MBA903 Not Selling During Holidays?

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And you might find that not selling during the holidays might be the way to go with your business. It might mean more sales, more time for you to work on your business, and more time for you to enjoy the holidays. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Well, the holidays are upon us. And whether that's Christmas or Hanukkah or New Year's, somewhere someone around the world is going to be celebrating something, taking time off, enjoying time with family. And it's usually a super busy time for businesses. Most businesses run a crazy amount of sales. They're really trying to cash in and make as much money as possible during the holiday season. Now I'm suggesting that maybe this holiday season you don't do that. You actually don't make a push to sell as much as possible. Now I know you think this is crazy, but just hear me out. Now first of all, this is not applicable for every single business. If you sell Christmas trees, you're going to want to be open during Christmas, right? But if you sell an online course, if you sell software, if you sell coaching packages, services, cat design services, business consulting, whatever it is in the service industry, you may want to Consider this. Let me tell you why. Number one, this is something I learned in Arnold Schwarzenegger's autobiography, Total Recall, and he says, always go where it's not crowded. So if everybody is selling and doing sales and promotions and giveaways and free shipping during the holiday season, it's really hard for you to stand out. Why are they gonna buy gifts from you rather than other places that are bombarding them with emails or circulars or whatever it is? Not to mention all the ad ads on Facebook. Right? It's really hard to stand out when it's crowded. But if you decide to, let's say, sell before the holidays, like around now, before it gets really crowded, and not sell during the holidays, you create your own market. It's not as crowded, you create a sense of urgency because, hey, you're literally not going to be selling. Your doors will be closed at a certain date. Let me give an example. In the online course world, John Lee Dumas and Kate Erickson, who run the brand Entrepreneur on Fire and also have an online community and course called Podcaster's paradise. For those who are looking to start a podcast, it's a great course to check out. Now, during the holidays, they close their doors. Not sure exactly the date, but somewhere in the beginning of December they say, we're gonna be closing our doors on this date well before the holidays. So if you wanna buy, you should buy now. Now you might be thinking, well, why don't I just wait until after they open up again? Well, because prices go up at the start of the year, so what they do is they spend that time when they close their doors, whether it's a month or six weeks, to revamp the course, to improve it, to add more content, maybe even do a UI change. And they're adding more value to the course and therefore the price will go up. But hey, if you buy before they close their doors and before they make these improvements, you'll be grandfathered in. So you'll be getting all the improvements for free. So they incentivize people to buy a little earlier. Right. Also, you're going to be closing their doors for a month. So if you're looking to buy and start your podcast, it's a good time to start now. So they run their own promotion well before the holidays, somewhere around the end of November, sometimes even earlier. Now, there are a few advantages to this strategy. Again, you're creating your own sale time rather than trying to compete with everybody else in mid December. Not to mention no last minute shopping in late December. And In New Year's. Number two, the holidays are a busy time and it's a good time for you to take some time off and maybe enjoy it for once. But also you can take some time to work on improving your your product. Good reason to close your doors and take a breather. Number three, a good reason to increase your prices so your revenue is higher next year. And this gets even more effective year after year because they saw last year you did close your doors and the prices did go up and therefore they felt, man, I missed out. So if they missed out last year, they're going to want to buy this year, right? They don't want to miss that opportunity again. Lastly, the nature of their product is not really a gift giving product. Yes, you probably can buy a course that's worth $1,000 to somebody as a gift, but it's not the bulk of their sales where they're like maybe an e commerce store for specialty mugs, right? Or that could be a gift. So their sales are going to be slow anyway during the holidays. They might as well create some buzz beforehand, make some sales, spend the time to improve their product and relaunch with a higher price. So these are all great points in favor of not selling during the holidays. Here's another one. If you run a team of people where you're just not running your business by yourself, they're going to want to have time off during the holidays, right? For their family and friends. You're doing a massive sale. Even after the sale is up and it's after Christmas, people are going to be emailing about returns or service or whatever it is. You are not going to be able to give everybody off or be able to take some time off yourself because of this buzz. By preempting this and actually doing the sale way before that, you can give your staff some time off, time that they really would appreciate off because hey, your doors are closed. Nothing is for sale right now. See you in the new year. Here's another point. Come the new year, let's say January 2nd third, you relaunch your website, you relaunch your product, new price. The new year is a great time to sell a course. People have resolutions. They are going to want to maybe release a new podcast in this example, or maybe in your example, whatever your coaching services are, or maybe you're a web designer and you want to help them out with their new website. People are fired up at the start of the year to do new things, take some steps forward in their life and in their career. Great Time to leverage that energy and launch your new product or launch your revamped product. So let me walk you through how you would implement this. Number one, you need to choose a window where people can buy your product, the sale time. And a good window is about 10 days. Because you want to create some buzz beforehand and trickle in some emails in the last few days. You're really, you know, reminding them frequently with emails and telling them, hey, today's the last day. Today's the last time you can buy this before prices go up, before we close our doors, the last hour. You get it right. And this could be the last 10 days of November. It could be, you know, end of November, beginning of December. Choose your 10 days. It doesn't have to be some huge promotion where you're giving a discount or giving bonuses. It could be simply, hey, hey, this is the lowest price it's ever going to be. The price will go up. You can disclose what the price will be, or you can just say it's going up when we open our doors again in the new year. Decide when you're going to close your doors. And close your doors. Make sure that people cannot buy after that date. And if people email you and ask you, hey, I missed the opportunity to sign up for your product, can I get in? You're going to have to say no and say, hey, you're going to have to wait until the launch of the product in the new year. That's one of the hardest things you're gonna have to deal with. But you have to do it because you gotta be a person of your word, right? And they have to learn that, hey, when you say a deadline, you really mean it. So the next time around they learn their lesson and actually buy when they have to buy. Now, it's very important that you just don't set your close date and do nothing. You gotta make sure that you actually fulfill on your promise and improve the product. Whether they're new lessons, new modules, whether you're gonna repackage your services. If you're a service business, a redesign of the members area. Maybe you're going to be launching a new community chat or a Facebook group or a forum. Make those improvements after you close your doors and make sure you give yourself enough time to make those improvements. Whether it's four weeks, five weeks, six weeks come the new year, whether it's first week of January, second week of January, email your list, make some buzz, let them know they're reopening your doors in a few days. Let them know when you're opening your doors and you may want to do a little special bonus or discount or for those who buy on the day you open your doors, or maybe this couple days after you open your doors and it's like a reopening of your store, reopening of your product. Have a little fun with it. Celebrate, set your new prices and business as usual. Now, if you want to know if this is right for you, the strategy is right for you. Take a look at your sales. Last holiday season, was it significantly more than other months or did it dip? If it dipped, you definitely should consider this because obviously you know whatever was happening is not working and doing something different might help you increase sales given you not have to compete with all the noise during the holidays. If it didn't dip, let's say, for example, it actually increased heavily during the month of December, you may not want to follow this strategy to a T, but you may want to promote a little earlier so you don't compete with all the noise. Like I said, you'll still get sales because your store won't be closed, product will still be for sale, so those sales should still roll in, but your promotion will have less competition. So therefore you might make more sales in November or the beginning of December than you normally would. Sales and marketing is all an experiment. That's the secret here. People don't know this a lot. Let me let you in on a little secret here. Sales, marketing, pricing, it's all an experiment. No one knows exactly what works and what doesn't. For every business, you need to figure it out. For your business, you need to experiment and check it out. I can give you some indicators, some advice and some strategies. But you need to figure out when to use these strategies for your business. And the data doesn't lie. Take a look at the year before that. If you're a new business, don't stress about it too much because you don't have much data. Roll with what you feel comfortable with your first year round and then use that as a barometer for next year.

