do this. Welcome to the thrive by design podcast. This is Tracy coming into your earbuds with a quick and dirty Tuesday Tips episode. So I'm going to be recording these Tuesday Tip episodes every now and then as a bonus episode for the week, I'm going to try to keep them short and sweet. So let's get right to the point. Today's episode is all about how to get sales consistently coming into your business. And I've noticed over the years that people who struggle with the sales cycle, they are always stopping and starting and you want to think through the entire sales cycle on how to get consistent sales coming into your business. And so we will look through this model and when we think through the framework of The Desired Brand Effect my random methodology. And if you haven't picked up my book, make sure that you do it. Or if you haven't taken our Laying The Foundation program, make sure that you take it because I teach you how to do both a book is kind of the high level, the Laying The Foundation is the nitty gritty, if you're struggling with sales, you need this or if you ever kind of get into a sales plateau. This is something where I would love for you to think through this lens. So in The Desired Brand Effect, there are three core pillars creating desire, this is all about attracting your audience, sharing desire, which is all about converting people into a first time customer, then delivering a great experience so that they buy from you a second time. And then scaling desire. And this is really about supporting yourself with the business systems that are going to help you scale for growth. So what you want to be thinking through is on a regular basis, how are you generating new leads? How are you developing collections and pricing those collections in a way that people actually want to shop from you? How are you optimizing your marketing assets in a way and your lead generation, your brand voice all the things to actually speak to your perfect customer. So this is this is all the content that you create, this is what you're putting out into the world to get people into your sales funnel. So you want to be focused on that, at least 1/3 of the time. So if you're thinking through, like the seasons of your business, you know, you can do it in big waves, or you can do it what I would recommend is to be doing this cyclically every single month is to be rotating through these filters. Okay, what am I doing to attract people to my brand. So this would be include, like lead generation, like getting people on your email list on a regular basis, building your Instagram followers, right, building your wholesale account list, if you sell wholesale, this would be you know, finding the good shows to participate if you do in person shows. So it's fine. Like how can you get in front of the right people, and attract the right audience who are going to buy your work. Now the next step of this is to be creating the experience of your brand that gets people to know like and trust you and sends them to that decision phase of actually buying your product. So you want to be rotating in your marketing and your filter by consistently marketing to people. In the first phase of creating desire. You're always building your list building your audience getting in front of more people. Right now the second phase is turning those people into buyers. So you need to ask for the sale. Like how are you doing that? Are you sending out regular marketing like emailing at least once a week or maybe three times a week during the holiday season? Right? Are you selling things in a proper way on social media? Are you using the technology that the algorithm favors on those social media platforms like reels right now or Tik Tok? Are you retargeting people who landed on your website with the right kinds of ads on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and some of these other platforms like Pinterest that are really rising in popularity? are you optimizing your brand for local search so that people can find you and get into your sales funnel? Now one of the things about converting a buyer into a customer for the first time is delivering a great experience. So I want you to think through the lens like how am I communicating with people? How am I showing up for them? How am I delivering great service on the front end before they've even purchased and on the back end? So they remember who I am. Because if you can deliver that exceptional service, then you have people who will remember you, even if something goes wrong, you Now I've mentioned this before, but Tara Silverberg, who is a retail store owner in New York City, she owns a store called the clay pot that's in Brooklyn. And she had also a sister store in Soho for a while, she said to me, once, when I chatted with her, she was a customer of mine back in the day, she said, You know, one of the ways that I know if a designer or brand is going to be good to partner with is what happens when a piece of jewelry breaks. Because if they're freaking out, and like, acting like a jerk to have to, like repair it and deliver a great experience for the customer, I know it's not going to be a lasting relationship. But if they are gracious, and offer to fix it, and, you know, deliver a great experience for me and the customer, then I know that this person is someone that I'm going to want to partner with for a long time. So that's a wholesale store saying that's the same thing for a retail or direct to consumer customer. So you want to be delivering a great experience for people. And even if the customer isn't always right, think through the lens, like how can I create a great experience, even insight of something going wrong. So these people remember me and refer me out to other people over the time. Now, this is not to say, you're not going to get jerky customers sometimes who are not very nice. And then the other part of this sharing desire piece is to get into a consistent mode of doing sales and marketing activities that actually grow your sales. That's a huge missed opportunity, especially for makers who love to make their products, they get out of the habit of actually asking for a sale. And