Want better sales? Channel your ADHD creativity!

Hey, new listener, thanks so much for checking us out. And there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on. Don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. In this episode, we're going to talk about ADHD creativity and how you can channel it for sales savvy in your business. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the weeniecast. One of the fears a lot of new business owners have is that if they quit their job, if they quit working for a company and go start a business and decide it's not for them, that they're never going to get hired again, and that the skills that they'll spend all this time and money and energy learning to start this business won't be applicable back on the job market. And I'm here to call bull, because hindsight is 20 20, and I'm constantly thinking about if I knew what I knew now from running my business, from learning how to attract clients using social media and different ways to promote my business. I'm constantly thinking about ways I could have used this in my past sales roles. And not only would these strategies help me be more successful, help me make more money for myself and the company that I work for, but it would give me an outlet for my creativity, for my ADHD brain to thrive in these jobs that I formerly felt were a massive misfit for me, where I felt like I had to constantly burn myself out in order to reach quota. So really quickly want to debunk that belief. If you leave your job to start a business and decide it's not for you, there will always be someone who's willing to hire you back. I mean, unless you, like, light the building on fire on the way out and really, like, tear them down on social media, at that point, you probably won't get hired back. But excluding those circumstances, if you start a business, that in itself is not a disqualifier for you to get hired into a job again. In addition to that, the things that you learn through starting a business will make you that much more valuable as an employee. So if you're worried about that, stop it. This is the end of that fear. Okay, Deal. Okay, episode over. Just kidding. So with this episode, I'm actually going to be showing you some behind the scenes of how I come up with different offerings in my Business that help me grow into different verticals. One of the things that I regret about my sales career is that I didn't have the entrepreneurial skills that I have today with what's available to us through social media and what I've learned about self promotion and enrolling clients, all this could have been applied to all the sales roles that I had in the past. Now, I didn't know any of this shit back then. I couldn't use all this back then because quite frankly, TikTok did not exist. Reels did not exist. LinkedIn was a completely different environment 10 years ago than it is today. But with that regret that shoulda, coulda, woulda. Oh my God, I wish I'd known this back then comes an idea of, oh my God, this is an offer I could do now. So I'm gonna walk you through how I'm applying the learning I've had in the last six years in starting my business and growing my business. And how if I had this knowledge back then, I would apply it to these kinds of jobs and I would show you how I would kind of frame everything up. And from that, here's how I develop a new offer, here's how I roll something new out that I know there's need for because I needed it back then. And as you're listening to me, like walk you through, you know, here's this one job and how I would have utilized these types of social media platforms to gain more business. There's. I want you to be thinking about what are the skills that you've learned in the recent years that you could have applied to you, you 10 years ago, that 10 years ago you like, it would have been a game changer for them. Because I guarantee you there are still people in the world who have that same limitation that 10 years ago you did. And you in the here and now can develop a program that will help them overcome, that will help them be massively successful in whatever it is that you do. One of the things that's really challenging about being a business strategist is my brain works really fast, connecting the dots. And it's not easy for me to explain how I come to the conclusions that I come to to help my clients. And because I just recently went through this and broke all this down for myself and figured out this new offer, it's fresh in my mind and I am so excited to share it with you. And I'm curious at the end of this episode if you come up with an offer that you're super excited to offer your audience, then I would love it if you were to DM me and tell me about it. Because conversations like this are where successful businesses are born. Even if that conversation is happening in your own head while you're listening to me talk at you. Here are the things that I wish I had known back when I was in sales for all these different companies. And that would have made work so much more fun. That would have helped me build deeper relationships with my clients, that would have helped me build my personal brand and make me a more viable candidate when I was ready to move on. And that might have had a really awesome impact on my workplace, allowing for everyone in my role to be able to utilize their creative ADHD ness in different