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Difference Between Marketing & Sales

Well, welcome back, welcome back. I am blown away, too, that it is day three but we are gonna wrap up everything today. We are gonna do a little bit more hands-on business modeling, dig in deep to the things that we were doing yesterday, and we're going to bring it all full circle with segment two, segment three, and segment four today. We're gonna set some sales goals, set some pricing goals so that'll be good to tune into. We're gonna talk about sales cycles. How do you actually sell these products, the ones that you either already have in your business model or the ones that you're considering creating? And then we're gonna set some bigger goals. What are you gonna create and when? So that you know that this isn't just hypothetical, right. All of this conversation, all of this planning, all of this ideation that we've been going through the last two days, this isn't hypothetical. This is real, you can make it happen, you can execute it and you can live the life you want to live with...

the business you want to have. So that's what we're doing today. You know, nothing small. You know, nothing small. Alright, so let's get started. Let's tackle Hands-on Business Modeling Part three. If you were with us yesterday, you know that we were actually digging into the different parts of your business model. We were working through some different exercises. We brought people up on stage and worked through different examples that way. Guess what, we're doing more of the same! (laughs) And in this section, we're actually gonna tackle marketing and sales which I know is something that everyone always wants to hear about. But before we get to that, let's talk about this again. Let's talk about this again. One of the whole themes for these three days for this workshop has been something I'm calling the micro business earning plateau. That's this middle part here. You know, when you're starting off in business, it's exciting. Oh my gosh, you're finally putting your dreams into reality. You're finally taking the bull by the horns, hanging out your shingle. I'm really good at mixed metaphors. And you know, you're getting winds and winds and winds. They come fast and furious even if they're just one at a time, at a time, at a time. You're able to see the results of, you know, your hustle on a daily basis. You put something out into the world and you get something back. It happens fast, you feel good, you're excited. You are feeling more and more successful on a daily basis even if it's just step by small step. But there comes a point where those winds, you know, even if they're coming at the same speed, it's not as exciting anymore. The growth starts to level out. You can't just push to make it work anymore but you try. You hustle and you hustle and you do more and you do more and you expend more energy and you start burning out. You start losing steam. And way too many business owners also drop out at this phase and I don't want you to have to drop out on your business. I don't want you to have to drop out on your dream. I want to help you reach that revenue goal. But how do you get from this plateau, this earning plateau up to that revenue goal that's sky-high? Well, you do it with our little friend here, the business model. The fact is that when you're in that micro business earning plateau, more work, more hustle is not the answer. The answer is, you know, rethinking, re-imagining and planning the systems of your business that will actually get you to the place you want to be. It's laying a foundation, it's creating revenue systems that work for you instead of against you. It's figuring out how to run your business with less energy, with less busy work, with less push and more love, more impact, more presence, more mindfulness. That's what the business model is all about. So we've been looking at business models in terms of six questions. Six questions that help us build layer by layer a business model that is a healthy living, breathing organism. If you think of your bodies, you have lots of different systems, right? You've got your circulatory system, your heart pumps the blood. You've got your nervous system, your brain and all your nerves help you understand the world. You've got your digestive system that lets you put really good food in and get rid of the waste. And all of these systems function well on their own but they don't make you you until they're functioning together, right? They don't make you healthy until they're functioning together. Your business is the same way. If you think of each product offering or each service offering you have as an individual system, then they layer up so that you have a whole body, a whole organism, a whole bigger system that can work together in its own healthy way. That's a business model, alright. Layer by layer, system by system. These six questions which I'm about to reveal are the questions you need to ask yourself about each layer, each individual system in your business, each individual product offering, alright. So what are those six questions? The first is, what will this product help my customers accomplish? What will this service help my customers accomplish? This is a question all about value. What kind of change am I creating for my customers? What will they be able to do after they use this product or service that they've not been able to do before? How will they feel differently? How will they perceive the world differently? What new meaning will be in their life? That's the first question. What will this help my customers accomplish? The next question is, who are these customers? Who am I designing this for, what's unique about them? What are their frustrations, what are their desires, what are their values? We talked a lot about values on day one when we were talking about pricing, when we were talking about how you can shape the story of your business and the story of your individual product and even the story of your prices to be able to attract the people you want to attract. And so that's what this question is all about. Who are these people? It's not just their demographic. It's not just the 30s to 50-year-old women who live in cities who have dogs. It's so much more than that, it's so much more than that. It's a deeper, more in-depth understanding of the psychology of the people who you are designing your products and services for. The next question was maybe one that a lot of you haven't thought about a lot, which is, how are we, as a business, going to approach our relationship to our customers? How will we approach our relationship to our customers? Are we creating a product that's really DIY? Are we creating a product that's really quick fix, grab and go? Are we creating