MBA1087 How to Make the Most of a Slow Month in Sales + Free Ride Friday!

Hey there. Today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. It's a $500 value, but you can get it for free by just leaving us an itunes rating and review and winning our weekly random draw. That's right, just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter the draw every single week. Listen in on Friday to see if you won't. That's our way to say thank you for showing us love on itunes. Let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 NBA Show. Because you don't have time for useless jibber jabber, we give it to you straight every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson, you will learn how to make the most of a slow month in sales. Depending on your business, depending on your market. Sometimes you're just going to have a slow month. If you're in the swimming pool business, maybe December, January, February are slow months. January is notorious for being a very slow month for toys because the parents are spent after Christmas. Or maybe it's just different in your market. The point is, sometimes you're just going to have a slow month in sales. How do you make the most of it? How do you make sure you recognize the fact that you're just not going to get new customers as much as you would normally, but you still have to bring in the dough. What are some things you can focus on to make sure the sales are still coming in, you still make revenue, and you continue to grow your business. Sometimes these slow months are a blessing in disguise and I'll show you why in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Support for today's show comes from Codecademy. Codecademy has helped 45 million people level up their careers with interactive coding tutorials. And now Codecademy Pro is making it even easier to learn how to code with a simple mobile app, customized learning paths and quizzes that you can use to check your progress, all starting at just $20 a month. Talk about a great deal on a good investment. Get 50% off your first month of Codecademy Pro by going to codecademy.com mba and entering promo code MBA at checkout. Codecademy Pro. The easiest way to learn to code. Every business is bound to have a slow month, or at least most businesses. For us, December's our slow month. For webinar Ninja, our software company, December is a family time. It's time for the holidays. People will spend a lot of time with family, travel, things like that. So they tend to not, you know, jump in to buying a webinar software during the month of December, especially towards the end of December. But January starts to pick up big time because, hey, it's the beginning of the year. People start putting their marketing plans in place and they start using webinars. But for us, we have to plan for December. We know we expect less sales, inbound sales coming from our market, from our audience. So we try to come up with some strategies to make up for that. First of all, not all months are going to be the same. Some months you're going to have more sales than others, and that's totally fine. That's why it's better to have quarterly or annual financial goals. But if you don't want your revenue to take too much of a dip, it's good to have some other strategies in place where you can focus on certain action aspects of your business that can make you money to replace that loss of new income. Let's get into those options right now. Option number one. For us, December is the month we focus on retention and churn. So we're not going to get as many new customers, but we really try to focus on our strategies to really think about how we can keep the customers we have and keep them from leaving. So, say, for example, your normal growth month over month is about 5%. You get 5% new customers every month, but your churn rate is 3%, which means your growth rate is 2% the difference. Right? But if I can get my churn down to 1.5 from 3, I can increase my growth rate from 2 to 3.5. That's 3.5%, all by just trying to keep more customers and keep them happy. This is especially important if you have a membership business, a membership area, a course, a software, a subscription of some sort. Focusing on keeping the customers you have during your slow month is a great exercise, and that means taking a look at your onboarding sequence. What do you do when you have a new customer? How do you nurture them? How do you make sure that they're getting the most out of your product or service. I double down on this in the month of December and I try to revisit our existing systems. This is a good time to get feedback from your customers. Get on a live webinar, try, talk to them, find out what they're looking for and improve your product or service or the delivery of your products and services to keep the customers you already have. This is taking notice and just dealing with the reality. Hey, I'm not going to get as many new customers as I normally do during this month. So instead of me worrying about that and just trying to like, go uphill, try to go against the grain. I'm just going to focus on keeping my existing customers happy as much as possible to keep my churn down and, and my turnover down. In other words, keep my retention up. Here's another option. Option number two, when sales are slow, you have an existing customer base, customers that have already bought from you or are continuing to buy from you like they're in a subscription. Not only do you want to keep them happy, but now you can really focus on trying to get more sales from those customers. This is a great opportunity to make them offers. These offers could be like upgrading their plan at a discounted rate. This could be a special coupon just for past customers. This could be access to the latest model, the newest course, you just came out first time. Access to only these particular customers. The customers have already bought from you or customers have been with you for a year. Basically, you're treating your existing customers to a special offer. This is allowing you to get more revenue from the existing customers you have and you're tailoring an offer just for them. That means if you're launching a product or a new product line or a new service, it might be a good idea to launch it a couple of months after the slow month. So in our case, our slow month is December. So maybe launching towards February would be a good idea for us. Why? Because before we launch in February, I might want to give early access to my existing customers and say, hey, jump on early access. You're going to get a discount. Sign up now. This is only for you. You're going to get it two months before anybody else and you're going to get an amazing deal. This strategy really, really is effective because number one, it's genuine, it's honest, and you're treating your customers to something that they probably want because they bought from you before and you're giving them a special deal. You also get some genuinely good people to give you great feedback on that new product line, that new product, that new service. What other things can you do when sales are slow? Well, option