and exciting ways. And when it boils down to it, it's essentially building a personal brand that's aligned with the company. So there are three companies that I want to acknowledge as I'm breaking down my shoulda, coulda wouldas of how I would utilize my entrepreneurial skills in a sales role. And the reason I've picked these three companies is that they're very different. One was Equinox, which if you're not familiar, is a high end fitness club where people would pay for membership and buy packs of personal training. Another one was solar energy, where people were choosing to have solar panels put on their roofs to reduce their energy costs. And the last one was a SaaS company, Cisco, where they were selling software as a service to other businesses who needed their service. So let's start with Equinox, shall we? Let's acknowledge the limitations of the job, right? So if you're a sales advisor at a fitness club, you're limited by geography, okay? It's not like you're selling memberships for a club in San Francisco. It doesn't mean that you can sell to someone in Boise, Idaho. That's not going to happen. That's too long of a drive to go and work out. Okay? So one of the things that I would do is I would get on social media in a very intentional way where I was geotagging different places in the neighborhood. And actually, as I think through this, back when I worked at Equinox, Instagram didn't have reels. There was no such thing as TikTok. God, do I feel old. But let's assume that I worked at an Equinox in the here and now, where reels are a thing and TikToks are a thing. Here's how I would build my personal brand on those platforms to attract More people to buy gym memberships from me. Honestly, I wouldn't do a hard sell. I would probably set up an account on TikTok and have things repurposed to Instagram where I was doing a lot of day in the life, right? So day in the life of a membership advisor at a high end fitness club, I would probably talk through me picking out my outfit for the day, you know, because how you pick out an outfit to work at a fitness club is you pick out an outfit that like halfway through the day part of it will work for your workout and then you can change into another outfit. Like there's a, there's a costume change in the day. You know, I would talk through the healthy things that I would eat and the not so healthy things that I would eat I would do. A day in the life of here's where I go for my coffee in the morning. I would talk about what I do when I first get into the office. I check my email and then I get a call from the front desk or someone who's here for a tour. I'm sharing these things because I'm allowing my followers on this hypothetical account to see the kinds of things that I like, to get a sense of my personality, to see what my routine is a little bit. All things that they wouldn't know unless we were friends and flipped in there. There would be things like I can go for a tour of the gym if I'm curious about membership. Oh, here's Katie working out with her personal trainer. Oh, here's Katie doing deadlifting and getting a personal PR of £180, which I did once. I was very proud of myself. I haven't gotten back up to there since the pandemic though. Let's not talk about it. I'm a little sensitive about it. Oh, cool. She's working with different personal trainers who have different specialties. Interesting. I'm curious about working with one of those personal trainers I might talk about. Oh my God, I'm so excited. I get to go for a massage and a facial later today. I'm so lucky. I work in a place where, you know, on your lunch break you can go and get a massage and a facial or after work you don't even have to leave the building and you get a massage and a facial and slipped in there occasionally. If there was a membership drive, if I was asking for referrals, I would say, hey, by the way, you know me on here because I do a lot of lifestyle stuff. But here's what I do for work. And if you live in this geographic area and you're curious about membership, when you come into the club, ask for me or DM me and set up a time to come in for a tour. Another element of what I could do if Reels existed and I were on TikTok and I had these accounts is I would make very strategic partnerships with different businesses in the area that were complimentary to belonging to a high end fitness club. So. So clothing boutiques and nice restaurants. I could potentially line up some sponsorship things for my account if I had a certain amount of followers. And I was saying, hey, I'm going to this restaurant. Here are the three best things on the menu. And I was driving new clientele there. That's one way to get the employees of a business to start talking about you is to say, oh, we were actually featured that. Katie McManus, TikTok, she's an influencer. She does this. She has a lot of lifestyle stuff. Her favorite things on the menu are this. If you've ever thought about signing up for that gym, you should go talk to her. In addition to a social media strategy, one of the things that I wish I had thought of back then was to make a meetup list of all of the different people of all the different clients that I had signed up for membership. And I would make this a separate email list. Anytime I was going to be going to the food truck park with some friends, or that I was going to go to an outdoor yoga class or that I