a product that's long term? Are we creating a luxury support system? How do we want to interact with our customers and how do we design products and tell stories and assign prices that feed into those relationships? This is a really important question for getting the details right, for telling the right story. And when you get the details right and when you tell the right story, everything gets easier, right? So you have to understand how you're going to approach your relationship to your customer and you have to make an intentional choice about it. Don't just make an assumption, make a choice. The next question is, finally, what could this solution look like? What will this solution look like? Yesterday, we did a couple exercises where we were actually able to say, alright, this is our customer, this is the value that they're looking for, this is the kind of relationship that we want to have with them, these are the values that they have, what could this solution look like? We were actually able to come up with three different ways to build out those solutions, to build out those products so that there was a lot of variety. We had options. We weren't being backed into the corner of product development. We had a whole realm of product development available to us. And so when you wait this far into the process to ask, what could this look like, how can I deliver this value to my customers, you have way more options, you have way more choices and you can be much more intentional about how you design a product, which leaves you with a more creative, more innovative solution which helps you stand out in the market. Alright, the next question is, how will we let our customers know about this? By what means are we going to create awareness about this product or service? How are we going to help people figure out if this is the right thing for them or not? How are we gonna guide them toward a buying decision? That's the next question and the last question is, how much is this gonna cost? And not only how much is this gonna cost in terms of price but how much is this going to cost us? How much is this going to cost this business? And we're not only gonna look at that from a kind of formulaic perspective, which you can easily do. You know, you can come up with a formula. It's materials, it's overhead, it's labor, it's profit, equals wholesale, times two equals retail. It's right there, that's the easy part. The hard part is understanding, what are the soft costs to you of any product? How much energy does it take from you? How much mental capacity does it take from you? How much time does it take? Is there a cost to your reputation? Is there a cost to your brand? Is there a cost to your story? Is there a cost to your purpose? We're gonna get much more into that in this segment. But those questions are all extremely important in not only understanding how much a product is gonna cost to your customer but whether it's an appropriate choice to have in your business model at all. Alright. So as I said, we are gonna focus on those last two questions this morning. How are you gonna let our customers know about what we have to offer? And we're gonna look at this product by product. These are not business-wide solutions. This is a product by product decision. And then we're gonna look at how much are these things going to cost both to us and to our customers. In the next segment, we're gonna spend a lot of time more specifically on pricing and on sales goals. In this segment, we're gonna talk more about just kind of ballparks and, you know, how do we determine what the more soft costs or the costs to us are, okay? So, we're gonna talk about marketing. And we're gonna talk about sales. I have more than a few things to say about this. Alright, so, first of all, marketing is greater than promotion. Marketing is greater than promotion. Too often, people use these words synonymously. Promotion is one fourth of marketing. Marketing is people, marketing is purpose, market is position, which we've talked a lot about, and then marketing is promotion. But you don't know how to promote a product, you don't know how to promote yourself, you don't know how to promote your business if you don't get those other three things right, if there isn't a whole story going on there. And so, you know, when you're going out and you're looking for marketing tips or when you're going out and your trying to market your business, are you focused solely on promotion or are you taking a bigger picture look? And I will guarantee you that taking a bigger picture look, thinking about marketing in your business as much more than promotion will get you way better results, way better. So if you've been doing a lot of promotion, say you've been tweeting a lot, you've been Facebook-ing a lot, maybe you've been blogging a lot or even emailing a lot, or even, you know, just going, say door-to-door, and you haven't been getting traction, you haven't been getting the conversions you want, you haven't been getting the results you want, I think you need to really ask yourself whether there's a fundamental problem with your promotion or whether there's a more fundamental problem with your marketing as a whole. Is the right story there? Is the right purpose there? Are the right people there? We'll get more into that. Another thing I want to say is that marketing doesn't equal sales. Marketing doesn't equal sales. They're two separate processes that happen. And absolutely, they play one off of each other. They play off of each other but they're not the same thing. And when we equate them, most of the time, we're losing out on one or the other. Either we're trying to sell before we've properly told a story or we're telling a story and we never go for the sale. And so I want to ask all of you today to make a special intention to think about your marketing and your sales separately. Then when you go back home, you can start thinking about how they're gonna play together again. But I want to just ask you to think about them separately first this morning. Alright, marketing, so what is marketing? Marketing is creating awareness about what you have to offer to the right people, with the right story, for the right reasons. Marketing is creating awareness about what you have to offer for the right people, with the right story, for the right reasons. It's that creating awareness. It's that kind of getting people on board. It's giving them the information they need to even consider making a buying decision. How do you buy if you don't know something exists? How do you buy if you're unaware that a certain story is playing out? How do you buy if you're unaware there's a solution to your problem? How do you buy if you're unaware you have a problem? You know, maybe one of the things that you've