Transcript
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Welcome to Tiny Marketing.
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This is Sarah Noelle Block, and this is a podcast that helps B2B service businesses do more with less.
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Learn lean, actionable, organic marketing strategies you can implement today.
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No fluff, just powerful growth tactics that work.
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Ready to scale smarter?
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Hit that subscribe button and start growing your business with tiny marketing.
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Growing your business with tiny marketing.
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Hey, beauties, I'm Sarah Noelle Block and you are listening to episode 109 of the tiny marketing show.
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Today I am talking to Jack White, a sales expert for female entrepreneurs, and she teaches us how to sell more authentically, so it feels good.
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You know, most of us, me included, feel real icky about selling unless I'm being truly authentic and I know that I'm driving value for my client.
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Otherwise, I'm like I'm not going to do it.
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So let's talk about today's episode.
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So let's talk about today's episode.
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It's a doozy we are getting into one how to sell more authentically, so it feels good as a female entrepreneur.
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Two, we're talking about how to plan our profit for the next year.
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So we're digging into a lifestyle business where we know exactly how much money we need to make in order to live the lifestyle that we want to live and then reverse engineering that so we know how much we have to sell in order to get that number.
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And last, we're talking about the growth playbook experience.
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That's happening November 12th, live, and in that experience you're getting a private podcast, you're getting bonus masterclasses from people like Jack and you are getting so many templates.
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So let's get into it just a little bit, just a skosh of getting into it.
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You're going to get a spreadsheet to be able to plan your revenue according to your offers so you can tweak your offer pricing to meet your revenue goals.
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And, of course, I want you to compare that against other people who are selling the same thing, so it's not wildly out of the realm of possibility.
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We're also building a content bank.
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So in order to sell that, we need to also attract enough leads to be able to sell to hit that revenue number.
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So we're building a content bank based off of our offers so we know exactly what kind of content we need to create, what questions we need to answer, what stories we need to tell across social media, our signature series, our lead magnets, all of the things.
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So you're getting all of that before the live experience and then on November 12th we're going to be live together, co-working and going through and making sure that we have a plan in place to have our most profitable year yet.
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So if you are not signed up yet, what are you waiting for?
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I have the link down in the show notes and I want you to sign up.
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I want to see you there live and, oh, I think in a week I'm releasing the pre-live elements to it.
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So the secret podcast, the spreadsheet, the content bank template all of that is going out really, really soon.
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So make sure you sign up for it, and if you can't attend live, that is fine.
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You still get all of the other elements to it.
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Okay, so now I need you to stay tuned for Jack.
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Hey, jack, how's it going?
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It's going well.
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How are you?
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I am good.
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We were just talking about how it was possibly the last gorgeous weekend we're just absorbing it.
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As much as we can get outside and soak in that sun and that warm air.
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We're doing it.
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Absolutely, and it's fall, so I had to go apple picking.
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Oh nice, had to pick out some ugly pumpkins, because that's my favorite.
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What did you do?
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Anything fun?
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We did the apple picking and like the cider mill and the pumpkin two weeks ago.
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This past weekend was a lot of visiting with friends in the city and like doing unexpected outside stuff.
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So my son's young, so it was playground and snacks in the park, that kind of stuff, nice, nice.
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Yeah, so for anybody who doesn't know who you are, can you introduce yourself to the audience?
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Yes, Hello, I am Jack White, the founder of Honeybees Group.
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We teach women and small teams how to sell their products and services, and I am the host of the Girls Make Bank podcast.
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I have worked in sales and business development and partnerships for over 20 years at big companies like the New York Times and Armani Exchange, as well as a bunch of VC-backed startups, and have had Honeybee's group for about the last six years, where I'm working with mostly female entrepreneurs on founder-led sales and partnerships for growth strategy.
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Yeah, and we need it because we need it Sales.
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Just I don't know, it doesn't come naturally to me.
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It feels icky, unless I'm coming from a place of value, like I'm adding something to your life in this sales experience.
