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Courage & Clarity
193: Everything I Lost By Only "Selling Sometimes" - And How I'm Fixing It This Year
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Okay, let me guess. You fall into one of these two camps. The first camp is you want to earn $100,000 in a single year for the first time or you're in the second camp where you've already made six figures in a year before and now you want to learn how to make a hundred K or more in a single launch. And you don't want to just do it once, you want to do it every single time. Whether you're in Camp 1 or Camp 2. I want to invite you to a brand new training that I have cooked up and it's called 100k group programs. We are going over the 12 month blueprint I have for you where you're going to learn how to start, sell out and scale your group program. Whether you are making your First a hundred K or you're scaling to 2,50, even 500K, you need to know where you are on this map and exactly what strategies you need right now to get to the next milestone. This training is brand new, totally free, and it's happening on July 8th at noon Eastern time. If you want to get signed up, go ahead over to stephcrowder.com workshop and I cannot wait to see you there. Let's go to the show. 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 go. Hello. Hello CNC listeners. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for listening to today's show. It's going to be a good one. As always. We are going to talk about this idea of only selling sometimes and it's going to be. I'm going to talk. It's a very personal episode. I think I'm going to talk about something that I realized recently, something that has been like a huge light bulb for me. We're going to kind of dive into this a little bit as like a case study and I think it's going to really help you. I hope it really Helps you sort of have a light bulb moment like I did around what can happen when we are sometimes thinking about selling and then sometimes not thinking about selling. And the cost of that, what I saw it cost like in real brass tax in my own business. And what I think you need to look out for and how so many problems are going to be solved in your business if you can get off this up and down roller coaster of selling. Sometimes not showing up, other times having to sell again. It really does create a vicious cycle that I think is so optional and is causing a lot more pain than we realize inside of our businesses. I'll tell you what I realized about this in terms, terms of my own story. So it's so funny because, you know, as a sales coach and business coach, like I'm always talking about selling. I teach my clients money making activities. We talk about an hour a day of mma. This is like a little chant that we have inside my mastermind sold out group programs. MMA stands for money making activities. And so I train my clients how to have what we call good sales hygiene and good sales hygiene looks like. Think about your personal life and the things that you do for your hygiene, the things that you do every day or most days. Right. Whether that's brushing your teeth or taking a shower, you know, looking after yourself. Right. And I talk to my clients a lot about how you need to be thinking about your sales hygiene. You don't want to be showering once a month. You're gonna be like, I don't know how many people are gonna wanna be around you. Right. And so we have to be treating our businesses the same way. I coach a lot on how selling gets a lot easier when it just becomes like something that you do every single day in a natural way versus when we build it up. And we wait until we're in trouble, we wait until we're running out of money, we wait until our client load has dropped and then there's all of this emotion and all of this panic. Yes. In some ways it might feel like, gosh, it's a lot of work to be thinking about selling every day. But I actually think, and this is what we're going to explore a bit on this podcast today is it makes your life so much easier in the long run when you are maintaining. Okay, when you are sort of maintaining a certain pace with your sales. We're going to talk again about a specific example. But there really is a huge, huge cost of this up and down relationship that we can have with selling. And it can Be sneaky. I mean, like I said, I am supposedly the expert on this, right? Like I'm the professional. I coach on this every single day. And yet it has occurred to me this year that I have been secretly, kind of unbeknownst to me, indulging in a version of only selling sometimes. So I'm going to give you the example and how I had this light bulb moment, what I've realized and what I'm going to change to make my life and my business so much easier. Okay? So you know, we have to be just like, for starters, we have to be thinking about sales hygiene. Regardless of what your business model looks like. I think it's easiest in my opinion to conceptualize this idea when you're doing one on one services like coaching. One on one coaching or service providing. Right. For my clients, which you might be surprised to know that there are, there's a good chunk of my clients in my mastermind sold out group programs. Even though it's called sold out group programs, I have a number of clients who are working primarily on getting booked out with their one on one services. And that is because I see one on one in some cases, in many cases actually, as part of the journey to being booked out with groups. So we have a number of clients who are working on that as their, you know, 90 day goal right now. And I think when you're looking for three one on one clients or five one on one clients or whatever your number is, you can really conceptualize, okay, it makes sense for me to spend at least an hour a day selling and prospecting. Right, right. Because your cart is kind of always open, your doors are always open until you fill up all your spots. So of course it would follow that we