When you launch your new offer, the first time you enrol, we know what that’s going look like, right? It’s likely to be a soft launch, it’s likely to be; reaching out to tell your warmest contacts about the new thing, maybe you will do a live event, I’m sure there will be a flurry of social media activity where you talk about it, maybe a flurry of emails where you contact your list about it, and you make those exciting and all-important first sales.

But then the serious business is filling this program month on month. You don’t have to enrol every single month if you don’t want to, but most people do want sales every month, right? So that’s why I focus on monthly enrolments. That kind of cash flow – consistent monthly cash flow – does not happen by accident. It absolutely does not happen by accident, and that’s why I want you to design a promotion and sales cycle.

They’re going to look very similar because they’re all going to contain the same elements over a similar time period, but the specifics of the subject matter, and how long you require to do something, and what kind of event you decide to run, are going to be unique to your business and what works for you, what works for your energy, what you like to do, what you want to do, and what your current level of resource is like. You get to set the pace.

I’ve used the example of a six weekly sales cycle. That’s what I aim for in my business. It works for me. Some people teach to do it every month. To me that feels a little bit, a little bit frantic and you may even decide that you want to stretch it out to an eight week sales cycle.

The important thing is, is that you get back on the cycle every time you fall off. It’s by going through it over and over and over again that you develop a standard process, a procedure that you can repeat whenever you want to sign new clients. Some of you have already launched enough times or run enough live events that you have assets created now. You have landing pages that you can copy and repurpose. You have emails that you can copy and update and adapt. So every time you do it, the process gets a little slicker, right? It gets a little bit more rehearsed. It gets a little bit elevated every single time you do it. The standard process, a procedure that you can repeat whenever you want to sign new clients.

Another key, key critical part in this process is the automations. They’re not going to do all of the work for you. That’s not their purpose. Especially at the beginning, like when you’ve just set them up, are not going to bring you the number of clients you want. Not when you have a tiny ad spend and not when they are still like pre-optimization, right? They’re not going to convert at high numbers for you. Ultimately, that’s the goal – but at this stage, it’s an added bonus if they convert into sales. Yes, we would love to sign a few clients from those automations but the more important job that they’re doing is growing your audience, and also warming up the people as they join.

So that each time you run this six-week cycle – if your automations are set up – you will have more people in your audience than you did at the beginning of the previous six-week cycle, and they will be pre-warmed. They will already have some understanding of your brand, your methodology, your offer. All of that has been handled by the automation.

This is how your cycle helps you break the feast and famine roller coaster which is a big part of why we’re doing this, right? That’s one of the big benefits of having a profitable, always open group offer is to break the terrifying and exhilarating highs and lows of sales and revenue which really scupper a lot of very small businesses. The thing that really stitches up a small business’s lack of cash flow.

The biggest success indicator in this whole system is lead flow. If you can nail lead flow, which is good fit clients joining your audience, you massively stack the odds in your favour. It’s one of the hardest things to master and it is one of the most important. This makes and breaks businesses, whether you know how to consistently generate leads. How to get people to raise their hands and say, yes I’m interested in this work.

So why do we need a six week weekly cycle? Why can’t we just rely on the automations to do it? Evergreen versus cohort group programs each have their pros and cons, and on the downside for Evergreen is that it’s really tempting to think that you have to be promoting the same thing constantly all the time and that is really difficult to do. It’s really hard work to be in constant lead generation mode. It’s really hard work to be in constant sales mode. Launches are very very draining, yes, but at least they are time constrained!

If you need to promote constantly to fill your group, that does not sound like a good time in business to me. Selling all the time just doesn’t feel great. We need variety and we need to change the pace, otherwise we lose steam, we get this feeling of hitting your head against a brick wall, screaming into the void, and ultimately your audience gets bored of the same message and start to ignore it. But! We do still need leads every month. We do still need sales every month, so what a conundrum we are in.

Because we need those sales every month, ‘not promoting at all’ is not an option either. We need to find a middle ground. That’s what this six-week cycle is designed to do: take the best bits, the most important bits of the launch process, and combine it with the most efficient, effective pieces of evergreen marketing as well.

When we get this right it means we have inbound leads – people reaching out – from automations and your content strategy, and you have a repeatable, reliable, system for deepening your relationship with your audience, which will be growing and changing every time you repeat the six-week cycle.

The first part of the cycle, which we’re not getting deep into today, is the automations. And what do I mean by that? I mean, “what happens when somebody joins your list.” That could be from the Thank You page, the email welcome sequence, nurture emails. It’s the invitation to join your Facebook group and what happens there. And this will be largely hands-free once it is set up. It’s a crucial part of the process, but it’s not something that you need to attend to every six-week cycle, once it’s set up.

The automated piece is really, really important. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you in terms of selling to people who are ready to buy. So if you have a validated offer, if you have an offer that people have bought, but you haven’t got the automations set up yet, let’s talk about that. It’s definitely something to look at. It will serve you really, really well over the long term.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a hefty, chunky piece of work. It’s kind of daunting to undertake. It’s not something that you can just knock out in a day or even a week. But if you have that piece working really well, and it’s all converting, and you’re running ads at the top, you can actually skip the six-weekly sales ritual because you have so many calls booked, client signed just from the automated marketing.

Even once you do have all those automations in place, you probably are still going to keep doing all of the other pieces of this ritual, at least for a while. Then you have a process that you can run anytime you want to see what you can do to boost your sales figures for any particular given month.

The next piece of the six-weekly cycle is, things that you do daily and weekly, which I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on. But this is the part that most people are kind of on top of. So it’s like the social media content semi-consistently, you know a few times a week. It’s your nurture strategy. It’s your hand raiser posts. It’s the DM conversations that you’re having, the sales conversations that you’re having, the market research conversations that you’re having, its deepening connections and relationships. It’s networking.

