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Hey there, it's Steph Crowder. Are you sick of the sales roller coaster I got you? Join me March 16th through the 20th at 2pm Eastern Time every day that week for the Sold Out Sales System Summit. This is a totally free, five day live training that will get you fully booked and launch your groups repeatedly, consistently and with ease. You're going to learn how to build a predictable plan, create content that actually converts, growing, grow an audience that buys with you, and launch repeatedly without the panic. You can register right now@stephcrowder.com summit. Welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's. Hello, my courageous listeners. Okay, so here's a question for you. When you think about growing your audience, when you think about what we're gonna talk about on day four of the Sold Out Sales System Summit, which is predictable audience growth, what do you picture? Is it more followers? More reach? Probably some version of finding new people who've never heard of you, right? Like maybe you're thinking about consistently adding new faces and new individuals to your world, but what if I told you that that instinct is actually pretty backwards for most coaches and service providers? What if your next client isn't a stranger who you haven't found yet, but is more likely someone who's already watching you, already paying attention, already interested, and you just haven't noticed them? So we're talking about predictable audience growth today. And I want to start by saying that, yes, growing your audience and ultimately adding more people to your network is going to be important for the longevity and scalability for your business, but probably not as important or immediate as you're thinking it is. I'm really going to start by making the case that most of you don't really have an audience problem. You're telling yourself you have an audience problem? I hear it all the time. People will say, my audience is too small. My audience is burnt out. My audience is tired of hearing from me. My audience is fatigued. Like some version of that. Have you told yourself some version of that? A lot of entrepreneurs that I talk to have, so it's very normal. But what is more likely, after working with hundreds, if not thousands of entrepreneurs at this point, is every bit as much. You have a conversion problem. Okay. And until you can see the difference, you're just gonna keep chasing strangers while leaving a warm room full of interested people who would've worked with you. Right? So I'm not here to say that you shouldn't grow your audience and that that's not a worthy pursuit. It absolutely is. If we think about the image of a sales funnel and moving people through the funnel, yes, it is important to be adding people to the top of the funnel. You'll never get an argument from me about that. But what most entrepreneurs, or at least many entrepreneurs that I talk to share with me is they what I see. Just like across the board, across niches, across different industries. And I'm willing to bet this is the case for you as well, my dear listener, is you are likely putting more weight on the top of that funnel than you really should be and inadvertently neglecting the rest of your funnel. By the way, when I say funnel, I don't mean like evergreen funnel. I don't mean like email sequences. It's not what I'm talking about. Instead, funnel is like a ancient sales concept. When I say funnel, what I really mean is your sales process, right? From cold to enrolled, from new brand new stranger to actually working with you. And like all of the steps in between, right? You have to walk people through. Never heard of you. To sign. Signing on the dotted line. And most entrepreneurs will spend way too much time and energy worrying about those strangers. Okay? And honestly, if you think about this just from a mindset perspective, it makes sense. It is like so many things, it's actually can be a really sneaky, super sneaky and efficient and effective form of procrastination. Because if you have an audience sitting in front of you, I don't care how small. I don't care if it's a hundred people. And you're thinking to yourself, well, I. This isn't big enough. Like, I need more people before I can sell, I need more people. Do you notice how convenient of a story that is? Do you all know that I tell my clients that we often think thoughts that I call convenient stories? It's like, oh, that would be so convenient. Our brain's number one job is to conserve your energy, not do anything scary, not separate yourself from the tribes, that you don't get killed by a saber tooth tiger. So how convenient, Brain. How convenient that you would feed me this story that I'm not ready to sell. You think about that. It's like you really are telling yourself, well, when I have a bigger audience, I'll do that, right? When I get more people, I'll do that. And I hope that even by me just opening this conversation, you can just have an honest moment with yourself. This might not even be on your radar. You really may have been reporting to yourself, oh, my audience is too small. Oh, I just need more leads. You've been reporting that to yourself like it's the news. And listen, I'm not even gonna argue with you and say that you don't. That you don't need more leads. I don't really care if you do or you don't. But