MBA1932 How To Make Revenue Past The Holidays + Free Ride Friday

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Powerful business lessons. You can't afford to miss 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's episode you will learn how to make reven past the holidays. A lot of businesses make a lot of revenue at the end of November through December, but come the new year they suffer what's called a revenue drought. Especially if you're in the B2C world where you are selling products directly to customers like an e commerce store. But in today's lesson, I'm going to show you how to plan for success. The first quarter of the year to me is the most important quarter of the year because it's what sets the pace for your revenue goals for the entire year. It's very hard to play catch up as the quarters roll by. So we're going to plan for success and make sure that come January, February, March, we have our best quarter yet. We take advantage of the economic climate and bring in more sales than we ever had in Q1 before. I'm going to share with you strategies that I'VE learned over the years and some new things I just learned recently that I'd love to share with you. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk?

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

A lot of businesses focus on the holidays. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, throughout Christmas. People figure, hey, people are in the spending mood. Why not spend money on my products and services? And of course, it depends on what you sell, what your business is, what your services are, whether you service individuals or businesses. But in general, people usually do all their promotions and sales during the holidays. This leads to a first quarter drought. January, February being quite dry when it comes to new sales and revenue. Now, of course, there are exceptions for different markets, but generally a lot of businesses feel like, man, things really slow down come January for them in terms of cash flow. I recognize this in my first couple years of business and I realized I don't want to go through that again. So you got to plan for success. You got to plan so that doesn't happen whether it's booking clients or deals in advance well before the holidays so that that revenue's coming in the first quarter or you take advantage of the situation. And this is my first tip. The first quarter of the year, especially the month of January, is the best month to spend money on digital advertising. On marketing. You can get incredible value for your dollar on Facebook ads, on Google Ads, on LinkedIn ads in January. Why? Because the big boys with the big budgets often haven't allocated their marketing budgets yet. I know that sounds crazy, but a lot of big companies that spend a lot of money on digital advertising don't settle on their marketing budget until about week two or three of January. How do I know this? Well, I work with a lot of big companies. I know their marketing cycles because they are sponsors of this podcast. And usually the rates of digital advertising drops in January and slowly goes back up in February. You should tap into that. You could literally acquire a customer for half Your normal cost in some examples or some markets. If you're a coach of any kind, if you provide any services, definitely use the angle of a new year new you, helping people get on track and start the year right. People are ready for that. And if you are front and center, if you have that brand awareness, if your ads are out there, you are more likely to convert because your placement's going to get better and your reach is going to get better because it's not as crowded, you're not competing for eyeballs as much as you normally would. So my advice is, if Q1 had a budget of, let's say $10,000 on digital marketing, I'd spend at least half of that budget just on January. This will automatically result in more revenue because you're bringing in more customers, more highly qualified, targeted customers. Again, because you are not competing against a lot of the big names. Next tip. One of the easiest ways to make revenue at the beginning of the year is to go after low hanging fruit. Your current customers offer them something that's useful, that they need and can improve their experience with your product or service. Now this leads to my third strategy, which is a pricing strategy. Now, if your product is a large purchase, let's say $2,000 or more, break it up, offer a payment plan. It's going to secure the sale and you're going to be able to at least get some cash flow in that first few months. I can't tell you how many course creators make so much more money off payment plans breaking up the price of their course over the course of, you know, three months, four months, six months, instead of, you know, charging only one large sum as the price. If you haven't tried this yet, this is definitely a great option to start doing in the beginning of the year. My next tip is to go after it early. When you are going after clients, you're going after partnerships. Why? Because a lot of people have a slow start to the year. They don't really actually go into full swing until week two or three of January. If you're hitting the ground running after New Year's Day, you're going to have a leg up. If you secure those partnerships, you secure those clients, you screw those deals before other people approach those companies or those people. For example, one of the strategies that we use all the time is partnerships. We do partner webinars, so we get in front of new audiences and we are able to get our brand, get our products in front of new eyes, right? But often when you reach out to a lot of these partners, a lot of these affiliates, you know, their calendar is quite full, so you need to get there before the calendar gets full. And this is why my first week in January is all about booking my full year of appointments, of webinars, of partnerships. I'm getting there into their calendar before anybody else does. The same thing goes with cutting deals. If you're looking to secure a supplier or you need to buy some sort of large purchase, or you need to negotiate some sort of large purchase with a supplier or a vendor, this is a great time to do it because they're looking to make money, they have slow sales, and you can negotiate some really good rates. On a personal side, it's actually one of the best times to buy a car. By the way, I know this because my dad was in car sales all his life, and January is one of the slowest months for them, and they are willing to do pretty much anything to get cars out the door. The same thing goes with any kind of business purchases for you. Negotiating office space, negotiating your contract with your supplier. If you're a restaurant and you have suppliers that are supplying you food or drinks or ingredients, these are people that you can really negotiate with at the start of the year. Because, hey, they're looking to make more revenue, too.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