And then the third piece of the ecosystem, is really what we’re here to talk about today which is the monthly or six-weekly cycle. Now let me see if I can give you a link. If I’ll drop the link in the group. It’s just a blank calendar, which you can update the date in the first cell of the first row. It’s the spreadsheet, all of the rest will automatically adjust. So what you will be left with is a blank year to view calendar with one square for every week of the year.

Okay, so the first thing to do will be to go through add to the calendar in any commitments you know you have. Like if you’re traveling, or you decided that you don’t work in August when the kids are off school, Christmas and Thanksgiving, just block off those weeks where you’re not available for work. And then go through your calendar and in every six-week block, we’re going to have a sales period and a live event.

The biggest mistake that I see people fall into – I have fallen into it many, many times – is setting up all of the rest of these pieces, setting up the automations, setting up the daily and weekly content strategy, but forgetting to actually promote. Because we have pushed back against the idea of promoting all the all the time what we end up doing is promoting it maybe one day a week, or two or three days a week but mixed in with a whole lot of memes and other kind of unfocused content, so in effect we’re just not promoting it at all, and then wondering why we don’t have sales.

So out of your six week block, two weeks are going to be dedicated to actually selling an offer. Not engagement, not lead generation, not connection, actually selling. For me that usually looks like a week of selling in the DMs, and then a week where I’m all over my socials. Sometimes they take a bit longer; this is your calendar, you can change the dates, you can change the amount of time you give to the different elements, but I want you to be sure that you are actually promoting your thing. That you are asking for the sale. That you are selling your shit for at least 10 to 14 days out of every six weeks.

There are lots of resources in the teaching library about what that looks like. For most of you, it will be a similar strategy to mine, which is a big focus on lead generation and getting people into DM conversations, sharing a Google document with people who raise their hands. But if you are unsure about any of what needs to be a part of your two-week promotion cycle every six weeks, we can talk about that on our calls, and there are lots and lots of trainings that I can direct you to.

Now you’ve got a six-week cycle, you’ve taken out two weeks which are going to be your promotion, enrolment, signing clients, asking for the sale period; and the other thing I want to appear in that six-week block is some kind of live event. Could be an hour-long class, a half-day workshop, a three-day challenge, a five-day challenge, a Facebook group, a Zoom call, small group Voxer coaching—there are so many options. It’s one of the best bits of launching, being in relationship with your audience, and sharing energy before sales and conversions. And the automations that you’ve got set up are just providing the foundation for this. They have pre-warmed your audience.

If you’re doing live events without having lead flow and automation – you don’t need that kind of pressure on every live event to convert. That’s why we have the automations in place: to support, and underpin, and add fire to everything else that we do.

What is the subject for the live events? You’re not going to lose in business by running the same event over and over again. You’ll just get better at it. And you’ll be amazed at how many people in your audience actually do want to attend the same workshop twice.

Equally, if you get inspired to teach something else, you can switch it up! You still have the benefit of all the marketing assets that you created for previous events, and you’ve saved yourself a great deal of time in being able to update and repurpose. Obviously, the quickest and easiest thing to do is to do the exact same thing again, but it’s still easier to update than to be building it from scratch.

The first time you do these things, whether it’s building a registration page, or an email automation, or running a live event, or promoting an offer, the first time you do it is always the most difficult and every subsequent time it gets a little easier, a little bit quicker, and and it gets better. Because you’re reviewing, updating, and refining it, in line with your deepened understanding of your business, yourself, the soul of your business, your audience, the market research that you’ve done, what’s happening in your industry – it just gets better by doing over and over again.

We’re very familiar with the concept of allowing ourselves to be a beginner. We also need to allow ourselves to become an expert.

Now, out of six weeks, you have two blocked out as promotion. One week is labeled as the week in which your live event is going to take place. And obviously, you’re also going to need to promote that live event, so the week before the live event is going to be promotion, you will sell it just like you would sell a paid offer. You will sell it in your DMs, and you will sell it on your social media.

So now, out of six weeks, four are taken up. There’s two weeks promoting and delivering a free offer, your live event, and two weeks promoting and signing clients to your core, profitable, evergreen offer; and there’s two weeks left over. Obviously, there’s some preparation to do ahead of both of the promotional weeks, and sometimes there’s going to be some overlap, so you will be preparing content for one thing while you’re promoting another, and that I find is why having this visual cue is really useful.

Also, in those two “clear” weeks, we know they’re going to get filled right, like client delivery is happening alongside our marketing activity – obviously we’re not doing one or the other – so having those two clear weeks means you can catch up if you’ve got behind, there is some wiggle room with dates, sometimes we just need to rest and lean out a little bit from being in the energy of promotion and marketing.

So just imagine, tell me, what do you think would happen to your business if over the next 12 months you ran eight live events and did eight enrolment periods? Even if you shoot for that and end up doing six, or even five… however many you do, you’re going end up having a really big year in your business, in terms of developing marketing assets, in terms of learning, growing your audience, interacting with your audience, the number of leads you have in your business, and ultimately of course in the number of sales you make.

It sounds like a lot, I know. The first six weeks are the hardest. After that, you have the bones created, so you’re just adding to, refining, optimizing, getting better at it.

So, I just want to quickly tell you the three places that people get stuck—it might be four, I’m not sure. I think I’ve touched on most of these.

One place where people get stuck is they’re just doing the weekly actions, just posting content and wondering why they’re not getting clients. They might even be posting promotional content and still not getting clients. They’re ignoring audience growth and the whole automated nurture piece. So, they are missing the opportunity to sell to people and engage them when they are most interested, which is right after joining your audience.

Not investing – energy, time, or money – in top of funnel. To get to a six-figure business is rarely going to come purely from organic marketing. And if it is, there’s going to be a consistent strategy for collaboration, for getting in front of other people’s audiences. It doesn’t necessarily mean Facebook ads, but it is likely to mean some kind of investment.

