It’s utterly frustrating when you have put so much blood, sweat and tears in to build your business and not enough people are buying. The question I always want to discover is WHY? Why aren’t people buying from your business?
I know a lot of shame can come up as a business owner when not enough people are buying. We can put the blame on ourselves and make it about us. We can feel like we are failing and we aren’t good enough to make it work, whether we have been successful in the past or not. All our shortcomings can come to the surface.
Most of the time it isn’t about us at all. Often there are some gaps that are missing to the foundations of the business. These simply need to be fixed to get the business thriving again.
One of the biggest challenges that most business owners face is the ability to have a constant stream of clients coming in.
Let’s talk today about one of the foundations of your business… Your Offer
Because this is an area that many businesses do struggle with getting right. Firstly, when I talk about your offer, here’s what I am talking about:
- Your products.
- Your services.
- Your membership program.
- Your online course.
- Essentially any of your offerings that people can buy from you.
The sad truth is that there are countless offers out there that never get purchased. I think nearly every business owner has experienced it. Have you?
I know I have!
Let me share something very important with you…
Just because people don’t buy, doesn’t mean it is a bad offer!
It might be, but often it isn’t the offer that is the problem.
I’ve been in business for over 22 years now and have created so many products, services and programs that either no one has bought or very few people have bought, and it totally sucks!
You put in the effort, you have a great idea and you truly believe that what you have to offer can benefit people massively and then the sales just trickle in.
I’ve also had products and offers that have been great successes, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars in a day. Not only does it feel good to be rewarded for the hard work put in, but it also feels great to be helping people and making an impact when my products and services sell.
So let’s dig in to a few of the big reasons that people aren’t knocking down your door to buy off you when it comes to your offerings…
-
You haven’t marketed enough
Here’s how it normally goes for businesses (and yes I have been fully guilty of this at times!). They come up with an offer (a new product, service or program) and they get ready to launch. They spend months or even longer creating the offer and putting everything together so that it is ready to launch. They do 1 or 2 emails to their database, they do a couple of posts on social media, they even might mention it to a few people in passing.
From that bit of marketing they may not get any sales, or they might get a few.
But it isn’t the flood of clients or customers that they were expecting. They feel frustrated and defeated by the let down of the whole experience.
So they move onto something else, putting it down to the offer is not what people want.
It is true that somethings will sell like hot cakes as soon as they land and will be a phenomenal success without much promotion, but that is very rare. A lot of the hysteria that you see when products launch and sell out quickly is from well known, established, big businesses and usually they will have spent tens of thousands of dollars (if not hundreds of thousands of dollars) on the marketing pre-launch!
Small businesses don’t have the budget to spend on intensive marketing like that, but they can definitely learn some lessons from the big ones…
In order to sell your offerings, people need to know about them! They need to know who you are, what you are offering and why they need to buy it.
That means you must market to them. You have to be visible.
Not just once or twice. Not just for a week or two, but actually do a decent amount of marketing where you will be seen by your ideal clients again and again.
In today’s noisy world where we are bombarded with non-stop marketing messages all day long, people need to see your marketing messages more in order to take notice.
There is no set answer to the question “How much marketing do I need to do to get x amount of sales?” It depends on a number of factors and results can vary massively depending on what type of marketing you are doing and how you are communicating. This is where an experienced business coach can be incredibly valuable to help you create the best marketing strategy tailored for your particular business.
This brings me nicely to reason #2 why people aren’t buying…
-
You aren’t communicating the offer effectively
Contrary to what you may think after reading about the #1 reason, more marketing doesn’t look like “buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff!”
There is so much more to say and do to create effective marketing that works.
Effective marketing is COMMUNICATING the right messages to your IDEAL CLIENTS at the RIGHT TIME.
What do I mean by communicating?
Actually letting people know about your offer and your business:
… What the offer involves
… What are the benefits of the offer to them
… What they are going to get from buying off you
… Why they need what you are offering
… What is going to change for them
… What pain or challenge is going to reduce or be removed from buying
… How you deliver the offer
… What they may not know that they need to
… What the long term value is of them buying
… and so on
There is so much you can say and remember that YOU are IN your business. You know your products and services and offerings inside out… but your prospective clients don’t!
We are often so masterful as business owners in what we do that we forget that others don’t know what we know. The information you know about your products and services can seem like common sense that everyone will know, but they don’t.
So don’t assume that a prospective client knows the benefits of what you are offering, or even why they need what you are offering, because most likely they don’t! And so they don’t buy.
This isn’t about being sleazy or hard selling, it is simply about COMMUNICATING to then attract the right people. Which brings me nicely to the last reason people don’t buy that I am going to talk about today, which is…
-
You don’t know who your ideal market is or you are not talking to them
Here’s a fundamental concept in business success. Don’t try to have everyone as your clients.
I know it can be easy to want to talk to everyone. To try to convince and serve everyone. But that very way of thinking is likely to be doing your business more harm than good!
The clearer you can get on WHO your ideal clients are, the easier it is to communicate what you need to, for it to really land with them.
Leading them to happily buy.
For example, I don’t just work with any business owners. I work with passionate small business owners that are ready for their business and life to change for the better. The people I work with are action takers and are open and responsive to seeing things differently. They want to create more impact in the world through their business, but also want a life they can enjoy and don’t want to be working themselves to the ground in the process. They want a thriving business that is rewarding them for their efforts, and they want to create a meaningful life. Personal development work is done regularly already and they want support to fast-track the goals and results they want to create. Plus they very much see the value in that support.
This is NOT every business owner. In fact my ideal clients are a very small subset of the business owners out there.
When you are clear about WHO your ideal clients are,
you can then speak directly to THEM.
You can talk to them about their challenges, their pain and struggles, their aspirations, their dreams. You can really get to understand how and why they think nd behave the way they do. You can also get an understanding of why they would want to buy what you are offering.
Have a think about your best current and past clients. Who are they? Are there particular traits or demographics that make them your ideal clients? Do they have particular habits or behaviours that make them your ideal clients?
The clearer you can get on this, the easier doing effective marketing and growing your business will be.
It can be hard to know why people aren’t buying from your business, but those are 3 gaps in your business foundations as to why people possibly aren’t buying off you. There are some other reasons as well that it can be, but that’s plenty to digest for today. Do any or all of those reason bring some truth for your business? Let me know below in the comments, I’m curious to hear.
Go well and here’s to creating your own amazing business.
Kim.
PS. If you are ready for change, want 1:1 support to see exactly where your gaps and opportunities are to grow and streamline your business with more ease and flow, then apply to join my Kaizen Coaching Program here.