what I'm here to say is that you don't have an audience problem as much as you think you do, right? When you're so busy obsessing over finding new people and converting new people, you will overlook the people who are sitting right in front of you who are watching. They're not saying anything, probably, but they're watching and they're thinking about it. And like we talked about with the episode about content, when we talked about the Instagram dashboard being a liar, those people are like low key excited when they see your name come up on their stories or on their, you know, LinkedIn updates or whatever the case may be, right? So here's the deal. Coaches and service providers, entrepreneurs, creators, they come to me feeling like they need more followers, more reach, more people before they can really, truly sell. Like I said, sometimes that's true. I mean, sometimes, yeah. Like, the fact is, when you have a bigger audience, a lot of the strategies that I teach or any business and sales coach teach are just going to work better at a certain point. Yes, you are correct. There is a numbers game involved. Right. But more often they have that crowd right in front of them and they're treating them like background noise. Right? And what I want you to picture is imagine like this is like the craziest image. Imagine that you are standing at the front of a room, like a conference room, or it could even be like an auditorium, and you are like at the pulpit and you're on the stage and there's all of these people in chairs. They're sitting there. They're like, okay, I'm so excited for her to start her presentation right like, what does she have for me? And you are the speaker and you're standing on the stage and your eyes are just on the door and you're like, is anybody else gonna walk in this room? Like, and you're if for the people sitting in the audience, they're like, is she. Like, does she even see me right now? Like, who is she looking for? Right? And I know it might feel like a little bit of a dramatic image, but if you think of it that way, even if it's only 20 people sitting in the chairs, those are like. You treat it so differently if it was 20 people sitting in a room with you, right? Every time I put something on Instagram or TikTok or even this podcast, and I look at like, you know, just, I look very quickly and not very often at some of my stats, I like to picture as cheesy as it is. Like, you know, for example, you might say to yourself, gosh, only, you know, 15 people liked my post. Bummer. Another way to look at that is like, that's fifth. Put 15 people in a room and think about how differently you would feel, right? Like for your podcast, if a hundred people listen to your podcast, you're like, well, you know, it's not 10,000, but imagine a hundred people in a room to hear you speak. And you'd go up to them and you'd shake their hands and you'd say, thank you for being here. Okay, so that's the image I want you to have in your head. Now when we take it online, it's easier to get lost in the sauce. It's easier to think to yourself, like, oh, you know, it's not enough, right? But all this is something I talk about a lot with my clients. You are overlooking interest. Okay, we're going to talk about this more at the upcoming Sold Out Sales System summit when we get to day four. This is what we're talking about. But what does interest look like? I fancy myself a, like, laser focused, like, very trained eye when it comes to spotting interest. And the analogy that I always give on this, and I've probably said this in the past, but it's so important is like if you are go to a bar with your friends or like, you know, if you're single or maybe you were once upon a time, and it's like somebody starts talking to you, like a cute person starts talking to you, and you just have a conversation, whatever, and they walk away. And then your friends are like, oh, my God, that, that guy or that gal were. They were so into you. And you're like, what do you mean? Like, they were just talking to me. And your friends are like, no, that's called flirting. Like, that was interest. And you're just like, huh? And it's like it went right over your head. Every time someone does something as small as liking your posts, subscribing to your emails, commenting on anything you put out there, the one person who DM'd you a question or DM'd you to say, loved your episode this week, right? Anyone who came to your last free event that you did, whether it was a workshop or a webinar or a lunch and learn or whatever, every single one of those people gave you a signal. Whether or not you chose to accept it is a different matter. But every single one of those people was raising their hand. They said, I see you. Something that you did caught my eye. Really take a second to take that in, because I know most of you are not registering this. You are understandably focusing on how much more attention you wish you were getting. And that's normal. But this will change everything for you because most coaches, service providers, and entrepreneurs will do nothing with that interest. Nothing. They will scroll past those signals, looking for new strangers to impress, while the people who already like them drift away because nobody followed up, nobody made them feel seen, and nobody invited them. Okay, so hear me when I say this. Growing your audience and activating