For example, I know that there are now pay-to-advertise Facebook groups. It might be contracting somebody to seek podcast appearances for you, strategically with an eye to audience growth. It could be paying somebody to do your PR for you. There are options, but they all require investment. And honestly, slow organic growth is a great deal of hard work for not a lot of gain.

We talked about the pitfall of not actually doing the promotion. Like, you’d think it would go without saying, but we can get so close to our business, and so focused on doing an individual piece, like setting up one piece of the automation, that we can just let weeks go by without actually doing any concerted promotion, which is obviously going to show up in your bottom line.

And then, I just think it’s a real missed opportunity when I see people who are not doing live events. That is the part of launching, of live launching, that is really fun and that really works. It creates buzz, live energy. And whether we’re talking about a live event or talking about a promotional period, there’s a real benefit to giving it a constrained time period and a narrow focus for a short period of time, so rather than seeding the idea of a live event, or rather than having a kind of diluted promotional period for your paid offer, to have short periods of intense focus.

Everything that we’re doing here is about optimized marketing, so really just paying attention to the pieces that actually move the needle in your business, which are not beautiful sales pages, gorgeous graphics, lovely websites, fancy funnels – when you’re a sole entrepreneur without the benefit of a team or a large marketing budget, we have to just focus on the pieces that are most strategic, the pieces that deliver the greatest profit per hour of your time, essentially – that’s what we’re talking about.

There’s a lot of baggage that comes with the topic of DM conversations, right? It’s one of those polarizing subjects that people love to post about on our social media feeds. So, if we’re thinking about using a DM strategy, we have a bias towards noticing people talking about that type of content themselves. And that’s when we run into comments like, “Oh, I can’t bear it when people jump in my DMs and pitch me.” “It’s so spammy, and I can’t believe that even works.”

We hear a lot of judgment about DMs, which essentially boils down to us worrying about what other people think of a specific strategy.

If we’re feeling hung up on, “Can I do it? Is it awkward?” a big part of that is usually our concern about how it will be received by other people. So if that’s you, here’s why we’re not buying into that belief that DM conversations are gross, sleazy, spammy, salesy, manipulative, disrespectful, invasive, or any of the other adjectives you may hear being leveled against the whole strategy of DM outreach:

The first point is that those who are complaining about complete strangers or brand new connections leaping into the DMs to immediately pitch them are talking about cold DMing, cold pitching. Yes, you’ve experienced it; a brand new connection or somebody you’re not even connected to yet will like a bunch of your posts, send a friend request, and immediately, at least with me, it’s always appointment setters. They say, “So we can get you 30 sales calls every week.” And I’m like, “God, no, please. That’s the last thing I want. I would hate to have 30 sales calls a week.” No, that’s not the kind of DMing we are talking about. And I can guarantee that if you are concerned, if you’re the kind of person who wants to be ethical, respectful, polite, there’s no chance that you’re going to veer into the manipulative, sleazy, spammy, salesy kind of territory?

This isn’t about cold DMing. This is about initiating conversation with people in your audience instead of waiting for other people to go first. It’s about being proactive in creating opportunities.

Now, ultimately, yes, attraction marketing is what we are all about learning. That’s why we’re in the business of refining our messaging and positioning. Inbound leads—getting people messaging us to talk about working together—is the grail we are seeking. And we know that at least in the early stages, at least now, while we’re figuring all that messaging out and putting the evergreen marketing systems in place and so on, at least for now, there is going to be a shortfall between the number of inbound leads you’re receiving and the impact and number of clients and money you want to make. And those are opportunities. It’s on us as business owners to find and create those opportunities.

Posting on social media alone is not enough; that’s not a marketing strategy. Posting on social media and emailing is not enough. Consistent content isn’t enough to make sales. Creating opportunities and connections and networking Creating connections, creating opportunities with other people, whether that’s as clients or collaborators or partnerships, sharing one another’s audiences, we’re creating opportunities through networking, through this social networking. So, there is a class which I will link to on three missions and a side quest, which talks more about this, just like the kind of the highest level archetypal almost functions of marketing. The first one being talk to more people, creating connections with more people.

The other hesitation that I see comes out all the time, and the main one that we’re going to focus on, because the first one is just like stop caring what other people think about you so much. But the one we’re going to shift today is what happens when people follow my social media and lead gen strategy, they’re creating leads through their social media content, and then they open these conversations, they get these new leads on their CRM, but almost immediately retreat, saying, “I don’t know what to say next. I don’t know how to make people feel comfortable. It feels so awful and so cringe. Should I say this? Should I say that? When do I pitch my offer? I feel so frozen about this.” So if this is you, let’s breathe together because I want to remind you that you absolutely do know how to have conversations that make people feel at ease, even in DMs. You do it, I dare say, all the time. You know how to ask things of people in a natural way, and the only reason that it’s eluding you right at this point is because it’s unfamiliar. It’s a new marketing task that you aren’t an expert at yet, so it’s unfamiliar. There’s that discomfort of being a beginner and because the stakes feel high. “I am not an expert at this and I need to make sales. This is it. I have a lead. I have a new person in my DMs and I need to convert them. I need to make this number of sales per month. It’s high stakes.” And that energy is a bit of a conversation killer.