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That's the only way it works for me.
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It's funny, because so many people that I talk to don't feel good selling and I think when you flip it around and you say, well, I'm not selling you something, I'm providing a solution that I deserve to get paid for, yeah, you sort of flip it on its head, and for a lot of reasons, I believe women are naturally fantastic sellers, and so that's what I'm all about is really giving the strategy and the frameworks to make it feel good and to get results.
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I love that.
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I love that I for, because I worked mainly in retainers for a long time, I didn't have to sell.
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I had to sell a couple of times because I needed those initial ones, but they mostly came from referrals or people who knew me, so it was easy.
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And then I didn't have to do it again because they stayed with me for years.
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And then when I had smaller offers, I was like oh no, I don't know how to do this.
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Wish.
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I found you back then.
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Yeah Well, I think I consider selling a life skill, not just a business skill.
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When you think about just going through life and everything you have to navigate.
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I have an almost six-year-old.
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Negotiation skills come really in handy with toddlers and young children and then also in business.
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I agree, because I had a retainer business for many years and it is that sort of one cell, really warm leads that people are providing you.
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So it feels like the sales process is kind of like it's done for you already.
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It's so much easier.
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It's so much easier, but it's still a sale and I think a lot of people how you conduct that consult call like the language that you use, how you describe the value and the transformation that you can provide for those clients still can make or break that deal.
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And even the small selling.
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Once you get a client and they're on retainer, you have to make sure that you're servicing and upselling and providing value all along.
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People don't think of that as sales skills, but they are soft sales skills.
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So, yeah, I think it's really important, and especially for women, where we're conditioned that selling is aggressive or it doesn't feel good or it's okay to make money doing that and to ask for what you deserve.
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I think really, you know, when I work with people unlocks something in them around like, oh wow, this can feel really good while I'm doing it.
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Yeah, I think you make a really good point there, in that our examples of sales are very masculine and don't feel natural to us.
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So we think that because those are the examples out there for us, we're not seeing how you can sell in a way that feels good to us as females.
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Yes, it's true.
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And when you're selling, or when you're selling or when you're buying into something that is done the right way, it doesn't feel like sales, it doesn't feel like you're selling, it doesn't feel like somebody is pushing something on you, right.
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And so that's where I think the magic is is breaking this myth of you know you have to get to yes and you have to just win at all costs.
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I don't believe in that at all.
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If somebody is not a fit for what you have, then you should not, then you should be okay walking away from that and not trying to like make it work.
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Yeah, yeah, that reminds me I subscribe because I low-key, have an obsession with learning about sales.
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Because I was just like low-key, have an obsession with learning about sales, because I was just like I felt so uninformed.
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So I subscribed to this newsletter called the Follow-Up and I always scroll to this one section where it's like this pullout tip and I'm like every single time I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to apply that.
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But one of them was about how being a salesperson isn't really about being a salesperson, it's about being a guide and uncovering what it is, the solution that they actually need, whether that is a solution that you can apply or that someone else can, and that really changed my perspective on it.
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I'm just guiding them to a solution.
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It might not be me, and that's okay.
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Yeah, that's totally right and that's one of the reasons I think women can be really good sellers is because, in order to be that guide, you have to be a really good listener and you have to actively ask the right questions.
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And I think women are naturally inquisitive, we naturally want to be solutions oriented and collaborative and we're good listeners, and so that's what a guide does.
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I love that analogy and I think it's spot on is you know, we're helping you get to the right solution.
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And when you take the ego out of quote, unquote, winning and losing business, and you're about providing value even if you're not the right solution, people remember that and they come back and they say, oh, you know what?
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I didn't hire Jack to do this, but I remember she did X, Y and Z and I really liked her.
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Sarah, you should talk to Jack because I think she could maybe be a solution for you.
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Somebody walks away from that conversation with an icky feeling, feeling like you were pushing something on them that clearly wasn't a fit.