A couple more tips to make more revenue past the holidays. Before I wrap up today's lesson, one of the things I highly recommend is to really understand what is your customer's goal? What are they trying to achieve with your product or service? For example, you know, I run a webinar software called Webinar Ninja, and our customer's goal is to be able to grow their business to serve their customers, to make more revenue using the power of webinars. Specifically, they have their own sales goals, profit goals, lead goals for the year. So what I like to do is I like to spend the first quarter just talking about how to achieve these goals using my software. So I'm putting out a lot of content, I'm doing a lot of webinars on how to plan your year, how to set and achieve these goals, and of course, I'll share how my product can help them get there. The point here is that people want to feel confident that they can do what they're setting out to do for the year. And at the start of the year, this is a great time to do this, to show your expertise and show them how your product can help them achieve whatever it is. This can be applied to anything. This can be applied to fitness, to style. When I ran my own clothing line, E Commerce Store, at the start of the year, I taught people, hey, new year, new you. How can you set up a brand new wardrobe with just buying five pieces? What do your customers want to achieve? Help them achieve their goals. They're going to buy your product if they can see that connection. And my last tip is get specific. A lot of us think I just want, I want to make more money, I want my business to grow. But that's not a real goal. That's not really specific. You need to really drill down. How much money are you looking to make this next quarter? What's the actual number? What's the profit? Where are you now? Where will you be at the end of March? The reason why this is important is because then you can break it down. You can then work backwards. Let's say, for example, by the end of the first quarter I want to make a total revenue of $60,000 just on the first quarter. Well, then you can break it down. How many days are in that first quarter? Let me divide that by $60,000. So now I know how many sales I need to make every day. What's your average spend of a customer? So now I know how many customers I need every day. This allows you to get realistic about your goals and understand, hey, this is what I need to achieve on a daily basis to hit my first quarter goal. More is not a goal. That's the point here. It's actually quite powerful to have a number to know what you're shooting for. It's like playing pickup basketball and not knowing what's game up to. Right? That's the first question people ask. Hey, what are we playing to plan to? 11. All right, now you know the goal. Now you know what it takes to win. So get specific with your number. Thanks so much for listening to the hundred dollar NBA show. If you love it, you hear hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Today's episode's not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Eleni 7. That's the handle on Apple Podcasts. Eleni 7 says worthwhile lessons, five stars. I always get a nugget of info that's useful for me and my business. Even if the topic is not spot on at first glance, it's worthwhile and pretty inspiring for generating new ideas. Thanks. Well, thanks Alain87 for that great review. Your mission is to email me over@omar00mba.net so I can hook you up with a free ride to our Automated Webinar challenge. It's a $99 value over at webinar ninja.com awc a 30 day full course, step by step on how to build your own automated system to bring in new leads and new sales. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you want. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple Podcasts. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the most important things that me and my co founder Nicole do is before the end of the year we do a strategic plan for the next year. This is literally a six to eight hour session because we're literally planning out everything we want to achieve the next coming year. We plug things in in the calendar, events, goals, milestones, even our own personal time off and vacations so that we have that work life balance. We actually learned this from Dan Martell. It's called the Preloaded Year. If you go to YouTube and search preloaded Year Dan Martell, you can learn how to do it for your business as well. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.