I love the instinct. I love the instinct to move the conversation on and that’s what I’m talking about today and that’s how we’re using the DM strategy in general, is to move the conversation, the journey, on rather than waiting for it to happen by chance. We’re taking control of the customer journey. I am going to create some templates and worksheets linked to this video to lay out some of the messenger conversations, lay them out for you. I’m going to talk about a few different conversations that are really useful to have scripted so that you don’t need to put a great deal of thought or emotional energy into creating each one as it arises again and again. But like everything else in marketing, this is something that becomes easier and more fluent and fluid and natural and that you refine as you, you know, by doing it over time. We are doing this work with the intention that it becomes very normal and very natural for you to be having lots and lots of conversations with people who are interested in your work. It’s something that happens all the time every day. There are people messaging you and you are messaging people, and there’s just lots and lots of chatter behind the scenes about your work and about the ways people can work with you. And we’re going to create that buzz through action, intention, and attention because we know just like everything else, if this is what we give our focus to and we track our results with and we expect to work, if we give it our love and our time, the more it will grow and flourish. And we’re doing this because I guarantee, I guarantee that the more conversations any business is having with potential clients, the more sales they are making. Two identical businesses selling the same offer, if one is prioritizing conversations and connection, they’re the business that’s making more sales. It is all about connection, relationships, human networks. And this is really where small businesses like ours have the advantage, where the business owner still has the time and capacity because of the relatively small numbers involved to genuinely create those personal connections. The owner has time. The owner has the additional motivation that all of these conversations are whether they result in sales and money in the bank or not. They are all absolute gold of market research and learning about what your people are dealing with, what their challenges are, what their hopes and dreams are. It is all deepening relationships with people within your audience. And we’re going to do it in a way that also moves forward the people who are ready to buy now. They may only be 2% of your audience, but we definitely want to move those people on to make it possible for them to buy now. So when we’re talking about DM conversations, the first thing we need to do is stop thinking about pitching and sales for a moment. It is exciting to have new people on your CRM, new people joining your DM conversations. But I don’t want for your first instinct to be sell.

So there are, as I just mentioned, a very rare breed, 2% of people who may come into your DMs and say, “I’ve binge-watched all your stuff. I’m ready to work with you right now. Take my money.” And even when those people do come in, just think for a moment how you respond. The CEO, you, respond to somebody coming in and saying, “Take my money. I want us to work together.” It seems to me that most likely you would still have some initial questions for this person. If somebody comes into your DM saying, “I want to work together,” you are going to have some questions for them. How did you find me? Are we a fit? What are you hoping to get from working together? What are your priorities? Even somebody who’s ready to give you their money, you’re going to perform a kind of triage process with them so that you can make sure that your process exactly fits their needs or that you can, or that you’re going to be able to adjust your process if it’s a more bespoke thing. The point being, when you first meet somebody, you don’t know enough about their business yet to pitch them. So that’s the first mission, is to ask those clarifying questions, to triage, to diagnose what they’re going through and what kind of support they need. What are they looking for? How are they going to know when they found it? And what have they tried already? Now, the kind of questions you ask are going to depend very much on your niche and what your methodology is and how you help people to transform. But if you ask enough questions, there’s a sweet spot here. We want to avoid the feeling of an inquisition, but allowing for the natural flow of conversation unfolding over days, sometimes, weeks, sometimes. We want to keep it as short as possible, but you know, these things take time. If you ask enough questions, when it does become time to pitch, you will know exactly what this person needs and whether you are equipped and qualified to help them. So ask as many questions as you need to ask until you feel super confident that your methodology will help them. And then you feel really excited to tell them about whichever offer you’ve diagnosed is going to be the perfect fit for them. This is, it’s liberating, it’s exciting, it’s encouraging, it’s confidence-boosting to ask questions until it is so super clear that your offer is exactly what they need to the point that all you need to do is just lay out what it is that you’re going to cover with them and how it relates to everything that you’ve just been talking about. And you don’t need a script for this. There is no magic code for this. The only challenging part really is allowing it to unfold and not just kind of latching on to like, this is exciting, this is a lead, I’m going to hyper-fixate on this until they convert, okay? So this is, we have to give ourselves grace. If you are not already in the habit of DMing people in your audience every day, this, it feels very unfamiliar and this can be a real stunt on what feels like a natural conversation flow. But you do know how to make people feel appreciated. You do know what makes people feel good and seen. Slow down, breathe, take a moment to just like scan over the conversation you’ve previously had before you answered and look at the DM conversations you have had with business owners who have made you feel good. So I get messages from people who I have DM’d with saying, how is it that you can promote a live event or freebie and make me feel so delighted to be invited? And that’s not a secret or a copywriting secret or any particular like code or template. It’s just about slowing down a little bit, enough to look back at the conversation and also to be willing to move the conversation ahead, to be bold enough to lead somebody unapologetically toward the sale and also having a system for making sure that the conversations don’t die on me. This is the CRM that we’ve talked about in the program a number of times. I’ll give you a link to it. If you’re not tracking your leads in your CRM, that is where you’re leaving behind all the money. But using this system, you can have dozens, maybe even hundreds of conversations going on and don’t start freaking out about time management. This isn’t a problem that you need to worry about solving if your CRM is still 12 people. But suffice to say that by the time your CRM is unwieldy, your strategy will have evolved. So it’s not something that you even need to worry about. So you can be having lots and lots of conversations at the same time and yet still you are only pitching things that help people. You are only pitching things in a really transparent and non-manipulative way so that you can always feel good about the conversations that you’re having and the impact that you’re having through giving clarity and giving value even before people sign as clients. Now as I’m saying that, I have a word ringing in my head, boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. How do you stop giving, giving, giving and move people to sales? So I’m going to come back and talk about that. Make sure you’ve watched the class about setting up and keeping your CRM live. It is really, really important that you are tracking what happens there.