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They're not going to refer you or kind of mention your name in a good way, and that all a part of this like cycle of her, and it was a female what made her so good was that she was just an expert at pianos, so she was able to be that guide which I think that a lot of people who listen to this show would really resonate with, because a lot of us are the experts.
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We're in that expert seat, so you don't really need to sell so much as be able to listen and guide through your expertise, because you know the possible solutions Exactly.
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So that's not even the topic for today.
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You're a sales expert.
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That's not the topic today.
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Today, we're talking about your profitability planner, so let's get into that First.
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I just I'm curious what do you look at when you're trying to plan what your profit should be?
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I think it's personal for every business, so many.
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So I look at sort of my lifestyle, right, because I am a solopreneur, I have a small sort of external team that helps me run and grow my business.
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But I look at how much money do I need to put in my pocket at the end of the day?
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Right, and that's right now.
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What do I need to do to fuel my life?
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And then what do I want this like future vision of my life to be and how much does that cost?
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And that's how I really think about growing and scaling my business, because Honeybee's Group is a lifestyle business.
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Right, I'm not this, I'm not taking VC money, I'm not trying to scale at all costs.
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Like I'm running this business to help the people that I work with and to, um, you know, fuel my lifestyle.
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So I really think about profit in terms of fueling my lifestyle.
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Um, and I think it's different for every business Do you have?
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What kind of hard costs do you have in your business?
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What kind of marketing costs do you have?
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And so that's really what I'm trying to grow towards is sort of my future dream.
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State of lifestyle.
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Meets how much I want to work meets how much do?
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I want to scale this business.
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Yeah, that's exactly how I plan to.
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I literally just scheduled an episode talking about this exact thing.
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It's like building out your revenue goals based off of your lifestyle, because a lot of us are our solo businesses, we're running our own thing and our goal is only to live the lifestyle that we want to live, and that's okay.
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Just because person X is trying to hit a million dollars, which they may or may not, and their profitability may be really low or the same as what ours are, it doesn't mean that you need that same goal.
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Yeah, I think there's this.
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There's a lot, especially, I think, in the online coaching, consulting and course sort of world.
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We talk a lot about six, seven, eight-figure businesses and that is a great goal I love and I want people to hit those numbers if that's what they're trying to do.
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But I think the sake of doing it, for doing it without understanding like the why, the what goes into it, and you can have a seven-figure business and be pulling in really mid to low six figures in profit, like low six figures, and it takes a lot of work to get to seven figures.
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And so I just think, starting, you know, when you're trying to build a lifestyle business, starting with how much you need and really getting honest with yourself about the type of business that you want, because not every business is a lifestyle business.
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Sometimes you have products and you need teams and you need full-time people and you have real hard costs.
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Sometimes you want a scale business, right, and so you want to get acquired and I've worked for a lot of companies where that's the goal, and so that model and those revenue numbers and that profitability number looks a lot different, right, if you're trying to grow for scale and as much top line revenue as you can, with the hopes of getting acquired profitability might be less important to you than if you are building a lifestyle business, a solopreneur business, or maybe you have one, two or some fractional people helping you.
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Profitability is going to be really important to you, and so really knowing, one, the kind of business that you're trying to reach, what's your end goal, and then, two, how much money do you need, you know, at the end of the day, to fuel your life, are two really important things.
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Yes, I completely agree.
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Now let's talk finance terms.
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So can you tell me what the difference is between revenue, profit and all of those little terms that we're seeing on, like our fractional CFOs and accountants and bookkeepers are sending us?
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Yeah, I think you can really get complicated when you talk about business financials, again, depending on the kind of business that you're trying to grow.
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I think for a lot of the people that you work with and I work with, I try to keep it really simple, and so the three or the four terms that I talk about are income, which is revenue, top line revenue, expenses, profit, COGS, which is your cost of goods sold, and then taxes.
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We're going to put a pin in taxes because I think people really underestimate that.
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They do, Depending on where you live.
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So your income, your revenue, is all of the money that you have coming into your business and you can have multiple revenue streams.