was going to go to the Union Street Fair, I would say, hey, I'm going here with a whole bunch of people. If you want to meet some other members of the club and get to know some folks, then you should come along and here's how you can find us. Imagine the above and beyond service of cool. I've joined this membership. Maybe I just moved to the area from New York City and I'm new in San Francisco. I don't know anyone. I'm gonna sign up for a gym. Oh my God. The membership advisor is inviting me to hang out with a bunch of other people who also have an interest in fitness. In a social environment where it's not weird for me to like go up to them and be like, hey, how much are you lifting there? You know, Hey, I noticed that you're running really fast on that treadmill. Let me run fast next to you and hopefully we'll talk. No, you're out of breath. Me too. Okay, nevermind. Hey, we're both in the locker Room together and kind of naked. You know, that's kind of awkward. But imagine you're new in an area or maybe you just don't know a whole lot of people and someone is making it easy for you to enter a social engagement where they know you and they can introduce you around. You know, think about that. Think about that added element of customer service and relationship building. A member who becomes friends with a membership advisor. When they tell people, when they refer people to join the club with them, they're not just saying, go and talk to anyone. They're saying, hey, go and talk to my friend Katie. She will sign you up for membership. Go and ask for her and tell her that I sent you because they got a referral bonus. In building this list, I would also want to have some different fields where I talk about what people do, what their expertise is, what they're interested in. So when a new member joins and say they're looking for a job, and I know that one of my other members is hiring for a job, I can connect them. Or if two people have the same interests so they both want to learn how to knit. If I see a post about a new knitting class, I could send it to them. It would just be that, like, that extra touch of relationship building, the kind of thing that you do with friends. If TikTok and Reels existed and I somehow, like, we're still working at Equinox, which thank God, I'm not, these are all the things that I would absolutely be doing to bring in more business. Now, the one thing that I would want to be conscious of would be my safety. Obviously, I'm a woman on the Internet. I would want to be very intentional about not sharing things at the time I was there. So I'd be creating a lot of content and filming a lot of stuff and then posting it after the fact, because my job would be at a location. But I would want to make sure that if someone wanted to, like, bump into me at coffee in the morning, they wouldn't really know when I was going to coffee, you know, or if I were out to dinner with friends. Like, I wouldn't want them to show up while I'm out to dinner with friends. A lot of this would be scheduled after the fact. You know, if you are on social media, be very conscious of how much information you're giving people about where you are and when. Unfortunately, there are just some weirdos out there that you have to be careful of. Be smart people. Now, the next company, there's no chance in hell that I would ever want to work for this company again. It has now merged with Tesla. If you work for Tesla, if you've worked for Tesla or any Elon Musk company, my heart goes out to you. It's awful. They sell you on the Kool Aid of doing something good for the world and then they treat you like garbage. It is the worst. So for the sake of me not wanting to vomit while talking about this, I'm going to refer to it as a solar company. If I were working for a solar company and I knew what I knew now, I would again want to build up a following on social media now for solar, I would probably want to be more present on a platform like Instagram. The reason I would pick Instagram is because the average user on Instagram is a bit older than the average user on TikTok. And we want to go for older users because they're more likely to own homes. And the only people who can be your clients are people who own homes because you know you can't put solar panels on like over your window from an apartment building. The other cool thing about Instagram is you can tag different locations. The other thing I love about Instagram for this kind of promotion is geotagging is really common. So like you can post something and say that you are in a certain location. And it's more likely to show that post to people in that area because it's relevant to them. It's kind of like using hashtags, right? So if you're in San Francisco and you say this is the location of where I'm posting this in San Francisco, people in San Francisco are likely to see it than people all over the country. I would want to do some day in the life so that people felt like they knew me. But I wouldn't want my day in the life to be as personal as it would be for working in the fitness club. I would want it to be a little more focused on the work that I was doing. Like today I'm designing a system for this new client I have. We're seeing if solar panels will even work on their roof. Today I'm going to check in on a client who's having their install today and here's the little gifty that I'm bringing for