When Should You Pivot Your Offer?

Good morning everybody, happy Monday, uh, happy Cyber Monday, and we're back from Black Friday weekend, Small Business Saturday. Um, I'm Sarah Williams if you don't know me, if you're new around here, I'm with Launch Your Box, so let me know if you're new, I would love to say hi to you whether that's live or on the replay. Today we're going to dive in, um, to a topic that kind of is, it's timely. We're going to talk about when do you know when it's time to pivot your offer? And we can talk about a one-time product offer. We can talk about your subscription offering. But how do you know when it's time to pivot? And I'm going to give you some clear action steps that you can take on recognizing that it might be time to pivot and then what you should do to really pivot your offer. So let's talk about it this morning. Good morning, Susan. Good to see you. Good morning, Lexi. Um, good to see you here, Lexi. Good morning, Melanie. The team is here in the chat, so, um, they'll be with us this morning. Now listen, I'm going to tell you this, a quick story of why this is relevant and important this morning. Um, we were in the midst of our, um, Black Friday promotion, and if you've been around here hanging out with me for the last couple of months, you know that I've had everything locked and loaded, right? I've had all my promotions set up since September. I knew exactly what I was gonna run, I knew when I was gonna run it. So we had ads created, emails that were planned and mapped out, we've had posts scheduled. And, um, so I'm in the midst of Black Friday week, and so I was selling gift subscriptions, um, this last week. And so on Tuesday, early access went out to my current subscribers. Those are all of my box and t-shirt subscriptions. They got early access. So Tuesday's email went out Wednesday I was gonna go live and put the gift subscriptions up for sale, and I did that Wednesday evening. And, um, crickets, crickets. Now let me give you a little backstory here. I sold over 80 gift subscriptions in 2022 during this weekend, and those are— these are like 6-month and 1-year subscriptions. They're not a cheap subscription, okay? And then last year we didn't sell as many, um, and Um, so we only sold 26, and I felt like that was my fault because I didn't do all the marketing I was supposed to last year because I waited too late. I was tired and I didn't do it. So I was like, I'm setting myself up, I'm gonna run ads this year. I had never run ads. I'd also filmed commercials for, um, a local TV spot to run on NBC. Um, like, I was so prepped and planned. I'm like, we're gonna double last year. I don't know if we'll get to 80-some, but we're gonna double what we did last year. It's gonna be great. I'm gonna have new subscribers and they'll have paid for their subscription for the 6 months or the year. Okay, this was my plan. So Tuesday the email goes out, we sold a handful of, um, gift subscriptions, and I was like, okay, they're just, you know, they might be waiting till tomorrow, it's fine. I had to go live, my ad started running on Wednesday, like all the things were happening Wednesday, so I thought, okay, that's gonna be fine. Um, so Wednesday the ads start running, crickets. Wednesday night I go live. I had a nice live attendance. Um, nothing was bought during my live. Um, Thursday, no sales. Friday morning, no sales on my gift subscriptions. So I'm in a little bit of a— I'm a little bit confused. Um, and I'm thinking What is happening? I've sold gift subscriptions every year for 7 years. This is nothing different. My offer is not different. I don't know. And I've done all this marketing, all this extra marketing that I didn't do last year. And I just kind of sat there and I just was like, okay, I can either continue and have no sales or I need to pivot right now. And so I decided to make a quick pivot. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. And I'll tell you how that ends up before I get done today. But I want to know. And here's the thing, like my mastermind, they were my mastermind ladies. They were blowing up the Voxer. They were having crazy, crazy weekend. I'm like, they're killing it. Like, yes. And I'm like, I've got crickets, and I'm almost embarrassed because my mastermind ladies are having huge weekends. And I'm like, okay, I've got to pivot. So let me know in the chat, did you have a super successful Black Friday, Small Business Saturday weekend of sales? Let me know. Was it crickets for you as well, or were you somewhere in between? Okay, let me know in the chat like how your weekend was, because I was seeing it across the board. I jumped into Launch Your Box over weekend, I said, tell me about your Black Friday. And it was such a mixed bag of responses. Some people were like, it's going awesome, I'm having the best month ever, I'm having the best Black Friday I could. Um, and some of you are like, I've sold nothing. So it was such a mixed bag, and I couldn't figure it out because it wasn't like this was