Hey, it's Samantha Hartley with the Profitable, Joyful Consulting Podcast. And I'm going to welcome you back to season four. We're talking about marketing. And before I wanted to get into any specific strategies or tactics, I really wanted to share a perspective that I have developed for myself and that I use with my clients on the ideas of persistence, resistance and managing expectations.

I feel like so much of marketing is, especially if you don't come from a marketing background, if you're a consultant who's in a field like human resources or leadership development or finance, then marketing can be a really heinous task. And it can feel, especially if you're doing this on your own, Like nothing ever works, it's just frustrating and disappointing and you're constantly getting beat up with no, no that didn't work. No, this was difficult.

And I have a few stories or paradigms that I look back to that really helped me that I wanted to share with you today. So the first one is about Fort Sumter. Years ago, I toured Fort Sumter and I took away just really one particular thing about it. This isn't going to be historically accurate.It's very much based on my impression of a tour I took years ago. Fort Sumter is an island off the coast of I think Georgia or South Carolina, but somewhere in that region. And it was put there because they wanted to fortify the coast against foreign invaders, and so they wanted to have an island there.

No island existed. And so they had to build an island. And the way you build an island, basically, is that you take let's see 70, 000 tons of granite from New England, where I live now, and I've hiked on these granite mountains while they took that granite and they schlepped it down the coast and threw it into the ocean and they threw it into the ocean for 30 or 40 years until it began to emerge above the waterline.

That particular aspect of that story for some reason has come to mind so often over the last 20 years since I first toured that place. I think of it every time someone says to me well, I've been posting on my LinkedIn, I don't get any clients from it yet or nobody really even seems to notice.

I hear this from people who say I sent out one email about my program, but nobody responded to it. I hear it when people say, I've just been going to these networking things and I just, I still haven't got a client from it. And I will say, how long have you been doing that? And what specifically are you doing? And there's still this disappointment. They expected something to happen sooner. I know we all have this obsession with overnight success. And we know that like in Hollywood that overnight success has been at it for 20 years behind the scenes. We just didn't know about them. Maybe they were in New York on the stage or they were doing a TV show that we never saw.

And that's the same thing that's happening here is like you're toiling away and you're, perfect client hasn't yet seen you. You just haven't made it onto their radar screen. Sometimes, like at these networking things, sometimes people need to see you repeatedly in order to believe that you're really there and committed. And when you're posting on LinkedIn, like you may not even break the radar screen, but if you do once people go, Oh, that was interesting. And then you need to reappear repeatedly. So they go, Oh, They start to learn who you are and what you're saying. And in the case of emails, boy, I can remember so many times when I've sent out an email I was super excited about, about a program, heard nothing, and thought this thing's just going to be a complete failure.

Sent a second email and suddenly it's as if the first email either didn't register, didn't get up and didn't get seen or they just were like, Oh yeah, cool. And then the second one is Oh, I need that. So there is a time in marketing to really persist. And if you are committed to what you're doing, and you're committed to getting clients through one of these new techniques, which is usually what happens when he tries something new, or they've been at something for a while, and they're like, why is that still not working?

Sometimes you just need to persist further. And I've had programs where I look back at all of the throwing the boulders into the ocean that I was doing. And then one day an island started to appear and there was resonance with the audience and traction. So I'm offering this as my first example of persistence. There's a lot of what we will be doing in marketing that is just going to feel sometimes like we're throwing boulders into the ocean and you won't see immediate results from it. And when you do start to see them, you'll think, wow about time I've been doing this for this long. And finally, people are starting to respond to it or show up for it.

Now I've checked. Those numbers for myself sometimes. So from the time I began this podcast and from the time that people started to mention it in working with me. I felt was 30 or 40 years. If I really look at the math on it, it was about five weeks, you know our perspective can get stretched and distorted So I want you to think about persisting at the things that you feel like one day, one day, I'm gonna start to see an island here because I know that can happen for you.

Now, by complete contrast, I want to talk to you about resistance. So years ago, before I was full time in consulting, I had a little e-commerce company, and I wanted to in my neighborhood one day. I thought I'll do a little open house of my products, and I'll invite people from my neighborhood. So kind of like what you would do with a Tupperware party, I thought I would just have one of those. Everything that I did leading up to this was, there was resistance. It wasn't easy to create the thing that I wanted to do. I wanted to print a little postcard and put it in everyone's mailbox in our neighborhood. It wasn't easy to design the thing, it wasn't easy to choose a date, figure it out, do these things, get some catering happening. It wasn't easy to print. I decided to print the thing on my own computer. I had a nice printer. I had a nice Color printer I could use for this. It fussed and fought the whole time and I just was like, I can't imagine the amount of this printer is like really my enemy right now and I didn't have enough time to go to somewhere else for it. So I really just had to fight and push through the whole time for this printer. Then I distributed the postcards and then on the day of the event, guess what happened? Only two people showed up. So this event was not a success, and I believe that I was getting the message through the resistance of this printer that this probably wasn't a great idea.