need to be bringing in those leads daily. We need to be having, this is what I teach, like having sales conversations, generating interest, creating demand, having conversations, running sales calls that convert and you know, getting booked out. Right. So that makes sense. When it comes to launch based businesses, I think we can really fall down very quickly and fall into the trap of only selling sometimes. So if you're someone like me who has a, or you're not there yet, but you're, you know, this is gonna be your goal most likely is having a business that is 100% launch based. Right. Where it's like, you know, you have open enrollment a few times a year and you're doing like an intake of new clients during that time you're bringing in a cohort for a mastermind or some other like high level program. Yes. We could talk about having an evergreen model where you're always open, then you're definitely going to have to be thinking about selling all the time. Right. But this is specifically in this case that I'm going to tell you about. This is about doing kind of strategic open like sales campaign windows, AKA launching. Okay. And for me, if you've been hanging out here watching me for any amount of time, you know, I sell big and bold during my launches. Like I am not afraid. I actually love selling, sending lots of emails. I increase my production here on the podcast. I show up a lot on social media. Like I am out there. I have had, you know, it wasn't always that way. I've had to do a lot of work and a lot of coaching and a lot of exposure therapy with myself to get really good at showing up during these big sales pushes. I'm quite good at them. It's why I've done my past seven launches have all been over six figures in revenue. It's not a coincidence. Right. But what I haven't really been honest with myself about that I want to tell you about today is I've kind of been guilty of ghosting my audience, at least to some degree in between my launches. And it's very tempting to think like, oh thank God, like you put in so much work to a launch. You're emailing and emailing and you're talking your little head off and you're doing all the things and you're taking a million sales calls and then the doors close and you want to be like, oh, okay, now I can chill. Like, you know, I got time until the next one. I have definitely done this and you might think, just bear with me. If you're like, oh man, don't take that away from me. Like, I like that. Like you might be thinking to yourself, I like having time that I don't have to be so busy. But what I am realizing is, you know, we think about the launch roller coaster. Some of you have experienced this where it's like high highs, low lows. You feel like you're up, you're down, you're up, you're down, you're up, you're down. That is actually coming from this thing that I'm talking about. When you are loud sometimes and quiet or non existent other times you are giving your audience whiplash and then thereby by proxy giving yourself whiplash. Right. It kind of reminds me of like if you've ever had any kind. I'm sure we all have had health and Fitness goals. It would be like going on a big diet journey a few times a year and then kind of having like. Like really not doing any of those habits in the. In between time, right? And it's not that I'm saying be on a diet all the time, be miserable all the time. Like, that's not the point. But imagine, like, all of the habits that you would do if you had some kind of goal, whether it was building muscle or dropping fat or losing weight, whatever it was, and you hit it really hard for some period of time, say like eight weeks, right? And then you were like, oh, thank God. Okay. Like, I was getting 10,000 steps and now I'm on the couch, right? I was eating 140 grams of protein a day, and now I'm not tracking a dang thing. Well, like, yeah, when you, like, a lot of things are. We can all imagine a lot of things are going to happen inside of your body and frankly, inside of your brain when three months later you're like, I don't feel so good. Uh, man, I really liked those results I got before now. Like, oh, my gosh, like, it. It leads to this feeling of, like, starting and stopping, right? It's like, oh, my God. And so I wonder. This led. I've actually been thinking about this all year. All year long. I've been like, what would it feel like to even this out? To not feel so much like I have to be on, on, on, on, on, and then be so exhausted by that that I'm like, on the couch, right? And I'm not on the couch. Like, I'm, you know, serving my clients. Like, I'm. I'm busy, right? Like, I'm creating new curriculum for them. I'm coaching them. I coach every single day. I give feedback inside. I'm very, very involved. I'm give. I give, you know, feedback and coaching every day. And so it's not like I'm not doing anything. But on the sales and marketing side, I can see where I have ghosted, right? And it's so funny because one of the things that gave me access to the thought, I shared this with my clients. I said, I think launching is the easiest part of my business. And they were like, what? And launching really can become the easiest part of your business? When you start to demand this of yourself, when you start to think, okay, I have to. I have to always be selling something, right? I have to always be visible enough with this, like, high visibility sometimes and disappearing other times. If you start to think to yourself, oh, man, like, this, this just needs to be the pace, right? Like, I need to work on pacing out my business so that I am creating. We hear all the time about the value of consistency, right? We think about, we're going to talk about social media platforms as an example in a minute. We've been beat over the head with ideas like consistency. We say we want stability. It's one of the number one things I hear from my incoming clients is they're like, I want stability, I want predictability. But if we look at our actions inside of the business, there's nothing