Do These 3 Things To Sell With No Sales Team Or Budget
Do These 3 Things To Sell With No Sales Team Or Budget
The equation behind generating sales for a new business is pretty straightforward, but a lot of work to execute.
I get it, being “social” on social media to build an audience and creating content all the time sounds boring and draining.
Because it’s so boring, it’s also the main reason why the majority of you aren’t doing this groundwork.
Here’s the punchline of this post, to sell with no sales team or marketing budget, you have to: build an audience, get really good and being attention-worthy, and consistently show up.
Sound simple enough right? Here’s what ends up happening though and why the majority of business owners don’t do this:
They get bored by the redundancy and mundaneness of finding and building their audience online. Audience building on a social platform is not fun, interesting, or mentally stimulating by any means.
They get stuck on how to create attention-worthy content — they’re not quite sure how to create an interesting bridge between what they have to share and what their audience cares about.
Life gets in the way and they don’t consistently show up every week on their audience-building platforms. So they hit 0 traction and their audience doesn’t grow at the rate it needs to in order to generate substantial sales for the business.
Consider this post an owner’s manual on what you need to do this year if you’re ready to buckle down and invest in a system that’ll have a direct impact on your sales numbers.
If you’re looking for a way to intensely focus on a few key things this year with the end goal of doubling your revenue, this is the formula for you.
The only catch is that you have to commit to it for the full year, and potentially the lifetime of your business if it goes well.
If you have $0 to invest in this, totally fine — but in exchange for money, you need to invest your time into each step of this formula.
Pick 1 Platform, Build An Audience
Don’t pick 2, don’t pick 3, just pick 1.
Pick 1 platform that has the largest pool of your target audience — and because I don’t want you to be miserable while you’re doing this, pick the platform that you’re most stoked about.
For many, this may be a decision between Facebook vs. Instagram.
If you absolutely detest Facebook but are alright with Instagram, pick the platform you dislike less. If you’re going to hang out somewhere almost every day for the rest of the year, make sure you start off on the best foot.
Once you’ve picked your platform, work towards building an audience on that platform every. single. day.
If you don’t know how to do this, look it up. We’re living in an age where there are hundreds of how-to articles and YouTube videos training you on this exact topic. The excuse that you don’t know how to do something doesn’t fly anymore.
If you work on engaging with your target audience on Instagram every day, you can easily build an audience of 1K within a few months.
Take this task and religiously do it every single day for the rest of the year.
Be smart while you’re doing this — look up rules and limits specific to each platform, and reflect on your efforts every few months to make sure that the platform is producing some kind of ROI for you.
Push your audience to an email list so that you have access to them in case your platform’s algorithm changes or if everyone decides to move to TikTok tomorrow because Instagram has some PR disaster.
(My general rule of thumb is if a platform isn’t producing worthy ROI for your business within 3 months, dump it and pick something that you think will perform better.)
If this all sounds terrible to you and you’d rather spill $50 a week to hire someone to do this for you, there are services out there that will organically build your audience for you.
If you don’t like risk, picking 1 platform may sound super risky for you.
Here’s the reality though — if you’re a one-woman show, you won’t have the time or bandwidth to truly excel in audience-building beyond 1 platform. Pick 1 and be okay with it, don’t tinker with other things on the side.
If you truly want to put all of your chips into building an audience, boosting your sales, and succeeding at it — this is the play my friend.
Get Really Good At Being Attention-Worthy
Even if you sell the most coveted, interesting product in the world, if the delivery of how you speak about your product is pretty boring, no one will buy what you’re selling.
If you’re new to this, you may be getting caught up in creating pretty pictures and graphics so that you look good on whichever platform you’re on, or maybe you’re aimlessly sharing content for the sake of keeping the feed filled up.
While you’re focused on this, you may be completely missing the mark on the most important step of all of this, which is to create content that stops your audience mid-scroll and commands their attention.
If you’re sharing nice pictures and content without a compelling message, your efforts are basically pointless.
Even though Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest are all designed for you to share pretty pictures on it, if you focus on that alone, your audience’s eyes will bounce past you.
Stalk your competitors and look for muses who create content that provokes action.
If you find yourself clicking on a brand’s links all the time, are always watching their stories, or find yourself stopping to read all of their posts — study them.
Break apart what they’re doing and decipher why their content is attention-worthy and apply it to your business. Regardless of what industry they’re in, there’s an underlying strategy there that you can pull lessons from.
Once you have some strategies for creating attention-worthy content, tune it up and apply it at every opportunity. Train your audience to associate your brand with a voice, a voice that’s worth stopping the scroll for.
Consistently Show Up Every Week
This is the step 99% of you will stop at — consistently showing up every week.
I am not going to patronize you about this one because establishing a habit to show up every week to your audience dribbles down to one thing — how badly do you want this?
How badly do you want your business to succeed and make more money? You decide.
If you want this badly enough, you will find a way to consistently show up every week on your platforms and engage with your audience. It’s that simple.
Consistently showing up every week on your platforms is what separates the businesses that are thriving from the ones that are struggling.
If you want to be in the thriving camp, you know what you have to do.
Selling online is SO different from selling your products in-person. If you want to master selling online, join my free 5 day sales challenge here.