Why do people leave it until the last moment to buy your thing?

First things first, this is not me having a moan.

This is me saying to anyone reading this…KEEP GOING…don’t stop talking about your thing, don’t give up after posting about it just once across your channels, you are not rubbish, your product, service, and offerings are not rubbish….and neither are your audience a bunch of time wasting, tyre kicking, don’t know what they are missing idiots (too much lol?)

Now I would never have described myself as someone who enjoyed sales.

I’ve never really had to do it…well apart from selling programmes and ice creams at my local theatre aged 16, or pints in my local pub aged 18…but in both those situations you kind of already have a captive audience, and folks buy what you are offering without you having to do much but smile and look pretty.

Even when I worked for myself as an artist, trainer and consultant…I rarely had to sell. I got most of my work through word of mouth, and had a cracking CV, so often a new job or contract was literally mine to lose most of the time.

So the world of online business 8 years ago came as a bit of a shock at first.

Build it and they will come I thought.

I’d been writing my fitness blog for years, surely I had an audience that would buy….and I did, but not in the volume I expected them to at first.

WHY????

Because I was naive, I had in some ways trained my audience to expect my expertise and inspiration for free, I didn’t understand the psychology of selling…I ultimately I didn’t have a sales strategy, nor any real understanding of social media, I was just winging it. It was all fun and games until I found myself a single parent, and about to lose my home that I realised,

SHIT…I’ve got to make this work.

And so I took my audience development, audience activation, and audience hype skills from my performing arts and cultural programming days and I started to work my magic.

I remember the first time I activated 100 paid clients in a month…it was a programme called 100 Ways back in 2016, and I influenced 100 women to pay me £100 to work with them on a group coaching programme for 100 days…it was pretty easy looking back…I just needed to have the vision and the balls to back myself.

The second time round it became a little harder, the time after that a little harder still…until I got to the point where I didn’t want to run that programme any more…you see I’d ran out of sales tactics, and my audience wasn’t growing fast enough for there to be new people to sell to, my model was flawed.

And I went back to the drawing board.

A few years later when I started explicitly teaching other entrepreneurs this method in a programme called A Grand in Your Hand…I realised that so many small business owners are literally clueless when it comes to activation, engagement and converting warm leads into clients….now the cold audience to clients thing can be tricky…but goodness me, if people know like and trust you…they should want to work with you, it should be a no brainer if the offer is right.

But here’s the biggest problems as I see them…

1. Folks submarine market…they pop up when they have something to sell, and they disappear when they don’t. This not only makes you a bit of a spammy dick, it doesn’t help to remind people who you are and why you can help them, PLUS you get penalised on social media for this kind of inconsistency, and have to work hard to build up engagement again.

2. They don’t give their launches enough thought or planning, and this is whether they are trying to find one client, or 20. They just don’t understand the flow of a launch, the emotion that your audiences go through, nor the internal drama that you will face. Small business owners navigating the online space are simply not well equipped to last the course.

3. They give up after the dip...the dip happens in most launches. There is an initial flurry of activity and then NOTHING…and then you are left in a situation of “Holy shit I don’t have enough people…but I don’t want to refund the ones who have bought” or worse still “I haven’t had anyone show any interest” and you throw in the towel.

Let me share with you a little case study.

I am currently in launch for my Activate Your Audience™️ Bundle...it’s a beta launch, and my target is 100 sales. I got off to a cracking start a week ago with 20 odd sales in the first few days, and then….tumbleweed. I didn’t panic though…because that my friend is the DIP…and I have been there many times before. And because I am human too, I have crumbled, crashed and burned during the dip also…and I always regret not holding my nerve and just following my process.

Sales have started trickling in again, because my marketing strategy has shifted and we are hurtling towards the end of this reduced priced offer. At midnight on Tuesday 29th December, the price will go up to $97. I have reached the half way point…and I now have another 49 sales to find to hit my target.

So here are some things for your to consider…

• Even though I have been posting daily on social media roughly 90% of my audience will have not seen it yet (completely made up that stat…but I reckon its pretty close to the truth) its only your hard core engaged people…and some other random folks that the algorythms tend to show your stuff too.
• Even though my peeps have seen it multiple times (AND WANT IT) they haven’t got round to buying it (as explained by a lady on my social feed earlier today)
• Some people ALWAYS wait to the last minute, because they get FOMO, have busy lives, can’t quite make up their mind, like the thrill of the deadline
• Some people just haven’t seen the value yet…and as you continue to find creative ways to keep talking about your stuff, a lightbulb goes off in their head and they decide to buy…this often happens to me as I release detail…I’m not a detail person…and some of my audience are and are literally begging me to tell them more

So do you reckon I will hit my target? Will you celebrate me when I do? Or think “What has she got that I haven’t?”

And what will I do if I don’t hit the target?

Look I am goal orientated. I like to set and smash goals, as it makes me feel good. But all of my sales targets are only a small part of a bigger business growth strategy, so by themselves it never really matters if I hit a goal or not…I still work towards them though, because thats what keeps me motivated.

If I don’t hit it…I will pick another activation strategy, maybe like a sales masterclass, or a series of expert sessions in other peoples communities and do something in December and January at the higher price point, until I reach my 100 beta testers.

Now I know I have been a bit cheeky and told my own success story here…but I have many of them from clients too.

One of my clients made £4500 in a 48 hour period last week…and I couldn’t be more chuffed for her

You see it’s never just about the money, it’s about getting a return on investment for you time, energy and expertise you put into your work AND its for the impact that your work is going to create.

What motivates me to keep on showing up, even when some people may start getting a bit annoyed…is that those extra social media posts will activate one person to buy, and my programme will transform their lives.

I am about that life.