Think you need a big audience or complex funnels to sell? Here’s what’s actually holding most entrepreneurs back—and how to fix it with clarity, not complexity.
You’re likely making your marketing a lot harder than it ought to be.
And I say that, purely based on the questions that have been coming my way lately.
The throughline between them all is a tendency to steer towards advanced strategies before the business is ready, or to make things unnecessarily complex.
So, for example, that can look like spending time trying to build out elaborate funnels instead of learning things like how to compel your ICA, talking clearly about what you do, and facilitating powerful sales conversations.
It can show up as investing limited resources into Facebook Ads to drive traffic, when the problem you’re actually navigating is a conversion issue that won’t be solved by having more people land on your page.
And it can also look like getting distracted by creating new things to sell because you haven’t cracked how to sell your main thing, thinking that courses or webinars are “easy” or the golden ticket to getting paid everyday; or assuming that reach and engagement is what creates paying clients.
But here’s the thing.
A lot of these strategies require skills that you haven’t cultivated when you’re just getting started.
You don’t need a massive audience or lots of people going through a funnel to sell out a high ticket offer, so your time is wasted on those things.
The reason why high ticket offers work so well when you’re getting started is because you don’t need to make a lot of sales to have consistent income or to pay yourself well very quickly.
At this stage, you have more time than money.
You have a sales problem, not a scale problem so if you’re not making sales, you should be using all the time you have to to speak to people, to master these skills and be obsessed about creating results for your clients.
Facebook Ads allows you to pour gasoline on those skills; it doesn’t allow you to bypass building them.
Because if your offer is falling flat or isn’t compelling the audience you’re already speaking to, putting it in front of people who are completely cold and don’t know you won’t change that.
Conversion rates actually go down when you venture into colder audiences, which is why having your positioning converting with your warm audience first is so crucial.
And you can see that if people aren’t feeling confident to buy your main thing, it’s a messaging issue – and that doesn’t get solved by creating cheaper things.
It simply distracts you from cultivating the skills you actually need to solve the problem today and ongoing.
Courses are your way of saying that you feel confident enough with your process that you believe that someone can achieve the result you’re promising without having direct access to you.
They require you to have an actual framework and a process to get people results, which you won’t have if you don’t have experience working with people because your high ticket offer isn’t selling.
You can see where I’m going with this.
We can unknowingly waste time trying to jump too far forward, only to have to go back and fix things when our skillset gaps cause those more advanced strategies not to work.
It’s easy to believe that our marketing has to be complex and elaborate in order to work when that’s the marketing that our feeds are full of.
But I want to remind you that the only reason those strategies feel so pervasive is because they’re coming from business owners who have the budgets to get into your feed; business owners who are in a season where complexity and leveraged marketing actually makes sense.
What you’re seeing are the 1% of people operating within your niche.
Think of the big consumer brands like Apple, McDonald’s or Target. It wouldn’t make sense (nor would it be fair) for newer businesses to set such a high expectation for themselves to show up in the same way and places as those big companies.
And that’s what newer coaches and online businesses do when they think that adopting those strategies are the only ways to make sales.
I hit six figures with two companies – my coaching business and my done-for-you agency – in my first year and hit multiple six figures in year two.
And I did that, not because I had a massive audience, was posting every day or was doing anything particularly complex.
I achieved those milestones because I met myself where I was at and doubled down on the basics.
I got really good at talking about what I do and what I bring to the table.
I didn’t assume that my audience size affected my ability to make sales, so I leveraged other people’s audiences. A concept called “borrowed influence” that I now teach my students inside Life-First Business.
I pitched myself to podcasts and conferences.
I did joint ventures with strategic partners, many of whom have gone on to send tens of thousands of sales my way, and made a point to be anywhere my ideal client was.
I focused on serving the clients I had really well and understanding their unique problems so I can speak clearly to that in my messaging and use their wins as social proof.
I met up with potential clients in person and connected with past clients IRL, too, to see how things were going and how we could potentially work together again.
My audience grew as a byproduct of proactively putting myself out there, building connections and establishing a reputation.
So you can see, an audience helps create sales but you can generate a lot of revenue without one if you’re utilizing the strategies available to you.
I prioritized what was simple and easy for me to execute on with the skills I had at the moment and prioritized the next most useful skill I could learn.
And to be clear, not the skill I would need in a year’s time or when my business was in a completely different place.
The very next skill in front of me.
And over time, it compounded.
I skill stacked, which is what allowed me to layer in more complexity over time – and on a solid footing.
And that’s what I designed the new Life-First Business curriculum to walk you through — what to focus on and when because the order of things matters.
Today, for example, one of my funnels generates digital products sales every single day.
But the context that often gets missed when you see hooks like that on social media is that the the only reason that’s possible is because I’ve worked with enough clients intimately to know the problems that are top of mind for people; the kind that they’re willing to pay to solve straight away.
I’ve learned how to sell to people who know me AND to people who’ve just discovered me.
I’ve also learned how to write persuasive copy that uses my ideal client’s language so that they know that they’re in the right place and feel confident and ready to buy, without needing to ask further questions or speak to me directly.
That knowledge – about where they’re at and any potential reservations – was all taken into account in the way I wrote the copy.
Same with some of the other strategies we use.
I’m able to sell with webinars because I’ve learned how to drive consistent traffic from my ideal people.
After years of teaching live, I know how to hold people’s attention for an extended period of time.
And through tons of refining and optimizing, I know how to position my offer in a clear and concise way and make a compelling invitation.
You hear me say this all the time, but context is important, and that’s why I always want to walk you through the moving pieces behind the scenes that make those things happen.
These skills required time but the beauty is that you get to generate sales and make an impact with your work while you’re stacking these skills.
Whenever our businesses aren’t where we want them to be or are feeling hard, it usually boils down to one of three things:
- You don’t know where you’re going or moving towards
- You don’t know how to get get there and what to focus on
- You’re not doing the things you know you need to do, whether that’s because it doesn’t feel exciting, it requires you to venture into new territories or feels outside of your comfort zone.
To help you work through that, I’ve created a brand new FREE quiz.
All you need to do is answer a few questions about where your business currently is and what’s coming up for you and I’ll do the rest.
You’ll get a full diagnostics from me, where I’ll break down:
- Where your business currently falls on our growth scale, and the corresponding milestones you should be working towards
- What you need to stop doing
- What you need to start doing and double down on
- Any mindset shifts required to support you in moving to the next stage
- Concrete actions for you to execute on now to start building traction
Ready to get clarity and action steps? Click here to get started.
