I Surpassed My Sales Goal Last Month By Preventing Impulse Purchases
I Surpassed My Sales Goal Last Month By Preventing Impulse Purchases
How my startup still hit its sales goals during COVID-19.
I’ve never tested my sales system during a global pandemic before, so I held my breath last month.
I know that my marketing and sales system works when it comes to creating recurring monthly revenue, selling products or services online, and creating passive income.
I wasn’t quite sure how it would play out during the pressures of a global shutdown and a potential recession, but I know now — it still works. I was able to surpass my sales goal last month.
So what constitutes a sales system that is robust enough to keep a business going under duress? Here’s why my business is still hitting its sales goals despite external stressors.
No Impulse Purchases
A sustainable business isn’t built upon drive-by sales, it’s built by an audience who know you, like really know you. They’ve heard from you enough times that they now recognize you by name and seek your content out.
I spend a huge chunk of my week creating content I’m going to give away for free — I distribute this free content on my Instagram, emails, blog, and on Medium. I’ve continuously shown up with free content for the past 2 years which has resulted in building a relationship with an audience that knows and trusts me.
If anyone from my audience buys something from me, it won’t be an impulse purchase, it’ll be a purchase from someone they know.
When you trust impulse purchases to drive your business’ revenue, you are vulnerable to losing that sale to pretty much anything. Impulse purchases have a small window of conversion — if your shopper doesn’t buy right away, you’ve pretty much lost the sale.
I’ve set up my business to prevent impulse purchases. All of my programs require an application, interview, and acceptance prior to purchase. With this gate up, what happens is that I force my audience to slow down before thinking of buying from me.
This forced slow down pushes folks to really think through whether they want to spend their time filling out an application and reaching out to work with me.
All this thinking leads to two paths — people either realize that they don’t really want to work with me, or that they really do want to work with me. If they realize that they do want to work with me, I just gave them an exercise to convince themselves that they do.
Once your customer has convinced themselves that they want to buy from you, it’s really difficult for someone else to talk them out of it.
I Didn’t Convince You, You Convinced You
Because I’ve put in the work to build a relationship with my audience, if they ever want to work with me, it’ll be something they plan for. It won’t be an impulse purchase where the money may or may not be earmarked for me.
When a purchase is something a customer planned for and sold themselves on, that money and time will always be reserved for that thing they want to buy. Even if an external event shuts everything down, if money and time were already earmarked for your business, it’s not going to disappear. The decision has already been made.
This is what happened with my sales last month — these were purchases that were simmering in the background for a good amount of time, they were already in motion.
My marketing consistency was cultivating these sales for weeks and months.
This is the criteria of a recession, pandemic-proof business model folks — do the difficult work of building a real relationship with your audience, even if it means that you’ll say no to a few impulse shoppers. Even if it means that you won’t see any sales until 60 days from now.
This relationship is the only real and true thing that can carry your business through thick and thin.
Learn how to build this sales strategy for your business — take my free 5-day sales challenge.