a new offer for me. This is something I have done over and over again. This is something that has worked over and over again. And so I was just like, I was like, okay, I'm going to figure this out. And it kind of made me a little depressed, if I'm going to be honest. It kind of made me a little sad because I was like, I feel like we get a dopamine hit when we put together a promotion and sales start rolling in. They're like, yes, yes, yes, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. And I was kind of like, oh, now what's going on? What's going on around here? That's kind of how I was feeling. So let's talk a little bit about let's talk a little bit about— we're not going to just focus on my thing. I want to talk about just in general, and this could be why pivoting could be necessary. And I want you to recognize it before it's too late. And that's the thing. I didn't wait until Monday to realize that didn't work. I changed in the moment. So how do I recognize this? Okay, so one, you can have no sales. Okay, so that was what was happening to me. I had some sales early on, but not like a fraction of what I normally did. So you could have really low sales and this could be just signs of trend change, changes in consumer preferences, like all that changes over time, okay? So that's what I was seeing. You could have stagnant growth. And when I'm saying like stagnant growth, like maybe you've been at the same spot in your subscription box for a long time and it feels like your numbers, your sales, your subscriptions, your renewals aren't growing at all. They're just kind of stagnant or kind of going down, dipping down. Maybe we got some negative feedback from customers. Maybe people are canceling and they're saying, this is not worth my money, something like that. Or the offer is just not there. Like, they're not buying. That's negative feedback. If they're not buying your one-time thing, that's negative feedback. There's something wrong with your offer. And also, you could really have profitability challenges. I've met with a lot of you over the last few years that, you know, are struggling in the cash flow area. And when we look at it, it's our profitability, which our margins are too slim and we're really operating at a loss from month to month. And so any one of these market shift, people aren't buying, stagnant growth, your numbers aren't growing and we're actually seeing a decline. You're getting negative feedback from customers or your profitability is not there at all. If you see these, Any one of them is enough to make you want to pivot. But if you're seeing multiple of these, that is your sign that it's really time to pivot your offer. Okay, so here's what we need to do. So when we want to pivot effectively, I need you to listen to your customer. First of all, when we are having stagnant sales or no sales, we need to find out why. Do a survey. Do a poll, understand what they want from you. Okay, we've got to read the reviews, we've got to get feedback from cancellations, we've got to see the comments. And you're going to have random comments of, this is too expensive, or I would never pay that. Well, we live in the world of Temu and Shein and Amazon, and that's going to be there. So I don't want that to affect you, but we need to listen to what people are saying. Okay. Then I need you to review your numbers. Okay? I need you to review your sales trends. I've been trending up all month long and now it was just like, boom. Okay, so what was that saying to me? What was that trend saying to me? Well, I've been trending up, so there was no reason why I shouldn't have sales on this. That told me this offer was not what they wanted. And when I looked at the trends from the last few months, What has been selling? And they didn't want this offer. So we have to— that's their feedback, whether they're telling you that or not. That's the feedback that you have to get from this. Okay, what's your churn rate? Has that been increasing? Is that, you know, are you having a high churn rate or a higher churn rate than normal? And what is your profit margin? Like, you've got to evaluate your numbers, your sales, your churn, your profit, and you've got to know where that has shifted. To be able to make effective business decisions. Now, the other thing is, do we need to refine our niche? Is our niche too narrow or is it too wide? Do we need to go deeper? Do we need to back up out of it? We've got to figure that out too. Okay, we've got to figure out where our niche lies in this. Are we too niched down or are we too broad? Because that could be affecting all of these numbers as well. And then I want you to test with some new offers. Test with a new theme. Test with a new— if it's subscription box related, let's, let's test with a different theme. Do a one-time box with a different theme. See where that lands with our customers. If it's a one-time product offer, test with a different offer. Maybe what you're offering is not what they wanted in that moment. And we have to