How Solopreneurs Can Make Your Work Sell Itself Without Social Media Burnout

All right. Fantastic. Well, welcome to Be a Blessing Marketing. Turn the work that you love to do into your sales success system. We're going to go through the Allegiance Capital questions. These are just ways to make sure that you are where you want to be and that you're getting what you expected to get and also let you know what's going to happen as we go through and as we're all done. So you are here because you signed up for Be a Blessing Marketing, a free workshop for all subscribers, and you are in the right place if you're ready to find alternatives to the content grind and trying to be everywhere all the time, all at once on social media, and instead turn the great work that you do into your marketing and sales system. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to share my screen again. Those of you that have been with me before know the drill, and we're going to, we're going to get started. So For those of you that entered a little late, this is actually the good stuff starting right now. Okay, so here is the situation as I have experienced it, and I have seen most of my clients and community members see it. You became a solopreneur because you're a purpose-driven person that has a set of talents or skills or a point of view or just a desire to do meaningful work, work that matters with people you care about. And all you're asking in return is that you can simply fund the lifestyle that you want to fund and have the business fit around that lifestyle. What I see often happening, and this was definitely my experience, is once you get your business going and you validate your, your product or service and you get a little bit of traction, then you fall into the, the trap of paying attention to all the digital marketers and online gurus who are selling you all sorts of marketing and sales tricks, tactics, hacks, and strategies. And what ends up happening is you go from— you end up spending 80% to 90% of the time that you're spending in your business on marketing and sales activities that probably don't really feel good and align with your beliefs and guiding principles and philosophy. And you're only spending 10 to 20% of your time actually making the difference that you signed up for when you started your business in the first place. And so what I have discovered through my own experience and then honed a process, uh, by working with a lot of clients is that we can actually invert that whole dynamic. You can go from spending 10 to 20% of your time doing the work you love and 80 to 90% of the time doing the work that you don't love so much, to doing— spending 80 to 90% of your time actually making the difference that you signed up to make when you started your business, and spending only 10 to 20% of your time on the things like marketing, sales, content creation, and so forth. And my experience with this is that I went from spending about 80 hours a week in my business to spending now less than 10 hours a week in my business because I needed to build a business that funded and fit around my ability to become a full-time grandfather to my grandson Jasper. Spoiler alert, we're going to have another grandchild sometime in the next 8 months. And here's the whole thing, is that what we are striving for, the ultimate way to establish yourself or to build a prosperous, fulfilling, viable, and sustainable business is you have to become preeminent in whatever marketplace your business fits in. You have to be the best in the world at doing what you do in the way only you can do it. That's what I mean by preeminence. You have to be the one and only choice for helping someone make the change they want to make through a product or service that is done in the way that only you can make it. And you can't achieve preeminence if you're spending 80 hours a week on marketing and sales stuff that you don't actually like doing that much. You can only achieve preeminence if you're spending most of your time actually honing and practicing and executing your craft in whatever product or service that you're, you're operating around. Okay, so preeminence is the, the goal here. Reducing time spent on marketing and sales activities, boosting the time in making the difference that you seek to make through your product or service so that you can achieve not just a greater sense of fulfillment, but a greater level of prosperity, making a better living and a bigger difference while spending less time in your business and creating more velocity towards your goals and ease in the execution. So what we are trying to accomplish is first a full understanding of the journey that someone that could benefit from your product or service is going to go through, how that journey maps over marketing and sales activities, and then why we would want to choose this idea of a marketing web over the traditional idea of a marketing funnel. And I put air quotes around traditional because marketing funnels have not been around for very, very long. You could think of, you know, pre-online business marketing as being somewhat funnel-driven, but for the most part, we did things quite a bit differently before the age of media, and we, uh, and did it differently then than we do in the age of social media. So when we're thinking about the journey that someone in the marketplace, uh, for whatever product or service you have, goes through to become first a prospect, then a lead, and then a client, We are looking at a journey that goes from awareness, attention, trust, permission, interest, enrollment, and investment. Now that doesn't mean that everybody has to go through this entire sequence. It does look like a causal chain, and causal chains are prone to breaking. People can enter or be in your ecosystem already at, in any of these levels. But here's what I'm talking about. The first step is they have to be aware that you exist, that your product or service is available. You have to earn their awareness. Then