your audience are two completely different skills. Let me say that again. Growing your audience and activating your audience are two completely different skills. You are confusing them for being one and the same. When you don't have enough clients, you're telling yourself, I just need to grow my audience. But the problem is you don't know how to activate the audience you already have. So you can grow your audience to God's green earth, like, to kingdom come, whatever, right? But if you don't know how to activate them, it's not going to make a difference. You're going to continue to have a leaky bucket until you develop both of these skills. You will always feel like you need more people than you actually do. Isn't that crazy? Your problem is not nearly as big as you think it is. So here's something you can do. This is something practical, and we are going to talk about this a lot more at the summit. I want to talk to you about the lead list that nobody's keeping. Nobody's doing this. Okay? And I know that because I was talking to some of my clients and I actually went ahead and showed them on A call recently. This is for my same day sales clients. What my, what my lead list looks like, right? Like how I do it. Spoiler alert. It is extremely not fancy. Okay? It doesn't have to be a CRM. It's literally nothing crazy, but I have been doing this since the dawn of time, aka when I started my business over 10 years ago. And it's the sales rep in me, it's the cold caller in me. This is what you do if you've ever had a sales job, right? So I always keep, and I still do to this day, a list of actual human beings who have shown interest. Okay. And I have a habit of following up. I know it sounds so simple, but really ask yourself, are you doing this? And, and even if you do it a little bit, are you doing it super consistently? Because most sales aren't happening because of a perfect piece of content or because of a perfectly timed launch. Although certainly something that you say can wake somebody up or pull somebody in. Like, yes, that can happen, but, but more likely. And I just don't think people are talking about this enough, those sales are happening because of a conversation, because of a follow up, because of a moment where someone, like someone felt like you actually saw them, right? Every, like every reply, every registration, every dm, that is a person telling you that they're paying attention to you. And if you're not treating that as the beginning of a conversation, you're truly leaving your warmest leads out in the cold. And I'm not saying that to make you feel bad. I just really want you to see the opportunity in front of you. This goes back. If you think this is salesy or anything like that. This is like the oldest trick in the book, my friends. If we were to go back way, way, way pre Internet, when everybody had their own shop and everybody had their own storefront, this is how selling worked door to door. Who do you know? How's your father? Like, this is how societies have operated for eternity and we get confused the minute we go online. It's like online breaks our brain and it's like every human psychology principle that we're aware of goes out the window when really you're still. It's still human beings operating in community. Just because we're on the Internet and can't see each other doesn't change those facts. Okay? This is really about being a human who notices when people are showing up for you and taking the time to, to say something back to them again. I know, it is so simple and you're thinking it can't possibly be that, but it is. Okay? That habit alone, tracking interest and following up will do more for your revenue than any amount of new followers. Okay, at the summit, we're going to look at exactly how to build this and where most coaches, service providers are dropping the ball. I'm going to give you lots of ideas for where you are having that leaky bucket and where people are, you know, falling out of your pipeline. But for right now, before you come to the summit on, I guess this day will be. Oh, goodness, can I do the math? I guess it'll be March 19th. I think that's the Thursday. Yeah, that's the Thursday. That's when you're going to come and we're going to talk about this. Until then, I want you thinking about, where is my bucket leaking? Right? Where am I not following up with interest? Where am I not reading interest? And if you're really not sure, definitely come to the summit because we're going to talk about this and we're going to get specific. For right now, what you really need to think about is are you keeping track of people who are paying attention to you? Are you following up? Are you talking to them? Are you saying, when somebody says, I love your podcast and you're just like, pressing the heart button, right? Or doing nothing, why aren't you following up and sending them a voice memo saying, hey, what was your favorite part? What resonated with you? What have you got? What have you got going right now? Right? What are you working on? What are some of your goals? Hello? Right? Like, that's the way you need to be thinking, as if somebody came up to you in the street. Okay? So another thing I want to talk about here is this idea that you've, like, killed your platform or that, you know, you can't be successful with traditional audience growth strategies like social media? Okay, I