them. Or today I have four back to back assessments and I'm driving from here to kingdom come and hear the podcast I'm going to be listening to while I'm on the road. Those are the kinds of posts that I would want to do so that people felt like they knew me enough that they could connect with me. Like, people may be curious about what you do, but they're not going to ask you about what you do if they're not ready to buy. But if you're sharing something like the podcast that I'm listening to, they may say, oh, if you like those podcasts, here's three others that I love. I think you should try them. And that gets the conversation started. I'd give people enough information for them to have that in. I would also want to have a really strong vein of edutainment, you know, where I'm educating people on solar energy, on how they get solar panels on their roof. And I would want to entertain them at the same time. So I might make it funny. I might dress up like a solar panel and hang out by the pool on a lounge chair and soak up the sun and have a voiceover explaining how solar panels work. I would probably do some edutainment around stupid questions that people ask about solar and make it funny so that people don't feel ashamed about asking them. But it also debunks them before I get to talking to them. And just like I would with Equinox, I want to make strong partnerships with businesses in the area. And again, I would want those businesses to be adjacent to the work that I do. Okay, so instead of going to like restaurants and clothing boutiques, I would probably want to go to paint stores and different home improvement, maybe some interior designers, you know, engineering companies, landscapers. I'd want to connect up with them and feature them in some way, shape or form on my Instagram to send business their way. Because here's how that works. You send business to someone, they're appreciative. The next time they get a request for solar panels, they're going to send them to you. And again, like with working in the fitness club, I would want to make sure that I'm doing this on a delay because I wouldn't want people to know where I was and when I was there. Everything would be, oh, a few days ago, here's where I was and here's what I did and here's what my day in the life looks like. And while a lot of this content would get people comfortable with who I am, make them feel like they know me, and edutain them about how they could get solar on their roof, I would have a consistent call to action. If you're a homeowner and if you're spending more than X amount of Dollars on energy every single month. And if you're curious if solar would work for you, then here's a link to Book a virtual consult with me and we can assess if this is actually going to be a good fit for you. I mean, barring some, like, incredible natural disaster that makes what I do now not viable. I don't know what that natural disaster would be, but thank God. Thank God I would never have to do this again. And I'm sorry. If you really like your job in solar, more power to you. Get it? More power to you. That was not an intentional pun. But I always love a good pun. More power to you. Okay, moving on. That was a dad. That wasn't even a pun. That was like a really bad dad joke. And last but not least, if I still worked for Cisco or a tech company that offered software as a service, screw Instagram, forget TikTok. Where I would be spending most of my time would be LinkedIn. Now, I love LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of my favorite places in the world. If you had told me 10 years ago that I would derive this much enjoyment from being on LinkedIn, I would have thought you were on drugs or crazy or both. But LinkedIn is honestly one of the most magical places. And I'm not even being facetious with this. I have grown my business exponentially by being on LinkedIn. I have developed actual, real, honest to goodness friendships and business partnerships through LinkedIn. For instance, my podcast producer, Neil Valeo, I met him through LinkedIn. He was a content creator. And I started noticing him about a year and a half before I hired him. There was a point about six months into us being connected that I was like, this is the guy. When I'm ready to start the podcast, this is the person I'm going to work with. And it took about a year for me to, like, settle into that being ready but not ready. And when I contacted him, I basically had to tell him, shut up and take my money, because I had built this trust with him over the last year and a half. LinkedIn is a magical place. If I worked in a SaaS company, I would absolutely be building my personal brand there and attracting clients through it. And again, my approach here would be a little different, right, because you have to focus on different things depending on the platform and who your ideal client is and what you're selling. So if I worked for Cisco and I were building my personal brand on LinkedIn, I would be sharing some water cooler content, like, here's what I'm doing on my vacation and here's the restaurant I'm super excited to go to when I go to this conference in February. Light personal branding stuff. I wouldn't be sharing the vulnerable things that I share on LinkedIn. Now, that's part of my personal brand. I wouldn't be making a post about sales by telling a story about a bad date, because I would be