Do you ever feel like you're constantly trying to convince people to buy?
Like you're always explaining, justifying, or pushing a
little harder than you'd like? Today I want to talk about why that's
happening, why it's exhausting, and why it usually means that you're spending too
much time selling to the wrong people.
Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan. I'm Kathryn Eardley, and in the
next few minutes, you're about to get powerful real-world retail strategies
from insights shared both from my guests and myself, backed up
by my 25 years in the retail industry. Keep listening to learn
how to grow a thriving, profitable product business. Let's jump
in with this latest episode.
I'd like to start with an analogy, if you will.
So imagine that you decide you're going to host a party.
You really want this party to be a success. You want it to be
as fun as possible, and you want to have lots of people at your
party. So you stand outside the venue and as people walk
past, you say to them, come on in, come on in. We are having this
great party in here. You really want to join this. You don't wanna miss out.
And so they come into the party, but then you don't go in.
You just stand outside all night and you're trying to get more and more people
to come in through the door instead of coming
into the venue and actually talking to the people that you've invited in and making
sure that they're having a good time. And making sure that the
party's really a success. And businesses can be like that too.
The majority of time when I talk to people about their businesses, if
I ask them what they want, what they want more of, they will often say
to me, I want to grow my audience. I want to grow my online
presence, or I want to grow my customer base.
I want to get more eyes on the business. They say things like that. And
that is really effectively the equivalent of wanting to get more
people into your party. But what people often don't realize
is that it can be exhausting to constantly
be looking for new people, people who've never heard of your
business before, because that's the bit where you have to do a lot of explaining.
If somebody has never seen your business before, then you have to
explain who you are, what you do, why your products are amazing,
and you have to win their trust. Imagine if
you are selling at a Christmas market, for
example, imagine the difference in the experience. If you've got
somebody who walks up to your stand, which I'm sure happens all the time, walks
up to your stall, and you're having to explain to them everything about who you
are, what you do, why the products are great, versus somebody who bought
from you last year, they come back to the stall and they say, oh my
goodness, you're back this year. I'm so excited. Right, I'm going to buy 10 of
your candles or your jewellery this year because I know how great
it is. And that's really the difference between a new customer and
a returning customer. So one of the fastest ways to burn
out as a small business owner is to be only talking
to the new people, only standing outside the venue, trying to get people to come
in and not going inside the venue and making sure the
party's really happening inside, or otherwise known
as talking to your warmest customer. And it can be
a really exhausting feeling because the hardest thing to do
is to make people who've never heard of your business
want to buy from you, whereas when people have bought from you, they're much more
likely to buy. So one of my favourite phrases is nobody's more likely to buy
from you than someone who's already bought from you. So most
retailers overspend their energy, time, and effort on their cold
audiences.
If we think about the concept of a sales funnel, or a
customer journey is another way of thinking about it, we go from
cold, which is people who've never heard of you, to red
hot, which is people who've bought from you previously would be
primed to buy from you again. And the customer goes
through this journey. So if you think about the fact there are
over 8 billion people in this world, the vast majority of them
have never heard of your business. So the first thing that you have to do
is you have to make those people who have never heard of you before, you
have to make them aware of you. So they go from the unaware to the
aware stage. Then you have to move them down other stages
to the point at which they purchase from you. So they become a buyer.
And at that point, you have moved them all the way from someone who's
never heard about your business, all the way to somebody who not only has heard
about your business, but liked it enough, trusted it enough to purchase from it.
Those are the group of people that often get ignored by
the small business owners because what they're thinking in their head is, right, I
need more sales. I need more people coming in. And
yes, of course, every small business needs a stream of
fresh customers coming in, new people taking a look at the business,
new people having interest in it. But if you spend all of
your time and effort talking to those people, then
you will very quickly burn out compared to
the people who are already with you, who you can communicate with.