want to say this with so much love. If you've decided that social media, I don't care what it is, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, even your email list, okay? If you've decided that it's dead for you or for your niche, I really want to push back on that, okay? Personally, I have hundreds. I have clients who are getting hundreds of leads right now from social media. Organic, okay? No ads, not going viral. Just consistent, valuable content that makes people look forward to what they're putting out. Okay? This principle has not changed in 10 years. Be valuable. Be consistent. Make people glad they follow you. That has always worked and it always will. And I want you to ask yourself, where am I? Convincing myself that this isn't working anymore, that, you know, the algorithm's broken, that nobody can see me. And it's like instead of getting better at creating interest, you're giving it up on the whole thing. Right? And the folks who say that social is dead or podcasting is dead or whatever they're saying, the people who are saying that are almost always the ones who tried, if they're honest, if you're honest about it, if this is you, maybe half heartedly, maybe for a little bit, maybe you didn't see immediate results, or maybe you even didn't see the results you wanted over a period of weeks or months, but eventually you stopped or they stopped, right? And then they say the platform doesn't work, but what actually happened is they quit. Okay? When you quit, it's not going to work a hundred percent of the time. Okay? Now there's another version of this that will also not translate to growing your audience, because now we're talking about, like, we've talked a lot about activating your audience. Now we're talking about how to draw in new people, which is a part of audience growth, of course. Right? So sometimes I see coaches, service providers, entrepreneurs doing everything right to get visible. They're doing things like landing a podcast interview or getting featured in a summit, or, you know, one way or another, they're getting a wave of new attention, but then they fumble it and they're like, why didn't it turn into anything? Right? And typically, most of the time, the first place that I look as a coach is they have no clear CTA or call to action, right? These new eyes are finding them, and then there's nowhere to go. Or at least nowhere compelling to go. It's like the door opens and there's nothing behind it. It's like you're opening your door. But did you actually invite people inside? Did you invite them into a haunted house? Right? Did you invite them into something that looks kind of shady? Or did you invite them into a super compelling dinner party where the music is beautiful and the food smells so good and they can't help but want to come inside? And if you're sitting there thinking, like, gosh, I don't know how to create that, well, great, great, you've got work to do now. You've got a project. You've just been telling yourself you can't figure it out. And I'm here to tell you, of course you can. Of course you can. You've solved harder problems. I promise You've been through harder things. Okay? Visibility without creating direction is just noise. It doesn't matter how many new people find you if you haven't built something clear for them to step into. So remember, both halves matter. Showing up so people find you and then having a clear path so they know what to do next. Now, something I meant to mention when we were talking before about the lead list. Right. So I'm really thinking about these two pieces of audience growth, which is activating your audience, like bringing new people in, but then also activating your audience. If you don't believe me, I want you to know I have multiple clients. Multiple, multiple clients who have not had to really do like a ton of lead generation. They have not had a platform, much of a platform, and they have managed to stay sold out. Now, still trying to get them and the. And they are, you know, I'm trying to also help them fill the top of their funnel because like I said, that's important. But I have some clients who have just gotten really, really good at the art of reaching out to people and doing personal outreach. And I want you to know you can fill an entire group program with that. And I don't think we're talking about that enough. All it takes is reaching out and knowing what to say, right? Knowing how to create a compelling invitation to start a conversation. You've likely been over complicating what it takes to fill a group program. You do know what you need to know what to say, and you do need to practice that as a skill. But I want you to know just to kind of create that possibility for you. I have multiple clients who have not had to do a full launch in years. Years. Okay. They're able to do it with personal invitation referral and starting conversations. And that's something that you can do as well. So we're obviously talking about predictable audience growth. So I want to just spend a moment talking about what I actually mean when I say predictable. I know predictable has. If you've been listening lately, predictable has been like our through line. It's going to be the through line for the summit. Everything we're talking about is creating predictability, sustainability and reliability in your business. So predictable audience