representing the company. Wouldn't just be me that I'm representing. I'd have to walk that line. I would want to position myself as a sales leader. I would want to talk about best practices in sales. I would want to talk about my philosophy about building relationships with potential clients. I would want to talk about what my steps were and why I do them and what makes them good. I would want to teach good sales through my platform. Now, this would do a few things. A, this would show that I know what I'm doing and that my client should trust me because I have a process and I'm going to be supportive of them and I'm going to be ethical. And also, this would line up other jobs for me if ever I needed to transition into another industry or another role at another company. And the beautiful thing about LinkedIn is that only 1% of the people on LinkedIn are actually creating content. So it's really easy to stick out, even if your stuff is a little boring. I mean, if I were talking about sales all the time, I'd get kind of bored. Another big part of what I'd be posting about would be about the ideal client for what I was selling. I wouldn't be talking about, like, here's a feature that we do and here's the thing, and here's a button that you'll discover in the dashboard and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's boring. I would talk about the thing that someone was crying about when they finally got on the phone with me to buy the thing. When I worked for Cisco, I sold a tool for Internet security to msps. And MSP stands for a managed service provider. A managed service provider is basically a company that is outsourced tech for smaller companies that can't afford or do not want to house their own tech department. So MSPs are contracted by companies like law firms or accounting firms. So I want you to imagine you're an msp. You're a managed service provider. Your system just got hacked. That means all of your clients just got hacked. That's painful. That is something that is really hard to come back from. It violates trust with your clients and it guarantees some really bad reviews online, right? So one of the things that I would want to showcase is like, oh my God, I just got off the phone with an msp. I would never name them, but here's what they were really upset about, here's what happened, and this is heartbreaking. And if you had a tool like the one that we offer, here's how it would mitigate the risk. Now, there's no guarantee it would work 100%. We can't guarantee that these people are smart, but here's how it could add an extra layer of protection. Now the tricky thing with marketing for a thing like this is like if the product is working, like just nothing bad happens, right? So like it's kind of hard to paint, like, here's what success looks like, like, because it's just like nothing bad has happened, you know? So I would want to lean into the empathetic marketing model that I've developed and that I trained to all of my clients to showcase. Like, here's where you are now and here's what's possible. Here's the peace of mind you could have. I. I'd want to create distance from how they're feeling now and how they could feel. And I would want to consistently invite people to networking chats, even though I don't do those right now. If I were still working for Cisco, I would have a link on there two times a day. A networking chat with someone who's either an MSP or you know, works in an adjacent industry. I would regularly create a short 2 to 5 minute video talking about a struggle a lot of my clients have and how my product could solve for that. And I would send that out to every single damn lead on my list. Another thing that I wish I had done back then. Ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. One of the biggest challenges I hear from new business owners is how hard it is to figure out what to post on social media and to stick to consistent schedule with it, because it's hard. And so in the month of May, I'm actually launching a challenge to help you build that muscle of posting every single day. Each participant will get their own customizable content plan for the month of May, an extensive list of content prompts. So you have an endless bank of ideas of things you can post that work with your content plan. Every Monday through Friday, we will have a 45 minute Zoom call at 9am Eastern where you will create your content and one lucky person per day will be able to volunteer for for the coaching hot seat where I will help you fine tune your messaging so that your content can help you attract high paying clients. If you can prove that you posted every single day for the 31 days, you will win a 30 minute one on one coaching call with me. Normally I charge $497 for this but for the whole challenge for your content plan, for the content prompts for this 23 daily calls that you're gonna get throughout the month. It's only $197. This is my birthday gift to you this year and I'm so excited to hold your feet to the fire and make you post every day about your business and get more clients. If you're down for a challenge and you wanna join us, then go to weaningcast.com challenge I can't wait to another thing that I wish I had done back because it would have been possible. We had the tools back then. Even if, you know, all this other stuff didn't happen. I wish I had hosted a networking call for all of my clients