Your launch bombed, nobody bought, and now you are frozen. Maybe you’re telling yourself that you just can’t handle another disappointment, that you will have to give up if you fail again. Disappointment is as much a part of business as success is. And so I’m going to teach you a way to alchemize your disappointment into absolute nuggets of gold so that you no longer have to try to avoid it.

My name is Anna Belissima. I am a chaos witch and teacher of quick and dirty marketing to spiritual startups. And today, I’m showing you how to extract intelligence from your failures so that you can get back into the arena without spiralling into months of inaction, because that disappointing launch is packed with treasure.

So first, we have to normalize. Failure is a business, reality. Every successful business has bombed launches, angry customers, flopped marketing campaigns, but we don’t pay attention to that. We pay attention to the highlights and compare them to our low light. So when your launch doesn’t work, it feels uniquely devastating, especially if you are a coach, a healer, a creative entrepreneur, if you’re sensitive, empathic, if you feel particularly vulnerable to rejection. And then, so when you experience disappointment, that creates resistance, resistance leads to in action disguised as perfectionism, or I just need one more course, which leads to more disappointment, and we spiral down.

The biggest blocks in business are never tactical. If you need help setting up a sign up form, you well know that you can hire somebody for 50, 75, no more than £100 to help you with that. But when you are carrying with you the weight of previous disappointment, when you are terrified of failing again, when you are not resilient, no amount of strategy will help you move forward, so we need to process this. Not bypass it with affirmations, but actually process it.

Don’t try to power through the fear. Instead we do this. Feel it fully. If you feel afraid, sad, disappointed, rejected, let it out, cry, scream into a pillow, stamp your feet on the floor, throw a tantrum, let it fully exist in your body. When some of that energy is spent, talk to the part of you, that is protecting you from disappointment, the voice saying, “You can’t fail again,” it’s not here to sabotage you, it’s trying to protect your tender, tender heart. This is an act of love.

So instead of fighting it, use meditation, or journaling, or oracle cards, or automatic writing, to ask, what are you protecting me from? And then, you can tell it, explicitly, I am willing to be disappointed again. I am prepared to be disappointed again. I want to be disappointed again, because more failures are inevitable part of growing this business.

And then the third thing is to work with both of those fears, because if you are afraid of being disappointed, I dare say you are also terrified of being a disappointment of being disappointing to your clients, of having an angry customer, or letting somebody down. So visualize that as well, and feel it, and stay with the discomfort, just allow that discomfort to be in you, until it moves, and changes. And this is how we begin to separate ourselves, our worth, identity, from marketing results. And when we can do that, we can look at what happened a little bit more objectively.

Which brings us neatly to the FAIL DATA Framework. The fail data framework are 7 questions. You’ll find a worksheet somewhere around this video that extract intelligence from any disappointing campaign. Here are the questions:

Question one, did you complete it? Did you do earnestly and sincerely your best? Did you see out the full marketing campaign, or did you pull the plug after three days because you didn’t see immediate sales? Seeing the campaign through to completion, teaches you things that you can only learn by finishing the assignment, whether or not you end up making sales, and accepting the truism that we all know that many sales are made in the th hour before a promotional period ends.

Question two. Was it dead simple to buy? Confusion is the number one reason why people don’t complete a purchase? If they are not % sure of what they’re getting, or whether it’s for them, whether it’s right for them, when the program starts, what’s included, whether they’re a payment plans? And every time you promote an offer, your copy and your process will get clearer. That is cumulative progress.

The third question, did your audience grow between the last time you promoted this offer and this time? This is enormously important. If your offer sold well, the first time you promoted it, but bombed the second time, is because your hottest leads already purchased, and you are beginning to saturate your existing audience. We need to have new people coming into your audience and disinterested people, leaving your audience, so that there is a constantly refreshed pool of hottest leads, because in an audience that isn’t changing, at some point, everybody who is going to buy has bought. Your audience needs to be a river, with constant flow. People leaving and joining, not a stagnant puddle. If it doesn’t grow between launches, you have nobody new to sell to, and so you’re trapped in the cycle of constantly creating new offers, trying to appeal to the same small group of people in your audience.

Question four, did what you are selling solve one specific problem for one specific person? Vague offers don’t sell. You need to get incredibly concrete with the outcomes that are on offer.

Question five, do you have proof? Do you have testimonials? Do you have case studies and results that say you do what you say you can do? If not, that is your primary objective until you have them.

Question six, what is the market doing? Talk to your peers. Often you will find out that everybody is struggling with similar challenges, and it’s not uniquely you. Of course, that isn’t a solution, it doesn’t fix anything, but it can help you to stop making it mean something about your business specifically, or you personally.

And question seven, what are the soft wins? What are the less tangible outcomes of the promotion period that you have just completed? So, before revenue appears, these indicators often show up, more conversations happening, finding that people understand your offer more clearly. They understand the outcomes more easily, your audience is growing. Your engagement is increasing. These are bread crumbs, pointing to future sales. These are the clues that show up before the money does.

Which leads me to this critical reminder. Marketing today yields your results in six to weeks. The day you sow the seed is not the day you pick the fruit. So don’t call your promotional period a failure too soon, because chances are the true results you will see in several months from now.

So now that you’ve answered these seven questions, you know what to fix. You can build your comeback plan. You can repackage your offer based on the confusion, you identified in people who didn’t purchase. You can refresh your positioning, to speak more directly to people you’re trying to reach. When you change your messages, different people in your existing audience will step forward, and that will refresh your lead pool in itself. The ones interested in your old positioning drop back, and your audience evolves with you, as new people step forward.

The other thing I want you to do is be sure to identify the support you need, even if you can’t invest in it yet. Who do you need on your team? What automations would help you do this more efficiently. What training or mentorship do you need? Research it. Find out the costs. Put a date in the calendar for when you will explore this. Money loves a job, and having a clear plan for how support will help you grow, is very magnetic.

And here’s the paradox. Building this resilience creates more opportunities for both disappointment and success. As you know, the pendulum cannot complete only half of an arc. So think about it this way – the rejection challenge. If I challenged you to go and get 20 rejections for your offer, genuine rejections, where people say, “No, this isn’t for me.” Don’t you think you’d probably make one or two sales along the way as well? You can’t collect 20 no’s without getting a couple of yeses. And how resilient would you feel knowing that you can handle those rejections in a row and keep going? I promise you, anybody who has worked in sales gets very quickly inoculated to rejection. That’s the point.

Acceptance and rejection are completely entangled. You can’t have one without the other. You don’t get to choose only success, only happy customers, only winning campaigns. Failure is part of the territory, and your willingness to experience disappointment, and, yes, to be disappointing is what allows you to build the business that you want.

So, here is your assignment. Take your most recent disappointing launch and run it through the FAIL DATA questions.

As I say, you will find a worksheet around this video – or message me for it if you can’t find the link – extract the intelligence, build your comeback plan, and remember, the core belief that anchors everything is that there is so much demand for your work. When you believe that, to your core and a campaign goes wrong, we problem solve. If you don’t believe there’s demand for your work, chances are you’ll probably feel tempted to quit.

If you want practical marketing training, plus live support to navigate, all of this, offer design, messaging, sales copy, getting back in the game, I want you to join quick and dirty marketing, it’s £11 a month. The link’s in the description, there is no minimum commitment, cancel any time. Now go and collect some fail data.