Why are we focusing on DMs? As I’ve just mentioned, you can have lots of them at the same time. I can probably update 20 or 30 DM conversations in an hour. I could have one or two sales calls in that same hour. The more people you are talking to, because you can talk to so many more people, the more insight, market insight you are getting into what your audience is telling you about what they are dealing with. Ultimately, you are networking more effectively, creating more opportunities. A list of people who you can personally invite to a live event, for example. It’s creating opportunities to circle back to the beginning, not waiting for other people to go first. When somebody joins your network, we’re giving them multiple opportunities to learn more about you and about your work. A really important piece of that is giving them the opportunity to connect with you personally. So the first and most simple message I want you to get used to sending out to everybody, everyone who accepts a friend request, everybody who sends, everybody who accepts a simple, “Hello, it’s great to be connected,” smiley face emoji. That’s it. If you get a response, fantastic. You are in conversation and you can put them on your CRM. It’s weird and cringe to message people like that emphatically. So what? So what if you get a couple of messages back from people saying, “Hmm, why do you want to connect? Why did you want to join my circle?” If the worst thing you do today is cause a split second of mild annoyance to somebody with a stick up their ass, you are doing incredibly well. Seriously, don’t give it a second thought. Other people’s opinions about you sending a friendly DM when you connect as friends are actually irrelevant. And we are not here to be about being cool. Okay. We have bigger concerns. We have bigger ambitions than avoiding upsetting anyone. And that includes being in charge of the journey that people take when they join our world. Okay. So when people find you and they’re excited and ready to buy, we’re not going to leave that to chance. So in the templates that I’m going to share with you, going with this video, I’m giving you a few different possible message conversations that I really strongly suggest you integrate into your daily marketing activities. If you’re ever, I spoke with a client today about what business tasks would you prioritize if you could only work five hours a day, or if you could only work four days a week, what tasks would you prioritize? And following up and maintaining and adding to these conversations has got to be up there. There’s just about nothing that’s more valuable of a use of your time than paying attention to these conversations. These are going to get you higher conversions than your email list, higher conversions than posting on your social media channel, higher conversions than a live event or webinar. This is literally your sales pipeline. And if your focus is to add to this number of ongoing conversations every week, there will always be money on the table and clients available for whatever you choose to promote. So the very first DM I would like you to get used to sending to everyone, new friend or connection to set the tone, let them know that by joining your world, you are going to be contacting them by DM. That’s how you roll. You roll that way because it’s easier to make sales that way than any other way. Okay. So for example, I had a client who made zero sales in the first three, four days of her launch with emails and sales page, big fat zero. We started a DM campaign and she closed 10K in the week before Christmas. And that was all through DM conversations. Yes, people were going to read her sales page, but they weren’t buying off her sales page. They were buying from the conversations last September. Another client sold seven spots on a 2K retreat, tiny audience, tiny email lists, and didn’t once post about it, not even one single time on social media. Just this was all done through warm DMs. So lead generation social media content, never actually promoting the retreat or the offer itself. And then following up through DM conversations, which are all mapped out for you. It doesn’t need to be complicated.

So conversation one, new connections. Conversation two, if you have a Facebook group, when people join your group, likewise, you can send them a message. You can offer them a freebie. Here’s an idea. So offer them a freebie, but instead of directing them to your email list, ask if you can message them with the freebie. Of course, you’re going to also message people who say no to the freebie. But what I’m pointing to you is to prioritize these conversations over emails. A lot of people get will run a lead generation process like this was. They’ll say, raise your hand if I can send you the PDF and the person raises their hand. And then instead of just sending them the PDF, we’ll then send them a link to a signup page. So that’s adding another step to the process for those people. Your conversions will go down. And it’s just cleaner and more like, I need to sneeze. But talking about the natural flow of conversation, if you say to somebody, hey, can I give you an invite to a party? To just give them the invite rather than to send them off to a page where they have to register and join an email list and get the thing. What I’m pointing to you towards is prioritizing the conversation. It is worth more to your business than an email address is. There will be ample opportunities down the line to get the email addresses from everybody who is in your CRM. But given the choice between keeping the interaction in your conversation or sending somebody away and ask them to do something else, every time you add a step to the process, you’re going to lose people. Your conversions are going to go down. So just keep it prioritize the conversations. Don’t worry about getting emails from everybody. That’s not the vibe. Serve in the DMs.

So let’s talk about another kind of DM conversation. I’m going to give you templates for these content-driven conversations, similar to the Lead Magnet funnel we were just talking about there. There’s a class on lead generation. I can send you the link. I’ll add the link when I edit this video. The last 20 minutes or so is all about social media lead generation specifically, which often includes a process for people to raise their hand for a freebie or details of a particular class or workshop or program. And obviously you’re going to be following up with those people. As I just said, we’re going to just send them the details directly. No requirement to sign up for anything. That cuts your work down too, because you don’t need to create the sign up page. You don’t need to create the email automation. You just drop them the PDF link right there in the DMs. So those conversations, people who raise their hand to ask for a particular lead magnet or raise their hand to ask for details about a specific offer, these are the people who we are thinking about moving towards a sales conversation. This has gone beyond “hi, it’s nice to meet you.” And we’ve gone through some clarifying questions.

We’re recognizing here a bit more of an opportunity to move into a sales conversation because they are already saying yes to your work in this capacity. So it’s actually very natural to follow up with them to move the conversation on. You will say, “hey, I’m messaging because you said you would like to see my freebie. Here it is.” And then we might offer them something else as well. “I also have a recorded class on that topic and you would be interested to see?” And then there will be a follow-up to invite people to talk more directly with you. “Would you like to know how I can support you with this work?” And it can stay in DMs. It doesn’t even need to move to Zoom for a sales conversation.

The next kind of conversation I want to talk about is a direct pitch. If you are validating an offer and you have a CRM, so you have conversations already underway with people, maybe you spoke to them in the last kind of week or month. If you have something new that you are validating, it is okay to ask people if you can pitch them your idea.

You may have a high ticket offer and two, three, five people in mind who you think it would be perfect for. It is okay to go into people’s DMs and say, for example, “Hi, we have had some conversations related to this thing in the past.” So I was thinking you might be interested in some details I’ve put together for a program that is going to allow you to XYZ. I would love if you would look it over, please may I send you the document?” You are allowed to do that. That is not cold pitching. That is thoughtful outreach. It’s very different from turning up uninvited, unannounced, a complete stranger in somebody’s messenger box who just sent you a friend request.