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The reason why I decided to do today's episode, today's lesson is because I have been in the opposite scenario where we're doing a mega sale during the holidays and we got tons of business and it's super busy and I never get to enjoy any time with my family and never get to enjoy any time with my friends during the holiday season. I'm super stressed. My phone is going off notifications and it's just not an enjoyable time and I hate that. With this strategy you can chill a little bit, you can enjoy the holidays and you can do all that work beforehand so you're available for your family and friends. So you can ring in the new year with some positivity because you've done a lot of great work and you're gearing up for the next version of your product or service or business offerings. That's kind of the best thing about this strategy is that it works for life, not only just for business. I hope you take it on if it works for you. That's it for me today, guys. Thank you so much for listening to the Hunter MBA show. I want to remind you, if you're just getting started in your business and you want to know, hey, is this business idea going to work? We have a free seven part video course on idea validation to make sure you nail your business idea and it works in the real world. It's absolutely free. Just go to 100mba.net free course. Just pop in your email and we'll send you course access for free. 5 Steps to Idea Validation is one of the most popular courses inside the $100 MBA and we're offering it to you for free so you can get a taste of what we're all about. All right, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. I love that strategy that I shared with you that I learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger's autobiography, Total Recall. Don't go where it's crowded, go where it's empty. It's always good to go where there's less noise. So by promoting a little earlier than everybody else and not even being available during the craziness of the holidays really allows you to have one step ahead of the competition. Being different in a smart way. All right, I'll check you in the next episode. Until then, take care.

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