel very, very like like that is a real truth. And it just, we need to break the mold on that. And so I'm going to continue to have this conversation in every way shape and form possible. So you'll be feel a little empowered to release the pressure of focusing on social media so much and particularly like trying to learn the intricacies of, of the tools like that's going to make all the difference. When what really makes the difference in creating visibility for your business and creating connections with potential clients is relationship building. So taking actions that involve you connecting with other people getting in front of the right audiences, and getting the right people into your world, which leads me into my second point around money making activities. And that is that what I call the audience visibility gap. So this is what keeps you from being able to make sales anytime you want.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:05:35

On one side, I'm going to refer to my notes my piece of paper here with the visual and I actually made a video about this as well, if you wanted to send me a message on Instagram as well. So on one side, you're, you're struggling because you're unable to get clients whenever you want. Because your audience is not growing, your sales are stagnant, and truly awareness about you and your business. And what you do is low, and people don't know how you can help them. On the other side of the say, these are two mountains, mountain number one, struggle, mountain mountain number two, happy mountain, okay. And this is where you have the opportunity to reach clients at anytime you want. This is what is available and possible for you. Because you have people that you can put your offer in front of any time, and you stop worrying about the algorithm, okay, and people have already raised their hands as well. So what's in between there is the audience visibility gap that you can bridge with visibility.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:06:36

So another way to share this is like when we think about business growth, we need to think about our sales and revenue. So the dollars in the bank, and that's the point of this conversation today. So let's reverse engineer how to make that happen. You need an offer. So that is a way of working with you that is going that you provide in exchange for making money. So whether that's you have a course or you have a group program, or you have a one on one coaching package, or you have consulting offers you do Done For You services, you're a photographer, whatever that is, so you have something you sell, right and understanding what that is, is important. The second thing you need is an audience of leads who you can show that offer to regularly in order to make sales. So you need people who you can talk to about the thing that you do, right. And in order to have either of those things, you need to get visible to build that audience with leads. So visibility turns into leads, turns into sales. And if you draw that in a straight line, you take away visibility, you have no way of getting leads are making sales, the chain is broken, period.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:07:47

So I really just wanted to drive home, that connection between what you do to put yourself out there to promote yourself to show up to build relationships and make connections entirely supports the entire business and your potential to make sales. It's not about the specific sales mechanism. And whether you have a template for a sales call that you want to use, or if you have, you know, an email funnel in place, or you're using ADS, none of that it's the visibility in the first place. So when you're unable to get clients at the rate that you want, or make sales anytime you want, or your audience isn't growing consistently, and awareness of you and your brand and how you help people is low. That's, that's where you're stuck on the other side of the gap. When you use visibility and visibility tour, in particular, to bridge that gap, you consistently attract new leads who have already raised their hand and are interested in what you have to offer so that you have the opportunity to put your offer in front of them anytime that you want. And you get to make more sales that way. Okay, and speech number two.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:09:00

All right, let's go into point number three. And this is the this is the tough love part where I want to talk to you about how not putting yourself out there is doing a major disservice to your potential clients. And this is really consequences of your in action. So I sent out some emails to my list recently and I actually just want to read one of them to you because this is this is the important part where you take responsibility for your role in getting visible. Okay, so the subject line of the email is by not doing this. You're okay with your clients suffering. All right, I know you're here because you're a helper. You're a heart centered entrepreneur driven by the desire to make an impact. You have a gift that needs to be shared with the world, but you're staying hidden. And when you're the best kept secret. You can't help people Are you okay with that? By not putting yourself out there, you're saying you're okay with your clients suffering, you're okay with them hiring your competitors that are not as good as you. You're okay with your clients remaining frustrated, you're okay with them not having their problem solved. Are you really okay with that?

Kelly Sinclair: 00:10:22

When you hide and you're playing small, it's about your own insecurities. And I say this with so much love, because feeling like an imposter is a daily battle for me, too. There are consequences of your inaction, your people will be left not knowing how to create financial freedom, or simplify their bookkeeping, or implement home systems that will bring them peace, or whatever you help them do. So it's time to put yourself out there. It's time to get more visible. So that's the email. And that's what I wanted to also bring into this podcast episode today. Because I think we forget about that. We, we have the opposite feeling we're like, Oh, if we put ourselves out there, you know, it feels too salesy, and it feels pushy, and it feels uncomfortable. Well, what if you could reverse that and really own the fact that it's your job, to talk about what you do in order for the people who you help to receive that help. That is the mindset shift of marketing that we really all need to adopt. So I hope that that helps for that.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:11:33

So moving on to the last piece. So to summarize, of course, we just talked about the advice on social media, and why doesn't work for you, the audience visibility gap that's keeping you from being able to make sales anytime. And then how not putting yourself out there is doing a major disservice to your potential clients. And of course, I've also shared a lot about my visibility toward method, or intentional visibility that preserves your energy, identifies your priorities, ensures you have a clear message and tracks your ROI. And you can get a full breakdown of how that works in Episode 71. And I'll put a link in the show notes as well.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:12:18

So let's talk about timing for a minute. Right? Isn't it true that it never seems like the right time to do things summer's coming soon, and you may be wondering if it's really a good time to turn up your visibility. But you can make the same argument anytime of the year. It's my birthday, or kid's birthday, or it's Christmas or a different holiday or it's hockey season, like literally anything could get in your way. Either you or your clients may be distracted by other things like you know, With summer coming, kids are off school, maybe summer vacations, different schedules at the lake house. But just because people are heading there on vacations, or they're going to 100 weddings or their kids graduation, it doesn't mean their problems go away, because they still need you to solve them. And just because you may not want to work as much the summer because it's the season it's so short up here in Canada, it's like two weeks long. I'm exaggerating, we get maybe eight right? Of nice weather. So you want to take advantage of it where your kids are home or you're going to 100 barbecues, you still need to focus on visibility. And in fact, the visibility tour method I invented it last summer, in the summer, because it was an actual result of me not wanting to work as much my kids weren't in camp and I got a new paddleboard. So I also knew that I didn't want September to roll around and have to start from scratch. Right? So there's urgency here in the need to be proactive. There's urgency and need to prioritize your visibility right now.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:13:51

So I want to ask you, what are you going to do, we've got option A, which is keep delaying getting more visible and standing in the way of your clients having their needs met. Also known as your clients stay suffering and you don't make money. Pretty sure you don't want that. So option B is you allow me to hand you the plan. So you can step right into increasing your visibility in a strategic and aligned way. Plus, I will provide you with the support that you need to stay on track, customize your priorities and measure the effectiveness of the actions that you take.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:14:27

So if you want to choose option B, here's what I'm gonna ask you to do. Head over to Instagram and DM me the word visible and I will let you know your next steps. I'm looking forward to seeing you in my inbox. Bye for now.

Kelly Sinclair: 00:14:44

You did it you just listen to another episode of the Entrepreneur School podcast. It's like you just went to business school while you folded your laundry prep dinner or picked up your kids at school. Thank you so much for being here. I want to personally celebrate your commitment to growing your business, you can imagine I'm throwing confetti for you right now. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave us a review. Make sure you're subscribed and let us know you're listening by screenshotting this episode and tagging us on Instagram, head to entrepreneurschool.ca for tons of tools and resources to help you grow your business while keeping your family a priority. You can subscribe to our email list and join our community. And until next time, go out there and do the thing.