stable and predictable and repeatable about our behavior when we are starting and stopping and starting and stopping. And like I said, I have been so guilty of this as well. And it's so funny because to kick off this year, I decided to look at January. And January was not a launching month for me. I wasn't in launch, I wasn't in pre launch. It was just kind of like quote unquote off time. And I sat down with my calendar and I thought to myself, what if I turned January into its own campaign, right? Like, I'm not like my, my cart's not open for my mastermind right now. I'm just working on lead generation and nurturing and getting people to pay attention to me and being ready for my next enrollment, which was March. So January was just kind of like typically in other years I would have probably, if we're really honest, I would have probably missed some of my podcast episodes. Maybe I would have gotten them all out every week, but that would probably be it. Instagram, where, which is my main content platform, like social media platform, would probably be maybe a post every other week, right? Maybe I'd be on Stories, Instagram stories, but probably not because I've really, really fallen out of the habit of doing that unless I'm launching. And so when I sat and was like, I need to raise my standards of how I'm showing up when I'm not launching, all of a sudden launching didn't feel so hard anymore. Because at least with launching, I understand the playbook, right? Like I teach the playbook. I have a process called Buzz Blitz. My clients know it, I know it. It's how I've created seven six figure launches in a row. I could do that thing up, down, backwards, sideways. Yeah, it takes effort and energy. But I know how to launch, right? And when clients come into my world, they learn how to create this enrollment system that they can repeat. And so it's funny when you start to make visibility your standard, when you start to think about not just selling. Sometimes I think launching can start to feel like, wait a minute, that's actually the easy part. Because at least I know what I'm doing when I'm launching, right? If you are entertaining thoughts about how difficult launching is, about how exhausting launching is lovingly and in the most kind way possible, I want to encourage you to realize that that is the cost of doing business. Right? I really think we, and I know this is kind of bold, but I think we have to shut down those thoughts about, like, oh my gosh, like, it's so hard. It's so exhausting. It takes so much from me. Like, you gotta have an enrollment system, right? And so when we can look at it and be like, how do I accept that I'm always going to be selling, right? Whether I'm in active open cart launching or back to my January, I what am I selling? My cart's not open. I'm not making invitations into my mastermind. What am I selling? You might be asking yourself, like, but it makes sense. Your business model is only selling sometimes. Shouldn't you only be selling sometimes? No, right? In January, I'm thinking, what am I selling? I'm selling attention, right? Or I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm wanting people to give me attention. I guess that's the currency, right? Like, I want people's valuable time. I want them listening to this podcast, I want them hitting subscribe. I want them looking forward to my updates and looking for me on social media. That is me selling something, right? Engagement is a form of currency. And yeah, I still want to have calls to action, like, get on the wait list, right? Like, my mastermind will be opening up this spring. Make sure you're on the waitlist to get the best offer, offer to get the best bonuses, to get the best opportunity, right? Another way to think about this is like sharing client stories. Always being sharing client stories, always putting those testimonials out there, putting those case studies out there, not just when we're selling, but all of the time. Because you can start to build a reputation if you want to. Here's the thing that's so crazy. If you want your launches to feel easier, one of the things that's making them so difficult is having to roll that boulder up the hill from stagnation, right? If you haven't been doing that and you haven't been sharing case studies and you haven't been creating engagement and you kind of have this feeling of starting from zero, that is what's making launching so difficult. It's not having to write emails, it's not having to make podcasts, y', all, I'm sitting here yapping, this is not hard. Like, we don't need to entertain thoughts that it has to be hard. What if it's just business, right? What if it and if, if you don't want to do it after, you're like, well, shoot, then like, I, okay, then that's also fine. But I think things get so much, things have gotten so much easier for me mentally when I've accepted I'm always going to be loud. I need to be out here and visible and creating. Whether it's January, February, March, April, I need to be getting in front of people. I promise you. I, I, I wonder how this is coming off and how, like, you all might receive this. I'm actually super curious because on one see how that would be like, oh, that sounds really hard. But on the other hand, I just really want to encourage you to see that when you start to see business this way, it will take that emotional up and down out of launching. I have seen this with selling, right? Like I told you, my one on one. My clients who do one on one, one of the things that made it so hard for them, they'll come in and be like, I hate selling. It's so hard. And what they find is they don't actually hate selling. A lot of them tell me selling is now my favorite thing in my business. They never hated selling. They hated was having zero clients. What they hated was, oh, holy crap, I haven't pitched anything in four weeks and now I'm like, I don't know what to do. That's what they hated. Spending an hour a day reaching out to people, creating content, having