because they all had the same sim like the same kinds of problems, they all had the same kinds of goals. And it's really helpful to be in a room of your peers. And the beautiful thing about hosting a networking call is that whatever smart thing gets said in that room gets attributed to you because it was your space. Like I can't tell you how many times people come to Brave Biz Labs. The Friday call that I do on the fourth Friday of every month. If you want to come, there's going to be a link in the show notes. You can go to weeniecast.com forward/brave biz labs. But I can't tell you how many times I've had people in Brave Biz Labs. Someone else says something really smart, succinct, to the point, and is massively helpful and a couple days later I get quoted for having said it. Now I usually try to correct people because I don't want to take credit for smart things being said that didn't come out of my face hole. But that's what happens, you know, if someone gets a solution or builds a relationship, it always refers back to, oh, it was on Katie's call. Oh it was on Tiffany's networking call. Oh it was on Bob's networking call that I was able to figure this out or build that connection. Now, of course, knowing what I know now, I do have regret that I wasn't able to do this back when I was in these different roles. But here's the cool thing about regret. You can either have it and let it waste your time or you can do something with it. So one of the things that I'm really excited to be rolling out in my business is a new offering for companies that want their salespeople to be trained on entrepreneurial sales to learn how to create their own pipeline through building their own personal but company aligned brand on social media. Now this offering is time intensive on my behalf, so I will only be accepting two to three clients per year for this offer. But instead of just kicking around like, oh man, I wish I had done that. I'm excited to create something with it and I share that because I know there are lots of people who have this kind of regret. Like, oh God, I wish this thing had been around back when I was doing xyz. That could be a business business. If there's something you've learned now that could be applicable to former you, I guarantee there are plenty of former yous in the here and now who could use your help. My ADHD self who would have so benefited from having an outlet for her creativity, for having something that allowed for her brilliance to come out. I wish that I had this back then. There are so many ADHD professionals who have to force themselves into a mold that's handed to them. Here's how we do the job and here's how we've always done the job. And you have to do it exactly the way that we're teaching you how to do the job. It's why people with ADHD are so prone to burnout in nine to five jobs because we don't think like neurotypicals. And that's a very neurotypical way of approaching business. We're not linear. It would have given me that ability to go outside the box and, and try things and get excited about new opportunities and learn. I'd be constantly learning. You know, one of the things that I ran up against in every one of these jobs is I'd get a year in and I'd be so bored of the same conversation over and over and over and over again. There was nothing that was adding any zhuzh to my day. This could have been that thing that kept my head in the game. It could have made so much more money for the companies I worked for. It could have helped me win awards and accolades and all that stuff. But it didn't. So hopefully through this new offer that I'm doing, it will help other adhd entrepreneurial salespeople overachieve in a way that showcases their talents, that uses all of their ADHD brilliance to create new business, to develop relationships, to build their personal brand. If you're in corporate and you happen to listen to this podcast and you're curious about bringing this kind of program in, then I invite you to book a generate income strategy call with me. Now, of course, this is going to be a little different than my normal generate income strategy calls, because we're not going to be talking about building your business. We're going to be talking about building the business of your salespeople and how they can really step into entrepreneurship in their roles to benefit themselves and the company. And to book that, I want you to go to weeniecast.com strategycall and for my ADHD business owners out there who are thinking about what you want to offer, what's the thing you wish you had 10 years ago? Because while the world evolves quickly in this digital landscape, it doesn't evolve that quickly. There are a lot of people left behind and a lot of skills that I'm sure you have learned in the last 10 years that could benefit people who are still living. Ten years ago, I didn't even realize Luna was over there. Luna, you done? Are you done making noise? Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Join the weeniecast Hyper Focus community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls. Turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals, and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses, and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this. At the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weeniecast. Com hyperfocus. All one word. That's weeniecast. Com hyperFocus.