The 8 Steps From Invisible To Paid

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everybody, this is Julie. Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today I'm talking about the 8 invisible The 8 Steps from Invisible to Paid, and really diving into the difference between marketing and sales and trying to uncover why so many people get completely overwhelmed with marketing. And then they end up doing this sort of spray and pray method, and it feels like their efforts are wasted. And I drew a line in my notebook yesterday on sort of what happens from the moment someone knows who you are, you catch their attention to becoming a customer. And I, I outlined like 8 different stages, and it starts with, of course, attention. And they, for some reason, figure out that you exist on planet Earth and that your business is around. Then they move into attraction, and attraction is where they decide, okay, like, I really like who this person is, maybe I want to give them a follow, maybe I want to opt into their lead magnet, etc., etc. And then they go into what I call the nurture loop, which is education, belief, and trust. And some people can go from education, like understanding something, believing you, and trusting you in like one shot, but many people actually kind of stay in a loop there, and they learn from you, and maybe it changes their way of thinking, and it builds trust, but then they kind of keep going around and around and around. And that's sort of the marketing part of the line: attention, attraction, education, belief, and then trust. At that point, we kind of slip into sales, And the 3 stages that I call the sort of the sales process is desire, which is I want this, right? It's them taking a step towards I actually want to purchase this, or I want to work with this person. Then they usually hit objections, which are those last sort of, yeah, but I'm not sure, that, that kind of thing. And then ultimately the sale. And if you look at these 8, the first 5 are marketing, the last 3 are sales. Marketing is what is actually like building demand, and then sales is the process by which someone actually becomes a customer. Now, if your business has run on referrals or word of mouth, you are probably getting prospects right at the point of desire, and you're not having to even do any marketing because people are coming on transfer of trust from someone who said, oh yeah, you should work with this person. And that means that your attention, attraction, education, belief, and trust systems might be all over the place or nonexistent. And that's where you find people are like, okay, I gotta, I gotta get on certain platforms. You know, do I go on LinkedIn? Do I go on Twitter, Pinterest? Do I do Instagram, TikTok? How many posts? How long will it take? And we have this idea that like, okay, we should see money coming in the door as soon as we start doing this. And then we get annoyed when that money doesn't come in right away. It feels expensive. It feels exhausting. And here are a couple examples of maybe how that might look in a business. Let's say you're really good at long-form articles. Okay. You're writing articles on LinkedIn and this does a great job of education, belief, and trust, right? People could be, you know, following you on LinkedIn and they're, they're reading those articles and they're just gaining trust. But if you've, if you're never, if you're not running ads or you're not doing anything to get new people onto your LinkedIn profile, you're going to be obscure for a long time, right? You've got your education, belief, trust, nurture loop going great. But you have nothing with attention or attraction. And some people might say, well, my articles are supposed to get attention. And, you know, there is, there are times when articles go viral. It's not to say that it wouldn't help you get attention, but more often than not, you actually want to look at what mechanism is an attention-getting mechanism, an attraction-getting mechanism, and use that. And then the long-form articles become that much more powerful because there's more people paying attention. Another option would be maybe you're really good at the attention side. You're good at Reels or you're good at Instagram, you have followers, but you don't have a really good education, belief, and trust loop going on. You don't have email marketing or you don't have a funnel. And what happens is you start amassing followers, but then they're not paying you any money. You could also have a problem where let's say you have a, a good podcast, right? So you've got that education, belief, trust loop going. Maybe you also have a great sales script, so that's you know, your sales calls work really, really well, which is sort of the end of the line, but you don't have a bridge, and people that are listening to your podcast never make it over to your calendar. And that's an example of technically having marketing and sales covered, but there's no bridges. And I decided to sketch this out, and there are several places where I put this image. If you're listening on this podcast, you can go to LinkedIn. I have the article there. You can also go on Instagram, I have it there. And I basically sketched out this line and then I looked at all of the different marketing initiatives like lead magnets, podcasting, stage speaking, networking, email marketing, DMs, sales calls, articles, social posts, videos, ads, and then of course funnels. And what I did was I put like a check mark if it was like weak at a certain point in the line, or if it was very strong at a certain point in the line, I would put like 4 check marks. So for example, if we take ads, Right? Ads are really, really good at attention. So it should get like 3 or 4 checkmarks for attention and attraction. But ads are really not going to do much else in the line. And you could argue, you could say, well, retargeting ads could help with objections. And okay, that's true. I'm not saying that it would never work there, but ads, the primary job of ads is to get attention, right? And then you look at something like DMs, for example. DMs do really, really well over on the sales side with objection handling and closing the sale, but they don't work at all to get attention. You could do outbound DMing technically, right? You could cold DM somebody who doesn't know you and that could get their attention. But again, not primarily its job. And you find that if you do a cold outbound DM, now you've gotten them at the attention part, but now you've got to take them to attraction. Education, belief, trust, desire, right? So that's gonna be a long DM conversation. It's very difficult to like close that gap. And when you look at the image and the different sales initiatives, you'll notice that there are a couple that are really, really strong. One that kind of surprised me, kind of didn't— stage speaking. Stage speaking gets 3 to 4 check marks across every single spot in the line. And I thought, man, that's a really good argument for why stage speaking is so valuable. And this could be virtual virtual stages or in-person stages. But I thought that that was really interesting. And then the other thing is that certain funnels, I like to call them big daddy funnels. Like they're, they're not just like a lead magnet funnel or an opt-in funnel. They are a webinar funnel. They're a low ticket funnel, or they're like an application funnel. These actually basically take customer right after they have attention and they take them all the way through the line to sale with really minimal, minimal involvement from you. And that's why I feel like I'm constantly like harping on, hey, you need to have this type of funnel, you need to have this type of funnel. And it's not that, like, I mean, these types of funnels can absolutely change your business. There's no question about it. In fact, I just popped open the spreadsheet that I'm using for our Funnel Gorgeous webinar, and I think we've spent like $90,000 in ads and we have closed over half a million dollars in sales. It's just outrageous. We took $90,000 and turned it into half $1 million. Okay, that is like life-changing for so many business owners if they could just dial in, they could have the patience and the energy. But what I guess what I'm trying to say is like, okay, maybe it's not gonna like completely change your business overnight, but if you look at all this different marketing and sales initiatives, doesn't it make sense to find the ones that are the highest leverage in each of the lines, right? So like if you're doing attention, the best thing you can do are reels and ads. Like those are the best attention-getting things you can do online, and then stage speaking. And then you look at the rest of the line and you say, okay, well, how do I get the most leverage possible? And this should dial down some of that overwhelm and that spray and pray methodology that I see. And if you need money today, if you're in that like position where you feel very, very stressed about finances, you might hear people say things like, okay, you know, do some outbound like cold calling and DMing and networking, I would definitely suggest that you do activate the people that are already down the line, right? If you look at people who have already know you exist, already have opted in, already have read some of your content, you're looking for people who are already after step 5, right? Attention, attraction, education, belief, and trust. Then what you can do is you can do email marketing, sales calls, and DMs to close them. But if you are using email marketing, DMs, and sales calls to try to get cold customers from, you know, out in the ether, that is going to feel very frustrating because it's going to take quite a bit of time. It might be better served for you to focus on creating Reels and getting attention that way, and then focus your DM conversations on people who are already a little bit further down the line. Anyway, I hope this was helpful. As always, if you need a, a coach that can help you with all of this, but specifically and especially with building funnels, please reach out to me on Instagram, or you can email me julie@juliechenell.com. Talk soon. And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey. With resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.