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So, let's say you have different products that you sell, you have a retainer-based business, but then you also sometimes let people hire you hourly for like a you know, pick my brain or something like that right, those are two different revenue streams.
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Let's say you have some digital products, low-cost digital products.
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That's another revenue stream.
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So really, maybe you do events, Maybe you have a paid mastermind or sort of paid digital membership or in-person membership.
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All of those are different revenue streams and so all of them together are the income or the revenue for your company and you know, I sort of say that you should have as tight a revenue.
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You know, especially when you're a solopreneur you have a really small team.
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I think you should keep a really limited number of revenue streams from just a marketing perspective and a fulfillment and management perspective.
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But you can certainly, if you've been doing this for a while.
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Have you know, three or five or however many really strong revenue streams that serve different purposes in your business?
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Yeah, as long as you can handle it.
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As long as you can handle it, that's right.
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But you know that's the income piece, that's the revenue piece.
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On the expenses side, the same thing and this is where I see people really underestimate the cost of running businesses.
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When I talk to people about you know kind of ops and sales planning and financial planning for their business, they underestimate how much it costs, both from big expenses and a lot of little expenses that end up adding up at the end of the year.
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So your expenses are everything that you have to pay, right, to run your business and you should know all of these costs.
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That's your tech costs, right?
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So if you're on a Google suite and you have, even if it's $8 or $12 or $24 a month, right, that's a cost that you need to kind of track and know your marketing costs, any travel or conference costs, any actual costs that you have to pay to deliver what it is you sell.
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That is a separate line called cost of goods sold.
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The COGS is like the financial term for that that could be.
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If you sell digital, if you sell a physical product, how much does it cost you to actually create that product, ship that product to your customers?
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If you do events, you know how much does it actually cost?
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To put that event together and I think I mentioned marketing costs, but for some people that's a large expense.
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So all of those are your expenses.
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So when you take your revenue and you subtract your expenses, you end up with your profit and that's how much money you get in your pocket at the end of the day.
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Minus and this is where I see a lot of consultants and coaches and solopreneurs falling down is minus taxes.
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This is different, you know, depending on where you live.
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Depending on where you live, small business taxes can be pretty high, and so you should work with an accountant to really understand, like, how much money you should be putting aside for taxes, because it can be as much as a third of your total revenue, which is a lot.
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That's how much I set aside.
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Yeah, yeah, it can be a lot.
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Now, as a business owner, you get deductions for a lot of things, so you can work with someone that can help you figure out your tax strategy.
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But I see a lot of people get burned, especially the first, third, fifth year that they're in business, as they're scaling their business and they're maybe moving away from a W-2 sort of being an employee job to running their own business.
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They're used to those taxes just getting taken out automatically and when you're a small business owner, you're responsible for taking those taxes out.
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Yes, I myself have been hurt that way, I've been hurt that way too.
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Yeah, I even had an accountant specifically for that, and it was still messed up.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So it's something that I think you know, not to scare you, but just to save more than you think you're going to need for taxes.
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Yeah, I definitely recommend having a separate account where, every month, you're setting aside a third of what you made into that account, because Because, worst case scenario, if it doesn't end up being that high, that's great, that's your take home, that is your owner draw.
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Yep Exactly.
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I'd rather have an owner draw than a debt Me too.
00:23:37.932 --> 00:23:42.086
Okay, so you have a profitability planner.
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First, we looked at what are those financial terms we have to understand, but how do we determine what our enough number is?
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Yeah, so this is another.
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So the profit planner is sort of a digital workbook that allows you to go through these different steps for your own business and for your own life, and the Enough Number arch is really personal for each person and there's a worksheet.
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In general, I think people don't have a strong handle on their budget Business owners, whatever it is in general, I think people don't have a good handle on how much they spend and how much they need to sort of run their life, and so this gives you a real strong baseline to what is that number for you.
