You’re limiting your sales with these 5 common mistakes. Here’s how to fix them

Unfortunately, the best marketing in the world doesn’t guarantee sales. In today's episode, I’m chatting about the 5 common mistakes that are leaving money at the door and how to overcome them.

In today's episode we talk about
– Identifying the ‘happy medium' of offers that appeals to your audience… Ask yourself, what does my ideal customer need and how do they want to consume it…?
– How to strategically design a suite of offers where you can take your clients through the entire journey of developing, growing and repeatedly evaluating their business.
– Refining the problems that you solve by getting clear on creating a portfolio of offers that are related, relevant and bound by a common link.

 

Today, I’m talking about a couple of common mistakes that I've seen so many business owners make with the offers that they are selling to their audience. And these mistakes tend to actually limit how much you will sell. Now, I am a marketer. I love marketing my business, but as a business, I have also had to learn the difference between marketing and sales because they are not the same thing. 

And I've had to start to get really good at sales, even though I've always thought I'm not good at selling, I'm still not great at selling, but I have to do it. I've always thought I hate sales. I don't want to be salesy. All of those yucky things that pop up in our minds around selling. But unfortunately, without sales, you don't really have a business. And this is one huge thing that I wish I'd known in my first business. 

You can have the best marketing in the world, but if you can't convert the people you are getting in front of into paying customers or paying clients, you aren't making any money in your business. And you kind of need to make money to stay in business!

 

5 common mistakes that are limiting sales in your business

 

1. You're not giving your audience enough different ways to work with you

I've been guilty of this. For most of 2020, I only had two ways you could work with me. I sold an old product called the Digital Product Creators Vault. I had plans for what I was going to create and launch in the future, but Launch Magic didn't exist then. I wasn't working with clients. So I really only had two ways that somebody could work with me. 

Now different people have different budgets. Different people have different ways they like to work. Different people have different problems and different needs. So we need to create different offers for the different people that we can help. You can't expect to pigeonhole everybody into one way of working with you, unfortunately, and I learnt this one the hard way, because if you do, then they'll just go to a competitor instead. 

 

2. Giving too many different ways for somebody to work with you. 

I see this happen a lot with digital products. They'll create a bunch of mini-courses or eBooks on a whole range of different topics. 

And then they'll wonder why they aren't selling as many as they had hoped they would. And that's usually because creating a massive library of offers can be very confusing to potential clients. 

Think about when you open up Netflix and you don't really know what you're watching, you're not in the middle of bingeing a show. And you're like, oh, I feel like watching a movie tonight. 

And you scroll and you scroll through a hundred movies and you still can't decide because there is just so much choice. It's called the paradox of choice, where the more things we can choose from the harder it actually is to make a decision. And what tends to happen in our businesses is our potential clients don't usually know what the solution to their problem is. 

They are looking to you as the expert to guide them and to tell them what will solve their problem. And if they're not sure what the right solution is, they might buy the wrong solution. Or they won't buy anything at all. 

And plus it's just exhausting to run a business with a gazillion different offers. I did this for a while. I had a whole bunch of online courses. They were all on a bunch of different topics. And I thought, great, I'm going to create this library. All the courses were online. Business owners can just come and pick and choose and do the courses that suit their needs. 

I ended up retiring them because it was exhausting to keep the courses up to date. It was exhausting to run them. I didn't have enough time to launch them. So I have retired them and it was probably one of the best decisions I made. I also did this a little bit. When I was working one-on-one with marketing clients, I would let them design their own packages. And it didn't work because I was the one who knew what they needed, not them. I was the one who knew what the solution to their problems was, but they would pick and choose the services that they thought they needed instead. When I knew that the reason they weren't selling was that the messaging behind their products was off. 

But they would then go and choose to work with me on their Instagram marketing because they thought they needed to reach more people. 

So the real solution to this is to sell fewer offers. But make sure that the ones you are selling are strategically aligned. Because that will mean you attract new clients, new ideal clients. And it'll keep your existing ones coming back to buy from you over and over again. Because you're solving the problems that they have over and over again. 

 

3. Solving the same problem in all of your different offers

Now there is a balance here. But let's use this example. 

For example, if you are a website designer, let's say you work one-on-one with clients to design their custom websites. You also have an online course teaching people how to DIY their website design. And you sell templates with ready-made website designs. 

Yes, in some ways, you are giving different people, different ways to work with you. You are helping people to achieve the same outcome in different ways, the same outcome is that they have a beautiful website and some people will have the budget for one-on-one. And others won't. Chances are it's going to be a very long time before someone comes back to you and buys from you again. 

Because if what you are selling is any good, then they won't need a website again for a while. It's much easier to re-engage and sell to someone who has already bought from you once than it is to attract and sell to somebody new. You know, there's an old saying in the marketing world. I don't know where this came from, but it's been around for a very long time. And that is it's five times cheaper to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. If a client comes to you to solve one problem and you have nothing to offer them after you've solved that one problem and they loved working with you and they really want to work with you again. You're missing out on a lot of sales.

 

4. Trying to solve all of your audience's problems in one single offer

There is a very important distinction between giving them the ability to pick and choose the solutions vs solving smaller and more specific problems in each offer. We don't want them to be able to pick and choose as much as we want to be able to solve very specific problems. 

So instead of having one big cost, perhaps this could be two separate offers. One on starting your podcast and one on growing your podcast. The difference between that and then the pick-and-choose kind of solutions pick and choose Netflix style kind of offers would be like, Hey, here's a course on how to decide your podcast topic. Here's an ebook on how to choose the right microphone. They can pick and choose those little pieces, but they might already think that they have the right microphone and they might accidentally miss out on a very important part of starting their podcast that they don't realise is important, but you, as the expert knows is important. So there's a difference there between specific problems versus that pick-and-choose kind of method. 

 

5. Trying to solve too many different unrelated problems

This is confusing. It's confusing for you and it's confusing for your potential buyers. 

You tend to end up with too many, very vastly different ideal customers. And it results in everybody who comes across what you are offering, wondering if it's right for them and their question, like, who is this for? Is this for me? And that makes it really hard for them to make that distinction of, yes, this is for me. 

It's going to help me to solve what I need help with. It also doesn't really lead to clients coming back to you because half of the problems you solve, don't have. And the problems that they do have you maybe don't solve. So then instead they will go to somebody else who does solve the other problems that they have. 

It can also take your content in many different directions. And that tends to lead people again, to wonder what do you do? Who is this for? And it feels messy. It feels a lot like that Netflix-style offers library, where you have all of these different directions, all of these different offers. But they don't fit together nicely. There's no natural progression from one offer to the next. 

 

How to fix these mistakes

I have two action steps for you. Firstly, I want you to identify which of these mistakes are you making in your business. 

Are you trying to give your audience too many different ways to work with you? Are you not giving them enough different ways to work with you? Are you solving the same problem in all of your offers? Are you trying to solve all of your audience's problems in one offer or are you trying to solve too many different unrelated problems now? 

Once you've identified where you're going wrong. What can you do to fix it? I want you to think about what's one thing you can do to fix it. 

 

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