be okay with that. Like, I can't just die on the sword that I'm selling gift subscriptions this week. You know, come hell or high water, I'm selling those gift subscriptions. I can say that and I can do that. I have planned for this for months. But if I would have just died on that sword this week, I would not have landed where I landed. And so I want you to remember that if your product is out there and it's not selling, that's telling you something. You either don't have the traffic for people to see it You don't have the conversions. People are getting there and deciding it's not converting, and that can be a lot of different things— messaging, pricing, your product images. It's not what they want, and they're telling you that by not buying your product. Okay, and then we have to— once we test out a different idea, we have to communicate that change. And so Let me give you a couple examples of this. So my gift subscriptions weren't selling. And so on Friday morning, I just messaged my director of operations and I said, hey, I'm— we got to change something. We got to do something different. What's the easiest thing for us to do that we don't have planned? Everybody was off work on Friday. I gave everybody the weekend off. What is the easiest thing that we can do right in this moment? Because I needed to— we needed to make numbers, right? We needed to— we needed to have a plan. I didn't want this biggest shopping weekend of the year to go by and I just sat on my heels. I'm not a good business owner if I do that. I, I'm not. I would have got where I am today if I just sat by and said, well, it is what it is. So we needed to pivot. We just did a big Small Business Saturday, 25% off our entire shop. That was the easiest thing for us to pivot to because it required a coupon to set up and then a little bit of marketing materials that I could put together Friday. We did not have that planned. Now, because we did that and we pivoted our offer, I ended up the month up 8%, and I'm really proud of that. Now, my goal was to be up 10% over last year, and I didn't quite get there because I waited too long to pivot. But I'm really proud of myself for pivoting in that moment and not getting stuck with the offer that I had planned for, for months. Now I'm going to go back and dig into why this offer didn't work this year and what has changed with consumer buying. But I need you to understand that we can't die on the sword of our offer because our business will die on that sword with us. Do you understand what I'm saying? We have to be able to pivot at any given moment. The best business owners can make decisions like this. They can pivot like this. And it doesn't have to be scary. Let's talk about pivoting our subscription because I talked to you about my one-time offer. I, I was thinking about this this morning, like I want to give you an example of someone that's pivoted their subscription. And I'm thinking about Julie Harkin, and I don't know if Julie's watching this morning, but Julie had a tea towel of the month subscription for a long time, and she'd gotten to over 100 subscribers, and she was really just stagnant. It was that, that stagnant growth, like she got there and she just couldn't grow. And she did everything she could, she tried everything she, she could, and she realized that maybe this isn't the right offer, maybe this isn't the right niche. And so she really— she had 100 subscribers and she shut it down and pivoted. And she went and did the Pilot Wives Club. And I don't know if you've, if you've seen her subscription, um, but within that next year, she closed down the Tea Towel subscription, started the Pilot Wives Club. She was in all these groups. She's a pilot's wife. She had all this networking that she had. She'd been building this audience for years because she was friends with all these people, and they had all these specific, um, groups they were in. She launched the Pilot Wives Club subscription, and in a shorter amount of time that she had the Tea Towel subscription, she like 5x, 10x her subscription numbers with her new subscription. We can't sit on our offer and let it die. We have to figure out what's going on. This is— all my other products are selling except my subs. That's what's happening with me too, Beth. And here's the thing. Do I think that means my subscription is dying? No, not one bit. Like, I— if you look at like sales numbers, like that recurring revenue hitting my bank account every month, I would not give up for anything. Does that mean that I need to do some more one-off offers to supplement the The plateau in my subscription right now? Absolutely. And all we have to do is figure that out, right? But that's the best thing about having one-time products and having a subscription business is that one usually outweighs the other at any given time. Do I think that the subscription plateauing is going to be a long-term effect? No, I don't. I think it's the time of year and people are strapped for cash and they don't want to make a