conversations. They don't hate that at all, especially when they get in the groove. Okay? So I'm hoping that this is like, I want this to be inspirational. That if being big and bold and launching has felt like an emotional roller coaster to you, it feels like, oh my God, I need to go, like, take a month off after launching. I think it's a pacing issue throughout the year. Let me give you a specific example of how I know this is true. This is what this has been such an interesting learning. So if you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen that I recently posted a reel that I said where I said I haven't been fully honest with you. And in that reel, I talked about how I've stopped having fun on Instagram. I've been there for 10 years. It used to be a place where I would just show up so consistently every day, pop open my phone, not overthink it, just talk and share and, you know, be present. Right? And it was so easy for me to do. And somewhere along the way, I've lost that. I think I've become more private. Maybe as my kids are getting older, my family's made the decision, knowing what we know now, about what happens on the Internet. Unfortunately, we have decided that we don't show our kids faces. And as a result, I think that's led to some laziness on my part of now I feel like I can't show our life, which is not true. I can show lots of things, right? It doesn't have to be so all or nothing. And, you know, I've been so inspired. If you are on Instagram and you have followed this whole. It's blown up this whole yap challenge that Jesse Jean has put out there into the world, if you don't know what I'm talking about, definitely go down the rabbit hole, because I think it is so inspiring. Jesse Jean is a creator who had a $1.2 million launch with a product under $300. Do the math on that. Teaching people how to yap on Instagram, how to create kind of talking head videos. And they're very real. They're very. It really does remind me, and I always say in business, everything comes full circle. It reminds me of where we started, and it's been so inspirational for me. And meanwhile, my engagement on Instagram, along with a lot of people that I know, has gone down over time. I don't get as many likes and comments and saves and shares, right? And I try not to. I really try not to read too deeply into that. It doesn't keep me from posting. I always tell myself, people are lurking. Just because they aren't engaging doesn't mean it's not working. I have very strong thoughts about that, and that continues to be true. And also I'm seeing the engagement and the breaking of the Internet that somebody like Jesse Jean has done. And I've thought, oh, my gosh, a lot of us have been platform blaming. A lot of us have been like, instagram's dead. You can just go on Threads and you'll see people being like, oh, like, you know, threads is so much better than Instagram. TikTok's so much better than Instagram. We've been platform blaming, right? And I finally decided to take a hard look at, like, what is going on with my account and my content, where I'm getting these results. This is what I love about other people getting results. People like Jesse. I'm like, okay, so it's not. It's not the platform, it's me, okay? And I don't mean I'm not in a mean way to myself, but it actually gives me hope because I can have the thought I can fix this, right? When I see somebody else getting a result that I want, I immediately get to work and have the thought, I can figure out Instagram. She figured out Instagram. I can figure this out, right? So I started doing a deep dive. I started using Claude, talking to Claude, going over my account. And here's what we figured out. When you are ghosting your audience in between your launches, when you're really noisy sometimes, and then you're quiet, and then you want to go and get noisy again for your next launch, it confuses platforms. It confuses platforms like Instagram. Okay? My very best friend, Claire Pels, you all might know Claire, she teaches Facebook ads, and she has taught me about this concept of learning mode. Your ads have to go into learning mode, and when you make any changes to an ad, it goes back to learning mode for, like, 10 days. It's like the biggest pain, right? And learning mode is like the platform just showing it to people and trying to figure out, like, how do we make this a success, a successful campaign? Okay? And what clicked for me was like, oh, my goodness. When I am talking, talking, talking, creating engagement, creating content, creating value, and Instagram, when I'm launching, Instagram's like, oh, we like this. Let's show it to people. This is great. And then I stop. It's throttling. My reach is what I've been able to ascertain and determine, right? And what I mean by that is it's like, oh, like, she's not on stories. So, you know, her engaged followers aren't like, I'm not popping up for people anymore because I haven't really been super engaged on stories. I haven't been on there daily. Or, like, I've gone, you know, a week or two where I won't say anything. So I kind of fall to the bottom of people's feeds. You need your loyal fan base, no matter how big or small they are, to be watching your stuff. That helps it show up in their feed, which helps them like it, share it, save it, and that's how you start to reach more people, right? And so when, for me, let's just say that I do A big launch, and then I go to the couch and then another launch comes and I'm like, oh, crap, it's time to be loud again. It's like sending the Instagram algorithm back into learning mode. And it's spending part of my launch being like, what the hell is it we supposed to do with this? Right? And it's just been such a game changer for me to be like, this is another reason that I need to change my pace, right? Instead of sprint, sprint, sprint, sprint, sprint, lay down. Sprint, sprint, sprint, sprint, sprint, lay down. I want you to think of it as running a steady marathon pace, right? You're not