You don’t have to act awkward or hide the fact that you have an offer that you want to sell. You don’t have to pretend like you’re not in business. You don’t have to pretend that all your leads are inbound only. This is your job as a business owner to network and ask for the sale. Sometimes direct pitching is appropriate. Marketing and sales is not something that we need to shy away from and pretend that we don’t need to do. DM conversations are a key part of your outreach strategy. Every business needs an outreach strategy. Every growing business has an outreach strategy. I recommend DMing because it is so accessible. It is so efficient. It is so efficient in having so many people in one place that you can talk to kind of at scale.

A couple of things I need to add into here. One is: who this strategy is not good for. You can probably feel a part of you inside thinking this sounds like an awful lot of time and effort. And yes, it is. It takes a great deal of time and effort to turn leads into clients, which is part of the reason for the emphasis on having a highly profitable offer. If an hour of my time is worth, for example, $100 and if it takes, I don’t know what the number is, but let’s say for the sake of argument, if it takes me one full working day to convert on average one lead into a client, I don’t think it does. I think it’s far less than that, but let’s say it does, then each client would need to pay me at least double my daily rate in order for this to be profitable for me. So if I’m spending a day converting a lead into a client, if I’m spending a day to create every client and they’re only paying me $50, I’m going to go bust. They’re not paying me enough to keep going. So it needs to be a profitable offer. This is not a strategy that works for low ticket. You can sell low ticket if your plan is to upsell them to high ticket, but in that case, the math is different. You’re basing your profitability on an average customer value rather than on the low ticket item alone. So don’t use this if you don’t have a profitable offer, which makes you feel like you can afford to put time and energy into learning about your audience and pitching them a profitable offer. The other thing that I missed out and what was the alarm going off in my head? It was about boundaries.

Okay. So I’ve heard it described to me like this. If somebody raises their hand and would like to receive your PDF or your training or watch the replay of your masterclass or whatever it is, ask them some questions for context. This is going to be in the conversation template that I give you, but ask them some questions about what they’re going through and then save, serve them as if they were a client. Where that stops is if they start to behave as if they were a client. The key piece that I want you to remember is that you are leading the conversation and you are also training your audience on how to treat you on how to interact with you. So if that means shutting down a conversation, which is in danger of turning into free advice, and pitching a paid offer instead, that is exactly what you’ll do.

As with everything else here, there’s no code to make sure you never slip into that territory of over-serving, over-giving. It’s a very easy trap for us to fall into, especially if we were kind of brought up to please everybody and cause nobody any offense ever. So, and like so many boundaries, they kind of, we put them in place and enforce them when they’re tested. So it can be a kind of like painful, oh, I need a boundary here and all that boundary there, and oh, I need to tighten this up as time goes on. We’re not going to get it right at the very beginning. It’s not a reason to begin.

Hi, kittens. Thank you for joining me. We’re here today to talk about the unglamorous but extremely important topic of market research and why. Why is market research important?

Because having an understanding of how to extract learnings from the market, the market you’re operating in, is really a magic ingredient that’s going to help you to avoid making a lot of mistakes in your messaging, in your offers, in your promotions, and it is going to help you assess at every step of your business growth what is working, in other words, what is resonating with your audience.

Now, ultimately, of course, we do have the cold hard data of sales figures to guide our actions, but it’s not always easy to tell what is making the difference between messaging that converts and messaging that doesn’t. So having a research process will help to guide and shape everything that goes into turning a stranger into a client as quickly and as easily as possible. And that’s always the mission, right? To turn strangers into clients as efficiently as we can.

And so it stands to reason, it makes logical sense, that the more we know and understand about the people who make up our audience – the audience that we have right now, not the audience that we wish we had or the audience that we’re building, but the audience that we have right now – the more we know and understand about the people whose attention we have, the more informed our strategic and creative decisions can be, right? That makes sense.

So I’m going to give you a few examples of how you could start using market research today. And if you’re not already booking lots of client calls and sales calls, this is a really good use of your time. Use your time to go into market research, because what you learn is going to help your messaging, it’s going to help your understanding of your audience, and it’s going to help you, therefore, make a really good guess at what they’re going to respond to.

And before I tell you, give you these examples, I do have to caveat this with the truism. People don’t always take the actions that they say that they would take in a research setting. So we do always have to take the findings with a pinch of salt. However, it’s still the best and most useful method that we have for trying to predict what people are going to do, at least until we’ve built up a large kind of bank of data and evidence of our own to help us predict that.

Again, just to recap why we’re doing this. If you don’t know what your audience wants or what they respond to, you’re going to find it hard to sell to them. And if you’re going to invest a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy or resources into something. So for example, you’re creating a new offer or launching a new lead magnet funnel, or you are running ads, you can reduce the risk, all business activities carry risk, but you can reduce the risk so that you go in feeling as confident as you can that your assumptions, your conjectures are as close to correct as you can be. Of course, there are going to be nasty surprises. There are always nasty surprises, but nevertheless, we move. And although market research is not infallible, far from it, it is, as I say, it is still the best tool that we’ve got.

So let’s talk about some ways you can do some market research. So the first I’m going to mention is competitor analysis. This is researching the market that you are operating in. Before you do this, make sure you have your big girl underwear on your CEO hat. This can be triggering. It can be difficult to look at other businesses, other businesses, which are obviously showing their highlight reels, showing the best of themselves. It can be difficult to look at other people in your niche and analyze what they are doing. But we need to get into the habit of looking at social media, researching competitors, researching the market with the CEO mindset. So look at what other people in your niche are selling, what language they’re using. If they are selling a particular outcome, you can too. If they are over a long period of time, have a kind of core offer that they promote month after month, year after year, you can feel fairly confident that it is selling and you can sell that same outcome too. What outcome are they promising? What language are they using? If they are selling a specific outcome, there is a desire in the markets for that outcome. And so your challenge is to think, what would I do differently? How could I do it better? Again, the trick is not to get into comparison mode, not to start comparing your year two or three to their year 10, right? Act like a CEO, business head on, business actions, business decisions.