so they get like really busy like producing inventory or something like that. And then like oh shoot, I have no one to sell it to. Because I haven't consistently marketed that has to be consistent, we like to say 75% of your time should be spent marketing your business more than anything, and selling your product. Now, the final part of this to get into this cycle of sales coming into your business on a consistent basis, is really about setting up things that take the you out of the equation. And what I mean by that is a lot of people forget that the manual aspects of labor in a business meaning like human interaction, it sets you up for overwhelm and error in a lot of problems in your business, if you don't optimize systematize and create better functionality in your business. So in scaling desire, there are certain things that are just like more strategic, like business planning, and financial planning and stuff like that. But this is really about figuring out what are the parts of my business that I can get off my plate? Where can I start to automate things that don't need to be done, you can systematize and automate and put yourself into a scale mode, even if you are a solopreneur. So anyone who says that I'm telling you to stop making your own jewelry is right now I'm I'm calling you out on that. But there are a lot of things that you can do in your business, to create more streamlined functionality that take the you out of every single thing. Batch content creation is a good idea. It's like you still have to do it. But if you're doing it all at one time, it saves a lot of time and energy because you're not context switching. Time blocking is another way to increase your functionality. Creating systems in your business. Using automation tools like Zapier, using marketing automation that can sell for you on autopilot, like all of these things, help you grow and scale your sales so that you have a consistent cycle of sales coming in to your business. And what happens at the end of the day when you do this right, is that you start to avoid some of the common business problems, you avoid things like having unpredictable sales, or hitting a sales plateau. This happens a lot where people kind of hit a point in their business where whatever they're doing, if they don't make a change, they're never going to grow. Beyond that space. I see this happen a lot when people hit the $100,000 marker, or somewhere sometimes also in the mid like $50,000 range. And then there's other levels like 300,000. And once people kind of get to like right hovering around seven figures. A lot of times these are indicators of people hitting a plateau because the way you ran your business in the stage prior to that has to change in order to get to the next level. So if you're not changing the way you're doing something nothing's going to change, right? So sales, blood shows and then also business backslides, this happens a lot. I've had a few in my career, and we're coming out of one right now. And I say that because we had to fix a lot of things in our funnel that were broken, that we hadn't realized were broken so long. And we're like, why are certain things not working the way that they used to do and when that happens, and you have any efficiencies in your business that significantly impacts your ability to generate sales and revenue. I say this, just candidly like, I mean, I'm not here to share our sales numbers. We do have a seven plus figure business we're like doing well. But you know, we've had to make some changes over the last two You're it's not to like brag or anything about like what we're doing, but to also show you that we're human, I practice what I preach, when I see these problems coming up, I have to address the same things as you do. So it's always a live and learn lesson. When you do this, right, though, on the other end of the spectrum, you're creating consistent profitability in your business, you create a cycle of consistent predictable sales, you get a consistent flow of repeat customers, which we know becomes the easiest way to continue growing your sales. And ultimately, when everything's working in unison, you create financial security for yourself and your family, you create freedom, because you're not working for someone else, you have time freedom, you can create your own schedule, you get to do something that generates a sense of accomplishment for yourself, because you are doing something that you love and making money doing it. Right. And it feels good when all those things are working in unison, right, like you're financially getting paid your business is profitable, you know, you have things that are streamlined in your business. So it's easy to show up every day for work, you know, and it becomes fun, right at the end of the day. So if you want to create a consistent cycle of sales, there you go, just follow The Desired Brand Effect methodology. And always be working through that cycle of generating leads and getting your brand out there so that you're attracting your audience, doing the best that you can to convert those raving kind of followers and turning them into paying customers. And then eventually optimizing your business on the back end, so that you take you out of the equation and you start automating things in a way so that you're making sales that don't require a manual effort from you. And if you want to learn more how to do that, especially if you're just starting out, I would encourage you to reach out to us over at flourish and thrive. Or just join our Laying The Foundation program which is open for enrollment. Right now. We are starting our next cohort in October. You can learn more about that program by heading over to flourish thrive academy.com, forward slash LTF. And I'm looking forward to supporting you in your business goals. So thank you so much for listening today. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions over on Instagram. You can slide into my DMs I'm happy to answer any questions for you over at flourish, underscore thrive or you can reach me personally at Tracy Matthews and why and I'm happy to chat with you. Thanks again for listening today. Ciao