sprinting, okay? You do have to train. You do have to practice. This isn't something I expect you to get overnight. And it's something I feel like I'm practicing all year is how do I even out my marketing? Instead of going in these crazy bursts and then again needing to, like, go into. Put on my cone of silence. How do I see this as my pace? I think it's always gonna be louder during a launch. It should be. Right, That's. That's intentional. But my baseline needs to change because not only is it throttling Instagram, my Instagram engagement, it's throttling my mindset, right? Where it's like I'm having to, like, go back into the closet, get my superwoman cape, like, ramp myself back up. You feel kind of rusty at the beginning of a launch versus, if you can. It kind of reminds me is like, again, if you took like three months off of the gym and then you expect yourself to go back in and, you know, do all the things that you were doing before, it's not gonna work. Those muscles atrophy. That's the point. And again, do you need to work out Every single day? 365 days? No. Take breaks, take your weekends. But you have to think about, like, it's. It's just like a fact. If you want to be a human being with any level of. Level of physical fitness, we know we got to move our bodies every day. We accept that. We accept that, right? Like on a large scale. We accept that. Correct. Where are we not accepting that in business? Right? And we're like, mourning that and grieving that and complaining about that. I've been part of that. Maybe, maybe you too. And it's like, what if it's just how it is? Okay. What if it's just how it is? If you wanna be able to have those muscles, you say you wanna have a six figure launch you say you wanna have a six figure business, you say you wanna have a seven figure business. Just gotta do what's required, right? And sometimes that does include expanding our capacity and increasing our capacity. Again, doesn't have to be done overnight, but it's something that you can work towards. And so again, I think it's really cool that when we see ourselves as always selling, if that can be the mindset, I've always got to be selling, whether I'm in the off time and I'm selling, you know, attention and I'm selling nurturing and I'm selling ideas and I'm selling engagement or it's a, it's a cart open time where I'm selling my program. If I'm always selling, it's going to make my launches easier. Okay? And another thing that makes launches easier is when you have a process for them, they have become predictable. Okay? For me, like I've told my clients, launching feels easier because they're predictable and I know what to do. It's the in between times that have felt squishier. And so that's where I need practice is like I said when I did that January campaign, I felt like a, I felt like a goopy, like a baby bird. I was like, what am I doing? You know, like when you get really good at launching, sometimes you're like, I don't, this has been my issue. I don't know how to be here when I'm not in that mode. That's part of the problem is like, I know how to talk when my doors are open. I know how to talk when I have a masterclass coming up. But the new skill is how do I be visible and how do I create interest when that's not what's happening right when it's just January, when it's whatever, whenever, month. So that's kind of the emerging skill set. And I'm really coming to terms with that hidden cost of only selling sometimes. So that is what I'm working on. And it has been so eye opening, it's also been just a breath of fresh air because I love to think I have work to do. I like, to me, I'm not scared of hard work, I'm not scared of troubleshooting. I'm not scared of having to try new and different things and learn new skills. Doesn't scare me. It's hard. I'm not gonna say it's not hard. It's hard. But what scares me is having nowhere to go, having nothing to change. The answer being you can't fix it. It's broken. We've tried everything. That's how you know you're in trouble is when you're entertaining thoughts like that, right? Like. Cause then you just have nowhere to go. You have no place to take that. So those are just. I wanted to really, again, like, kind of a inside my mind episode. I talk to my clients all the time about how we can't just be selling sometimes. So it's funny for me to realize that in a really sneaky way, I have been doing that. So I want to encourage all of you to be so honest and for real with yourself and ask, where have I been selling? Like, only sometimes. Where have you been only selling sometimes? And how can you. Again, doesn't have to be overnight crazy changes for me. It's taking me like, all year to kind of like, get my head all year so far to get my head around, okay, if I'm not going to be posting and ghosting in between my launches, how do I do this? How do I make this? Like, how do I set up my days? How do I set up my weeks? Like, how can I change the pace of my visibility? How can I do everything I want to do on the. On the client side and have the space that I need for sales and marketing? These are all questions that take time to answer. But I think the important thing is even having the desire and the willingness to roll up those sleeves and figure it out. So I hope you all have loved this episode. I hope it's given you something to think about. I would love to know what you think about this. Genuinely. Can you relate to this? Was there a light bulb for you? I love to hear from you when you all listen to the podcast. So please DM me. I'm on Instagram at Hey, Steph Crowder. And you can reply to our email as well. And tell us, like, what. Tell me. It's me who reads emails. What came up for you? What are your thoughts? What are your questions? I. I absolutely would love to know. Okay, my friends, that is what I have for you right now. I am so excited. I have such good stuff coming out for you over the next few weeks, so stay tuned. And until then, I am wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.