number three, It's a good time to start a referral program or some sort of affiliate program, some way to generate sales outside your realm of influence, meaning getting your existing customers the ones you already have to promote for you. Let them know, hey, if you sign up for our affiliate program or referral program, when you use your link, you're going to get store credit, you're going to get cash, you're going to get a gift certificate, whatever your compensation is. Now, creating something like a referral program or an affiliate program takes some time. So it's good to spend time when things are slow to build that out and launch it to your existing customers. They're going to be your best salespeople because they're going to be able to write blog posts of testimonials, give reviews, create videos, tell their friends and family, email their email lists, and you can give them all these suggestions. When you introduce your affiliate or referral program, it's always a good idea to give them plenty of material to promote your products and services as an affiliate or a referee. If you want to see an example of this, you can go to Webinar Ninja's affiliate program page. Just go to webinar ninja.com affiliate program. There you'll see all the details of our program and how they can sign up and all their marketing materials and everything you need as a template, as an example to launch your own. We also have some episodes from the past here on the 100 LMBA show talking about how to set up an affiliate program with the right software and all that stuff. One episode that comes to mind is NBA437. You can check that out at 1000mba.net mba437 what's another option that you can focus on during a slow sales month? Well, you can think big picture and say, what will increase my sales and improve my business? Or overall, over the next six months, over the next 12 months, one of them is having a better team, building a better team, improving the caliber of your team. So recruitment could be that month, recruiting better players on your team, better talent. It could be training, training your existing team members so they can deliver better quality, deliver better service. This is an investment you're making now so you can reap the benefits later. And this could be as simple as giving them access to some onlinecourses or lynda.com this could be as simple as making one really great hire in a critical area in your business, whether it's marketing, sales or the actual product development. I got more on today's topic, but before that, let me give a love to today's sponsor. Support for today's show comes from Microsoft Surface. I'm a big believer in making sure you're as productive as possible when working on your business. One productivity hack that really has worked for me is creating an environment of focus. Sometimes when you work in the same place day in and day out, like your home office, you slip into bad habits that derail you from your to do list. A good way to shake it up is to change your location. If you feel like you're getting distracted, get up and go to a cafe. Go to a co working space. Change your environment so you can get refocused. That's why I'm so pumped to share with you the all new Surface Go. The smallest Microsoft Surface ever. At just over a pound and with a 10 inch touchscreen, the Surface Go gives you laptop performance and tablet portability. From running office to taking care of your everyday tasks, the Surface Go easily adapts to all your needs no matter where you are. And with prices Starting at just $399, it also adjusts to your budget. So what are you waiting for? It's time to go. Now. There's a final option I want to share with you. It's another long term option. It's taking this slow month to reevaluate your marketing and sales strategy. Recognizing the fact that hey, all right, it's going to be a slow month. Let me see how I can plan for the next year to improve my overall sales goals. What am I doing with my email automation? What am I doing with my, you know, digital advertising? What am I doing in terms of in person advertising? Am I going to conferences? How much is that going to cost me? Am I speaking at conferences? Am I sponsoring conferences? What about my content marketing strategy? How's my SEO game? Re evaluating where your weak points are and how you're going to improve them. I like to focus on our strategy during our slow month and I also allot some time to improve certain areas in myself to improve the business. So for example, I like to take a deep dive in improving my skills with SEO Search Engine optimization because SEO changes every year. You know, they change the rules, they change the algorithm, they change a lot of things and I like to be up to date. So I already have a course lined up for me that I'll be taking in December so I can implement these improvements in our business so that it affects our sales and marketing throughout the whole year. Well, there you have it. Those are my suggestions when it comes to capitalizing and utilizing that slow month of sales. Now, today's lesson might be over, but there's two things we gotta cover. Number one, if you have a question you want to ask, we would love to answer it. We answer questions here every Wednesday on Q and a Wednesday. Just email me at omar100.mba.net I'll make sure we get it answered. And number two, it's free ride Friday. So let's hear who won this week's free ride. Every Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our $500 course over at easycourse co how to build your own online course in 30 days. To enter the weekly random draw, just leave us an itunes rating and review. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is. Jay Benz. Jay Benz says this podcast has revolutionized the way I think about my business. I started listening to this podcast about a year ago, but drifted away since then. I started my own business and started listening again. Now I begin my mornings with the $100 NBA show and a cup of coffee. It's completely changed the way I think about my business. Many episodes hit right on the mark, like the David Allen episode on getting things done, which was super helpful to keep my mind on track. Well, thank you, jaybenz, for that awesome review. You are a free r Friday winner. Your mission is email me@omar NBA.net so I can hook you up with the free ride. If you have not left us an itunes rating and review yet, please do so so you can enter our weekly random draw and also so we can know what you love about the show and so you can let other people know why you tune in. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I'm sure you've heard the saying, business is a rollercoaster ride. The ups and downs, the excitement, and, you know, the not so exciting times. And sometimes when things are slow, it's kind of a lull and it's a little bit demotivating, but it's okay. These moments are great for kind of recouping, re evaluating, restrategizing, and getting ready for the more challenging times when things are go, go, go. All right. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you on Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care, Sam.