How to Prevent a Business Lull (Sales & Marketing). EP #318 - Den Lennie

You know, in the video industry, business is never that consistent and there are going to be times when your business.

Hits a bit of a lull.

Now the question is, how do you manage that and what should you be doing to prevent that? Well, in today's video I'm going to talk about the specifics of sales and marketing and how you should be preparing your sales and marketing so that you give yourself a really good consistent flow of opportunities as your business evolves. Now this was taken from a live coaching call inside the VBA elite program. So it gives you a little bit of an insight as to how we do things.

Lulls happen in sales. You just don't get opportunities flooding in every week and sales happening every week. It's ebbs and flows and when things do go slow is to just not shit a brick. It's like actually meditate, go for a walk, get some perspective and then just systematically hit the list one at a time and make meaningful connections. Like, you know, yes, you can send an email blast but you know you're Getting less than 1% click through rate on those things. Whereas if you actually intent go and look at someone's profile, send them a message. There's just something, I think something shifts in the energy around it and I think you feel like you're prospecting and when you're prospecting, you're, you know, where, where the, where the focus goes, the money flows. And I've seen that every single time you go through your database of warm leads, existing clients and just scrape and go, hey, how's it going? Look, in any market, the market always shifts, right? It shifts, it ebbs, it flows.

When it comes to selling in its true sense, you've constantly got to be listening to the market and adjusting your offers. We just set a whole lot of new ads live with four different ad creatives and five different images and three different audiences. And you've got to test marketers don't think they test. You just constantly got to test the market. And if you feel like that five grand experiment tells you that actually what's really important here is that the demand for live streaming has dropped from where it was. But hey, at least you're not fucking the CEO of Peloton, you know what I mean? Peloton had an enormous anything that had enormous growth during COVID now know, probably not doing so well and but it does force you to just go back to the list and go back to the data and go back to the connections and go, okay, what am I missing here? What angle can I come at? Because maybe the angle you were coming at isn't the right angle. Maybe it's helping them understand that, you know, it's not just live streaming. It's actually recording and capturing any live method, which. Which removes the need for editing. It actually accelerates the process from recording to getting it out on a platform to someone. And that just is one example of a diversion from we just do live streaming. Because there's an assumption made that everyone understands what live streaming is. This quarter in Australia can be odd because it's end of financial year. People are distracted. They're just focused on getting to the end of financial year. So you got January is a weird month, and June, July can be a weird month. It can either be really busy or it can be dead. And I think it's just understanding that no business on the planet is busy 24, 7, 7 days a week. Even McDonald's goes quiet sometimes. It's like there are seasons and there are periods where it's really slammed. And I think the more you can understand that a business isn't just the same money every month. It's like some months it goes up, some months it goes down. As long as you're tracking the quarterlies and you're on target, then it's like, just dig deeper into the marketing. And it's all about sales and marketing. And it's like, as Wayne Gretzky says, the famous hockey player, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. And with sales, it's just a numbers game. It's like, get on, bash the floor. I had the same conversation, Matt, last week. It's like, hey, go and try this. You just got to get out there. And like he said in his weekly wins, trust the process. I've got a couple of calls, a couple of guys who were really interested in joining Elite a few months ago, and they were like, having a few cash flow issues, waiting on some invoice to be paid. So I followed up again, like last week, conversation. One guy situation hasn't changed at all. And I said, well, look, you actually wouldn't qualify for Elite. Now, another guy who's absolute perfect fit just having some cash flow issues. I said, we spoke in January and you're still having these issues. That doesn't sound right. Why don't we just jump on a call, no pressure, and just actually work out why you're having this problem? Because if I can solve this cash flow problem, he'd be perfect in here. And when you know you can help someone and they're just going, I can't because I haven't got any money or they're waiting on invoices, then some things need to diagnose the bigger picture goal, how can we solve. If we get on a call and solve this problem and you get out of this hole, then you're naturally going to want to join us in Elite. And I've got the event coming up and it's like, hey, if you come in before the event, you come to the event, hang out with everyone. But I'm actually going to spend an hour with him and half an hour's time just trying to understand why his situation hasn't changed from January. Because what that does is it highlights to me that what he's doing on his own is not working. And sometimes you need to take people to kind of more pain to get them to commit. Now that's difficult to do when you're selling AV.

Or live streaming. There's more of a service based offer. But it's not to say you can't just get on a conversation and actually have a chat and go, hey, did you know that we actually do this as well? And is there anything I can do to give you some suggestions, give you an idea how we might be able to do X, Y and Z. And I think the more conversations you have, the more people just get into some sense of like understanding about you're trying to be helpful. And that energy of being helpful I think goes a long way.

So if you take everyone that's on your list that's, you know, for reply and just go back to them and go, hey, just wanted to let you know we're now doing this as well. It's a new service we've added and we can do it with or without live streaming. You know, if you ever need anything, sometimes people will just be like, oh, I know there's someone I can go to that I can just get this problem solved, doesn't matter what it costs.

But like if you go back to the, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. If you, if you connect with them and nothing happens, at least you've connected with them and made another touch point with a, with a kind of reason, reason to, to get in touch. The key is to be consistent. If you're not consistent, you're only doing one and not the other. The seesaw gets imbalanced. You know, it goes too much one way. You've got to maintain that balance. Three posts a week and the outreach, it's the combination of the two that makes it powerful. One without the other is like half power.

So if you found these interesting and useful, there's a couple of things you can do next. One is you can join our free community to scale your video business community or or go and watch our free training. Both are linked below. And let's work together to build your video business.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast with your host, Den Lenny. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support, and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the accelerator program can help you today. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes, and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review.