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And as you're planning your business growth, as you're planning sales goals, as you're planning what you need this business to provide for you financially, it's really important to know what that baseline number is.
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If your insurance, health insurance, if you're self-employed and you know you don't have somebody covering that through a corporate sponsor food, transportation, tuition or child care, vacations right, this isn't I'm not trying to give you like a bare bones, don't have any fun, right?
00:25:19.419 --> 00:25:23.961
So it's like a vacation gifting, manicure if that's your thing.
00:25:23.961 --> 00:25:33.247
So this is like you get to customize, okay, and you just lay out here's my life, these are the things that are important to us, charity or gifting.
00:25:33.247 --> 00:25:39.270
Here it is, and then here's what the total for all of that is.
00:25:39.270 --> 00:25:44.374
And if you do have a partner or other income, that is a part of that.
00:25:44.374 --> 00:25:50.836
Like there's a space for that too, right, because maybe you're not funding your entire lifestyle on your own right.
00:25:50.836 --> 00:26:01.821
It's two of you together and then that gives you sort of a baseline profit that you need your business to get to.
00:26:02.183 --> 00:26:28.806
And I think for people who maybe have side businesses they have a full-time job and they have a side business that they maybe want to grow into their full-time business this is really helpful if you're just starting out in your business or if you're looking to take your business to the next stage, like Sarah, when you moved from retainer to more of a ongoing sales cycle.
00:26:28.806 --> 00:26:38.123
Right, this would have been a good exercise to be like okay, what kind of hit am I going to take, what does my enough number look like and how do I kind of reconcile the two?
00:26:38.123 --> 00:26:44.595
Because from there we can start building a sales and a revenue plan for your business.
00:26:44.595 --> 00:26:48.010
But you need to know that number first, that baseline.
00:26:48.010 --> 00:26:49.365
This is how much I need to make.
00:26:49.444 --> 00:27:09.728
Number yeah, and for someone who also goes through this exact process, what I do is I use my QuickBooks and I go through that and see what do I have to spend money on every single month or every single year, because a lot of times I'll go through there.
00:27:09.728 --> 00:27:15.790
I was like I don't actually need that, I don't use that enough for it to be worth that much money and I'll cancel it.
00:27:16.440 --> 00:27:24.269
So I go through QuickBooks on the business side and then I use Rocket Money on the personal side and it basically works the same way with filtering.
00:27:24.269 --> 00:27:35.731
It's like a database of all the stuff that I spend money on and I can do the exact same process so I know exactly how much money I need to actually make to live the lifestyle I want.
00:27:36.553 --> 00:27:48.548
Yeah, and I think tools like that Rocket Money there's a few of them out there are really helpful if you, sort of you know, are spending in a lot of different places and it aggregates everything in one place.
00:27:49.069 --> 00:27:57.522
Yeah, and it's nice that it like categorizes it and tells you when your bills are coming out, and all of that so you can understand your cash flow a little bit better.
00:27:57.522 --> 00:28:06.895
Okay, so we understand our terms now and we understand how to come up with our enough number.
00:28:06.895 --> 00:28:17.515
So how do we last, how do we figure out how to sell to reach that enough number?
00:28:19.417 --> 00:28:24.465
Yeah, I think there's a couple things, I think marketing.
00:28:24.465 --> 00:28:29.942
So I think people confuse sales and marketing and I think they're two pretty distinct things.
00:28:29.942 --> 00:28:39.671
I think marketing is a very important part of your business and marketing is sort of all of the touch points that you have for your business.
00:28:39.671 --> 00:28:45.022
What is the total number of eyeballs or people that you touch in your business?
00:28:45.022 --> 00:28:58.318
And when you think about sales planning and sort of revenue, the marketing and the ecosystem of who you are talking to plays a big role in that.
00:28:58.318 --> 00:29:11.109
Right, because your sales is going to be a subset of the total audience, right, and so we often start with well, what does your ecosystem look like?
00:29:11.109 --> 00:29:13.374
What does your email list look like?