And persuade to buy again. And of course they'll want to buy again because your
products are fabulous. You've got great customer service. Overall,
buying from you is a wonderful experience. So of course they're going to want to
repeat it. And it's much, much easier to get somebody to move
from being a buyer to a repeat buyer, for example, than it
is to get someone who has never ever heard of you
to become a buyer. It's a much shorter process.
It's like pushing against an open door, as opposed to
really trying to go through this whole process of
convincing somebody. Now, of course, we've all met
customers who just appear out of nowhere and are immediately ready to
buy, but they are the minority.
Now, of course, we've all met customers who just appear out of
nowhere and are immediately ready to buy. But they are the
minority. So in terms of what that might look
like inside a small business, if somebody is doing this,
if somebody is spending too much time trying to talk to their cold traffic and
not enough time talking to their warm, then it might look something like this.
You are spending time on social media. You are
spending time, effort thinking about the kind of content that would draw people
in. And yet you are not having
conversations or not trying to start conversations in your stories
with people who are already following you. And you might even
have a list of people, maybe it's not the huge list, but it's some
people on an email list who've previously purchased from you, who've opted
in to hear from you, and you're never ever emailing them. For example,
it could be that people buy from you one time. And you
never go back and talk to them about what they might like to buy next.
It might be people who are coming to
your website, but you're not spending enough time actually thinking about
or examining the conversion rate of your website to see if
you're giving those people enough information to actually help
them buy. Instead, what you're thinking about is
solely, okay, well, how do I get my message out in front of
more people. And I've even seen it where people have put a significant amount of
money into paid advertising to reach more cold traffic
and to bring people into them instead of looking at their
warmest part of their audience and actually optimising that, selling to that
part of the audience before they spend any money going out to try
and get more new people. And it all works together in a very
symbiotic relationship. So for example, if somebody is spending
money on paid advertising, one of the things that I'm always really keen to
explore with them is, are they maximizing all of the other touchpoints
in their business? Are they, for example, really happy with
their email marketing, making sure that's fully optimized so that
anybody that they are paying to acquire, they know that they are actually going
to be nurturing, talking to those people correctly all the way through, as opposed
to just bringing people in as cold traffic and then selling to them once and
that's it.
So that's really the essential that I want to leave you with is that nobody
is easier to sell to than somebody who's already bought
from you, because those are the people that you've already gained
their trust, and you want to keep them moving through that sales
process until we end up with them as a superfan. So super
fans— there's this concept of 1,000 true fans,
which is all about how a lot of small businesses, if they had
1,000 people who bought everything that they ever put out,
that was super enthusiastic about the business, that were always promoting it to their friends
and families. If more small businesses had 1,000
of those true fans, it would be enough to move a lot of people out
of the small business category and more into the medium business category.
So we think about trying to reach thousands or hundreds of thousands
of people through our content, through our marketing, but if we're ignoring
that warmest part of our audience, then we are seriously leaving
a lot of money on the table and not just a lot of sales, but
a lot of profit, because it is always more profitable to sell
to your existing customers because you don't have to pay to talk to them.
Whereas a lot of the time, if you're trying to reach more of a
cold audience, you have to actually pay to talk to those people. So
this is something that we really delve into in the Retail Sales Game Plan. That
is my course, my 4-month course. Kicking off at the end of
February. The waitlist is open now. You can go to resilientretailclub.com/retailsales
and get on the waitlist. We're going to be delving into everything from
getting planned out correctly so that your sales feel calm and
consistent, to really delving into this idea of the
customer journey and how to create the content that moves
somebody from one stage to the next, and also how to build the rhythm of
your business around this warmest part of your audience. It's all
about working smarter, not working harder, and putting some
of that structure and support into place so that your sales
feel really calm and consistent. So if sales
currently feel exhausting, it's probably not because you hate selling. It's more likely
because you are focusing on the wrong part of the journey.
Keep listening because next week we're talking about the crucial secret
to sales success that most people completely avoid. See
you next week.