you have to earn enough of their attention to— so that you can earn the necessary trust for that person that Encourages them to give you permission to have a more direct conversation with them. Those are all marketing activities. When we are posting on social media, when we're pushing out our blog, when we're pushing out a lead magnet to get people onto our email list, when we have push— pushing out content to a YouTube channel or to a podcast, we are earning awareness, attention, trust, and permission. Only then can we push the right people, the right prospects into the interest enrollment investment part of the, the causal chain, which is the sales sequence or the sales cycle. They have to be interested enough to consider the possibility of purchasing your product or service. You need to earn their enrollment, their willingness to go on the adventure or to go on the journey that you can take them on to solve the problem they want to solve or achieve the aspiration they want to achieve. And then finally, they have to make the investment. They have to purchase your offer of whatever the product or service is that will help them achieve their aspiration or solve their problem. So when I'm talking about marketing and sales, I'm talking about those two elements of this entire journey. Again, marketing: awareness, attention, trust, permission. Sales: interest, enrollment, investment. When we are looking at this through the traditional funnel approach, we're using all sorts of tricks and hacks and tools and tactics and strategies to get people to move through this sequence through false scarcity, false urgency, through glitzy, you know, bespangled sales pages, you know, with just the right color of button and just the right color of CTAs, just the right bonus stack and all those things. Which is why so often I find, both for myself and for the people I work with, that we're we're not very excited when we're talking about marketing and sales because it always feels like we're talking about these tools, tactics, strategies, hacks, and tricks that don't feel like they fully align with who we believe we are and how we want to show up in the world. So one of the things that I also want to do here is reframe what I mean by marketing and sales. And then I'm going to make a quick comment about advertising just because I think it will be helpful for some of the people in the room. From here. So I'm going to switch tabs here and I'm going to go to an article I wrote called Getting the Word Out. I'll send this to everyone when we're done so that you can access. This is probably one of the more cited articles I've ever written because it really, it's loaded with insight and information about how marketing and sales actually really works. And it's, it's much more pragmatic and practical than other approaches to this that you might have, you know, read or experienced in something like the marketing seminar, for instance. So when I'm talking about marketing, I am talking about this idea of telling true stories to people whose lives will be enhanced by colliding with your idea, product, service, or cause. The way that everyone understands everything is through narrative. I'm telling myself a story about myself. I'm telling myself a story about you. I'm telling myself a story about how the story you're telling yourself about me. And I'm telling myself, you know, telling stories about the virtues of my approach to helping people solve the problem that they're experiencing or the aspiration they want. It's all storytelling. In traditional digital marketing and online guru tactics, we're often telling, we're telling stories that are leveraging all these scammy, spammy, tricky, hacky tools, tactics, and strategies that don't feel very true. And we don't care if their lives will be enhanced by our product, idea, service, or cause. We're just, we just want to close the sale. Which means that even if we succeed, we have to deal with all the repercussions of buyer's remorse and refunds and problems with fulfillment and, you know, just dealing with people that are generally unhappy. Why not just tell true stories to the people whose lives would actually be enhanced by colliding with whatever you have on offer that will help them solve their problem or achieve their aspiration? And when we're talking about sales, What I— my definition is leveraging empathetic antagonism. This is a— you can, uh, search for this in the Substack. What I'm talking about is getting under people's skin in a generous, empathetic way, just enough to encourage them to lean in a little bit more, to take another step towards you, to— as a viable option for helping them solve their problem or achieve their aspiration. We want to encourage the people who resonate with our marketing ideas to take the bolder step into possibility by adopting your idea, investing in your product or service, and making the change that they want to make happen. And so when I'm talking about empathetic antagonism, we are leveraging generosity, care, consideration, and obviously empathy to help people get from where they are to where they want to be. With the greatest velocity, with the greatest amount of ease, with the least amount of risk, and so forth. That's the way that I think about marketing and sales. When we're talking about advertising, people look at advertising as a solution to a marketing or sales problem. People rush to advertising far too quickly. They think, if I just throw some money at Facebook or Google or the local paper or the local television station or what have you, I can get, I can get my message, get my product, service, idea, or cause in front of more people and more is better. And if it's getting in front of more people, more people will go through this funnel that I've constructed and drip out the other end as customers. Unfortunately, people are usually investing in advertising before they've actually even validated their offer. Or have demonstrated any level of sustainability or achievability with