Now, I don't want this to sound too metaphysical, but when I have seen that when people are working on something where they just can't get any resonance or traction at all they'll be getting feedback about that through either people telling them, I don't think this is a good idea. I think you need to reconsider this thing or believe it or not through technology. Like the tech will push back, the website will fail. The email won't work. Then, like a lot of things like that will happen. And I know I've just told you a persistence story. In telling you a bail, sometimes you just need to push the eject button and bail on a thing. I don't want to sound like schizophrenic here.

There's truth in both things. Two things can be true. And what is key in this situation is when you find that you're doing something in your marketing and it's got resistance everywhere. Like whether it is from technology or from people or you can't, things don't flow. Oh, it's not. It's not easy. It feels like you're pushing a boulder up a hill.

That's an exercise for discernment. I'm not saying that you necessarily have to push the eject button. I'm saying that's a time to listen to circumstances and back up and just question. Wow, this is not easy. It is not in flow. What is, what do I think I need to take away from this? And then, listen. Because you can receive information from your own intuition, from God source, universe, whatever is the place that you're receiving wisdom from. You might receive some in that moment that says, you need to take another path. Here's a way to adapt this thing so that it will work or, hey, you just need to eject on this altogether and reconsider something else.

I know it's frustrating to have two different pieces of advice, but I will sometimes tell people two different pieces of advice because as I said, two things can be true. So the last thing that I want to talk to you about is managing expectations in your marketing and the story that I think about or the example that I think about in this situation is the best hitter in baseball.

The best hitter in the game of baseball any given year is never hitting more than the way that it shows is 0.33 could be 0.35 for a little while out of a thousand, right? So it's batting 350 something out of a thousand. What that means is that basically that person goes up to hit and one out of three times something good happens. And two out of three times he “fails”. Now for baseball sticklers, I know that you can have a productive out and blah, blah, blah. For marketers. And people who are trying to do marketing, but are not marketers. What that means is that two out of three times the very best hitter in the game is getting it out.

It's the thing that he was striving to do did not happen. And I feel like those are very commonly the way marketing goes in the beginning. When you're trying to get a new thing going or when you're trying to get your marketing going a lot of times it only one out of three things will work that you try.

And that is horrible unless you manage your expectation and say, hooray, one out of three, we're doing as well as the best hitter in baseball. So if you're trying a new initiative or if you have tried You know the various different things Don't look for every single thing you do to succeed because that just doesn't happen, it doesn't happen for the best marketers out there. They try some things and things fail and guess what they don't say Oh my god, I'm devastated. My entire identity as a business owner is crushed. What they say is huh? Interesting. It's information. It's learning. What it isn't is a failure. So I share that story because I want you to be able to try new things, to to play the game of marketing and to to enjoy the journey more than feeling like you're just constantly pelted by obstacles and resistance and terrible things happening.

Now, I hope that these three examples or stories have been helpful for you in creating a new attitude towards marketing. It's like you never lose, you learn. So let's think about the things that you can try, that you feel excited to try this year. And I want you to go out with that kind of open mind of I wonder what will happen. I wonder. I have no idea. I hope we succeed, but I wonder what will happen and to take everything that happens as information and to use discernment. Is this a place I need to persist? Like you only sent one email. People didn't even notice it. Send five emails and then decide. Or Should I bail on this networking event?

Do you feel like you've been there several times and you've never seen people who are perfect clients, perfect potential clients? It might be time to let that one go. Or, have you been trying something and the tech won't work and the ideas don't flow and when you talk about it to people, they just don't seem to get it.

Maybe that's an idea that needs some either refinement or needs to be set aside for a while. Now, one way to alleviate the frustration that happens with this is to bring in someone who has knowledge and experience and can help you with the marketing piece and the outreach and things like that. That can be a mentor, it can be someone like me who helps consultants to grow their businesses through their marketing to get all the clients that they want. Or it can be just you dedicating yourself to being a better student of the game. Either way, I am wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business.