This is a great one for competitor analysis. Record a voice note on your phone. They really are listening to you. Record a voice note as if you were your own ideal client saying something like, oh, I don’t know, saying something like, “I am so done. I’m doing like an old fashioned phone, do it like this. I am so done with hot flashes. I can’t handle these night sweats anymore. Brain fog is ruining my life. I really want a solution. I’m not willing to go to the pharmaceutical route just yet. Somebody must be able to help me.” Record that voice note. And I predict that within a few hours, targeted ads will start showing up in your social media feeds. So that is a great way to identify what your competitors are doing so that you can see how your solution fits in where the gap is that you can fill in your market.

Okay. So competitor analysis is one. While we’re on the subject of looking at your social media feed, social media listening is another method for your market research. Look at your social media feed, but look at it as a creator instead of a consumer. It’s a different mindset, but as you scroll through your feed, one, you’re going to see ads popping up, obviously, and every ad is a response to a need in the market. That’s one way of identifying the transformations that people are looking for, right? But also look in the groups you’re in, see what your friends and other people in your network and your audience are posting about. People leave clues everywhere about what they’re struggling with if you are open to see.

But if you are active on social media, you do have access to a large group of people to ask, right? You have your own social media network. Your following. You have your email list. You have your own Facebook group. Your own Facebook group. You have other people’s groups that you are active in. So you can use that population for broad research. Running a poll, using those stickers in your stories. Do you prefer this name or that? Are you interested in this class or workshop or that one? So like testing names of lead magnets, which would you be more drawn to? Which live event would you like to come to? I’m planning a series of workshops. Which one should I do first, A, B, or C?

The other thing you can do with large groups is set up a questionnaire. You will probably have to incentivize people to fill it out. But if you have something that people want, like a program that you could offer, you could offer to people which isn’t going to eat into your profit margins because it’s already created and it costs you nothing to deliver it.

Or again, like a raffle option for a reading or a class or a one-off session. Incentivizing people to fill in a questionnaire. I’ll give you my market research questionnaire that I used some time ago. I haven’t used it recently, but I think it will be still useful for you. You could even copy it and use it for your own market research. The benefit of that is that you can go into a bit more detail. It’s a little bit more refined and finessed than just kind of the blunt object of asking this or that. You can ask questions where people need to kind of write a few sentences to give you their response. And that’s an absolute goal because people are giving you their language and you can literally copy their language from the questionnaire into a document called audience language and use it in your sales and promotional copy.

So that’s a little bit about using larger groups like the whole market, your whole social media feed, your whole social media network to get insights into the market. But for a lot of us who don’t have huge audiences, it can sometimes be easier to get that insight on more of a one-to-one basis.

So here’s the technique I call the win-win call. Very simple. Here’s what you do. Here’s how the process goes. Number one, you post on your social media feed about something connected to your work. Somebody who engages on your post, they like it or heart react it or leave a comment. You send them a message and say, thank you so much for supporting my work for responding to this post. I really appreciate the engagement. I’m just getting started. And I was wondering if there’s any chance you would be happy to take just a 20-minute call with me. I literally have nothing to sell you, but I would love to find out what your biggest desires are, what are your biggest priorities, because it’s going to help me out so much. I’d be happy to buy you a coffee and you can literally buy somebody a coffee gift card, a coffee shop gift card in exchange for their time. And you might have to ask a few people a few different times, but then we’d look the call, jump on the call, and for 20 minutes, you listen. Ask about their desires, ask about their challenges, ask about their priorities and what blocks them, and then listen. At the end of the call, ask them, do you have any questions for me? Some people, not everybody, but some people will ask about what you do and the ways that you work with people. And then you just agree to keep in touch. You add them to your CRM and you keep in touch. They may or may not ever go on to become a paying client, but what you have got is some really deep insight into what your audience’s desires, challenges, priorities, blocks are. And although their answers won’t apply to everyone in your audience, they will apply to other people as well. Nobody is that completely unique, that they are the only person struggling with that particular challenge or priority. Okay? So that’s the win-win call.

Another way of getting market research from one particular individual is doing it in DM conversations. Obviously, you know I love a DM conversation. One way to do this, imagine we have posted some lead generation content. I have just finished editing a video on XYZ. Please raise your hand if I can send it to you, right? You are going to get the most value from those leads if you ask some questions in the DMs. Go and watch the class on DM conversations. But even without that, even without having watched that, you know instinctively that it can feel overbearing. It can feel even aggressive to just go straight to pitching, okay? But asking some questions ahead of time is just a way of easing into the relationship and it gives you some absolute gold in terms of the information that you get from those questions.

So questions might be like, how does this issue impact your life on a daily basis? What have you already tried? What keeps you from trying ABC? Those questions in your DMs, nobody is going to object to them if it’s just part of an easy flowing conversation. But it’s easy to overlook those answers when what they are is actually really valuable market research insights that are going to inform your marketing and your offer creation and your promotion and your messaging and everything. Just because you didn’t deliberately set out to do market research in a conversation doesn’t mean that you can’t take the insights or the information from that conversation and add it into your bank, your library of insights of what you know about your audience, okay?

So yes, I’m messaging because you said you were interested in this video, would it be okay to ask you a couple of questions? How is this going for you? What have you tried? And then when people reply to you, you need to respond as if they were a paying client. All of that is in the DM conversation class, but the information that your engaged leads give you here is absolute gold. And even if you don’t actually like note it down anywhere, you are going to start to spot patterns and themes in emerging from what you hear.