growth, Tim, if you're asking me, it doesn't mean going viral, okay. It doesn't mean guaranteeing X new followers per month. It doesn't even mean like linear growth, okay. It means consistent inputs that reliably produce outcomes over time. Let me say that again. Predictable audience growth means consistent inputs that reliably produce an outcome over time. So if I were to break this down really simply, what do I mean by that? Here are some examples. If you show up, and again, the operative word is consistent, a lot of you, this is something I have to say. So many entrepreneurs tell me they want consistency, they want consistent sales, they want consistent results. But when we talk about consistency in your behaviors, it's kind of a dirty word. A lot of people don't want to talk about that. They're like, oh, I don't want to be consistent on social media, it's too hard. I don't want to be consistent creating content, it's too hard. And it's like, really think about that. If you are asking for consistency, you're asking, you're asking for consistent results, are you not? You're asking to be consistently sold out. You have to ask yourself, where are you not being consistent with your inputs? Ooh, I know, like knife to the chest, right? But if you want consistent outcomes, you have to be thinking about what you're consistently putting in. If the answer is not much, then what you going to get back out, right? The answer is half heartedly same. The truth is whatever you're getting as an outcome is a mirror for what you're putting in. And it's not as simple as that. Like, I completely understand that there's a lot that goes into it. But for a starting point, this is good for you to evaluate. Okay, so if we think about what could it mean to consistently be putting stuff in to reliably produce outcomes, Here are some examples. If you consistently show up with value in a system that works for you on a platform that you have figured out, then you can consistently be sourcing people who find you and can start the know, like and trust process with you. That can become a consistent cycle. Okay? If you borrow other audiences, you can consistently get in front of new people through someone they already trust, which speeds up again that relationship with you. Okay? If you consistently follow up and learn how to follow up with people who are already paying attention to you and you get really good at that, you can consistently convert interest into relationships. And finally, if you have a clear CTA everywhere and you do that consistently, that's something I coach my mastermind clients on. So much is having a clear call to action everywhere and doing it weekly, right? If not daily. If you build that habit of having a clear call to action, every piece of content, every appearance, every conversation has a next step and people will start taking them, I promise you that. Okay, so none of these are complicated I get that none of them require a big following to start. Notice how you don't need a single new follower or a single new audience member in order to start taking advantage of everything I've shared today. Right. But doing all of them consistently in a way that compounds is where most coaches and service providers will fall short. Okay. Because it's usually not all of these things that going that are going wrong. It's typically one or even two, like specific leaks, interested people falling through the cracks, visibility happening, but like maybe haphazardly but not converting. Okay. And that's what we're gonna find together. That's what we're gonna troubleshoot, that's what we're gonna help you diagnose in your specific business. So on day four of the summit, I'm doing a real audit of some audiences out there. Okay. So it won't be a lecture about posting more. Hopefully, you know, that's not my style. It's not going to be telling yourself to work harder. We're going to do an actual diagnostic of where so you can really walk away knowing where your specific gaps are. I want you to remember that for most of you it will come down to one or two things. Okay. And once you can see them clearly, everything is going to compound differently. The content you're already making is gonna start working harder for you. The audience that you already have is gonna start converting better and the new people you bring in are actually going to stay and become clients. So if you've been spinning your wheels, trying to grow, I promise you're not alone. It's one of the top complaints I hear from the entrepreneurs I talk to. So come find out what's actually going on so you can start going in the right direction. Okay? It's totally free. March 16th through the 20th, one hour a day at 2pm Eastern time. There will be replays, but you gotta come live especially so I can give you. I'm gonna be selecting some real people to do audits with. So get there live. Don't miss it. Come on, you have time. Clear your calendar. But if you can't. I understand. Grab your spot@stephcrowder.com summit and I cannot wait to see you there. My friends, I'm wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Are you ready to get fully booked and fill up your group program? Join the Sold sales system summit March 16th through the 20th at 2pm Eastern. It's a free five day live training and I cannot wait to see you there. StephCrowder.com summit get all signed up and I'll talk to you soon.