00:29:13.374 --> 00:29:15.237
What do your social handles look like?
00:29:15.237 --> 00:29:17.140
What does your web traffic look like?
00:29:18.582 --> 00:29:32.234
And talk about kind of how many you know hits, quote, unquote can we get for your services and your products, and then from there we look at past data and do some math to figure out.
00:29:32.234 --> 00:29:45.474
You know, okay, here's what we can sort of estimate for sales now, and then play around with different levers to say, okay, is this enough?
00:29:45.474 --> 00:29:46.798
Can we fulfill on this?
00:29:46.798 --> 00:29:55.757
Do we need to add some fuel on top of the marketing engine right To kind of open that up to get more people into the funnel.
00:29:55.757 --> 00:30:25.160
But I think you know, knowing your enough number and then having a really clear idea of sort of what your business looks like now in terms of marketing efforts, what that engine looks like, what your sales conversion looks like, gives you a really solid base of like okay, today this is what it looks like, and then you can start to implement strategies and techniques to grow from there.
00:30:25.580 --> 00:30:28.511
Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it.
00:30:28.511 --> 00:30:31.819
So you're looking at your conversion rates for everything.
00:30:31.819 --> 00:30:39.943
You're looking at your close rate Once you get people on a sales call or if you group sell with, like, a workshop or a webinar.
00:30:39.943 --> 00:30:41.536
What's your conversion rate there?
00:30:41.536 --> 00:30:45.616
And then you can reverse engineer how many leads do I actually need?
00:30:45.616 --> 00:30:55.284
How many people do I need get into my website and you can add that fuel where maybe you'll run ads or maybe you'll do partnerships.
00:30:55.284 --> 00:31:02.634
So you're getting in front of new audiences and there's a lot of different ways to grow that audience.
00:31:02.634 --> 00:31:08.779
So, even if your conversion rate is a certain amount, the more people who are in it, the more conversions you get.
00:31:09.550 --> 00:31:10.492
That's exactly right.
00:31:10.492 --> 00:31:15.663
And then that's all a part, I think, of the sales funnel, right?
00:31:15.663 --> 00:31:24.819
So when you think of a funnel, it's like V-shaped and so it's really broad on top, deliberately, because that's all the people you touch.
00:31:24.819 --> 00:31:49.156
You're pouring them into the top and then, as you qualify people whether that's through marketing message, consultation, calls, you know, whatever your lead gen, freebies or low cost kind of digital products, whatever it might be, you know you're you're narrowing that audience down, down, down, down, down to the bottom of the funnel, which is the smallest part.
00:31:49.597 --> 00:32:03.055
That's where the conversion happens and that's where a lot of the work I do with small teams and and individuals is really important is you know you can get people down there, but how are you talking to them?
00:32:03.055 --> 00:32:21.192
What are those messages, what are the techniques that you're doing to really like, show value, show transformation, get the clothes done, because now you've really gotten the right people down to the bottom, if they've self-selected themselves all the way down there.
00:32:21.192 --> 00:32:27.671
That's where the sales training comes into play, right, because now you should be converting them.
00:32:27.671 --> 00:32:35.682
If you're not converting people, if you have, you know, this funnel and people get all the way down to the bottom and you're not converting them.
00:32:35.682 --> 00:32:38.681
Either one something's wrong with your funnel because you're not getting the right people in.
00:32:38.681 --> 00:32:45.979
Either one, something's wrong with your funnel because you're not getting the right people in, or two something's wrong with your sales technique because you're not closing them.
00:32:46.501 --> 00:32:47.286
Yeah, yeah.
00:32:47.286 --> 00:33:09.202
There are definitely things that you could do in your marketing to make sure that you are repelling the wrong people right off the bat so you can get more people through that funnel Like being incredibly authentic in your marketing, so you are attracting and repelling right at that discover stage of the funnel.
00:33:09.202 --> 00:33:18.153
And make sure that your sales pages address objections, talk to the transformation, speak to the challenges they're going through.