their product or service. So sure, you can, with enough money, you can get enough people to buy your thing. But if your thing is not actually solving the problem they have or helping them achieve their aspiration, again, you're just signing up for more headaches. So the way that I look at advertising is when you have validated an offer, when you have proven sustainability and achievability through that offer, then it makes sense to put some money behind marketing and sales communications that have already proven to be effective as a way, as an accelerant, as a way of amplifying and increasing your reach to more of the right people. So I'm not in any way, shape, or form considering myself an expert on advertising. I do leverage ads because I do have a validated and sustainable offer. But For most of you, you probably don't need to worry about advertising at all at this point. So let's look at the way that traditionally we think about how to do marketing and sales. And this has to do with funnels. What we're going to do is we're going to build some sort of opt-in page that leads people to some sort of sales page or webinar that gets people to watch a thing or read a thing and then purchase our offer. The idea, the metaphor of a funnel is really enticing. We have this funnel that leverages gravity to drag a substance from the top where it can collect a lot of prospects and drive them using gravity through to the bottom where they become clients. It's seductive and sexy. And it feels like it kind of makes sense, except I don't know if you've noticed, but people don't behave like liquids in a funnel. We all have our own fears and aspirations, our biases and false beliefs, and we're increasingly wary and cynical when we are feeling like we are being forced into a funnel. Which means that we— gravity doesn't just drag us through to the bottom where we buy something. And in fact, even the best funnels are incredibly leaky, which is why traditionally we've had to use advertising to get thousands of people into a top— the top of a funnel, because we know that very few of them are going to drip out into the bottom. I've been actually, um, doing some, uh, looking into funnel math, and I'm just going to give you some numbers. If you can get 100 people to visit your opt-in page, you will be lucky to get 30 to 50 of those people to sign up. Less than 50% of the people that land on your page will opt in. And 30 to 50% is those, those are high averages. So 100 people land on your page, 30 to 50 sign up, they opt in. Of those 30 to 50, about half or less will actually show up for your webinar or click through to your sales page. 6 to 15 people of the 30 to 50 that signed up will actually show up. And of the people that show up, 2 to 5, about a third, will actually watch the whole webinar or read the whole sales page. And of the 2 to 5 people that watch your webinar or read your sales page, you will make between 0.3 and 2 purchases. So funnel math means that the best you can hope for is a 2% conversion rate on people that enter your funnel that convert on the other side. Now, if you have a super high ticket offer, maybe it's worth it, uh, if it's validated and, um, proven— it's— if it's a proven product or service. But for the most part, most of us are simultaneously testing for viability and sustainability as we are constructing this funnel. And again, currently funnels are increasingly leaky, and the marketplace is increasingly wary and cynical about funnels. They can smell them from a mile away. They try to avoid them at all costs. And even when they go through the entire funnel, they don't end up, up at the other end as a someone that is thoroughly joyful and happy about the experience or the thing that they just bought. Which leads to all sorts of additional problems that you may or may not be interested in. So what we want to do is instead of looking at this, you know, competing with the diminishing returns of a funnel, is I am advocating a marketing web. What we are going to do is leverage what has historically always worked in marketing and sales, leveraging connection, Conversation, empathy, identity and belonging, and selling through what Seth Godin calls permission marketing. Speaking to people that are eager to hear from us, anticipate that they will hear from us, and that they will receive personal and relevant communications that will help them understand the problem that they have or the aspiration they want to achieve and see us as a believable, viable, competent, experienced way for them to close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. So with the— if you're a follower of funnels, you probably know about Russell Brunson. His tagline is, you're only one funnel away. Thing about only being one funnel away is it never ends. By the time you come across a funnel that works and hack that funnel and implement that funnel, it has already— is already delivering severely diminished returns. Because guess what? While you've been hacking the funnel, so has everyone else. And people with more resources and time and money have done it faster. And the thing about hacking someone else's funnel that worked in the past is you are not that person and it is no longer the past. So funnels are automatically delivering diminished returns by the time you see them, and even more diminished returns by the time you implement them. Funnels are leaky, webs are sticky. And so this idea of a marketing web, I'm going to go through how to set up a web and then I'm gonna kind of show you how I've implemented one. What I wanna say before I go into all that is you don't have to— like, with your marketing web, you don't have to rely on social media posting or podcasting or YouTube channeling or blogging or lead magnets and email sequences or web workshops or any of those things. Any of those things can work. There's no one way. To make a marketing web work. So let's dive into the idea of a marketing web. So when you're setting up your marketing web, the first step is