taken out of this three-day workshop is that you have a problem you didn't know existed. (laughs) Right? Part of this workshop is teaching you that the reason you're in that micro business earning plateau is because you didn't have a solid business model. Well, you would have never come to me and said, hey Tara, I need help on my business model. Maybe some of you would have. But by and large, it's not an acute need. It's not something you have a question about because you probably don't even know it exists! You don't know it's a thing! You create stuff, you sell it. You create stuff, you sell it. So I had to spend some time telling you about, I had to describe the problems that you have and describe how you feel. I had to tell you a story about your business either right now, where you've been or where your going such that you could identify with it so that I could create an awareness for you of this particular problem. Then, I could teach you how to solve it. But until I do that, your mind is closed. You're not gonna pay attention. It might not even be very interesting to you. You need to do the same thing. Certainly, in some businesses, they deal with very acute problems or they deal with very acute desires. My jewelry designers here, you know, I know you guys, people know they want jewelry, right? You don't have to work real hard at making people aware of the problem of not having jewelry, right? But, you do need to work hard at creating awareness of the story you want to tell, of what makes your brand unique, about what makes your products interesting and special and something that people might want to buy, right? So that's where your marketing goes there. But for a lot of others of you, you deal in problems that people don't know they have and so that creating awareness of that, telling a story, finding the right people that you could empathize with, that you can align with and that they can align with you back, that's marketing. And promotion is only one small part of that, alright? So if this is what marketing is, what's sales? Sales is guiding the people who are aware of your product or aware of your solution toward a buying decision. Sales is guiding the right people to a buying decision, alright. Marketing makes them aware, sales gets them to buy. So there's two different purposes for these two different things, alright. Marketing is making people aware, sales is guiding people toward a buying decision. So think about what's going on in your own business right now. Think about what's going on in your own business right now. Are you marketing, marketing, marketing, telling people about your product, telling them how you can help them, maybe describing their problems, maybe describing your solutions? That's marketing. When was the last time you told people, this is your problem, here's how I can help, here are three reasons to buy, or here's a story about what will happen if you buy and deliberately guiding people toward a buying decision? I think if you're really critical about what you do, it's all this and very little of that. One thing that I often hear with clients is, well Tara, I've been marketing my program for months. I've been telling people about it. They're aware of it, they're excited about it. They think it's great that I've developed this solution or that I've developed this system. But every time I launch it, I can't sell it, it doesn't sell. And I say, alright, great. Send me the last three emails you sent to your list before your launch or with your launch. And when I look at those emails, there's no ask. They aren't moving people toward a buying decision. They're just in this creating awareness land and we really need to be thinking about asking for the sale and making sure that we've given people the best information for why they want to buy, alright, so that they can make the best buying decision for them. It's not about convincing anyone. It's not about converting anyone. In fact, if you're finding the need to convince and convert, you've got bigger problems. But what it is is essentially supporting the people who are already interested in your product and just making the best decision for them. That's our goal with sales. Alright, so yesterday we had these ultimate questions, these questions that could help you start making decisions, more intentional choices about your business model. The Ultimate Marketing and Sales Question today is, what conversations lend themselves most naturally to your product and how do those conversations happen? What conversations lend themselves most naturally to your product and how do those conversations happen? If you remember back to day one, I mentioned that markets are conversations. We live in such a social world that everyone's talking about everything or somewhere in the world someone is talking about everything, right? And so it's your job as both the marketer and a sales person to be able to tap into those conversations, to be able to identify, okay, it's these people talking about this thing that's related to my solution, my product, my service. Sometimes, those conversations are really direct. They're easy, they're talking about the problem that you have a solution for. Maybe they're even talking about the solution you have. Other times, we need to connect a lot more dots, alright. And so if you have a business where you have to connect a lot more dots, you may need to really dig deep in this particular area of your business model. You may need to look for, you know, what conversation is related to what problem which is related to what solution which is in some way related to my product, alright. Brianna, I'm thinking of you immediately here, right? Girls want to play soccer. How do you get them from knowing they want to play soccer to also knowing they want to make investments of time and energy in their own personal growth and development? How do you make those connections together, right? So there's a lot more little steps. And it doesn't have to be a really complicated. It probably comes very naturally to you. There's a reason you have this idea and it was a good idea, right? But you do need to be very intentional about working people, working the parents and working the kids, from I want to play soccer to I need personal growth solutions, right? (laughs) Right? And so your very product helps you with that but the relationships that you'll build and the brand that you're building and the ways that you talk about what you do, those are all parts of your marketing process and then they'll all be parts of your sales process as well, alright? So sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's much more convoluted. So in the cases where it's much more convoluted, I've got a whole series of questions you can ask yourself to figure this out.