Okay, another DM conversation. Message somebody you know well. This is not for a cold DM. This is for somebody who you have already connected with. You have already had conversations potentially about working together, certainly had conversations about your work. You’re already in conversation with them. So if you have somebody in mind, you could just message them now and say, “Hey, do you have a couple of minutes? I would love to ask you a couple of research questions.” Assuming they say yes, I’m going to give you my example. My first question, the context for this, I wanted to put together a high ticket one-to-one offer. So I identified somebody in my audience who I knew would be pretty close to my ideal client for such an offer, messaged her and asked her, “As above, do you have a couple of minutes?” So I can ask you a couple of research questions. Super easy, no pressure to get back to me immediately. And the first question was this, “What do you really want from your business right now? What do you wake up wanting?” Okay, so that’s question one. Obviously, you can take out business and what do you really want from your relationships right now? What do you really want from your energy levels and health right now? What do you wake up wanting? Okay, and in this case, the answer was, “I want a spacious calendar and a full bank account.”

What a brilliant answer. So, so insightful, so concise, exactly what I needed. So my second question, why do you think it’s difficult to create? We’re asking your audience for their assessment of why it’s difficult to create. What you’re looking for is their insight on the problem or the challenge or the issue, not your diagnosis, not your assessment of why they are struggling, but what they believe is going on. Marketing and messaging is very much an exercise in shape-shifting and being able to embody what your ideal client is going through, what they’re thinking about, what they’re looking for, what they’re listening out for, so that you can be that thing, okay? So that’s the second question. Why is that difficult to create? Ask clarifying questions.

And in my example, the person in my audience said she was confused about pricing, she was confused about all her different offers. There was just a whole lot of confusion going on and not knowing what activities to prioritize. Okay, so we’ve already got some absolute wonderful insights here. And then the final question I asked was, and this is the real good one, if you were to design the perfect solution, this is my question, if you were to design the perfect solution for you, what kind of support would you include to get you to where you want to be?

So I’m actually getting my ideal client, although she’s not a client, we’re going to talk about that in a moment, but this person in my audience, I’m actually asking her to design the kind of support that she would want to meet her, to meet her needs, to get her to desires. She said, I would want somebody to have a holistic view of my entire business structure and me in it. And then I would, and that would help me to get down to the nitty gritty of building the various components. So I would want strategy and copywriting and coaching for when it all goes wrong. She told me I’m not interested in peer support or community or group offers because I get too distracted by the other voices and what they’re doing. Amazing. I literally asked her to design the perfect solution for her problems as she sees them.

Do you see how this is like such a potent set of questions to ask? If you have somebody in your audience who there’s a measure of goodwill between you, she’s not already a client, but she does closely match the kind of person that you would really love to work with. Okay. Incredible little exchange. The whole thing took about five minutes. I put it in some notes. The next morning it was a new offer. I posted about it five figures and literally sold a spot the very next day to a different person. The language from audience member one so closely matched the challenges of audience member two, but she just jumped in straight away. Okay. So a couple of DM conversations that you could try today.

Another method of market research, validating the idea. Most of you will know I never want you to create a course or program or offer or record or write a single piece of teaching curriculum until you have sold a spot. Validating an idea is a way to test the market and actually give you proof of concept or not before you invest any time, energy and resources into creating something. And that can be as simple as this. Ask your audience. I have an idea for something. I have an idea for a program that would, and then the transformation that you offer without having to do this thing that they don’t want to do. Is that something that you would be interested in? It can be as simple as that. I have an idea for XYZ. Is that something that you might be interested in? If you get a few people saying yes, go for it. Full steam ahead, start selling. And if you get absolute crickets, then maybe you need to change something about the, uh, the way that you’re presenting the idea before progressing. Okay. Can you see how that makes sense to test your idea in the market before actually moving ahead with it?

Now it is worth saying that if you have a very small audience and you haven’t been particularly nurturing and engaging your audience, so none of your posts are getting much engagement, you may need to ask more than once. But validating the idea with your audience before going ahead to build is a great way of researching your audience, your market in relation to the idea of the thing that you want to sell.

Before we wrap up, I have spoken to more than one person, coming on board as a client who tells me that they have done a lot of market research, but on close to the investigation, the people they are asking questions to are people who have already worked with them and come out the other side of the program. They are people who have already experienced the transformation. Now, it is of course valuable and very worthwhile speaking to those people for feedback. However, they are going to describe a different set of problems and challenges when they are on the other side of the transformation that you helped to facilitate, then they would have at the point at which they signed up with you, signed up to become a client, right? In other words, hindsight is 20/20. Even if I think I remember very, very well what I was experiencing before I joined your program, the chances are very, very low that I will describe it in the same way because I’m a different person than I was four weeks ago, six weeks ago, 90 days ago, how, however long the program is. So when you are doing market research for the purposes of selling something new or for the purposes of your marketing, please make sure that you’re speaking to people who have not, who are not your clients yet, right? Definitely speak to your clients at the end of the program. Get that feedback. That’s consumer research. It’s very valuable. It’s very important, but it is not the same. You’re not going to get the same answers as you would from people who you have not worked with yet, okay?

So let me summarize. We talked about competitor analysis and just having a look at what other people in your industry are doing. We talked about social media listening and strolling your feed as a creator rather than as a consumer. We talked about some easy ways that you can get insights from larger groups. So straightforward polls, stickers, asking questions, questionnaires, and incentivizing people to complete them. We talked about win-win call on one-to-one. That’s a really straightforward market research call where you just ask people pertinent questions and listen. We talked about the DM conversation with, I would describe them as hot leads, where you literally ask them to design the solution to the problem that they’re having. And we talked about the importance of validating your ideas in the market before you sell them. There’s a whole other class on validation, so go and watch that if you haven’t already. Scout implementing these methods today. Even small-scale market research can lead to significant changes in your messaging and significant improvements in your strategies and results. You can spot the gaps in the market. And what could you discover today that could transform your results tomorrow? Have a look at the workbook, ask questions on the group, and I will see you next time.