commitment. This time of year. So if you're seeing that, it's okay. It's okay. All right. So Tracy says we had great sales. I haven't had a chance to compare it to last year yet, but I ran my gift subscription sale a week earlier this year and did so much better. That's a note that I'm going to put in my Asana board. Maybe I need to run gift subscriptions the week earlier. Maybe I got drowned out. Because here's what I was seeing, and I was watching this really closely. You know, for a lot of years before COVID a lot of big box stores were open on Thanksgiving. And so Black Friday kind of got really skewed. And this year people were closed on Thanksgiving. So Black Friday was truly Black Friday and people were planning just like old times, like people would get the flyer from the newspaper and plan their trips and make a big old thing about it. And it was fun and exciting. That happened again this year, and, um, and I think that there was a lot of noise. There was a lot of Walmart ads, there was a lot of Amazon ads, and it was really, really heavy this week. And I think I got drowned out. Honestly, I didn't see any of my own ads for days, and I normally— I see myself in my feed every time I get onto Facebook. So I was getting drowned out. And if you felt like you were getting drowned out, I'm going to say, yeah, you probably were. And it's okay. It's okay. I don't have Walmart dollars. I don't have Amazon dollars, and I don't expect to run ads like them. I don't expect to have sales like them. So I just have to figure out what is working in the moment. And I know what was working was emails. People were seeing my emails, they were buying on my emails, so I just kept sending more emails. And that's where I ended up, up 8% for the month. And I'm really proud of that because I could have died on that sword of selling gift subscriptions only and stopped there. And, um, and I wouldn't be up 8% right now. I was up 8% because I pivoted. And so I'm giving you permission to pivot any offer you have going on. So when you look at December, I've got a couple more offers. Gift subscriptions are still on sale till tomorrow, and I'm not, I'm not denying that. We're still posting about it. I have actually a segment on our local NBC station running this morning right now while I'm live, a 5-minute segment on gift subscriptions. I don't know. If I'm going to sell any more or not. I hope so, but I'm not going to— I'm not going to die on that sword. I already have a plan for a live tomorrow. I've got my 10 Days of Deals starting on Friday. I'm going to keep pushing. And you know what? If something doesn't land, I'm going to pivot because I have enough product in this warehouse to pivot to anything else and I'm not worried about it. And then I'm going to make notes so that next year I can say, okay, this didn't work out on Black Friday week. And you're right, Tara says with Thanksgiving being later, maybe people shopped early. Maybe it was because my earlier sales did fantastic. So I want you to just not stop. If you give up when things get hard, it's never going to get easier. If your offer is not landing, what can you change about it? I want you to ask yourself that. If you're feeling stagnant right now, is it time for a change? Rebecca says pivot permission. I love it. I'm giving you permission. The new year also brings new opportunities. So if your subscriptions are down right now, don't worry. It's that time of year. You're gonna get more cancellations by the end of this month because December and January are notorious for cancellations. People overspend, people pull back, people think, I can live without this. But you know what? If your subscription's good, they'll be back by March. They'll be back by March. I promise you that. So hang in there. Pivoting is not failure. It's really a strategic move. To grow and improve. You are the CEO of your business and you have the power to make decisions for yourself and for your business and for your customers. I'm giving you permission to make a change in your business, whether that's a one-time promotion or that's your subscription box change. I need you to really reflect on that. Don't die on the sword of I've set this promotion up 3 months ago. I have to finish it out. Pivot. Make sales. We really have a couple of weeks left. So if you had a rough Black Friday, Small Business Saturday weekend, regroup today. It's not over. There's still a lot of opportunity to make sales. If that wasn't what they wanted last week, let's figure out what they want this week. Let's get some stuff out there. Let's go live. Let's send more emails. We have the ability to control our sales, but we have to take control of it. All right. Don't quit. Just pivot. Okay, now let's get to work. I'm sure we all have a lot of work to do. Make sure we have set up ads, emails, posts, lives. We got to go hard for the next couple of weeks. I promise January will thank you for not giving up in December. All right, we've got this. We can do this. I'll talk to you guys soon.